Captivating History - Operation Barbarossa: A Captivating Guide to the Opening Months of the War between Hitler and the Soviet Union in 1941–45

In Mein Kampf ( My Struggle ), Hitlers political testament and autobiography (in quotes because much of what is written about his life was exaggerated or made up, especially his claim of poverty; his father was a big fish in a small town with a maid, a pension, a uniform, and respect), the future dictator of Germany repeatedly stated his belief that it was the destiny of the German nation to expand to the east.

Germany, after World War I and even today, is roughly the size of the American states of Washington and Oregon together. The population of those two states combined is about twelve million people. The population of Germany at the time of World War II was seventy million (today, its eighty million). Hitler was not the only German-speaking person to hold the belief that Germany needed to secure Lebensraum (living space) in order to thrive and survive in a crowded Europe with enemies on all sides. Indeed, along with the vicious anti-Semitism included within Mein Kampf , the idea of Lebensraum is the most mentioned and elaborated upon.

In the years before the war, many of those in other nations who had read Hitlers book and who saw him clearly for what he was repeatedly told anyone who was willing to listen that Hitler meant to start a war of expansion in the east, which might evolve into another world war. Chief among these people was one of the leading political figures of Great Britain and its future leader, Winston Churchill.

In the years before the previous world war, many Europeans (especially those in the larger and more powerful nations of France, the United Kingdom, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia) held the belief that their nations needed to gain or hold onto territories and colonial empires in order to thrive. Though much of this late 19 th -century imperialism was supported by an undercurrent of racial superiority, its aims were economic gains and the power and prestige that came with a large empire.

However, Germany, prior to World War I, had a sizable minority of politicians, writers, philosophers, and journalists who were beginning to gravitate to a vision of Germany and Germanic peoples (which included the British, Scandinavians, Dutch, etc.) as a superior race, noting both their economic and military power along with their outsized cultural influence. This Germanic superiority extended over the other peoples of Europe, especially to the Slavic nations of the east.

Hitler, along with many Germans, Austrians, and other Europeans, were not alone in holding these beliefs; they existed in the United States and Canada as well. In the years between World War I and World War II, these ideas combined with new advances in science to bring forth the new science of eugenics, the idea that it would be possible to medically weed out hereditary and other infirmities such as intellectual disabilities, epilepsy, alcoholism, etc. On its fringes, the field of eugenics included educated medical professionals and philosophers who believed that it would be possible to breed out such infirmities and encourage the procreation of individuals who were believed to be smarter, better-looking, more fit, and healthy. Once it was combined with the idea that Northern European Germanic peoples were superior, eugenics began to enter a new and dangerous phase by the time Hitler came to power.