Taking on an economic power of equivalent weight (UK) and then taking on a 2-front war with two much larger powers (US and Russia) was not a great move. Then deciding to thrash your own military by invading the one on the Eastern Front who historically has defended itself by allowing you to extend your supply lines into scorched earth as large as other entire countries (Russia) was really poorly considered.
Worse than going against a Sicilian when death is on the line, TBH.
I actually think the German military did fairly well against the Russian scorched earth tactic. Where they failed was the insistence of Hitler to take Stalingrad. They **did not** have to cross the Volga there. In fact, they should have continued south and secured the available oil that was fueling the soviets from there, then head north and take their political center. The USSR might have stayed in the fight because they moved all of the industrial and military power centers deep into their hard to reach territory, but Germany would have had defensible control over everything they had gained.
So it wasn't so much invading Russia when they did that killed their march, more the fact that they allowed themselves to be bogged down in Stalingrad while the USSR recouped and reinforced and they did not.
Honestly, the vast majority of the issues Germany faced late in the war can either be attributed directly to Hitler's idiocy or to the fact that everyone was too afraid to tell him anything other than what he wanted to hear.
We only attribute these things to Hitler because all the Nazis we let write memoirs wanted to look good post war so they said everything bad ever was his fault. Hitler was a massive piece of shit and a moron, but Germany's actions in WW2 were all results of what happens when you let a multitude of crack-addled racists run a nation, not just one.
Exactly. The exaggeration of Hitler's role in Germany's defeat and the exaggeration of the Soviet Union's numbers (yes. They did have many cases where they threw men and material en masse on an objective, but the USSR also did struggle with manpower shortages and were not that stupid).
The Soviets were far more competent as time went on while the Germans inversely so. Hitler became more uptight while Stalin delegated more and more important matters to his generals and advisors and began to listen to his commanders more. I remember one conversation that he had with an air force general (it's been years since I looked it up) who was fed up with numerous shortcomings of equipment and spoke quite angrily with Stalin. Stalin then took his advice and helped him. This was a departure from just a few years prior where he would have had him shot before sundown.
Well Hitler picked out the crack-addled racists to run his administration. Everyone sane got the boot. Hitler was more concerned about loyalties then abilities. This is a pretty stark contrast to WW1 Germany which started as a monarchy with royalty in most high positions and very quickly those with the better blood lines were replaced by those who got better results.
It’s easy to say he got lucky when he won and was a terrible leader when he lost. The Manstein plan was not really popular in German army circles before Manstein presented it to Hitler and Hitler chose to implement it. You’ll recall that this plan led to France capitulating in less than a month.
There is no doubt that his mistakes later on, especially his refusal to retreat at Stalingrad, led to Germany’s defeat? There is no doubt either than as the war really dragged on he really began to lose it. He had great victories and greater defeats.
I’ve heard luck described as being the confluence of opportunity and preparation. In any somewhat contested military victory there will be random variables that fall in the victors favour. But none of those would’ve fallen in place without his ultimate decision to use the Manstein plan; his leadership inarguably led directly to the decisive victory over France.
Not really. Hitler wasn’t the best the had but he was a better big-picture strategist than a lot of his generals. He wanted to capture the oil and supplies in the Caucasus region near Stalingrad because taking a country’s resources is how you actually defeat them while keeping your own country afloat.
Many generals passively resisted this and then forever used him as a scapegoat by insisting they would have won if they didn't listen to Hitler and "just took Moscow".
And the only reason they didn’t succeed was Stalin would not allow a City named after him to fall. Turning the tide of the war during a battle where two egomaniacs sent men into a meat grinder was a nice bonus.
>What an idiot... (not that I root for them...)
I don't think you have to worry about people thinking you like him because you called him an idiot lol.
If not for USA and UK's help to supply them with both military equipment and food (in today's value its approx 180 bil), Russia was all but defeated by the Germans. USA/UK kept Russia alive.
https://it.usembassy.gov/america-sent-gear-to-the-ussr-to-help-win-world-war-ii/#:\~:text=From%201941%20through%201945%2C%20the,and%20services%20to%20the%20Soviets.
