The essence of Stresemann’s position was that the war did not change the fundamental direction of world history, which was dictated by the inevitable trajectory of economic development. Though Germany had been defeated, the war, by weakening Britain and France and promoting the United States, opened the door to a reassertion of German power, though limited to the economic sphere. Hitler regarded this kind of thinking as characteristic of the naïve optimism of the German bourgeois. Hitler
