Despite the extraordinary extent of the Wehrmacht’s victories, the space under Germany’s control in the autumn of 1940 was not, therefore, the self-sufficient Lebensraum of which Hitler had dreamed. Nor did Western Europe provide a promising platform from which to fight the long war of attrition that Britain and its backers in the United States were clearly determined to force on Germany. In economic terms, the Wehrmacht’s victories in 1940 did not release Germany from the dependence on the Soviet Union into which it had entered a year earlier.100 In fact, in the short term the only way to
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