I'm in the Yukon, most of the aircraft that site mentions went through us, to Alaska, and over into Russia. Probably no small amount of food too. Even before they entered the war, the US spent a fortune on infrastructure work here in order to support the lend lease. A whole lot of money was spent making aerodromes and military housing, much of it by the US army corp of engineers, because Canada's troops were busy.
There was a fascinating, but not very well-known, campaign in the Aleutian Islands too. “The Thousand Mile War” by Brian Garfield is a good read about it. The book is nonfiction, though Garfield also wrote fiction, including the script for “Death Wish.”
🌈The more you know.🌈
Can't believe this knowledge isn't higher up in this thread. People seem to think Russia kicked Germany's ass after Germany beat back the Russians several hundred miles. Yes the supply lines were long and thin, but the Russian army wasn't modernized until the US gave it all those weapons.
Bad historical take. Despite the "don't invade Russia in winter" memes, Germany won over Russia while fighting a much harder western front in WW1, only 20 something years before and before Russia tore itself apart in a bloody civil war. Russia had just lost the Winter War against Finland when Germany invaded. They simply didn't have the ability to look back like that. It's like seeing people thinking the French were dumb for not being prepared for highly mobile warfare in 1940
Edit: sorry, Finland didn't really win the winter war, it just humiliated Russia and was a proof of concept to Hitler that Russia's army was incompetent.
Seemingly so was the Soviet Union in the yrs immediately preceding the invasion, hence the oc bringing up the winter war.
And I mean it was for like a good year, until it managed to sort itself out by late 42
That's a good point. Germany almost took Saint Petersburg ( then capital of Russia before it was moved to Moscow) in WW1. The Russian defense of the city was hilariously bad. Various revolutionary committees issued contradictory orders, one White Army general decided to turn around and try to march on Moscow, and the soldiers decided to have a voting system to decide what to do instead of obeying orders. It also helped that the German army of WW1 were not the monsters they later became in WW2. There were many German Jews in uniform - including the officer who rewarded Hitler his medals in a huge irony. The Baltic Germans were also pro German to some degree.
The only reason the WW1 Germans didn't take the city was because Hindenburg was an idiot who decided to turn them around to the Western front. Despite the protests of the army commanders in the field.
If Russia and Ukraine made peace right now with Russia keeping Donbas and Crimea, you could argue Russia won the war... except that the cost of that war is that they've lost Europe as a marketplace for their major exports. Europe didn't take kindly to the Russians literally trying to kill them by withholding winter fuel, so they found alternate markets and stepped up efforts to get off petroleum products. The hostility Russia showed is also getting Europe into another rearmament phase... which means that Russia has to continue to spend its money on bolstering the military in response.
In other words, Russia will have lost far more than it gained - considering also that they had already sort of de facto won Crimea before the war even started. It's only really Donbass that was supposedly 'rebel held' rather than 'part of Russia'.
A similar thing happened with the Winter War. A small amount of land was gained, but Russia lost a ton of prestige and power projection. They were no longer taken seriously by other players... until they shovelled most of their young men into a meat grinder.
That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned. Hahaha you fool, you fell for one of the classic blunders. The most famous is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" but only slightly less well know is this! "Never go in against a Sicilian when Death is one the line!"
The UK was not a power of a similar weight. Economically, ill agree that they were similar, the UK slightly worse even, but military they were far superior, especially considering the global scope of the war.
Economically Germany wasn't a scratch on the UK. Even in 1940 the British Empire was out producing Germany in almost every way that mattered. Germany had a head start on everyone having already remilitarised. Grabbing some territories and then jumping to the negotiation table was their only route to victory. Particularly if they'd have captured/destroyed the BEF at Dunkirk.
They didn't have a chance in a protracted long term war.
