Despite Mein Kampf's pretenses of global Weltmacht, Hitler had relatively little in East Asia and China in particular. German foreign policy towards this region tended to hew towards much the same type of policies and diplomacy of the Weimar Republic in the first few years of the Third Reich. Elements within the Weimar Republic saw the emerging Nationalist China a means both to escape the strictures of the Versailles agreement and gain a strategic advantage for Germany within the post-1919 world. The Reichswehr sent advisors to the Chinese army and Max Bauer, a famous WWI veteran (he was the one who led the infamous Jew-census of the front) who was persona non grata in Germany because of his involvement in the Kapp Putsch, became one of the central military advisers to the nascent Chinese state. Bauer emerged as something of a jack-of-all-trades for German interests in China. In addition to helping restructure the Whampoa Military Academy after its purging of Chinese Communists, Bauer served to develop Chinese industry with the help of industrial concerns within Germany. Additionally, the Reichswehrministerium (War Ministry) organized the Die Stahl- und Maschinengesellschaft mbH (Steel and Machine Trading Company/STAMAG) to sell the Chinese illicit weapons Germany was legally not able to produce or export because of Versailles.

Hitler continued Weimar's twin-track of using the KMT government for military connections and to develop German trade interests in the region. Retired Rechswehr General General Hans von Seeckt went to China in 1933 as Germany's central man in China, Bauer having died in 1929. Von Seeckt continued the development of the KMT military establishment and promoted German business interests in developing the country. But while the Third Reich continued much of its predecessor's China policies, it was diplomacy in a new National Socialist key. Although figures like Bauer were avowedly anti-Communist, Hitler's China policy did argue for a more stringent anti-Communism. This created a degree of confusion in Germany's Japanese policy. One of the key assumptions in Berlin was that somehow the KMT and Japan could form a common anti-Comintern front in East Asia. While elements in Tokyo were interested in pursuing an anti-communist front with Germany, there was relatively little interest in either reigning in Japan's sphere of influence in China or opening up Manchukuo to extensive foreign investment or returning it to the KMT. For his part, Chiang Kai-Shek could never really stomach accepting either of those principles for anti-communism. Both Japan and China tried to ensure that Germany would be on their side in the deterioration of Sino-Japanese relations that preceded the Marco Polo Bridge incident.

For its part, the diplomats in the Third Reich was more or less satisfied with standing in between the two East Asian powers. Sino-Japanese enmity destabilized the region and had the potential to tie up both American and British forces in East Asia. The German drive for autarky also fit within this friendly neutrality between two increasingly bitter rivals. The German's need for strategic resources not available in Germany gave both China and Japan a bargaining chip in German trade. The sale of Manchurian soybeans grew exponentially after 1933, with the trade ratio of German to Manchurian trade being about 4:1 in Manchukuo's favor. In the meantime, the Reichswehrministerium organized Handelsgesellschaft für industrielle Produktion (HAPRO) which replaced STAMAG in 1934, to purchase strategic materials like tungsten in exchange for finished goods like tanks, helmets, or rifles.

This policy of playing both ends was inherently unstable, but the Third Reich operated under the further burden of having Joachim von Ribbentrop as its Foreign Minister. Von Ribbentrop sensed that Hitler's few thoughts on East Asia were pro-Japanese and sought to reorient German policy toward a more pro-Japanese tilt as a means to gain leverage against the pro-Chinese elements in the Foreign Ministry. Von Ribbentrop aggressively pushed for Japan to join the Anti-Commintern Pact in 1936 as part of a step towards a Japanese-German alliance. But while it certainly weakened the old China hands in the Foreign Ministry, these overtures to Japan gave it the initiative in this fluctuating relationship. As Oskar Trautmann, the German ambassador to China and opponent to von Ribbentrop put it, the new Foreign Minister had:

mortgaged Germany's interests in China to Japan and had made their future absolutely dependent upon Japanese policy and Japanese whims.

