Geostrategically speaking, Hitler had very few options, and therefore it is very easy to see the world through his eyes. The first thing to note is that during the Interwar Period (1919-1938) oil was mainly produced in United States, Russia, the Persian Gulf, mainly Iraq, and South-Eastern Asia, mainly Indonesia. The oil of North Africa and Saudi Arabia had not been discovered yet.
Map Oil Production in the Interwar Period
During World War 1 the British and the French had managed to take control of the oil of the Persian Gulf, the Russians had the oil of the Caspian Sea under their control, and Germany had nothing. The Germans could only count on the smaller oilfields of Romania.
Map The International Order After WW1
The Italians were importing their oil through the British and the French, and they knew very well that in case of war the British and the French could immediately cut off their oil supplies.
What Hitler wanted was to destroy the world order that was established after WW1, in order for Germany to take control either the oil of the Persian Gulf, or the oil of the Caspian Sea, or both. To do that Hitler had only five choices. At the following map you can see four of them.
Map Inside Hitler’s Mind
The option for Hitler was to repeat the strategy of the German Empire during World War 1 i.e. to march to the Persian Gulf through Austria and Turkey (yellow line).
However if Hitler was to do that the Russians, the British and the French would do what they did during WW1. They would leave their differences aside for a while, and they would attack Germany.
Moreover, during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 the British, the Russians and the French had used Greece and Serbia to form a geographic wall between Germany and the Ottoman Empire. In addition, Turkey was scared by her defeat in WW1, and she preferred to remain neutral.
For all the above reasons Hitler did not want, or could not, repeat the strategy of the German Empire during WW1, in order to reach the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea through Austria and Turkey.
The second option for Hitler was to form an alliance with Mussolini, in order to jointly attack the British and the French at Palestine and get hold of the oil of the Persian Gulf (purple line).
Map Inside Hitler’s Mind
This option was partially used by Hitler and Mussolini with the Arab Spring of Palestine of 1936-1939 (Arab Revolt 1936-1939). Mussolini was the main supporter of the Arab Spring of Palestine, and he was sending money and weapons to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Muslim Brotherhood, in order to cause an Arab Revolt against the British. But Hitler was also a close ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore it is a sure thing that he was behind the Arab Spring of Palestine too. See “The Alliance Between Hitler and the Muslim Brotherhood”.
https://iakal.wordpress.com/2016/08/18/the-alliance-between-hitler-and-the-muslim-brotherhood/
Many Jewish terrorists were also attacking the British, most of them supported by Stalin and Russia. It is said that Jewish terrorism against the British was also supported by Hitler and Mussolini, but Hitler and Mussolini were allies of the Muslim Brotherhood, and therefore Stalin had a lot more space to support Jewish terrorists against the British.
Remember that many of the Jews of Palestine were Russian Jews who had fled Russia to escape from the Tsar. The Jews were allies of the Ottomans, and Tsarist Russia was very anti-Semitic. Palestine was an Ottoman colony at the time, and many Jews were leaving Russia for Palestine, were they were welcome by the Ottomans. When the Russian Communists came to power they were recturing some of these Jews of Palestine in order to carry out terrorist attacks against the British. However during the British mandate of Palestine most of the Jews of Palestine were British allies i.e. the Haganah.
Therefore Hitler did use this second option, even if only partially, and he attacked the British in Palestine with Mussolini. What is interesting is that Mussolini had almost become an ally of Britain and France against the Nazis in 1935 with the Stresa Front agreement. With the agreement of Stresa Front the British and the French agreed to give Mussolini some space in Africa, in order to convince him not to become a Nazi ally.
However things went wrong because Mussolini wanted Italy to have direct military control over the agreed regions in Africa, while the British and the French were willing to offer Italy diplomatic and economic control.
Map The Mussolini Ambitions
During WW1 the British and the French had taken control of East Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, and Mussolini thought that it was only fair that they allowed Italy to control Libya and Ethiopia, in order to reach the Indian Ocean through Africa. As I said the oil of North Africa had not been discovered yet, and Egypt was in Britain’s sphere of influence.
But if Mussolini controlled the Horn of Africa with his army, the British and French spheres of influence in the Persian Gulf would be constantly under threat, because Mussolini could attack them from Ethiopia, the Russians could attack them from the Caucasus and Iran, and Germany could attack them through Turkey. Moreover Mussolini could attack the British and French ships at the Straits of Bab el Mandeb at the Red Sea, and he could cut off their oil supplies from the Gulf. Remember that the oil pipelines of the Middle East were constructed after the end of WW2. See Foreign Affairs “Pipelines in the Sand”.
