Discuss the role of Hitler in bringing about the Second World War.

Ideology and the capture of the German state

• Mein Kampf and Nazi speeches named Jews, Slavs, and the Versailles order as enemies, and Lebensraum in the east as the cure for Germany’s alleged encirclement.
• Appointment as Chancellor in January 1933, the Enabling Act, the night of the Long Knives, and the fusion of President and Führer in 1934 turned a party into a war-capable dictatorship.
• Rearmament, conscription (1935), and the Luftwaffe broke the military clauses of Versailles and taught Europe that treaties would be tested by force.

From revision to open war

• Remilitarisation of the Rhineland (1936) was a gamble that Paris and London did not stop; it destroyed the last buffer of 1919 and raised Hitler’s domestic prestige.
• The Rome–Berlin Axis, intervention in Spain, Anschluss with Austria (March 1938), and the Munich dismemberment of Czechoslovakia (September 1938) showed a method: threaten, split the democracies, then occupy.
• Occupation of Prague in March 1939 ended the pretence that Hitler wanted only German-speakers; Britain then guaranteed Poland.
• The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939) freed the eastern front for a week; the invasion of Poland on 1 September, with a Soviet entry on 17 September, made a European war certain after Britain and France declared war on 3 September.

Agency without a single-cause myth

• Appeasement at Munich, the League’s failure in Manchuria and Abyssinia, and Japan’s China war created a climate in which Hitler could move, but they did not write the Polish ultimatum.
• Hitler’s personal timetable—autarky, Four Year Plan, and a war he believed must come while Germany was strong—turned revisionism into a general war rather than a limited border fix.
• A fair discussion therefore gives Hitler the decisive European agency while still naming the wider breakdown of the 1919 order.