This race would have the incontestable right to grow at the expense of nations considered decadent. Germany is about to resume even in the middle of the 20th century the great invasions of the barbarians. Moreover, most naturally and logically, she will wage her war in barbarous fashion, not only because National Socialist ethics are indifferent to the choice of means, but also because war must be total in its means and in its ends.
Whether we consider a Crime against Peace or War Crimes, we are therefore not faced by an accidental or an occasional criminality which events could explain without justifying it. We are, in fact, faced by systematic criminality, which derives directly and of necessity from a monstrous doctrine put into practice with deliberate intent by the masters of Nazi Germany.
From the National Socialist doctrine there arises directly the immediately pursued perpetration of Crimes against Peace. As early as February 1920, in the first program of the National Socialist Party, Adolf Hitler had already outlined the future basis of German foreign policy. But it was in 1924 in his Landsberg prison, while writing Mein Kampf, that he gave a fuller development to his views.
According to Mein Kampf the foreign policy of the Reich must have as its first objective to give back to Germany her “independence and her effective sovereignty” which is clearly an allusion to the articles of the Treaty of Versailles, referring to disarmament and the demilitarization of the Rhineland. It would then endeavor to reconquer the territories lost in 1919, and 15 years before the outbreak of the second World War the question of Alsace and Lorraine is clearly raised. It would also have to seek to extend German territories in Europe, the frontiers of 1914 being “insufficient” and it would be indispensable to extend them by including “all Germans” in the Reich, beginning with the Germans of Austria.
After having reconstituted Greater Germany, National Socialism will do everything necessary to “insure the means of existence” on this planet to the race forming the state, by means, of establishing a “healthy relation” between the size of the population and the extent of the territory. By “healthy relation” is meant a situation such that the subsistence of the people will be assured by the resources of its own territory. “A sufficient living space on this earth will alone insure to a people its liberty of existence.”
But so far that is but a stage.
“When a people sees its subsistence guaranteed by the extent of its territory, it is nevertheless necessary to think of insuring the security of that territory”—because the power of a state “arises directly out of the military value of its geographical situation.”
Those ends, Hitler adds, cannot be reached without war. It will be impossible to obtain the re-establishment of the frontiers of 1914 “without bloodshed.” How much more impossible it would be to acquire living space if one did not prepare for a “clash of arms.”
“It is in Eastern Europe, at the expense of Russia and the neighboring countries that Germany must seek new territories. We are stopping the eternal march of the Germans towards the South and the West of Europe and are casting our eyes towards the East.”
But before anything, declares Hitler, it is necessary to crush France’s tendency towards hegemony, and to have a “final settlement” with this “mortal enemy.” “The annihilation of France will enable Germany to acquire afterwards territories in the East.” The “settlement of accounts” in the West is but a prelude. “It can be explained only as the securing of our rear defenses in order to extend our living space in Europe.”