Hitler Risked War After Just Six Years in Power

Hitler didn't wait to become a superpower: Mefo debt was maturing

In September 1939, the Third Reich had existed for six years and was already embroiled in a European war. The question haunting any serious analysis is why the regime did not consolidate its power for fifteen or twenty years, as any strategy manual would demand, before launching a global offensive. The short answer is that there was no time. The long answer involves an economy built on colored paper and a racial doctrine that allowed no delays.

A Pyramid Scheme with an Expiration Date

The most repeated argument in economic analyses of this issue is that the so-called German miracle was largely a financial construction sustained by opaque debt. Mefo bills functioned as a parallel payment mechanism with which the state financed rearmament without public accounts reflecting the hole. When those maturities began to tighten around 1939, the alternative was accepting a return to the inflation of the early 1930s or seeking resources abroad. Invading Poland was, in this reading, a flight forward: seizing territory, raw materials, and labor to keep feeding the scheme.

This is not a marginal thesis. Some argue that Germany remained economically devastated in 1939, with the only difference being that it disguised it, and that the accumulated debt in scrip had to start being repaid. Rearmament, the navy, and the air force were not the luxury of a country preparing calmly: they were the bet of a state that needed to win before the bill came due.

Lebensraum Was Not an Election Campaign Metaphor

The second pillar of the argument is ideological. Lebensraum, or living space, was not an electoral slogan: it was the core of the program. Poland was the natural zone of German expansion, and the Danzig corridor, with the German population of Prussia separated from the rest of the country, was the last pending affront of the Treaty of Versailles. After Austria, the Sudetes, and Czechoslovakia, the question the regime asked itself was not whether the allies would react, but why they would do so now.

Added to this is a racist calculation regarding Eastern Europe: the idea that Slavic territories would function as a German colony, with Germans as feudal lords. It was not an improvised plan. It was written and repeated.

Why Did Hitler Believe Britain and France Would Not Go to War?

Here consensus breaks down. Part of the analysis argues that Hitler thought France and the United Kingdom would back down at the last moment, as had peine with Austria and Czechoslovakia. The proof, they say, is that there was no German plan in case the Western allies declared war in 1939. The rapid collapse of France, one month later, surprised even the Germans themselves.

The other reading is more uncomfortable: Hitler invaded Poland without caring much about the possibility of going to war with London and Paris. If he truly believed there would be no response, he would have backed down when he saw that there was one. He did not. And the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, with the partition of Eastern Europe, was not signed by accident.

The Soviet Miscalculation and the War Nobody Wanted

The other major area of discussion is Stalin's role. Some defend that the USSR was preparing to attack, with the Red Army deployed in offensive formation and pontoon units near the front. The best proof that they were not going to invade in 1941, others respond, is the disaster that trinc Operation Barbarossa: the Red Army was, in the words of a participant, a mob. The most cited hypothesis is that Stalin waited for Germany to wear itself out against the Western allies, as in 1918, and then move.

In any case, the fundamental question remains unresolved: why did Hitler agree to act as an icebreaker for Stalin, getting him entangled first in Poland so that the Soviet could annex the Baltics and Finland without anyone looking.

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Six years of government, an economy built on maturities, and a doctrine that admitted no pauses. The war was not an excess of ambition: it was the only plan they had. With these elements, it is not strange that Hitler started it in 1939. What is strange is that someone still thinks he could afford to wait.