In a subsequently published speech given at
Erlangen University in November 1930 Hitler explained to his audience that no other people had more of a right to fight for and attain "control" of the globe (
Weltherrschaft, i.e. "world leadership", "world rule") than the
Germans. He realized that this extremely ambitious goal could never be achieved without an enormous amount of fighting.
[14] Hitler had alluded to future German world dominance even earlier in his political career. In a letter written by
Rudolf Hess to
Walter Hewel in 1927, Hess paraphrases Hitler's vision: "
World peace is certainly an ideal worth striving for; in Hitler's opinion it will be realizable only when
one power, the racially best one, has attained complete and uncontested supremacy. That [power] can then provide a sort of world police, seeing to it at the same time that the most valuable race is guaranteed the necessary living space. And if no other way is open to them, the lower races will have to restrict themselves accordingly"
...
According to captured German documents, the commander-in-chief of the German Army,
Walther von Brauchitsch, directed that "The able-bodied male population between the ages of 17 and 45 will, unless the local situation calls for an exceptional ruling, be interned and dispatched to the Continent." This represented about 25% of the surviving population. The United Kingdom was then to be plundered for anything of financial, military, industrial or cultural value,
[18] and the remaining population terrorized. Civilian hostages would be taken, and the death penalty immediately imposed for any acts of resistance.
[19]
The deported male population would have most likely been used as industrial slave labor in areas of the Reich such as the factories and mines of the
Ruhr and
Upper Silesia. Although they may have been treated less brutally than slaves from the East (whom the Nazis regarded as sub-humans, fit only to be worked to death), working and living conditions would still have been severe.
[20]
After the war,
Otto Bräutigam of the
Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories claimed in his book that in February 1943 he had the opportunity to read a personal report by Wagner regarding a discussion with
Heinrich Himmler, in which Himmler had expressed the intention to exterminate about 80% of the populations of France and England by
special forces of the
SD after the German victory.
[21]
...
In mid-late 1941, as Hitler became overconfident of an Axis victory in Europe against the UK and the Soviet Union, he began planning
an enormous extension of the
Kriegsmarine, projected to include 25 battleships, 8 aircraft carriers, 50 cruisers, 400 submarines and 150 destroyers, far exceeding the naval expansion that had already been decided on in 1939's
Plan Z.
[97] Historian
Gerhard L. Weinberg stated that this super-fleet was intended against the Western Hemisphere.
[97] Hitler also considered the occupation of the Portuguese
Azores,
Cape Verde and
Madeira and the Spanish
Canary islands to deny the British a staging ground for military actions against
Nazi-controlled Europe, and also to gain Atlantic naval bases and military airfields for operations against North America.
[98][99] Hitler desired to use the islands to "deploy long-range bombers against American cities from the Azores", via a plan that actually arrived on
Hermann Göring's
RLM office desks in the spring of 1942 for
the design competition concerning such an aircraft.
[100] In July 1941, Hitler approached Japanese ambassador Ōshima with an offer to wage a joint struggle against the U.S.
[101]—Japan's own
Project Z aircraft design program was one possible manner in which such a goal could be accomplished, all during the timeframe that the
USAAC had itself, on April 11, 1941, first proposed a competition for airframe designs for the same sort of missions against the Axis forces, the
Northrop XB-35 and the
Convair B-36, flying directly from North American soil to attack Nazi Germany.
In this final battle for world domination, Hitler expected the defeated British to eventually support the Axis forces with
its powerful navy.
[99] He stated that "England and America will one day have a war with one another, which will be waged with the greatest hatred imaginable. One of the two countries will have to disappear."
[102] and "I shall no longer be there to see it, but I rejoice on behalf of the German people at the idea that one day we will see England and Germany marching together against America".