Economic growth could not be taken for granted and Hitler was by no means the only person to say so. As we have seen, the doctrine of economic life as a field of struggle was already fully formed in Mein Kampf and Hitler’s ‘Second Book’. And this Darwinian outlook was only encouraged by the subsequent Depression. Given the density of Germany’s population and Hitler’s insistence on the inevitability of conflict arising from export-led growth, the conquest of new Lebensraum was certainly one means of raising Germany’s per capita income level. Hitler could hardly have been more emphatic or
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