Hitler’s Alliance With The Soviet Union :: European History Essays

Hitlers Alliance With The Soviet UnionWhen the world awoke August 24, 1939 it appeared that the absoluteimpossible had just occurred in Europe, National Socialist Germany andSoviet Russia had just agreed on a Non Aggression pact. By that morning theentire political world had changed, it had been thrown more or less on its headand people quickly asked how it could have happened? Over a period of threeyears the German chancellor, Adolph Hitler had repeatedly pushed the majorpowers to the limit with his territorial demands in the Rhineland, Austria,Czechoslovakia, and now in the Polish corridor. Hitler had succeeded ineach gamble and grown bolder each time as he noticed the vacillating reputationof the supposed major powers that stood in the way of his completing hislong held foreign policy program. This program, first coherently laid downin his 1924 book Mein Kampf, called for the re-armament of Germany and the scholarship of allies like Italy and Britain, the neutralization orde struction of his hated enemy France, and finally with Germanys rearprotected the way would be clear for the broad fight againstJudeo-Bolshevism in the Soviet Union, and the gaining of Lebensraum for thesuperior Aryan German race. Since coming to power in 1933, Hitler hadcompleted the first phase of his program salve for the making of a Britishalliance or at least their promise of neutrality in any upcoming Europeanwar of revision. Realizing that the British would need some coercing toaccept his program, and that if war was to come with the west his easternborder must be secured, Hitler relied on his great ability to play the pluckyof power politics and shocked the world by allying with his sworn enemy. Hitler sought the Non-Aggression pact and covert military alliance with theSoviet Union because it was a interim means to an all encompassing end. Hitler would use the hated Soviets to secure his eastern flank while hedestroyed France with or without the help of Britain, only to have thefavor by attacking them when Germany was ready. It was a move consistentwith the power politics and foreign policy program he had been pursuingsince 1933, his attempts to force Britain into a military alliance or atleast a proclamation of neutrality in any continental war, and thesubjugation of France as a obligatory to obtaining Lebensraum in the East.The Non-Aggression pact of August 1939, was the pre war culmination ofpolicies designed by Hitler to further his foreign policy program of making