Therefore the British and the French were willing to grant Italy with the political and economic control of the Horn of Africa, but not with militarily control. That was not enough for Mussolini, who finally decided to enter the war on the side of Germany and Russia against Britain and France.
Map The Italian Corridor of Mussolini (Green Line)
Hitler’s third option was to form an alliance with the British against the French and the Russians. The Russians were fighting the British in India and the French were fighting the British in Africa, and therefore the Germans could form an alliance with the British, in order to take the disputed borderlands at their borders with France, and in order to take the oil of the Caspian Sea from Russia. And in return they would leave the Persian Gulf to the British (pink line).
Χάρτης Οι Επιλογές του Χίτλερ
That was the so called Lebensraum i.e. the “living space” of Germany, which you can see at the following map.
Map Lebensraum
But the British were not interested in helping the Nazis promote the Lebensraum i.e. to take the oil of the Caspian Sea, because Hitler was not reliable, and they were sure that once he had taken control of the Caspian oil he would march to the Persian Gulf. The British were proposing Hitler and alliance with Germany accepting the international order that was created with WW1, which meant that Germany would import oil from Britain and Russia, but would not stretch her muscle to the Caspian Sea. But the British proposal did not satisfy Hitler.
The fourth option for Hitler was to form an alliance with Stalin against the French and the British. The Germans would attack the British at the Persian Gulf from the West, and the Russians would attack the British from the north at the Persian Gulf and India.
Map Inside Hitler’s Mind
This one was the option that was finally promoted by Hitler, but in a version proposed by Stalin. The Russian Communists agreed to supply the Nazis with oil, iron and wheat, in order to help them beat the British and the French, but they did not want to exhaust their army in a war against the British, because they knew that once Hitler had got hold of the the Persian Gulf he could march to the Caspian Sea too.
Therefore they agreed to help Hitler beat the British and the French, while they would keep their army fresh, in order to defend their oil supplies if Hitler decided to attack them after the British and the French were finished, and in order to attack the British in India if they lost the war against the Nazis.
This plan was a good one for Stalin. The Germans, the French and the British would exhaust themselves in a war, and that would increase the relative strength of Russia. And that was what actually happened up to a point. But in the end the Nazi-Communist alliance was broken by Hitler, because the oil that was sent to him by the Russian Communists was not enough for his thirsty army. And Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 to take control of the oil of Baku.
These were the 4 out of the 5 options that Hitler had at his disposal. The 5th option for Hitler was to follow the British advise and respect the post WW1 international order. But that meant Hitler would not go for neither the Persian Gulf nor the Caspian Sea, and it was an option not interesting for Hitler. Therefore Hitler decided to form an alliance with the Russian Communists, and go for the oil of the Persian Gulf instead.
Map the Nazi-Communist Alliance
References
I read various things and I normally do not mention my references. But sometimes, when something really helps my thinking, I have to mention some references, as I have done with Murray Rothbard in some of my economic essays.
Therefore I have to mention Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy. Three of the chapters of his book really helped me understand the geopolitics of World War 2 i.e. “The End of Illusion – Hitler and the End of Versailles”, “Stalin’s Bazaar”, and “The Nazi Soviet Pact”.
Very simple writing, very clever writing, very informative writing.
Image Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy
Articles
In March 1938 the first oilfield of Saudi Arabia was discovered.
“History of the oil industry in Saudi Arabia”
Saudi Arabian oil was first discovered by the Americans in commercial quantities at Dammam oil well No. 7 in 1938 in what is now modern day Dhahran.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_oil_industry_in_Saudi_Arabia
Libya’s importance was enhanced in the 50s, when there were signs that Libya had oil, and in 1959 oil was discovered.
“COLD WAR LIBYA:ALL ABOUT OIL”
1-5th Paragraphs
When the Cold War began, Libya held little importance for either superpower. Yes, it was the home to Wheelus Air Force base, one of the major American bomber bases in the Eastern Hemisphere, but that’s about it. Leading exports were esparto, a type of grass used to make paper for currency bills, and scrap metal scavenged from the rusting tanks and trucks and weaponry that had been left behind by the Allies and the Axis powers.
The country gained some recognition when independence was declared on December 24, 1951. The Soviet Union had been stymied in its efforts to establish a Mandate over the country following the end of World War II. Now, Libya was the first country to achieve independence through the United Nations. It was also one of the first former European possessions in Africa to gain independence.
Proclaimed a constitutional and hereditary monarchy, the new United Kingdom of Libya was made up of three arbitrarily joined provinces: Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan. The kingdom formed a federal government with three capital cities.: Tripoli, Benghazi, and Al Bayda. Idris as-Senussi, the Emir of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and the leader of the Senussi Muslim Sufi order, was declared king.
