The Homeland-Sweet-Homeland pictured in the new art of the Third Reich expanded with Hitler's ambitions of a Greater Germany and with his demands for more "living space" for Germans. Hitler's foreign policy of expansion in the later 1930s went almost unchallenged until he invaded Poland and the free world said, finally, "enough!" It was all too obvious that Munich brought no "peace in our time." The last bastion against German aggression in Central Europe had been mortally wounded on the conference table. Poland, next on Hitler's agenda, was defenseless against forces and new weaponry tested in the Spanish Civil War. On the first day of September in 1939 German tanks crossed the Polish border and rolled into the history of a Second World War.
The Third Reich was six years old, and would have another six years to live. It was, at first, a European war and a Blitzkrieg, or "lightning war," in which the German army, freed from attack on its eastern front by Hitler's pact with Stalin, won a series of remarkably swift victories in the west. But after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union and the entry of the United States into the conflict following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the war took on new dimensions: it became a World War.
"Danzig is German," reads the inscription on this postcard, and the proclamation of its reunion with the German Empire on the first day of the war announced to all Germans that the "dictated" Treaty of Versailles, which had separated East Prussia from Germany by a Polish "corridor," was no longer in force.