Germany would embark on building a huge navy and win a massive colonial empire in Africa and Asia as the prelude to war with the United States. In addition, Hillgruber argued that Hitler did not wish to destroy the British Empire, as he believed that the United States would take advantage of the collapse of the British Empire to seize British colonies for itself, but at the same time, Churchill's repeated refusals of Hitler's offers to begin peace talks in 1940-1941 left him with no other choice but to work for the destruction of British power. In his 1974 article "England's Place In Hitler's Plans for World Dominion", Hillgruber argued that, during the Nazi period, German foreign policy went through ten different phases. Hillgruber contended that, during the early phases, Hitler was intent on having the anti-Soviet alliance with Britain he had written of in Mein Kampf and in the Zweites Buch. By the time of the Hossbach Memorandum of 1937, Hillgruber argued, Hitler was undertaking a course of expansion either "without Britain" or, preferably, "with Britain", but if necessary "against Britain". By the late 1930s, when it became clear that Britain had no interest in Hitler's overtures, German foreign policy turned anti-British - as reflected in the Z Plan of January 1939 for a gigantic German fleet that would crush the Royal Navy by 1944. Hillgruber argued that the 1939 German-Soviet non-aggression pact had its origins in the British refusal to make an anti-Soviet alliance, which led Hitler to turn over much of the running of German foreign policy to Ribbentrop in 1938-1939, and that Ribbrentrop in turn believed that a solid continental bloc of states led by Germany would deter Britain from involvement in Europe. In this connection, Hillgruber argued that for the moment Hitler - under the influence of Ribbentrop - put off his plans for a "grand solution" in the east in favor of an anti-British foreign policy. At the same time, Hillgruber argued that British appeasement had as its aim the goal of securing the peace by making enough concessions to Germany that the Germans would accept the post-war international order created by the Treaty of Versailles, whose legitimacy they had never accepted. Hillgruber that by March 1939, when faced with signs that Hitler's foreign policy went beyond merely revising Versailles in Germany's favor, the British chose to "guarantee" Poland with the aim of "containing"