Hitler Reversing the TOV

• The revision of 'Diktat' was clearly a fundamental goal of the Nazi's foreign policy. Hitler had made this clear from the Nazi Party's 25-Point Programme published in February 1920 which referenced things such as the 'union of all Germans in a Great Germany', a clear reference to Anschluss.
• In Mein Kampf, written in 1925, Hitler declared Germans to be 'the highest species of humanity on this earth'. He wrote that 'only a sufficiently large space on this earth can ensure the independent existence of a nation'.
• In October 1933, Germany withdrew from the Geneva Disarmament Conference and then from the League of Nations.
• In January 1935 a referendum was organised in the Saar. Voters could decide to return to Germany or continue under League supervision. The Nazis used a combination of intimidation and violence to ensure a vote of more than 90% for a return to the Reich.
• In March 1936, Hitler sent 20000 troops into the Rhineland. He used the principle of self-determination that had underpinned the TOV to legitimatise his demands that German speaking people be returned to the Reich.
• Self-determination was his rationale for Anschluss in 1938 and the return of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia through the Munich Conference.
• The state of Czechoslovakia itself had been created by the TOV, the German invasion of March 1939 represented a direct military challenge in the borders created after WW1.
• The invasion of Poland in September 1939 was driven by the desire to remove the Polish Corridor, another creation of the TOV.