As early as 1925, Hitler had declared a war of conquest and annihilation against the Soviet Union as the main goal of his foreign policy in his programmatic pamphlet Mein Kampf. He justified this with the inevitable world-historical struggle of the "Aryan race" against "world Jewry", whose most extreme form of rule was "Bolshevism". There "the Jew" showed himself to be a "tyrant of the people", so that one could only fight both at the same time.
Consequently, an alliance with the Soviet Union was out of the question; one could not "cast out the devil with the Beelzebub". Furthermore, the mere reconquest of German territories lost in the First World War was "political nonsense". Rather, it must be a matter of securing for the German people for all time "the land on this earth which is due to them" and which guarantees them economic independence in the continental area of Europe. This ground was to be sought above all in Russia and its subjugated peripheral states. National Socialism therefore proclaimed as a new goal, even in the face of the "annexationists" of the Kaiserreich: "We stop the eternal Germanic march to the south and west of Europe and point the gaze to the land in the east." Hitler legitimized this perspective with two assumptions: a racial, and therefore political and military, inferiority of the Slavs supposedly dominated by the Jews, so that Soviet rule was "ripe for collapse," and a willingness of Britain to accept Germany's prior conquest of France and then support it in the struggle against the Soviet Union. He criticized the elites of the Kaiserreich for not seeking a clear alliance with either Britain or Russia, but instead engaging Germany in an unwinnable two-front war. From this he concluded that the Soviet Union could only be conquered after an alliance with Great Britain, which would cover the previous conquest of France and thus German "freedom of the rear".
In 1928 Hitler affirmed in his "Second Book": Since Germany could permanently find its living space only in the East, an alliance with the Soviet Union made no sense. Destructively inclined Jewry would destroy the Soviet state and make it easier for the Germans to shed their inhibitions about the only possible "goal of German foreign policy": to conquer "living space in the East" sufficient "for the next 100 years". To do this, he said, Germany must acquire "great military power" and concentrate all its state forces on this conquest. In this formula Hitler inextricably linked racist, expansionist, and imperialist ideas. The goal of conquering the European parts of the Soviet Union was to determine all German armaments and foreign policy and to make possible a later world domination by the German Aryans.
Even after his seizure of power in 1933, Hitler repeatedly professed, both publicly and internally, the goal of a great war of conquest in the East. On February 3, 1933, he explained his Lebensraum concept to the commanders of the Reichswehr, who in turn advocated similar concepts (see Liebmann record). In 1934 he first considered waging blitzkriegs in the West first, so that he could then turn his attention to the East, since the Western powers would not grant Germany Lebensraum. The Wehrmacht would have to be ready for this in eight years. From 1937 he was ready to dare a war against France and Great Britain in order to carry out the expansion to the East. In two major Reichstag speeches in 1937 and 1938, he declared that he was relentlessly waging war against "Jewish-international Moscow Bolshevism."
On January 30, 1939, Hitler threatened in the Reichstag that the result of a new world war would be "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" instead of the "Bolshevization of the earth." On 10 February 1939 he told troop commanders that he preferred the solution of the "German space problem" by conquests in the East to increased export-import trade. The next war necessary for this purpose would be "a pure war of world outlook, i.e., consciously a war of the people and a war of the races." He, Hitler, as Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, was also a world-view leader to whom all officers were bound, for better or worse, even if the people "let him down" in the process.
On 23 May 1939, one day after the conclusion of the steel pact in preparation for the invasion of Poland, Hitler told Wehrmacht leaders that he was not concerned with Danzig in the conflict with Poland, but rather with "expanding the living space in the East and ensuring food supplies, as well as solving the Baltic problem". In August 1939 he gave the League of Nations Commissioner Carl Jacob Burckhardt to understand that he would solve the "problem of Danzig" militarily, even against resistance from France and England, and that he finally wanted to have "a free hand in the East":
"Everything I undertake is directed against Russia; if the West is too stupid and too blind to understand this, I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, defeat the West, and then, after its defeat, turn against the Soviet Union with my assembled forces. I need the Ukraine so that we cannot be starved out again as we were in the last war."
Hitler understood the Hitler-Stalin Pact decided on August 23, 1939, only as a temporary tactical maneuver for the invasion of Poland and the war against Poland's protecting powers France and Great Britain, as he expressly emphasized to Wehrmacht leaders. Poland was the future deployment area for Germany's "further development" to the east. To NSDAP representatives on 27 August 1939, Hitler alluded to his statement in Mein Kampf: it was a pact "with Satan to cast out the devil". Ulrich von Hassell noted that Hitler "did not change his fundamentally anti-Bolshevik policy"; any means against the Soviets, including this pact, was fine with him, since he inwardly "reserved the attack on Soviet Russia for later.
According to Nicolaus von Below, Hitler declared in a small circle on 31 August 1939, the eve of the attack on Poland: his "offer to Poland" - meaning German proposals to Poland by March 1939 to ally with Germany against the Soviet Union as a "junior partner" (dependent satellite state) - had been honest. For his foreign policy task remained "to crush Bolshevism": "All other struggles served only the one purpose of clearing one's back for the confrontation with Bolshevism." On 9 October 1939 Hitler explained the necessity of the Western campaign against France to the OKH by saying that Soviet treaty loyalty could not be relied upon, only military strength. On 21 October 1939, he told Reich and Gauleiters that after the victory over England and France he would "turn again to the East" [...] and "set about creating a Germany as it had existed before". In his address to the Commanders-in-Chief on 23 November 1939, he told the generals that the Soviet Union would remain "dangerous in the future"; "but is weak at present" and the "value of the Russian Wehrmacht" was low, but it could only be countered if it was unbound in the West. Treaties would be held only as long as they were useful to the contracting parties. He urged that the Western campaign be carried out in the spring of 1940, so that the Army would then be available again for "a major operation in the East against Russia."
