The Role of Geopolitics in the Third Reich

The idea of empire as an expression of a vital and cultured people was commonplace in the 1930s. The argument that the Germans were waging a geopolitical war was popular in the wartime U.S. It is difficult now to deny that geopolitics helped to shape the territorial and racial ambitions of the Third Reich, writes Julian Zelizer. But he says it destroyed the new German empire because Hitler failed to recognize the gap between geopolitical fantasies and military reality.