Broadly speaking there were two major peace offers Hitler made during the war. The first was in October 1939 when after the victorious Polish campaign and Anglo-French inactivity in the West, Hitler offered in a series of speeches an offer to end the war on the argument that the Polish matter had been settled and Germany was willing to forgive the Anglo-French for declaring war on Germany over Poland. The second major offer was in July 1940 where Hitler offered Britain what he termed a final appeal to peace in the wake of the conquest of France and the Low Countries. Again, the basic terms were to accept Germany's conquests as a fait accompli and to end hostilities. Hitler did not maintain any real offers for a peace offer from July 1940 onward. Various members of his entourage such as Goebbels and von Ribbentrop recognized after Stalingrad that victory was unlikely and at times pressured Hitler to send out feelers but Hitler did not budge. Goebbels's diary records he brought up the issue of a separate peace to Hitler both in autumn of 1943 and June 1944, and both times Hitler rebuffed such ideas as impractical.

All of this leads to the question of the sincerity of the 1939 and 1940 offers of peace. In short, they were not that sincere of a peace offer. One of the reasons why they feature so prominently among neo-Nazi circles today is because these offers' audience was not so much the Anglo-French leaders as to the German people. They did not propose serious concessions or even a framework for peace, but they did appeal to emotions and asserted Germany was not an aggressor. It is more useful to examine these initiatives as responses to a skeptical homefront than as serious international overtures to the Western allies. The war itself was not terribly popular among the German populace and the fact that the Polish war had spiraled into a major war with two great powers summoned up unsettling memories of the last war. The fact that the war continued after Poland's fall was a source of much anxiety and numerous accounts from the time as well as other evidence like hoarding show a number of Germans did not think the war was a wise move on Hitler's part. Thus Hitler's peace campaign had a PR component to it where he sought to persuade the German public that Germany did not want this war and place the onus for continuing it on the Anglo-French leaders. The 1940 peace offer doubled-down on this blame-shifting and the rhetoric of Hitler's speeches on this matter painted him as the aggrieved party and Churchill as the one who was not listening to reason.

Even had there been sincerity behind these initiatives, these offers were dead letters. The basic preconditions for both were that the Allies accept all of Germany's territorial claims and give sanction to Hitler's violation of international treaties and agreements. Even die-hard Realpolitikers at the time recognized that accepting German hegemony on Europe was dangerous and that Germany had shown that it could not be trusted. Why should these Allied powers have put faith in a peace treaty when Hitler had already shown little concern with other agreements that bound Germany's behavior. Germany had already broken or unilaterally abrogated the Munich Pact, the German-Polish Nonaggression Treaty, the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, the Anti-Comintern Pact, and a host of other bilateral and international agreements made with Germany by 1939. Simultaneous to Hitler's peace offers to the West, he and his generals were already planning to abrogate the German-Soviet nonaggression pact and these efforts only accelerated after the Fall of France. There was nothing to indicate in either 1939 or 1940 that Hitler had changed and there was no rational cost-benefit ratio that favored an accommodating peace with Germany.