• DOI:10.1017/S0018246X00012747
• Corpus ID: 159671713

Hitler's ‘Programme’ and the Genesis of Operation ‘Barbarossa’

@article{Koch1983HitlersA,
  title={Hitler's ‘Programme’ and the Genesis of Operation ‘Barbarossa’},
  author={Hannsjoachim W. Koch},
  journal={The Historical Journal},
  year={1983},
  volume={26},
  pages={891 - 920}
}

• H. W. Koch
• Published 1 December 1983
• Political Science
• The Historical Journal

Hitler's foreign policy is still an area of widespread interest - particularly the question of its inner coherence. The present consensus goes back to the early 1950s and 1960s, when the German attack upon Russia was viewed as one stage in Hitler's quest for European hegemony or even world domination. While Alan Bullock viewed Hitler as an opportunist, Hugh Trevor-Roper in his essay on Hitler's war aims interpreted Hitler's invasion of Russia as a systematic step in Hitler's programme. Since then this model has been highly refined and systematized, notably by Andreas Hillgruber, who argues that Hitler's foreign policy programme had already been formulated long before he came to power, particularly in Mein Kampf and Hitler's Second book. On this model National Socialist foreign policy was programmatically fixed and Hillgruber goes as far to say that Hitler's programme ‘alone determined the great line of German policy in general’ and that he devoted all the energies available to him to realizing it. Yet even before Hillgruber had formulated his model, case studies were available which appeared to contradict its inner coherence and logic. Serious objections have also been raised by Martin Broszat, who describes Hitler's idea of an eastern empire as a ‘metaphor and Utopian figure of speech’.