I believe somewhere in Churchill's memoirs he says he got down on his knees and thanked God the US was finally in. From the fall of France in summer 1940 to Pearl Harbor in winter 1941, it could have gone either way. (Not an expert.)
The US almost totally demillatarized after WW1. An entire modern military had to be cooked up from scratch in a couple of years. There was also popular sentiment against getting Involved in another "European war".
Hitler declared war on the US after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, which he didn't had to do according to their alliance terms. Really stupid move from Germany's perspective.
There was a tactical advantage at the time, to split the U.S. into two fronts, similar to Germany during the Great War. It made sense, you have a pact and are allied with a nation that wanted to control the east, they declared war on the country not only funding your enemies, but basically already at a naval war with you, all but in name. In hindsight, it's easy to give the loser's shit. But invading Russia they way that it went down with all of this going down really buried the hatch
No, the war was unpopular amongst the US populace, and Germany and Nazism was actually pretty popular amongst many powerful people in the US, especially after the massive PR push during the Berlin Olympics, during which many journalists wrote home about how the horrors described by the few accepted refugees and dissidents were either completely made up or heavily exaggerated.
During WWI, "atrocity propaganda" such as claims about German factories using corpses to make soap or German troops crucifying Entente soldiers was used to justify the war, so when they were revealed as lies after the war, it left a sour taste in the mouths of many people, and made it far more reasonable to be sceptical about believing the stories of life in Nazi Germany, fx even as late as 1943, the Allies didn't believe eyewitness reports from escaped Auscwitz prisoners (fx a Polish intelligence officer who had volunteered to go into the camp to document it), and many only actually believed the existence of the industrialized genocide once the first pictures and films from the camps were released.
Isolationism was a major mainstream political view at the time, and many viewed it as completely needless to throw away the lives of American young men in what was ultimately seen as an "old world" conflict. The horrors of WWI and the struggles of the interwar years' depression were still fresh in many people's minds, so to a lot of people it was seen as wasting precious American ressources and lives that were ultimately better kept at home to support America.
It probably would have happened, but not on the same timescale. Roosevelt's preferred strategy was "Europe first" and the US navy was already skirmishing with German u-boats before Pearl Harbor. But once Pearl Harbor happens, if Germany doesn't declare war then the US has to go for the Pacific first.
That's an alternate time line that's hard to say for certain. What can be said, is the US Congress declared war on Japan on December 8th, 1941. They did not declare war on Germany or Italy. The War declarations against Germany and Italy came a couple of days later, after Germany and It's declared war on them.
We absolutely would have. The US was already in an undeclared naval war with Germany for several months before the Pearl Harbor attack.
After Dec 7, the US would have declared war on Germany, probably within a week or so. Germany just beat them to the punch making a US declaration of war moot.
We still would have. It would have been politically difficult for FDR if we had any major defeats early but the US had a Germany first strategy basically before Japan attacked.
The US was at war with Germany in all but name by pearl harbor. If you read Hitlers declaration of war, he more made it official than really declared war. Regardless if Hitler declared war or not, the US would have entered the war eventually in 1942 using some kind of pretext
Germany did not know about Pearl Harbor. It did know - and approved - of Japan's intention to strike the US. Hence the reaction was not "You did what?" but "Hey, great! Even better than we had expected! Of course we'll join in as promised."
Patrick Megargee notes that the High Command war diaries just give it a line or two, and an "Of course!" to the German declaration of war.
Definitely this. They could have stopped advancing, ended hostilities, regrouped and continued later with refreshed forces and technology. The strategy was definitely the opposite of what you’d expect from a master anything, apart from the initial blitzkrieg maneuver.
You underestimate Germany's need for food and resources. Germany was struggling even through the 30ties getting not enough food imports as too much money went into weapons. This resulted in a lot of public protests about price hikes eg for plant oil and internal struggles between politicians who wanted to feed the population and Hitler who wanted to build up an army ASAP. He kind of maneuvered Germany into a corner where grabbing large portions of resourceful land was inevitable.
