This Eastern policy was essential to Nazism; all other positive aims — the conquest of France or Britain — were
subsidiary and incidental to it. The offence of France was its
traditional policy of Eastern alliances, which had enabled it,
for three centuries, to intervene in Germany. The offence
of Britain was its refusal to be content with a maritime supremacy, its insistent tradition of preventing the domination
of Europe by a single continental power. But the offence
of Russia was the existence of Russia.
H. Trevor-Roper, The last days of Hitler (1947, 7th edn. 1995), 4-5
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