Military strategy
War strategy

Hitler's strategy for war was laid out in Mein Kampf (1925/1926). Whether Hitler intended global or merely European conquest, or whether he even had a plan for war in advance is debated; see Nazi foreign policy (historiographic debate). In Mein Kampf, Hitler had imagined a short war against France, and then the conquest of the USSR. He had wrongly assumed that Britain would be a German ally in the west against France, and so he did not foresee an enduring war in the west.

Once the Second World War had begun with France and Britain as allies, German strategy aimed to win a short war in France and to force Britain to the negotiating table. After the conquest of France in May–June 1940, Churchill 's refusal to surrender or to negotiate on terms favorable for Germany put the German gamble in jeopardy. Germany could not match Britain on the open sea and had not prepared its army for operations across the Channel. Instead, the Wehrmacht hoped to strangle Britain's economy through success in the Battle of the Atlantic (1939–1945) and the Battle of Britain (1940).

In June 1941 Germany invaded the USSR (Operation Barbarossa) to carry out the second part of Hitler's strategy. The campaign plan envisaged defeating the USSR in a single summer / fall campaign, but Barbarossa failed to achieve any of its major objectives. In December 1941 Japan attacked the USA and Germany declared war on the USA shortly afterwards. Through the summer and fall of 1942, German strategy to win the war remained based on defeating the USSR.
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