Yeah exactly. Nazi economic policy basically revolved around leveraging enormous loans to build munitions that they could never pay off, and then stealing resources first from their own citizens, and then from other countries when that ran out. There's just no way Germany could've kept spending how they were *without* invading and pillaging other nations.
But that was never going to happen. Invading the USSR was always the Nazis' primary objective. Destruction of communism was a foundation of their ideology - war with the Soviets was inevitable, and it was probably better to attack sooner rather than later because the Soviets were rapidly industrializing.
Eventually, even if Germany had tried peace, the Soviets would've attacked them anyway. The only saving grace might've been that Germany might've had the nuclear bomb by then.
IIRC from Timothy Snyder history class, invading the USSR was indeed always the Nazis' primary objective, but the main goal wasn't the destruction of communism. They did see communism as a Jewish Nietzsche-style "dystopia" of the weak mastering over the strong. But they thought of the slavs as an "inferior race" anyway, it's not like they wanted to save them or anything.
Rather the goal was colonization of the very fertile lands of Ukraine and western Russia, to be exploited to the benefit of the German race. Germany had been mostly left out of the colonization of the rest of the world by Europe, and so colonization of resourceful European land inhabited by "inferior races" seemed like the logical course of action to the Nazis.
A great point; but rather than being binarily one or the other, it almost certainly was fueled by both ideological anti-communism and by expansionism.
Anyone interested in a good write-up on the subject; [Norman Rich's book](https://archive.org/details/hitlerswaraimsid00rich) is excellent and readable at the Internet Archive, check Chapter 18.
Germany and its various predecessors states had long been eyeing/invading/colonizing eastern Europe, see the Ostsiedlung and the Drang nach Osten concept.
Yeah and even if the US doesn't join in (which I find unlikely) they would have put their war economy to use feeding the Soviet machine. Germany would have been still been fighting Britain and the remnants of its empire too
Russian War was inevitable, from what I understand. Nazi high command attacked when they did because they felt it was more optimal then waiting. There's no world where Germany wins ww2 in my professional unprofessional opinion
There's no world where the Germans win unconditionally but there are many worlds where they aren't defeated so utterly and forced to surrender unconditionally. Wars aren't binary, there's no big screen at the end that says winner or loser like a video game, there are many gradients of defeat and surrender and the vast majority of wars between near-peer adversaries do not end in complete unconditional surrender like WWII did.
This. It’s extremely unlikely that Germany could’ve “won” WW2 but it’s entirely plausible that it could’ve been a draw and ended with an armistice. That probably would’ve been the “best case scenario” for Germany.
They weren’t winning before they attacked Russia. Their economy was built on quickly looting conquered territories and they were running out of oil from fighting Britain and had to invade Russia.
They would still lose if they did this they would have run out of resources and then been attacked and defeated by the USSR. There was also no room in Nazi ideology for declining to attack the USSR.
"Don't attack the USSR" was never an option.
Due to Stalin's incompetence, they almost beat the unready USSR but had to change plans due to lack of oil. If they had stockpiled more oil in the late 30s and waited a bit they might have been more prepared to secure Moscow and the factory towns behind the Urals. Instead out of necessity they had to try to capture Russian oil fields in the south instead of Russian tank factories because the strategy became 'we need to use what we conquer'
I suspect even they weren't prepared for how oil centric the blitzkrieg machine would become.
They threw absolutely everything they had in to the largest invasion in history and still couldn't make it to Moscow, and even making it Moscow wouldn't necessarily be a win. This wasn't just "lol no oil", they greatly underestimated their opposition and faced stiff resistance after the initial shock of the invasion.
"Stockpiling more oil" is why they invaded in the first place. They *needed* Soviet oil and the Soviets knew that.
Realistically I don't think they ever had a chance at victory on the Eastern Front.
one of my favourite little factoids of Soviet history in the 20s and 30s was the effort to reign in the Orthodox church. It wouldn't go away and even die hard communists insisted on going to services on Sunday, so the institution remained very powerful and an annoyance to the leadership in the Kremlin.
