What were the foreign policies of Hitler?

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Hitler’s foreign policy and its role in the international system is often misunderstood. It was based on a clear conception of geopolitical and ideological objectives. Hitler explained his views in numerous speeches but more systematically in Mein Kampf and in a second, unpublished book on foreign policy written in the late 1920s. The following geopolitical and ideological assumptions guided Hitler’s foreign policy throughout his career. Germany should regain its position as the dominant power in Europe. A Greater German Reich should be created, bringing together all the "German lands" of central Europe, and it should be purged of all non-German elements. Germany needed Lebensraum, or living space, for its expanding population. This territory was to be taken in eastern Europe, which would ultimately require war with Russia. This war against Russia also had an ideological dimension. The Soviet Union was the home of what was called "Judeo-Bolshevism," and hence a war against the Soviet Union would be a crusade against both the Jews and the Communists. Creation of this Greater German Reich would allow Germany to assume its rightful place in an international system dominated by four empires. A revived Germany should dominate the European continent. Britain would retain its global empire. The United States would be the hegemonic power in the western hemisphere. Japan would play the leading role in Asia. These goals would require the destruction of the Versailles system. 

Hitler moved first to revise the military clauses of the Treaty. He withdrew Germany from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations in 1933. In 1935 Hitler announced that Germany would rearm, in violation of the Versailles Treaty, with the conscription of an army, creation of an air force, and development of a naval fleet. 

By the close of 1936, the Treaty of Versailles was a dead letter. Revising the Territorial Clauses of the Treaty. In 1937 Hitler explained his territorial ambitions to his military and foreign policy establishments—recorded in the Hossbach memorandum.  Hitler launched the Anschluss (connection) with Austria in the spring of 1938. This crisis was provoked when Austrian chancellor Schussnigg sought guarantees of Austrian sovereignty from Italy and the western powers. On March 12, 1938, Schussnigg called a plebiscite in Austria on linkage with Germany,, but he later retreated in the face of Hitler’s opposition. It ended with Germany’s peaceful annexation of Austria. The next crisis involved the Sudetenland in the fall of 1938. It was prompted by agitation in the Czech Sudetenland by ethnic Germans headed by Conrad Henlein. The situation was complicated because the Czechs had treaties with both France and the Soviet Union. It was concluded peacefully at the Munich Conference in October. War had been averted, but at enormous cost.

By the end of 1938 the territorial clauses of the Treaty of Versailles had been utterly revised, if not destroyed, and the international system that the Treaty had sought to create was dead.