Warlords
Under scrutiny
Delusion and error
Hitler |
***** |
Hitler's belief in his own infallibility was delusion verging on madness. The fact that the Western powers had failed to take action against him when he seized control of the Ruhr, the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia led him to believe that they would never go to war. When they did, as a result of his invasion of Poland, Germany's early military successes caused him to think that the Nazi war machine was unstoppable. Thus he launched the war-losing invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and barely paused for breath before declaring war on the United States, too, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor the following December. The rest of the war was a catalogue of delusion and error by the Nazi leader, ended only by his suicide while the Red Army was closing in on his Berlin bunker.