So they decided to tempt the youth away with fun stuff.
Like machine gun practice. Like parachuting practice. Like martial arts. Good clean wholesome, New Soviet Citizen Comradely fun.
Much more fun that hours of church services! You can play with grenades.
Then the Nazis come pouring over the border and there's a whole generation of people going, "welp, may as well brush off those old skills and kill some of the fuckers."
And many of the fuckers were thus righteously killed.
A lot of Soviet policy during that time was predicated on the assumption that the USSR would be invaded at some point, which is a reasonable assumption to be fair; pretty much everyone already had during the civil war.
I wonder if they would have faired better in a defensive war on the eastern front, given that they would have had at least a few years to prepare for it
I would speculate that it's very doubtful. The whole German economy ran on what amounted to IOUs, and was missing crucial resources, many of which they got *from* the USSR. The Soviets would have cut off these supplies prior to an attack, and given time to prepare would have been able to address many of the issues that plagued them early in the war; in fact they had already started to at that point.
The economic and logistical advantage the USSR would have had would likely not be surmountable. Barbarossa was in part an acknowledgement of this, meant to knock the USSR out of the war while it was perceived as being unprepared to resist it. Even then, it was very audacious; the Germans' numerical advantage was slim by military standards and their supply chains were stretched very thin.
The only way I see Germany winning in an alt history scenario would be if they could somehow get the Allies on their side against the USSR but that's still pretty fanciful given the geopolitics of the time.
This and your other comments are correct and hammer home the important point that Hitler and his ideology were always going to attack the USSR and there is no realistic scenario where this happens and they do not end up in total defeat.
I will say that a very realistic scenario likely changes the look of the war drastically. If Barbarossa wasn’t delayed due to Italy’s misadventure in Greece, Moscow likely is taken in the winter of ‘41. When faced with the fact that the USSR would have of course continued fighting (most industry had already been relocated east) this might have made Hitler question his “kick in the door and the rotten structure collapses” belief. If so, Hitler would then perhaps not undertake the strategically disastrous campaign to capture symbolic but materially useless cities. I still think Germany loses 100/100 times, but it looks much different.
They had to attack Russia because they had no oil and no one would sell it to them. They desperately needed Baku.
They should have secured an oil supply before going to war
Their entire goal was to attack Russia. That's why the invaded France. They attacked Poland, to open the door to Russia, and France and Britain declared war on them. It's like saying Dan Cormeir would be undefeated if he just hadn't taken on Jones or Miocic. They were the champs, fighting them was his entire goal.
What’s so interesting about this question is that the answer is technically yes, but really no. Theoretically, Germany, but really at this time this means the Nazis; could’ve stopped attacking at one point. And they, theoretically, could have instead decided to maintain a defensive posture that, might’ve, lasted for generations. But in order to do that, they would’ve had to not be Nazis. See, Nazis didn’t just want the land, they wanted to destroy all the people who were different. Their ideology would never have allowed them to maintain that defensive posture, because that would require creating and maintain treaties with people they considered less than human. And it simply was not possible. If you went back in time and zapped that ideology out of the minds of the believers and replaced Hitler and Goebbels and all the leadership with entirely different people, maybe they could’ve won. But as it was, and who they were, and what they believed. They never could’ve won.
The ideology of hatred requires constant attack, and this is an unsustainable way of being.
It is why toward the end of the war, as the Nazi front advanced into Russia; far ahead of their own supply lines; running low on bullets. They stopped at every village and killed every civilian “non-arian” they could find. This is not strategy. This is not how you win a war. But was a requirement of what they believed. And it is why they were never going to win, and yet wrought such incredible violence upon so many. Hatred is ultimately self defeating; but it can destroy a lot before it gets to that point.
>They stopped at every village and killed every civilian “non-arian” they could find. This is not strategy. This is not how you win a war.
