if germany and russia worked together to invade poland at the same time, why did germany decide to declare war on russia?..
History - 5 Answers
Random Answers, Critics, Comments, Opinions :
1 :
Bad judgement and miscalculation. Same as the reason Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. One side of every war is going to lose and the rulers of one of the two sides figured things wrong every time. The Southern Confederacy must have believed they could win. The Brits must have figured they could whip the Maoris and the Fuzzy Wuzzies, as well as the Afghans [twice]. The Mexicans must have thought they could win a war against the US. The Argentines must have thought they could win against the UK. ad infinitum.
2 :
Hitler wanted to rule the world. After he signed the Treaty before invading Poland the Russians trusted him and did not expect him to invade.He also wanted russia so he had a clear path to Japan.Also, Hitler viewed the russians as subhuman . At the time Russia was also ripe for the picking . Stalin's purges had decimated the russian officer corps, leaving for the most part only political lackeys in high military leadership. This combined with poor military infastructure left them very vulnerable .
3 :
The whole idea of Hitler was to conquer as much of Russia as possible. In German, that was called "die Drang nach Osten", roughly translated "the urge to conquer the east". From Day 1, that was what Hitler wanted to achieve. Conquering Western Europe was just to safeguard that attack.
4 :
Hitler believed that Germany could only flourish by expanding Eastward to gain what Nazis called lebensraum, living space. It seems this belief was based on his assumption that [supposed] racial superiority over the Russian population gave Germans the right to take the Eastern lands as opposed to the [supposed] cultured west. These ideas of racial superiority combined with Eastern expansion were at the very heart of Nazi ideology. The pact with Russia was just an expedient for Hitler which allowed Germany to take most of Poland without a Russian war which they were not yet prepared for and simultaneously [as Hitler thought] keep France and England from going to war by denying them Russia as an ally.
5 :
The main reasons are in 2 categories, economic and ideological. Economic reasons: Hitler's Third Reich needed oil, food, slave labour and land for the expansion of Germany and the Germanic People. All these were available if Russia could be conquered. The German economy needed to plunder resources from other countries so as to keep the standard of living high for the German population.The Germans had already conquered te rest of Europe.To stave off economic collapse at home, it was necessary to conquer Russia and use its resources to prop up the German Home economy. Ideological: Nazi political ideology was fundamentally opposed to Communism. Russia was the only existing Communist state - if it could be conquered, the main political ideology opposed by the Nazis would be eradicated.. Several million Jews lived in Russia. Nazi racial ideology saw the Jews as a direct racial threat to the purity of the blood of the Germanic people, so the Nazis wanted to kill all the Jews. To get at the Jews in Russia, invasion and conquest of that country was necessary. Note: 'Drang nacht Osten' translates as ' The drive to the East' rather than 'urge to conquer the East'
