Hitler's Aims and Early Foreign Policy 1933-1934
Hitler in Power
When Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in January 1933, the world he stepped into was already shaky. The Wall Street Crash had wrecked international trade, the League of Nations was struggling with the Manchurian Crisis, and Germany’s Weimar democracy had collapsed under unemployment and political extremism. Hitler arrived with a clear set of foreign-policy aims rooted in his book Mein Kampf (1925) and in the wider Nazi belief that the Treaty of Versailles was a national humiliation that had to be undone.
Hitler’s foreign policy had three intertwined aims: (1) revise or destroy the Treaty of Versailles; (2) unite all German speakers in a Greater Germany; (3) win Lebensraum — living space — in eastern Europe at the expense of the Soviet Union.
The Three Aims
First came treaty revision. The 1919 settlement had stripped Germany of around 13% of its territory, restricted its army to 100,000 men, banned tanks and submarines, and forbidden union with Austria. Hitler promised to tear up these clauses one by one. Second came pan-Germanism: the idea of a single German nation including the Austrian Germans, the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia, and German minorities in Poland and the Saar. This appealed to a wider Volksgemeinschaft — the Nazi ideal of a racial people’s community that crossed existing borders. Third came Lebensraum: living space in the east, to be carved out of Poland, Ukraine and European Russia, settled by German farmers and ruled by a German racial elite. The aim was openly anti-Slav and anti-communist.
These three aims were not separate boxes; they overlapped. Tearing up Versailles cleared the path for pan-German union. Pan-German union pushed Germany’s borders eastward. The eastward border made Lebensraum easier. Anti-communism justified moving against the USSR and reassured British and French conservatives who feared Bolshevism more than they feared Hitler.
First Steps in 1933
Hitler moved cautiously in 1933. Germany was militarily weak — the army was still capped at 100,000 men, and rearmament had only just begun. He used the Geneva Disarmament Conference as a stage. France refused to disarm to German levels; Hitler used this as the pretext to walk out, and in October 1933 took Germany out of both the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations. The League made no meaningful response. This first test — would the Allies enforce the Covenant on Germany? — ended in silence.
In January 1934 Hitler signed a ten-year non-aggression pact with Poland. On the surface this looked peaceful — even surprising, given Nazi hostility to Slavs and Hitler’s long-term aims in the east. The real purpose was tactical: it broke the French alliance system in eastern Europe (France had relied on Poland to contain Germany), it bought Hitler time while he rearmed, and it presented the Nazi regime to foreign observers as a rational neighbour rather than an aggressive one. The pact was always meant to be temporary — Hitler would tear it up in 1939.
The Dollfuss Affair, July 1934
Hitler’s caution had limits. In July 1934 Austrian Nazis, encouraged from Berlin, attempted a coup in Vienna. They burst into the Chancellery, shot the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and proclaimed union with Germany. The coup failed: Austrian government forces crushed the Nazi rebels within hours. The decisive response, however, came not from Britain, France or the League, but from Italy. Mussolini, who had personally cultivated Dollfuss as an ally and who was at that moment hosting Dollfuss’s wife and children in Italy, moved Italian troops to the Brenner Pass on the Austrian border and threatened intervention. Hitler, not yet ready for a confrontation, publicly disowned the rebels.
The Dollfuss Affair mattered for three reasons. It showed that Hitler was willing to interfere in a neighbour’s politics. It also showed that he would back down if a great power resisted. And it set up a paradox: in 1934 Mussolini was the obstacle to Anschluss, but within four years Mussolini would be the partner who waved it through.
Two patterns set in 1933-34 shaped what followed. Britain and France did not challenge Hitler over leaving the League or over the German-Polish pact — both fitted a wider hope that a satisfied Germany would settle down. Italy did challenge Hitler over Austria — and Hitler retreated. The lesson Hitler took was that great-power firmness worked, while moralistic League protests did not. He would now look for moves where the Allies were unlikely to push back.
1933-34 was a cautious testing phase. Hitler walked out of the League in October 1933 with no Allied response, signed the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact in January 1934 to buy time, but backed down in July 1934 when Mussolini threatened intervention over the Austrian Nazi coup that killed Dollfuss.