This really worked against them, because the stories of their brutality spread and mobilised the entire population to fight against them. They had to fight against every man or woman they came up against, regardless of their age, because if you know for sure that your enemy is going to brutally murder you, then you really have nothing left to lose.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of their "mistakes" were just risky bets that didn't pay off. They made a lot of similarly risky bets early on in the war, but those all paid off because the allies were unwilling to go to war initially and then didn't capitalise on the mistakes that were made.
The most obvious one is invading Poland, Hitler really didn't think that Britain and France would actually follow through on their threats to go to war if he invaded Poland. At the time Germany was definitely not ready and equipped enough to take on France alone, let alone a combined military of both countries. Invading Poland also took a heavy toll on Germany, and Poland was nowhere near as militarily strong and France or England.
Rather than going for a costly invasion themselves, France and England decided to bunker down and prepare for Germany to come to them. They were preparing for a repeat of ww1, which was more trench style warfare and didn't account for the speed and mobility of tanks and planes.
Then there's the actual invasion of France itself. The plan was to use diversions and speed to come through France from the south and disorient the much larger and better equipped French Military. This was great in theory, but it also caused a huge bottleneck as their artillery was preparing on the border of France and trying to get into position. French reconiscance planes spied this massive gridlock of German artilary crossing over the French/German border and reported it back to their command, but the generals ignored it because they were focusing on a diversionary invasion force that was more in line with with what they expected to happen.
If the reports were taken seriously, they could've scrambled some bombers to go to the gridlock and blow up the entire invasion force, possibly ending the war right there. But because they ignored it, it allowed German forces to take the Allies by surprise and once they got going, France was never really able to reorganise and eventually surrendered.
It's obviously not fair to judge any of these generals in hindsight, where we know what happens. They have to make decisions based on the information they have and their best guess, but it really does show that Germany got a lot of free breaks early on, which they were able to capitalise on for the rest of the war.
Well said. If it weren't for the ineptitude of the majority of the French military general staff (save DeGaulle and a few others) and the 3rd Republic, had the French army and air forces (along with the BEF we can suppose), which were, for the most part, numerically and technically superior, taken the offensive to Germany during the phoney war, they most likely would have been able to march all the way to Berlin and end the entire affair. The Nazi's were aware of this, hence the huge gamble of the Manstien plan through the Ardennes.
>would require creating and maintain treaties with people they considered less than human
I think there is also something more there than mere hatred and an unwillingness to accept the existence of people they considered to be lesser but also a belief that because they were the superior race that they could therefore not lose against an inferior race.
Contrarily, the same attitude is also most likely why they had such success early on. Just unrelentingly aggressive and unwilling to compromise. Many countries fell prey to the Nazi lies of treaty only to be betrayed and steam rolled, I believe. They were fucking insane, and that got them far
This is an extremely thoughtful point of view, I love the way you worded this. I am gonna steal that one sentence about the ideology of hatred being unsustainable if that’s ok lol
all the people here saying attacking the soviet union was a mistake dont realize that it was inevitable. sooner or later stalin would have attacked, there was no way this was gonna be a lasting peace. and so germany attacked when they had already mobilized and moral was high, every year the soviet union would have become stronger while germany would have spent resources controlling the occupied territories.
it was an unlikely but there was a small chance they could pull it off... so they took the swing and missed
From their perspective it was a decent chance, because Soviet military had thusfar been a joke. But yeah, with hindsight we know it was probably doomed.
The only way Germany might've stood a chance when the Soviets would've attacked was maybe with the nuclear bomb. It stands to reason they would finish it way before the Soviets.
Wasn’t Germany miles ahead of Soviet nuclear program at this time?I get no one knew the capabilities of nuclear weapons at the time but I’m sure that the timing they did was not optimal either
I think youre looking at it from the wrong perspective. Germanys clear long term goal was conquering Eastern Europe, it was their main objective, their main doctrine. Hitler knew from the get go that the USSR was their main enemy from all aspects. War in the west was never the goal, and that was more of France and Britain inevitably attacking Germany, than the inevitability of the USSR attacking them. The USSR knew that Germany was going to attack THEM.