Two years after independence, on March 28, 1953, Libya joined the Arab League.
In the mid 1950s, Libya gained further significance with the growing suspicion that the country might produce oil.
8th Paragraph
The first round of negotiations in 1957 saw 17 companies bid for a total of 84 concessions. Early exploration results were disappointing, but this changed in 1959 when Standard Oil of New Jersey made a huge strike about 100 miles south of the Mediterranean coast. The US State Department summed it up: “Libya has hit the jack-pot.”
13-18th Paragraphs
While the Libyan government at that time was friendly — or at least neutral — toward the United States, the Libyan business environment was hostile, permeated with corruption.
Soon the political environment would be hostile as well. On April 25, 1963, the federal system of government was abolished and the name of the country was changed to the Kingdom of Libya. More far reaching changes were soon to come.
The monarchy ended on September 1, 1969 when a group of military officers staged a coup d’état against King Idris while he was in Turkey for medical treatment. The coup was led by a 28 year old army officer named Mu’ammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhaffi. King Idris was exiled to Egypt.
The new regime, headed by the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the new Libyan Arab Republic. The new RCC’s motto became “freedom, socialism, and unity.” It pledged to remedy “backwardness”, take an active role in the Palestinian Arab cause, promote Arab unity, and encourage domestic policies based on social justice, non-exploitation, and an equitable distribution of wealth.
The new government soon negotiated with the Americans to evacuate the Wheelus Air Base from Libya. The agreement had just two more years to run. In December 1969, the US agreed to vacate the facility by June 1970.
http://coldwarstudies.com/2011/03/24/cold-war-libyaall-about-oil/
“Oil - Oil and world power”
The United States dominated world oil production in the first half of the twentieth century. U.S. fields accounted for slightly more than 70 percent of world oil production in 1925, around 63 percent in 1941, and over 50 percent in 1950. The U.S. oil industry operated in a unique regulatory environment that included a permissive legal regime, generous tax treatment, and a cooperative system of national production control centered on the state of Texas, which accounted for almost half of total U.S. production. During the Great Depression, the federal government, several state governments, and the oil companies worked out a control system that placed a ceiling on total output and allocated production so that marginal producers could survive in the face of considerable excess capacity. Although Texas authorities refused to require producers to pool their extractive activities in each oil field, thereby allowing wasteful extractive processes to continue, the system allowed high-cost marginal wells to continue to produce, thus preserving lower-cost fields for future use. Higher prices also somewhat reduced consumption. With the Texas Railroad Commission as a balance wheel, the system remained in place until the early 1970s, when domestic production alone could no longer fill national demand.
In addition to being blessed with a thriving and productive domestic oil industry, five of the seven great oil corporations (the so-called Seven Sisters) that dominated the international oil industry from the 1920s to the 1970s were American companies. U.S. oil companies, along with British firms, dominated the oil industries of the two main producing countries in Latin America, Mexico and Venezuela, and had smaller holdings throughout the region. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the United States successfully supported efforts by U.S. oil companies to gain oil concessions in the Middle East. U.S. companies were also involved in regionally significant oil fields in the Netherlands East Indies. By the eve of World War II, U.S. companies accounted for nearly 40 percent of oil production outside the United States and the Soviet Union.
More importantly, the United States possessed the means to ensure the stability of the producing regions and gain access to their oil. The United States Navy had emerged from World War I second to none, thus providing the United States with the capability of securing access to overseas oil-producing areas. The United States was already firmly entrenched in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico–Caribbean region before World War I for security reasons that predated oil's emergence as a strategic commodity. World War II and the Cold War reinforced traditional U.S. determination to maintain an economic and strategic sphere of influence in Latin America. Securing the Persian Gulf, which emerged as the center of the world oil industry following World War II, was more difficult for several reasons, including the region's distance from the United States, the involvement of rival great powers, and the dynamics of regional politics. Great Britain had emerged as the leading power in the Middle East following World War I. Following World War II, the United States gradually assumed Britain's role as the main guarantor of Western interests in the Middle East.
Oil became an important element in military power in the decade before World War I when the navies of the great powers, led by Great Britain and the United States, began to switch from coal to oil as their source of power. In addition, the major military innovations of World War I—the submarine, the airplane, the tank, and motorized transport—were all oil-powered. Although the surface fleets of the great powers played a relatively minor part in the fighting, German submarines wreaked havoc on British and French shipping and helped bring the United States into the war. In addition, oil carved out a role in the manufacture of munitions when the British, using a process developed by Royal Dutch/Shell, began extracting toluol, an essential ingredient in the explosive TNT, from oil. Access to oil became more important toward the end of the war with the transition from static trench warfare, with its limited demand for oil-powered machinery, to a more fluid operational environment in which tanks, motorized transport, and aircraft played a larger role.
