Here is your short paragraph on Hitler’s invasion of Poland’!
Hitler’s invasion of Poland which led to Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, and the start of World War II was motivated merely by Germany’s desire to regain the city of Danzig, which had been given to Poland in the Versailles Treaty.
Had Poland simply negotiated with Hitler, war could have been averted.
In fact, Hitler wasn’t bent on world, or even European domination. He would have been happy with just Danzig, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps. It was only thanks to the aggression of Britain, Russia, and the U.S. that the conflict was expanded. So, goes the implication, any deaths that occurred after 1940 including the 6 million that comprised the Holocaust are on the Allies’ heads.
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Hitler did not seek a ‘world war’, but he would not change his own plans for expansion to the east in order to avoid one either. He invaded Poland knowing that Britain and France had pledged to defend her. Allied declarations were phrased in terms on the order of ‘if Germany does not withdraw, a state of war shall exist’, so there was still an opportunity for Hitler to avoid wider war. Hitler also accepted that he might have to fight traditional enemy France in order to remove that threat before continuing east. He hoped to reach an accommodation with Britain on the basis of recognizing each other’s sphere of influence.
Hitler occasionally talked about regaining Germany’s overseas colonies, after the World War-I experience he realized that such colonies were hostages to fortune in the event of war with the major naval powers. Instead he sought his empire on land.
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At that time it was taken for granted that European powers, even little Belgium and Portugal, had a God-given right to rule over vast areas of land and millions of ‘inferior’ people. Germany posed little threat to the European empires, but it is an interesting sideline that after Japan entered the war, Britain, Free France, and the Netherlands were fighting as much for restoration of their colonies as for defeat of the Axis.