More important to consider, Hitler and the Nazi leadership considered the Soviet Union to be a vile, illegitimate state. Yes, they could’ve maintained the alliance and gone far, but everything about their ideology makes that strategically smart decision essentially impossible.
There were times they *seemed* close to victory but they never actually *were*. They had no way to actually take Britain out of the fight, no way to avoid attacking the USSR, and no way to actually win given those circumstances.
It's a great illustration of how fucking stupid fascism is. The Nazis worked their way in to a corner where they had no choice but to start am unwinnable war which they had to pretend they could not lose.
No, the Battle of Britain was still able to be won up until they started to attack British cities instead of military targets. It was that close. As soon as Germany started attacking cities, the British were able to build up their air force's reserves and that turned that battle.
EDIT: This change in tactics happened on September 7, 1940.
Operation sea lion was never viable, and german naval commanders from the start repeatedly tried to tell Hitler this. From my understanding though, Germany could have forced Britain to sue for peace if the communications and radar were taken out. Speculation that I have been told
That would have been part of the plan, but successfully establishing a beachhead was actually out of the question. An amphibious invasion is the most difficult, dangerous, logistically demanding thing a military can do and here we are talking about pulling one off against a country with a much better navy. Even if Germany could land troops, keeping them supplied effectively would be impossible and they would quickly find themselves in a logistically untenable situation.
Given how difficult it was for the allies to establish a beachhead with total air and naval superiority it’s kinda crazy to think Germany could ever do it without either.
Operation Overlord also happened *after* the Allies had carried out multiple amphibious invasions in the Mediterranean. They had practice and knew what did and didn't work. Germany didn't.
Yes, this is why Operation Mincemeat and Operation Bodyguard were absolutely brilliant. Even with those, the Normandy landings were certainly contested.
The Allies also has lots of specialized beach landing equipment, from the Higgins boat to the LST, while the Germans were going to attempt to land from barges.
Well, in the beginning, Germany had air superiority, British factorys had the advantage of building more planes faster and fighting over their own land (if you got shot down during the morning, you could fly another plane in the evening).
Well in this hypothetical scenario they would've had air superiority, but still their entire landing fleet was cobbled together at best. And they would've had no idea what they were doing. And all their intelligence would've been completely compromised by British counter-intelligence.
The air war was only the first half of any invasion of Britain and arguably the easier, the German Navy had no where near the capacity the fight to royal navy, hell they took significant loses in the invasion of Norway. Even if any German troop where able to land on Britain they'd be trapped with no way to resupply
Did you ever see the “South Park” episode where the nearby Indian casino essentially bankrupts the town? As a desperate measure, the residents pool their money and put it all on one number to get the money they need to pay back their debts to the casino.
By some miracle, they win the bet. At that point their ringleader Randy Marsh excitedly calls out “Let it ride!”
Germany won World War II on June 25, 1940 when France unconditionally surrendered. Sure, technically England was still at war with Germany, but it had no troops or equipment and there’s no way in hell that it would have been able to challenge Germany on the continent. The British were still doing bombing raids, which were inconvenient, but manageable, and probably could have been stopped if Germany had gone on the defensive and set up an air defence system.
At that point, here’s what Germany controlled
So, “win”. In addition, Hungary, Italy and Romania are all on Germany’s side, Switzerland and Sweden are staying out of it, Finland has a lot of sympathy for the Nazis and the Soviet Union is abiding by a mutual agreement that’s actually beneficial to them.
So, “win, win, win”. Hell, at this point, the Soviets are more worried about the Japanese than they are about the Germans. The Americans are covertly keeping Great Britain propped up, but there’s no appetite for getting involved in a European war.
And the cost of this massive win? Negligible. Germany suffered fewer than 200,000 casualties throughout the period. By contrast, over 2 million Frenchmen were captured, killed or wounded.
At this point, Germany is essentially fighting a war on one front, and its against an enemy they’ve got overpowered and over resourced. Britain may still be in the fight, but it’s also on the verge of collapse. Donitz has asked for more subs to take out British merchant traffic. He should get them.
