1)Poland was the straw that broke the camels back.
2)Germany annexed Austria and another country whose name escapes me right now.
3)Every country knew Germany was gearing up for war and that they had the best aircraft and weapons.
4)A large standing army and a desire to make an empire.
5)What the English had was a piece of paper that Neville Chamberlain brought back from Germany "Peace In Our Time".
6)It was fight now or fight later.
1) In Allied agitprop that we now embrace yes. But what we forgot is that Poland was occupying tens of thousands of square miles of german lands + peoples that the allies of WW1 Had given them (!) These people did not want to be there. They were interested in self determination instead.
2) It's impossible to annex a people that wants to be part of you. Thats called.. wait for it.. Self-determination. In the constitution Austria gave itself in 1919 Paragraph 2 read : We are part of the German Nation and it is our constitutional duty to work todars unification with germany. The allies kept blockading food imports starving the people of Austria until they chnaged the constitution.
In the meantime they took a huge part of that country (the Sudetenland populated by 3.5 million germans fully 40% of German Austrian population and annexed it to that concentration camp of Nations called Czechoslovakia.
There was no reason to create that country except to ensure an everlasting hatred bewteen Czechs (and they were hoping Slovaks but it didn't work) on on side and hungarians and germans on the other.
It was deliberatly created in bad faith.
3) Actually EVERY SINGLE YEAR from 1930 to 1939 Britain and France by themselves spent more money EACH on the military than germany did EVEN though Germany carried the extra expensive start-up costs of rearming.
This is one of the fundamental causes of the War. Britain and France thought it would be a cakewalk to reimpose their imperial dictation on their victims.
Even the Poles were bragging that their Army would "cut through germany like a hot knife through Butter" and that they would take Berlin within weeks.
The difference between what happened was due to the german fighting smarter and making the best use of what they had.
No one including the germans could have predicted this.
BTW did you know that the Polish military was nearly as large as the German military?
They had nearly as many tanks ( and better ones) as the germans?
Poland also had a significant Air Force.
The "tanks against brave polish cavalry" myth is just that a myth. ... Not that such an engagement did not happen but it was not indicative of the reality on the ground.
Germany tried a compromise and peace with Poland again and again.. but the Poles (egged on by British and French guarantees) were not interested.
None of this is controversial its all black letter history and can be learned at any military academy.
or anyone who reads a serious book on the preliminaries to the war. (instead of wartime and postwar feel-good propaganda.. "Why we fight " and all that dishonest nonsense)
4) Empire? Who had a large military and a desire for empire? Britain whose empire covered a quarter of the globes landmass?? France who was not far behind? The US which had only a genration earlier annexed Purto RIco and the phillipines ? The Soviet Union which was committing daily atrocities on its minorities every year between world wars one and two with total victims dramatically exceeding the Holocaust. An Empire that was following a ideology of expansion.
As for will of empire who here "show of hands" has ACTUALLY read documents from the time on germany interwar policy and goals? And not just "learned" from hollywood or socialist propaganda of the war years.
Stated german policy was to rescue the germans from allied injustices and crimes of 1919.. Even Hitler only hoped for more (Lebensraum) once the war was joined (and going surprisingly well in the beginning).
5) Again the English also had the biggest Empire on the planet and Churchill was running around gassing Russians in 1921 and Kurds (in the 30's the RAF on Churchills agitation gassed many many more Kurds than Saddam Hussein ever did) trying to make a name for himself as British hardliner to recover from the disaster of Gallipoli which had been blamed on him.
(Seriously i hope there is no one on here who doesnt know this.. )
If he had been alive in 1776 he would have likely pursued a policy of genocide against the colonists too.
Think about that for a bit....
6) yes and the "fight later" is now.. As the Chickens of backing the wrong side in WW2 are coming home to roost here and in most of Europe.
One can only hope that the Poles , the Czechs, The Ukrainians and Russians can avoid the fate that Western decadence has so richly brought on itself.
Soon they may be all that's left of the continent of our ancestors... and its all the result of foolish + failed allied policies before and after both Wars.
Are the germans free of blame?
No.
But they were always the underdogs compared to the multitude of huge allied empires.
it is the more powerful parties that had the ability to shape our reality.. so it is they who must take the blame.