This ominous constellation of forces was not as Hitler had predicted or as he had wished. But since the enemies of the Third Reich were improvising, Germany would have to do the same. What Hitler could not do, in light of the ‘will to annihilation’ (Vernichtungswillen) that Nazi conspiracy theory attributed to the enemies of Germany, was to back down or to hesitate.144 War with the Western powers involved huge risk. But given the increasingly unmanageable dynamic of the global arms race and the existential threat supposedly posed to
