Was looking at the Spiegel website the other day; it had various links to continuing issues from WWII. It had a more spiffy than usual picture of a young Adolf in a brown shirt and brown tie. We usually look at WWII as the Germans had too high a debt load and were crushed too much etc. This might have been true in some emotional sense. The war aim of Germany during what became WWI was to gain some strategic depth from Russia. The German generals were afraid that Russian railroads could deliver troops to the eastern frontier of Germany too quickly. With the defeat of Russia and the creation of Poland that war aim seems to have been achieved however.