Hitler had a grand strategy of sorts, as laid out in Mein Kampf. He wanted Alsace-Lorriane back, and lebensraum in the East. He had a sort of vague plan of the final line of that being in the Urals or thereabouts, with the territory being held by a distant line of German soldiers somewhat akin to the Roman legions of old keeping the barbarians perpetually at bay with no actual final peace with the Slavs. Over the following decades the lebensraum would be populated with German colonists and depopulated of ‘inferior’ races. This was already being accomplished during the war years, not just by the extermination and explusion of Jews, Slavs and other ‘undesirables’ but by the colonization of what had been Poland by ‘Germanic people’.
Germanisation in Poland (1939–1945) - Wikipedia
An intense process of Germanisation was carried out by Nazi Germany in German-occupied Poland during World War II, with the ultimate goal of eliminating Polish culture and people. This included the mass-murder of Polish intellectuals and the kidnapping of Polish children.
GERMAN RESETTLEMENT POLICY IN OCCUPIED POLAND 1939-1944
The first territories to be “Germanized” were the areas directly incorporated into the Reich. As early as October 1939, the inhabitants of Pomerania (approx. 35,000 people) and Warta County (about 70,000 people only from Poznań) were expelled during the first six months of the war. By mid-March 1941, a total of approx. 460 [sic, I’m assuming the word ‘thousand’ is missing] people, including 420 [again sic, I’m assuming thousand] Poles were deported from the territory annexed by the Third Reich. This territory was taken over by German settlers, whose population in the Polish lands incorporated into the Reich is estimated at 353 thousand “ethnic Germans” and 370 thousand Germans that came from the Reich (data refer to the beginning of 1944; at the end of 1944, due to the progress of the Soviet troops and the evacuation from the eastern territories, their number increased by approx. another 250 thousand).
Those were only the broad strokes of a grand strategy though, his strategy as carried out can best be described as opportunistic. He took a huge gamble remilitarizing the Rhineland in 1936 at a time when German rearmament had barely begun and could have been easily squashed by the French if they had intervened, and it is doubtful that his regime could have survived such a humiliation. His continued push for territory in the Anschluss with Austria was something his future ally Mussolini didn’t particularly like but was unwilling to do anything to stop on his own. Taking the Sudetenland through the capitulation of the British and French (which Stalin actually showed a willingness to become involved in preventing - but how exactly Soviet troops were supposed to get there was another matter, with a justifiably wary Poland in the way) could be described as Hitler reaching the point of simply not caring if war came at that particular moment or not, he was going to go to war with France and the UK eventually anyway.
After swallowing the rump of Czechia and making a puppet state of Slovakia, the UK and France did guarantee Poland’s borders. There’s evidence to be taken either way that Hitler knew this would trigger war with the UK and France when he attacked Poland or that he thought he could continue to get away with expanding and the British and French wouldn’t actually act. There is also a lot of evidence, which is also my personal belief after looking it over, that Hitler simply did not care one way or the other. As far as he was concerned, the war was going to happen, and it didn’t really matter to him too much when it did.
Hitler did tell his generals that he wouldn’t go to war with the French and British until 1942, but that isn’t really evidence of a certainty of a timetable considering his actual actions. This was also done in the context of Plan Z, his promise to Raeder to massively expand the Kriegsmarine by that date, a promise that was wildly impossible to meet. Simply producing the ships in the plan would have taken until 1948, and it assumed no reaction on the part of the British to such a naval buildup, which was utter folly considering Britain’s reaction to the expansion of the Kriegsmarine prior to WWI.
The path toward a major fleet expansion was paved shortly thereafter, on 14 October, when Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) Hermann Göring announced a colossal armament program to dramatically increase the size and power of the German armed forces. The plan was to be completed by 1942, by which time Hitler planned to go to war against the Anglo-French alliance.[17] He nevertheless assured Raeder that war would not come until 1948.
He certainly did not expect France to collapse in six weeks, he was expecting it to take a very long time and come at a substantial cost. The war plan, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) was very conservative, and assumed defeating France would take years:
On 9 October 1939, Hitler issued Führer-Directive Number 6 (Führer-Anweisung N°6).[34] Hitler recognised the necessity of military campaigns to defeat the Western European nations, preliminary to the conquest of territory in Eastern Europe, to avoid a two-front war; these intentions were absent from Directive N°6.[37] The plan was based on the seemingly more realistic assumption that German military strength would have to be built up for several years. Only limited objectives could be envisaged and were aimed at improving Germany’s ability to survive a long war in the west.[38] Hitler ordered a conquest of the Low Countries to be executed at the shortest possible notice to forestall the French and prevent Allied air power from threatening the industrial area of the Ruhr.[39] It would also provide the basis for a long-term air and sea campaign against Britain. There was no mention in the directive of a consecutive attack to conquer the whole of France, although the directive read that as much as possible of the border areas in northern France should be occupied.
Luckily for him, fate stepped in with a confluence of two events: Manstein’s plan with the sickle stroke through the Ardennes to destroy the Allied armies in Belgium and Northen France being written as a third alternative to a rewrite of Fall Gelb drafted by Halder which would likely have been utilized, and the Mechelen incident of January 10, 1940, where a German plane carrying a copy of the war plans for Fall Gelb became lost and crashed in Belgium, and the plans fell into Belgian hands and were given over to the French. Had either the original or the Halder revision of the plan been carried out, the war in the West against the French and British could well have lasted years.
Again, he did have an overall strategy of sorts in terms of what he wanted the results to be but actually carrying it out was just done on the fly. As noted earlier, prior to the war Germany had absolutely no plan whatsoever to defeat Britain if they didn’t simply capitulate, which again as noted, ignores Britain’s centuries old policy of relying upon naval supremacy and the English Channel to refuse to end a European war with a single nation dominating the continent and their willingness to prolong wars for a decade or longer if needed to achieve this.
Hitler did anticipate that defeating the USSR would be easy and done well before winter, but a large part of this plan relied upon the kind of hubris and denial of logistical realities that you’re more than familiar with the Japanese high command suffering from: the superior will of the German soldier would be able to accomplish anything, overcome any material deficiencies, and negate any logistical realities.
David Stahel wrote a series of books covering the Russo-German war from the invasion to the battle of and retreat from Moscow, Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East, Kiev 1941. Hitler’s Battle for Supremacy in the East, Operation Typhoon. Hitler’s March on Moscow, The Battle for Moscow and Retreat from Moscow. Wow I’m getting old, I was going to say recently, but the last one was written in 2019. I’d have to dig them up to properly quote from them, but the upshot of his conclusions is that Germany lost Barbarossa because it unequivocally failed in its stated objective: the destruction of the Red Army before it could retreat to the interior. I’ve long known the German logistical situation was bad to the point that it made defeating the USSR before winter an impossibility, but some of the research in his books was astounding even to me. For example, even after the months long operational pause in Army Group Center from August 1941 until Operation Typhoon, the planned final push to Moscow in October 1941 the German logistical situation was so terrible that there was not enough stockpiled petrol on hand when Typhoon was launched to actually make it to Moscow. (!)
Hmm, actually checking search there is a quote here from an old thread that I won’t copy here since this post is already getting rather long, but the upshot is Typhoon was launched on Oct 2nd, and the panzer and motorized divisions were already unable to exploit opportunities due to lack of fuel on October 5th, with generals clamoring for fuel and begging the Luftwaffe to fly in fuel in amounts to they were completely unable to do and would have done little to alleviate the situation even if they could.