by D. Vogt

Created on: October 08, 2010

The Hossbach Memorandum are the minutes of a meeting between Nazi German fuhrer Adolf Hitler and a number of his senior military and diplomatic staff, which occurred in 1937. The Hossbach Memorandum has been described as evidence of Hitler's master plan for war with Britain and France, although some historians believe it actually shows that the dictator had little in the way of long-term plans and was essentially improvising as he went, with one fateful decision leading to progressively worse ones.

The memorandum was prepared (and since named after) Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, who at the time was Hitler's personal adjutant. (Hossbach was dismissed from this position the following year after defending the Army's commander-in-chief, General Werner von Fritsch, against charges that he was a secret homosexual). The conference was called to discuss the perennial complaints of the German navy (the Kriegsmarine) that it was not being allocated a fair share of the country's annual steel production and therefore could not keep pace with Germany's rivals in terms of modern ship construction. The relationship between the Nazi army (Wehrmacht), air force (Luftwaffe), and navy was testy even in good times, and both predictably refused to share their allotments with the navy.

Hitler seized the moment to pronounce a new and fateful policy. If Germany was falling behind in the arms race and lacked the domestic economic strength to correct that problem, he observed, then the solution must lie in increasing Germany's power in other ways - namely, through expansion. First, the German government would have to exert even more direct control over the national economy, channeling efforts in the most efficient directions for further development of the military. Second, it was unacceptable that Germany be dependent on powerful and potentially hostile foreign governments like Britain or France for supplies of necessary raw materials or food. Sooner or later, Germany would have to conquer eastern Europe. That would give it new reservoirs of raw materials to fuel its war machine in the event of a future conflict with France and England.

It was a controversial decision. The navy had already been nervous about its position - and the prospect of imminent war made it feel even more unprepared. Foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath, army commander von Fritsch, and war minister Werner von Blomberg also suggested to Hitler that the country needed more time to arm and prepare for war before

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