by bobo

Created on: March 02, 2007   Last Updated: September 06, 2009

There are a number of key differences that separate Nazi foreign policy to that which would have been pursued by a purely nationalist government.

Firstly, it is important to look at the Hossbach Memorandum in November 1937, as it laid out an aggressive foreign policy scheme. This meeting was the first time that Hitler spoke of any ambitions for war. He outlined that he expected to deal with Austria and Czechoslovakia by 1942-43, although it would depend on the circumstances, such as civil war in France, and he would know when the time was right.

During the meeting, there was surprisingly little plan for intervention in Austria. This may have seemed somewhat odd at the time, due to Hitler's pan-German beliefs that all Germans should be in their fatherland. This essentially meant that the Nazis wanted all Germans to be part of the greater German nation and was especially relevant in Austria and Czechoslovakia, particularly in the Sudetenland, due to the higher percentages of Germans living there.

However, Nationalists also shared this pan-German view, but did believe that it would be achieved through returning to the borders that Germany had before the Treaty of Versailles and not by adopting an unnecessarily hasty policy of war that was favoured by Hitler and the Nazis after the Hossbach meeting in 1937.

In this sense, there are some clear similarities between policies favoured by the Nazi government and those favoured by the conservative nationalists in Germany during 1938. These similarities are limited however and only go so far as to agree on the basic pan-German issue and do not expand to agreement on the method of achieving this goal.

Secondly, Hitler chose to directly sideline many of the conservative nationalists in the German government. This in itself indicates that Hitler did not want to follow a foreign policy constructed in a conservative and nationalist way. The purge of many of the senior government positions held by conservatives or nationalists occurred in 1938, when Joachim Von Ribbentrop was to replace Neurath as Hitler's foreign minister. From this position, he was directly involved in all the actions of waging an aggressive war.

Ribbentrop was very much Hitler's 'yes man', simply telling Hitler what he wanted to hear. Neurath was given what Hitler called a promotion, but in reality it simply took him away from major decision making. In addition to the foreign minister, Hjalmar Schacht was also essentially replaced by the Nazi Goering, once

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