Britain and France were able to draw on over-seas sources of supply from Iran, Mexico, and the United States, while the Germans were limited to oil from Romania. By the last year of the war, the United States was supplying more than 80 percent of Allied oil requirements, and the American navy was playing a key role in supplying and protecting tanker transport of oil to Europe. Although Lord Curzon's boast that the Allied cause had floated to victory on a wave of oil was an overstatement, severe shortages of oil in 1917 and 1918 threatened to immobilize the Royal Navy and the French army. In both cases, urgent requests to the United States for help led to the provision of the needed supplies. In contrast, without such external assistance, oil shortages hindered German military operations at critical points.
In addition to being a tremendous military asset, access to ample supplies of oil provided the United States with important advantages in the industrial transformation of the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1890s, the United States had overtaken Great Britain as the leading industrial power in the world, and by the 1920s, the U.S. economy was larger than the combined economies of the next six great powers (Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Soviet Union, and Japan).
Cheap and plentiful supplies of oil were a prerequisite for the automobile industry, which played a central role in the U.S. economy from the 1920s to the 1960s. Oil became the fuel of choice in land and sea transport as well as the only fuel for air transport, and challenged coal as the main source of energy for industry. Oil also played an important, if somewhat less crucial, role in heating and electricity generation, but oil-powered machinery became crucial to modern agriculture, and oil became an important feedstock for fertilizers and pesticides. Indeed, with the development of the petrochemical industry, oil reached into almost every area of modern life. Already almost one-fifth of U.S. energy consumption by 1925, oil accounted for around one-third of U.S. energy use by World War II. Outside the United States, in contrast, oil was a secondary fuel reserved mainly for transportation and military uses and accounted for less than 10 percent of energy consumption in western Europe and Japan before World War II.
The Soviet Union was the only other great power that possessed significant quantities of oil within its borders. The Russian empire had been the world's leading oil producer in 1900, accounting for more than half of world production. Soon thereafter a combination of geological and political problems caused output to plummet. Soviet oil production recovered rapidly in the 1920s, and by 1939 the Soviet Union was the second-largest oil producer in the world, far behind the United States and slightly ahead of Venezuela. Although the Soviets reentered exports markets briefly in the late 1920s, by the end of the 1930s almost all Soviet oil production was being devoted to internal uses.
The other great powers (Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan) lacked indigenous oil reserves and were therefore dependent on foreign sources. Although British companies held concessions in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, maintaining access to this oil required stability in the oil-producing areas and control of the sea routes linking the oil-producing areas to Britain. British security policy called for the Mediterranean and the Middle East to be defended because they lay athwart land, sea, and air routes to India, the Far East, and the Pacific dominions. If the Mediterranean were closed, a prospect that seemed increasingly likely as Britain's relative power declined in the 1930s, access to Middle East oil would be very difficult, assuming that the oil fields and other facilities could be defended. Production in the Far East was not great, and access to its oil would be even more difficult to defend in wartime. Wartime access to Western Hemisphere oil would be dependent on the acquiescence and probably the assistance of the United States, to which Britain had conceded regional supremacy shortly after 1900 and whose help would be needed to transport the oil safely across the Atlantic. This dependence on the United States for vital oil supplies was a critical weakness in Great Britain's power position.
During the 1930s, the British government studied the possibility of reducing its reliance on imported oil by using Britain's ample coal supplies as a source of synthetic oil. It rejected this alternative on security grounds, concluding that, given the British position in the major oil producing areas and the strength of the Royal Navy, reliance on imported oil would be less vulnerable to interdiction than large synthetic oil plants that would be conspicuous targets for air attack.
France's stake in foreign oil was largely limited to a share in Iraqi oil production and a few holdings in Romania. Access to Iraq, which by 1939 supplied almost half of France's oil imports, was dependent on British assistance to keep the Mediterranean open and the Middle East secure. Romania was able to fill only a small portion of French oil requirements, and access to Romanian oil would be unreliable in the event of a conflict with Germany. Access to Western Hemisphere oil, the other source of French imports, was dependent on U.S. goodwill and assistance. The French also explored extracting oil from coal and using alcohol as a motor fuel, but neither alternative provided sufficient supplies to relieve France's dependence on imported oil. France w