Hitler himself gave von Ribbentrop relatively little support in his Japanese overtures, and Sino-German-Japanese diplomatic triangle devolved into incoherence even before the Sino-Japanese War broke out. When the Chinese KMT envoy Kung Hsiang-hsi visited Berlin in June 1937 to gain German diplomatic and economic support, he had the support of Hjalmar Schacht who sought to expand HAPRO's support in China. But simultaneously to Kung's visit,Germany had renewed the Germany-Manchukou barter agreement. In Germany's East Asian policy foreign policy, the left hand did not know what the right was doing, and the internal rivalries and delusions of Realpolitik only deepened these contradictions. Once war broke out, Germany still sought economic concessions from China, but now had to defend its lack diplomatic support for the KMT. Simultaneously, German envoys had to explain to Japan why German weapons and advisors were now fighting their Anti-Comintern partners.

The Third Reich's China policy was marred by inconsistency, blatant German self-interest, and a general disinterest on the part of Hitler in East Asian affairs, but the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War did not immediately erase Sino-German connection. Germany's China hands in both the Foreign Ministry and industry did not really know how to respond to the outbreak of hostilities, with some advocating German negotiation and other individuals pushing for backing Japan. For their part, the German military advisors in the Nationalist Army emerged as advocates of a stiffer resistance against the Japanese invasion, and German-trained troops fought in the Battle of Shanghai. Berlin added little clarity to this situation and Chiang's chief German adviser, Alexander von Falkenhausen complained to his American captors postwar that German foreign policy towards "China was, to say the least, peculiar, if it in fact could be called a policy." Von Falkenhausen would later claim that he tried to push for a more proactive German involvement in the war, since, as he put it "the Yellow Peril was never Chinese, but Japanese," but that Berlin would not hear of it and forced him to leave his position.

Even though von Falkenhausen's pleas fell on deaf ears, they do show that German's China policy was somewhat malleable in the first years of the Sino-Japanese War. German industrial and commercial entities, which were under state control like HAPRO, continued a parallel trade with both Manchukou and China through 1938 and 1939 selling machinery and weapons to both parties in exchange for strategic raw material and hard currency. German commercial and foreign policy (and with Third Reich, the two were almost interchangeable with regards to China) only really shifted to a pro-Japan policy by late 1938 with the withdrawal of advisers and individuals like Trautmann. Yet, the turn towards Japan gave Germany relatively little power over Japanese policy. Nether the Japanese nor the Germans were on the same page when the Second World broke out in 1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact shocked a number of anti-communists in the IJA and many did not understand Germany's moves and Barbarossa was as much of a shock to the Japanese as the Pact eighteen months earlier. More importantly, fighting the war in China remained the chief priority for the IJA and this prevented any changes in Japan's military policy between 1939-41. German diplomats and military envoys in the summer of 1941 did hope that Japan would move against the British in SE Asia and the US in the Pacific in the hopes of tying down Anglo-American resources in the Pacific while Germany took care of the USSR. But the Nanshin (Southern Drive) championed by the IJN could not gain traction without the IJA's support, and it was only when the US threatened the Japanese war economy with sanctions that broke this deadlock.

The larger reorientation in favor of Japan in 1938-1940 did not completely erase Sino-German ties. Despite the increasing affinity for Japan among the circles of German decision makers, the KMT still actively sought to actively court German public opinion to enlist this nation in the fight against Japan. One avenue was for the KMT to fund a German language newspaper in Germany that would give voice to the public propaganda of the KMT regime. This newspaper, Das neue China, published editorials by prominent Chinese intellectuals to persuade Germans of the righteousness of the Chinese cause and the ideological connections between the KMT and National Socialism. By the same token, there were still some KMT exchange officers training inside the German military, most famously Chiang's son, Wei-kuo, who famously appeared in a Fahnenjunker portrait. Wei-Kuo commanded a panzer unit during the Anschluß and was recalled to China prior to the invasion of Poland.