World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseIn 1937, German Navy Admiral Erich Raeder warned Adolf Hitler the Navy was not receiving enough steel and other raw materials to continue its expansion, and neither the Army nor the Air Force were willing to share their allocated portions. As the result, a meeting was called for top German leaders to arrive at a solution. The meeting took place on 5 Nov 1937, and attendees included Adolf Hitler, Reich Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Reich War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Army chief General Werner von Fritsch, Navy chief Admiral Erich Raeder, and Air Force chief Hermann Göring. Colonel Friedrich Hossbach was placed in charge of taking minutes for the meeting, and thus the subsequent name for the conference. The meeting took place at the Reich Chancellery, Berlin, Germany. As Hitler knew that none of the branches of service would easily concede to a reduction in resource allocation, he took the opportunity to implement a policy of territorial expansion in order for Germany to reach the state of autarchy (nearly or completely self-sufficient). He noted that the German economy had reached the critical point in which demands for resources had gone beyond German capacity to supply the needs, thus the only course of action Germany could take was to aggressively obtain resources of other European nations, starting with Austria and Czechoslovakia. The United Kingdom and France were now considered as future rivals as well. Furthermore, Hitler also established the Lebensraum concept (coined by Friedrich Ratzel in 1901 and re-interpreted by Hitler's 1925 book Mein Kampf) as a national policy. Blomberg, Fritsch, and Neurath noted that the plan was too risky, as any aggressive move against nations such as Czechoslovakia might result in war, which would necessarily bring France into the war through alliances; they warned that Germany was not yet strong enough to deal with this potential large-scale war, and later advised Hitler to wait several years before embarking on any aggressive maneuvers.

Hossbach Conference Timeline