Road to World Conquest

Hitler’s Projected Road
to World Conquest

Reich means "empire." In the political vocabulary that was adopted by the Nazis, the First Reich was the empire instituted by Charlemagne in AD 800 that endured to the time of Napoleon. The Second Reich was largely assembled by the Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck and officially proclaimed after Germany’s triumph over France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. (The Second Reich ended with the defeat of Germany in World War I.)

Hitler wanted the Third Reich, his own German Empire, to last as long as the First Reich, but to be a far wider and more glorious realm. In my view, the ambitions that festered in the German dictator’s monstrous personality meant that only total world domination would have satisfied his sense of the "master race’s" destiny.

He did make common cause with the Japanese Empire, and he spoke of granting the Japanese part of Siberia as a reward for their cooperation during World War II, but in the long run the Nazis would have tolerated a huge and industrious Japanese rival no more than they tolerated an independent France.

The question that remains, then, is how Hitler envisioned the expansion of his empire.

We know that FDR thought the Nazi war machine, given sufficient momentum, would have attacked South America on its way to invading the US. But how did the president expect Hitler to enter the New World?

By way of Africa, undoubtedly. Already in January of 1941, a Fuhrer Directive had decreed that German forces be sent to the aid of Mussolini’s troops in Libya, where the Italians were losing to the armies of the British Empire that Winston Churchill had ordered to the region.

The German Afrika Korps, as it came to be known, was commanded by Lt-General Erwin Rommel, and it quickly turned the tables on Churchill’s troops, driving them back into Egypt, which had been occupied by imperial Britain for nearly 60 years.

General Rommel, the "Desert Fox,"
in Libya, 1942

The British prime minister’s despair at this juncture was probably deeper than at any other time during the war. Churchill was facing the loss of the Suez Canal and, therefore, a breakdown of communications between UK forces east and west of Suez. An empire with a severed spinal cord could not expect a healthy future.

When Rommel captured the stronghold of Tobruk on the northeastern coast of Libya in June of 1942, Hitler made him a field marshal and, at the urging of Joseph Goebbels, allowed him to become one of the most publicized German heroes of World War II. The post-defeat, pro-Nazi French were in control of much of the rest of northern Africa (as dramatized in the movie Casablanca), so essentially the whole region had fallen into the Nazi sphere.

Had things gone according to Hitler’s best-case scenarios, all of Africa above the Sahara would shortly have been controlled by fascist forces, and German military planners would eventually be estimating what resources would be needed to send an invasion force across the Atlantic at its narrowest point: the gap between western Africa and Brazil.

But Rommel’s next task lay to the east, not the west. Hitler ordered him to pursue the retreating British, drive them out of Egypt, and seize the Canal. That done, the new field marshal hoped, as he recorded, to advance "into Iraq and cut the Russians off from Basra," an Iraqi harbor just by Kuwait that was controlled by the British.

This particular dream of Nazi conquest ended at El Alamein on the coast of Egypt west of Alexandria, where numerically superior forces under the command of the British commander Bernard ("Monty") Montgomery brought Rommel’s string of victories to a sudden and stinging end.

When American soldiers under General Dwight Eisenhower and other Allied troops landed on Algerian and Moroccan soil in November of 1942, the fate of fascism in north Africa was sealed. It was now unlikely that Hitler would ever be able to menace the United States from the south, though German submarines did sink some American ships in the Gulf of Mexico.

Allied victories in Africa severely irritated Hitler, for he had long imagined that the continent might belong to him by the end of the war. He fell into fits of rage and depression when his plans for world conquest started to look like a mirage. Surprised and troubled by the Allied successes in north Africa, he was even more concerned about the Eastern Front.

Hitler Examining
Map of Eastern Front, 1943

According to Hitler’s projections in January of 1942, the Soviet Union should have been forced to surrender unconditionally before the beginning of 1943. Communism would then be essentially finished, but the Nazi war machine would continue to advance anyway.

With the Soviets out of the way, Hitler planned to push his victorious armies in Russia both east and south. A prime target for the southern wing of his forces would be the growing Jewish settlements in Palestine. To the applause of many Arabs, every last Jew in the Holy Land would be murdered. (God only knows what Jerusalem might have become under Nazi rule.)

After taking control of all the oil reserves in the area of the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf, other fascist units that had triumphed in Russia would drive into Afghanistan. With deadly aircraft and Panzer tanks leading the way, Hitler would then order his armies through the Khyber Pass and into India, which was then the most important colony of the British Empire, its "jewel in the crown."

German forces might even be able to link up with Japanese armies that were pushing toward India through southeast Asia. A joint German-Japanese conquest of all Eurasia might then unroll with frightening speed. Or perhaps the alliance between Germany and Japan would have failed even more quickly than the alliance between Germany and the USSR.

In any case, Hitler knew that a rapid conquest of Russia would make him the most powerful leader of all time. Briefing his generals on his plans for the invasion of the USSR in January of 1941, Hitler concluded that "The vast spaces of Russia will yield hoards of incalculable wealth. Thus we will have all we need to be able to fight whole continents in the future, if need be. We will be invincible!"

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