Summary Of Hitler's Gamble By Adam Tooze

The article Hitler’s Gamble by Adam Tooze provides information on the different scholarly views regarding Hitler’s intent to start the Second World War. Tooze does this by examining the views of the leading historians on the topic. He looks at where the historians agree and where they disagree and concludes with his own analysis of the topic. Tooze explains that the main disagreement on the topic is regarding Hitler’s purpose for escalating international tension through the invasion of Poland. There are those historians, specifically Richard Overy and Ian Kershaw, who argued that Hitler did not intend to provoke a war over Poland. He explains that this view was most bitterly opposed by the British historian Tim Mason and he goes on to cite a furious dispute that

Weinberg does agree that Hitler would of course preferred to avoid a conflict with Western powers, but he realized that this was something he would inevitability have to face. Hitler’s Chief German biographer, Joachim Fest, argues that Hitler’s growing sense of mortality was what convinced him that it was time to increase aggression. Tooze that not much has changed regarding the positions on this topic since the 1980’s, but offers the probability of some alterations as a result of new archival evidence. This evidence, Tooze argues, forces historians to further explore Hitler’s war against the his Jewish enemies who he blamed for Germany’s economic crisis. He explains that Hitler viewed Germany's problem through the lens of his racial ideology and this made war inevitable for him. Tooze does conclude that Hitler he probably wished to avoid a big war with Britain and France until the early 1940’s, but this become impossible with the events that had unfolded by early 1939. He further argues that Hitler’s anti-Semitic views and his belief in the Jewish responsibility of Germany’s combined with Western democracies aligning with each other propelled Hitler to take action that would lead to the Second