Impact of TOV on Hitler's F.P

• The revision of the 'diktat' was clearly a fundamental goal of the Nazi's foreign policy.
• Nazi Party's 25 Point-Programme published in February 1920 demanded 'revocation of the peace treaties of Versailles and the unification of all Germans in a Great Germany, a clear reference to Anschluss with Austria, specifically banned by Versailles.
• Mein kampf, 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 independence existence of a nation'.
• The need for territory would clearly require a revision of the borders established at Versailles.
• As soon as he took office in 1933 Hitler set out to break the conditions of the Versailles settlement.
• His foreign policy decisions were rooted in defeat in 1918 and the subsequent TOV.
• His entire foreign policy was motivated not by a desire to return to the pre-1914 borders, which he considered now obsolete, but to destroy the Europe created at Versailles.
• His support came from this embittered by their perceptions of the 'diktat' imposed at Versailles.
• Breaches of the Versailles Treaty gathered pace throughout the 1930s.
• Steps towards Versailles dismantling:

  October 1933 - Germany withdrew from the Geneva Disarmament Conference and then from the League of Nations.
• Steps towards Versailles dismantling:

  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.
• Steps towards Versailles dismantling:

  Although Versailles specifically forbade there to be a German military presence in the Rhineland, in March 1936 Hitler sent in 20,000 troops. He was able to use the principle of self-determination that had underpinned the Versailles settlement to legitimate his demands that German-speaking people returned to the Reich.
• Steps towards Versailles dismantling:

  Self-determinism was also in his rationale for Anschluss with Austria in 1938 and for the return of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia through negotiations during the Munich Conference in the same year. Having defended that principle in drawing up the borders of the new Europe at Versailles, it was difficult for the Allies to muster support for military action against the Germans.
• Steps towards Versailles dismantling:

  The state of Czechoslovakia itself had been created by the peace settlements of 1919 - the German invasion in the March 1939 represented a direct military challenge to the borders created after WW1.
• Steps towards Versailles dismantling:

  The invasion of Poland in September 1939 was driven by the desire to remove the Polish Corridor, another creation of the TOV.