Japan and the Pacific theatre, I agree. Italy in Africa - I don't see how it was a cause of war. German expansion to the East was motivated by the revanchist spirit of post-Versailles, along with the intention of going West and settling matters with France.

But my point would be that it's not enough to point to imperial ventures as potential causes of war to say that under a Pax Romana, or rule of law of an all-embracing empire, there is more war, more destructive, more bloody, than between independent sovereigns in the absence of such rule of empire.

I hasten to add that I don't like American imperialism. But I don't believe in independent sovereigns as a "solution".

As a result of hyperinflation, there were news accounts of individuals suffering from a compulsion called zero stroke, a condition where the person has a "desire to write endless rows of [zeros] and engage in computations more involved than the most difficult problems in logarithms."

You know, considering that hyperinflation ended in 1923, I am finding the folk-history causal connection between hyperinflation and invading Poland more tenuous by the day.

When the new currency, the Rentenmark, replaced the worthless Reichsbank marks on November 16, 1923 and 12 zeros were cut from prices, prices in the new currency remained stable. The German people regarded this stable currency as a miracle because they had heard such claims of stability before with the Notgeld (emergency money) that rapidly devalued as an additional source of inflation. The usual explanation was that the Rentenmarks were issued in a fixed amount and were backed by hard assets such as agricultural land and industrial assets, but what happened was more complex than that, as summarized in the following description.

...

After November 12, 1923, when Hjalmar Schacht became currency commissioner, the Reichsbank, the old central bank, was not allowed to discount any further government Treasury bills, which meant the corresponding issue of paper marks also ceased. Discounting of commercial trade bills was allowed and the amount of Rentenmarks expanded, but the issue was strictly controlled to conform to current commercial and government transactions. The new Rentenbank refused credit to the government and to speculators who were not able to borrow Rentenmarks, because Rentenmarks were not legal tender. When Reichsbank president Rudolf Havenstein died on November 20, 1923, Schacht was appointed president of the Reichsbank.

...

Eventually, some debts were reinstated to partially compensate those who had been creditors. A decree of 1925 reinstated some mortgages at 25% of face value in the new Reichsmark (effectively 25,000,000,000 times their value in old marks) if they had been held 5 years or more. Similarly some government bonds were reinstated at 2-1/2% of face - to be paid after reparations were paid.  Mortgage debt was reinstated at much higher percentages than government bonds. Reinstatement of some debts, combined with a resumption of effective taxation in a still-devastated economy, triggered a wave of corporate bankruptcies.

Economics is politics by other means

Most directly, Hitler saw his territorial expansion as a response to the impositions of Versailles, against which he railed. These did include the loss of colonies, though that was a relatively minor real price, (Bismark had likely been right about the worth of Germany's African colonies.) Hitler opted out of the monetary system, especially the gold standard, (Germany having almost no gold), and enthusiastically embraced a command economy in cooperation with industrialists.  In order to guard against the sort of blockade that had been used against Germany in WW I, he sought to secure needed resources via routes he could control - land routes.

I see little evidence that he counted on anything that he could not get by force and suspect that he expected that to be the end game. Hitler never accepted the Versailles Treaty and sought to overturn it by force. To the extent that colonial empires entered into his calculations it was primarily for access to resources and control of trade routes, though he resented Germany having been stripped of her colonies.

Rommel's adventures in North Africa really were just grabbing low hanging fruit unless Germany could seize Egypt and the Suez Canal and, had that been accomplished, he may have been able to secure access to mid east oil as well as to hamper the Allied effort in Asia. I am far from an expert on WW II, Hitler or Germany, but I believe that Hitler saw colonial empires mostly as an aspect of realpolitik.

In effect, WW II may, to a significant degree, have been an echo of pre-WW I imperial rivalries in addition to an attempt to change the outcome of that conflict. Some people have long memories.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."