Hitler's Ideals
The Treaty of Versailles
The treaty of Versailles had been a historic humiliation for Germany. Central to Hitler's ideas was that it should be scrapped. This would allow Germany greater economic freedom,
and more importantly allow it to construct a modernised army with tanks and aeroplanes such as the Americans or British were able to use. The end of the treaty would also signal that
Germany had recovered from the pain of losing WWI and was once more a power on the world stage.
Lebensraum
The Nazi manifesto of expansionism was underwirtten by one major principle; that of Lebensraum, which translates as "living space". In short, since the Nazis believed that Aryan Germans
were superior human beings it also stood to reason that it was a good idea to make sure there were as many of them as possible. This in turn would require more land for them to live in,
and, as it happened, that land currently happened to not be in German hands. Essentially Lebensraum gave a moral justification for the Nazis in rolling over slavic states to exapnd the Third
Reich.
The Fuehrer Principle
As Lebensraum was to expansionism, the Fuehrer Principle was to Dictatorship. Essentially the idea isquite simple; that neither Germany nor anywhere else can truly be effectively
governed by an elected government, simply because the government will disagree with other parties and so nothing ever gets done as fast or efficiently as it could be. Therefore the best
situation must be to have just one leader who will rule the whole country; one strong leader, or "Fuehrer", on whom all power is centralised. Hitler's own personal belief was that, also,
that that Fuehrer should probably be called Adolf Hitler.
Race
Hitler believed that humanity was divided into races, and that some races were inherently better than others. The best races of all would be "pure" races, those where people had not
interbred with those of other racial or ethnic groups. The German Aryans were, for Hitler, the perfect example of a race that was the purest and best of them all. It was, he believed,
vital that they keep themselves pure to become the "master race" that would dominate the world.
Communism
The political system of Russia at the time, Communism was inherently very dangerous in Hitler's eyes. In his world, where the Aryans were dominant and fundamentally pure against the other
races that were weak and racially impure, the base ideal of communism - that all men should be truly equal - simply could not exist. This incompatibility led to a deep hatred of Communist
ideology; Hitler was determined that Communism should be wiped out.
Anti-Semitism
Hitler believed that Jews (Semites) were the biggest threat to the purity of the Aryan race. Where he saw Aryans as strong, pure, simplistic, humane, he saw the Jews as brutal, greedy,
hedonistic, and weak. He also thought that in 1918 they had backstabbed Germany to end the First World War as part of a plot for world domination; for these reasons, the Nazis believed
that the Jewish people should be destroyed and wiped out.
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