I've been looking for information about Hitler's motivations for specific actions, and what the military/economic/moral endgame/justification of his actions are.
In particular what were his reasons for starting war-actions, were there ever legitimate offers of peace to/from any other nations, and did he think he had enough people to take over the world? Or did he think he could convert people or gain new allies?
I have lots of questions about this, and if/when you respond, I'll probably ask secondary questions looking for more and more info.
I haven't been called a Holocaust Denier yet, and want to emphasize that my intentions are not to ask loaded questions in any attempt to change anyones mind about anything... I very much so want to understand the driving forces before, during, and after one of the largest wars in recent time.
If I have committed any spelling, grammatical, or logical errors: please correct me so I can appear smarter next time.
Lebensraum (Living Space) for a racially pure German Empire that spanned to the Urals. This expanse, as well as how to get it, was described by Darré in a private speech to high level members of the RNS in 1936 thus:
The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people.
And it hardly was new news at that point. Quite soon after taking power Hitler had made clear (to certain people. He wasn't blabbing it to everyone) plans to launch a war of conquest into the East, and anyways, anyone who had read Mein Kampf should have already known, although far too many people made the mistake of dismissing it as mere rhetoric.
From pretty much the moment the Nazi party took power, their primary focus was on rearmament with the pointed goal of facilitating this expansion. It is generally understood that the rate at which Germany was going was totally unsustainable, and the only way collapse would be preventable was through these presumed conquests that would continue to feed the war machine, and pay for its own conquest in the end. The party made grand promises for the improvement of the German people's lot, to improve their standard of living to that of the United States, and while various policies were advanced to this end, to quote Adam Tooze:
The real instrument for the attainment of American-style consumer affluence was the newly assembled Wehrmacht, the instrument through which Germany would achieve American-style living space.
The endgame beyond that was competition with the United States (which, at least in the 1920s, Hitler believed he could team up with the UK to take on). In his unpublished "Second Book", Hitler talks about the final showdown with the United States which, again, reaching to Tooze:
by one last great land grab in the East it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States.
So, that is the framework that we should look at Nazi Germany within. Focusing on industrial improvement with the goal of building up their military might, and slowly pushing the envelope with the Western Powers until they would intervene - first through rearmament in of itself, remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia as a whole, and finally Poland, which was the point where war of course broke out.
Sources: Quoting from Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction", but also drawing on Richard Evans' "Third Reich Trilogy" and Ian Kershaw's "Hitler: 1889-1936"