Did Germany really want peace?

Not really. At least Hitler did not pursue policies that would have led to a satisfactory and sustainable peace with Britain.

German propaganda would often trumpet Hitler's initiatives he tendered towards the UK and claim that Britain's imperial interests were in line with German domination of the continent. Friedrich Stieve's 1940 book Was die Welt nicht wollte: Hitlers Friedensangebote 1933–1939 (What the World Rejected: Hitler's Peace offers 1933-1939) was an example of such propaganda. Stieve was an archivist and official active in the German Foreign Ministry. This was a piece of agitprop produced during the war's early stages that tried to paint Germany as the aggrieved party in the European conflict. Stieve put a gloss on German foreign policy and claimed that Hitler constantly sought an accommodation with the West for peace. These included a Reichstag speech (21 May 1935) where he claimed Germany had not violated the Versailles Treaty but would participate in a proper bilateral and multilateral talks from an equitable position or the Franco-German Treaty of 1938 to respect each other's borders.

None of these offers were made in good faith, as seen in Germany's abrogation of the Munich Pact- Stieve's fifth offer. For example, Hitler's 1935 initiative did bear fruit with the Anglo-German Naval agreement of June 1935. The Germans though never really honored the agreement to a fleet of 35% of the tonnage of the RN, with Hitler directed the Kriegsmarine to plan for a massive building project for an eventual war with the UK. The lower priority in defense spending for the navy prevented the Kriegsmarine from expanding beyond the limits before Germany unilaterally abrogated the Treaty, but its design process envisioned ships that would exceed the 35% limit.

Even had there been sincerity behind these initiatives at the time they were made, experience showed that Hitler regarded international agreements as an nonbinding inconveniences. The war showed the hollowness of Hitler's commitment to peace. The basic preconditions of his two main peace offers during the war- both after the conquest of Poland and later France- were that the Allies accept all of Germany's territorial claims and give sanction to Hitler's violation of international treaties and agreements. Europe's 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 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.

Works like Stieve's feature prominently among Denialist literature and these attitudes have seeped into other areas like Patrick Buchanan's paleoconservative isolationism. Hitler did preside over multiple pacts with other states and Germany abandoned or jettisoned these pacts on its own initiative. Hitler did make several prominent peace initiatives over the course of 1939 and 1940 to Britain. But taking these claims of German peace offers at face value misses the salient fact that Hitler's foreign policy did not seek allies but vassals.