5. Why did Hitler wage war? What did he hope to accomplish? Challenging conventional views. I presented my findings in Nations have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War, in scholarly papers, and in over 6000 Newsletters distributed to prominent scholars throughout the world during the past fourteen years. Here, I’ll show how Hitler acted to bring about Germany’s destruction—and his own.
    
5. We are used to looking at the Second World War in a certain way, a narrative presented in history books and endless documentaries. We take it for granted that we understand the war. We do not.
    
5. I’ll focus on Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s war against the Soviet Union launched on June 22, 1941. Typical explanations for why Hitler attacked Russia—in the midst of Germany’s war against Great Britain—include: the desire for “living space” in the East; economic benefits that would accrue if Germany had access to the vast resources of the Soviet Union; Hitler’s wish to avenge Germany’s defeat in the First World War; and of course his desire to have access to Soviet territory so that he could locate, identify and kill every Jew within this territory. Broadly speaking, most people—historians and laymen alike—say that Germany waged war aspiring to “conquer” the Soviet Union.

5. Expecting a quick victory, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union along a 1600-kilometer front, the longest in history. Three-and-one-half German soldiers attacked, supported by artillery, air force and tanks. Well over three-million Soviet soldiers were captured in the first month, the majority of whom died in POW camps. German troops were brutal, intent on domination and victory at any cost. Several leading Nazis proclaimed this a “war of extermination.”
6. I won’t discuss the course of this gigantic struggle. Suffice it to say—moving to the endgame—that eventually the movement of millions of German soldiers into the Soviet Union went into reverse. The war began moving in the opposite direction, from East to West instead of from West to East. From being the invader, Germany was invaded.

5. During the first months of January 1945, Soviet troops reached Berlin, and the work of Germany’s destruction began to reach its conclusion. The Second World War ended with Hitler, his wife Eva Braun and other German leaders trapped in a Bunker. Not much “living space” there. Hitler married Eva Braun the day before he shot her and himself—on April 30, 1945.
6. Standard historical accounts suggest Hitler might have won the war if he had not made strategic mistakes, for example, declaring war against the United States on December 11, 1941, for no apparent reason, allowing British troops to escape at Dunkirk, failing to complete the conquest of Great Britain, waging war simultaneously in the Middle East etc.
   
   It’s clear that Hitler bit off more than he could chew. His dream of conquest was an impossible dream. The last months of the war in 1945 brought massive destruction throughout Germany, total military defeat, and unconditional surrender.

5. What were the thought processes of the Commander-in-Chief, Adolf Hitler. I begin with Hitler’s Declaration of War delivered in a speech at an Extraordinary Session of the German Reichstag on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland—the commencement of World War II.
5. The ending of the war was contained within the beginning. Hitler’s Declaration of War was a prophecy of what Hitler wished to have happen and what eventually did happen. If we listen carefully to Hitler’s words, it becomes clear that he said what he meant and meant what he said:

"As a National Socialist and a German soldier, I enter upon this fight with a stout heart! I ask of every German what I myself am prepared to do: to be ready to lay down his life for his people and for his country."

5. What Hitler was prepared to do: lay down his life. This was Hitler’s fundamental desire and command. That every German lay down his or her life for Germany. Hitler asserted that this is what he himself was prepared to do at any moment: to “lay down his life for his people and his country.” Then Hitler continued: If anyone thought he could “evade the national duty” (to lay down one’s life for Germany), this person would “perish.” Die for Germany, or if you try to evade dying for Germany, we will kill you.
5. This was Hitler’s plan for German troops and Germany: Asking Germans to lay down their lives was at the heart of Hitler’s thoughts and actions from the beginning when he declared war on September 1, 1939.

Less than two years later (in June, 1941 when Germany attacked the Soviet Union), the Holocaust began: Hitler asking Jews to lay down their lives. In actuality, asking the German people to lay down their lives and asking Jews to lay down their lives were two sides of the same coin: compelling human beings to die for Germany.

5. Hitler’s Declaration of War was a both a prediction and a threat, expressing what Hitler wanted to happen and what eventually did happen. Either lay down your life, die for Germany—or Germany will kill you. What this meant for the German soldier was: either die in battle (be killed by the enemy); or failing to perform this duty (dying while fighting the enemy), you will perish in any case at the hands of the German nation.
5. Millions of German soldiers died in battle. While troops that tried to avoid fighting and dying—refused to engage in battle, tried to surrendered, moved backwards instead of forward, etc.—often were killed by German military officers.
5. It seems bold to say that Hitler was asking Germans to lay down their lives. But he was only asking of his soldiers what every nation asks of soldiers in times of war: To enter battle and if necessary—“die for their country.”
5. The idea of sacrificial death guided Hitler’s thinking from the very beginning. In Mein Kampf, he stated that any man who loved his people proved it solely by the “sacrifices he was prepared to make for it.” To be “national,” Hitler said, was to act with a  “boundless and all-embracing love for the people” and if necessary “to die for it.” Giving one’s life for one’s country, he stated, constituted the “crown of sacrifice.”
5. Stephen Fritz reports that by August 1, 1941, the 18^th Panzer issued a special order emphasizing the consequences of refusing to continue fighting: “Every case of cowardice will be severely atoned for with death.” In other words, die in battle—or Germany will kill you.
5. Just after the Red reached the Oder, Hitler printed his version of Stalin’s “Not one step back” order of 1942:

Military tribunals should take the strictest measures possible based on the principle that those who are afraid of an honest death in battle deserve the mean death of cowards.

Hitler’s demand, in short, was that German soldiers had only two alternatives: die in battle; or, lacking the courage to do so, die at the hands of a German military officer.

5. German soldiers suspected of desertion often were executed and left dangling from trees or poles with placards around their necks reading “cowardice in the face of the enemy.” Reporting to Wehrmacht authorities, one German officer saw an executed German soldier in front of the headquarter building lying on the grass with a large placard on his chest containing the following words: “That’s how it goes for one who is a coward.”
5. As the war wound down, Hitler reiterated his initial command or prophecy. On April 15, 1945, just before the Battle of Berlin, he declared that “Whoever does not do his duty at this moment is a traitor to our people.” Whoever commands a German soldier to retreat will be “taken prisoner at once and if necessary killed on the spot.”
5. Whereas during the First World War, the Kaiser executed only forty-eight German soldiers, in the Second World War between 13,000 and 15,000 German men were put to their death by their own army.
5. Sixteen-year-old Hans-Rudolf Vilter never forgot the picture of chaos in Berlin in 1945, especially the treatment of deserters. He saw several apprehended soldiers hanging on lampposts and trees with the sign, “I hang here because I am too cowardly to defend my fatherland.” In short, die for Germany, or Germany will kill you.
5. To the end, Hitler refused to allow his officers and soldiers—or anyone—to say the war was lost. He continued to require that they “lay down their lives” for Fuhrer and Volk, fulfilling his prophecy that one would either die fighting for Germany—or perish.
5. One soldier, according to Fritz, recalled with bitterness that in the fall of 1944, armed German officers gave his unit no choice but to attack enemy lines. The other option was clear: be shot by your own leaders. Units established special formations whose instructions were to “make immediate use of their weapons to enforce obedience and discipline.”
5. The situation in which many soldiers found themselves, Helmut Altner wrote caustically, was devilishly simple. “There were only two possibilities. Death by a bullet from the enemy or death brought about by the “thugs of the SS.”
5. Thus did Hitler fulfill the prophecy contained within his Declaration of War: Die for Germany or Germany will kill you.

German Military Deaths