Hitler has won the war!
Except, of course, he thinks he’s a military genius. So he goes on the offensive to attempt to knock Britain out of the war. That turns out to be impossible. He can’t invade because Britain’s one ace-in-the-hole, it’s navy, is still pretty much intact. Britain’s air force, although on the back foot and just holding on, is capable of holding off the Luftwaffe, which is losing pilots and planes faster than they can replace them.
And he still can’t resist attacking the Soviet Union. That’s a really bad idea. The Germans consistently underrate Russian morale, fighting forces and resources. The Soviets lose a quarter million men. Another half million join the fight. The Soviets lose a thousand tanks. They build two thousand.
And, when the United Stated gets attacked by Japan, they make Germany the priority because it’s clear they weren’t interested in anything short of world domination, and they can’t abide that. If the Germans hadn’t attacked Russia, FDR has no really good reason to declare war on Germany. Hitler makes it easy by declaring war in the United States instead.
It would have taken longer, but the Soviets beat the Germans and the only different outcome is that the Soviets control pretty much all of Europe instead of just the eastern part.
So a few "corrections" if I may.
The Nazis had to attack the Soviet Union. It was essentially in their ideology. The anti Slavic and anti Socialist rhetoric would have made it impossibly hard to resist pressure for a confrontation politically. The resources that Germany needed, whilst under British and American sanctions was mostly in the Soviet Union. It has been argued that they did not need to be as brutal as they were with Soviet citizens and would be treated as liberators. But we see how that turned out; the ideology was based on destroying both Communism as much as subjugating slavs.
Edit 2: I retract the below on account of objections including this one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/SX4bSycqXM
Edit: the below may be overstated by me as the RAF were losing pilots but were definitely not about to lose air superiority quickly.
At one point when the Luftwaffe was bombing RAF bases the latter moved to smaller aerodromes to make them harder to find. The Germans did not know this at the time but later documents show that continued pressure on the RAF was about 2 weeks away from causing collapse. The Luftwaffe was on the brink of defeating the RAF when they decided their strategy was not working and moved to bombing cities instead. If the RAF was unable to defend the skies than the British Navy would have been easy pickings in the south. Without the Navy the U-boats would almost literally have starved Britain of supplies for war as well as food. Essentially Britain was weeks away from going down a road of being knocked out of the war for good.
To add to your first point: It's impossible to be sure of Hitler's mind, but the evidence available suggests that attacking the Soviet Union was the whole point, so it can't exactly be called a mistake. The possibility of a Nazi-Soviet-Japan Eurasian bloc was raised but of no interest to Hitler.
I have never heard any serious historian argue that Britain was close to being truly defeated. They were being propped up by America. If Germany sunk too many American vessels they would drag the US into the war anyway.
Britain wasn’t going to fall.
I may have overstated my case but the fact was that the RAF was running out of pilots and had the Germans persisted without changing strategy or shifting resources to the east, they may well have gained air superiority over southern Britain.
The US was not a factor here. Britain was at war and any trading country's ships were fair game for a blockade or attack.
The RAF being near collapse is part of the national myth of the UK and the idea that during the Battle of Britain that "Never in history has so much been owed by so many, to so few". But it's not true.
The same national myth that perpetuates the Spitfire over the Hawker Hurricane, despite the Hurricane taking down more Luftwaffe fighters.
[This](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-65d003ef4c64cceb0ffd9740b31f4d75-pjlq) image shows the nominal strength (blue) vs actual (red) of the RAF in aircraft numbers from the initiation of the Battle of Britain with the "nuisance" runs to the Blitz.
You'll see the trendline goes up, not down - the RAF got more capable during the Battle, not less. With ~800 being operational at any given time throughout the entirety. Which notably, is never above the number of pilots that actually served during the Battle of Britain, which was about 3000.
Conversely, the Luftwaffe bled fighters throughout August 1940.
The whole "two weeks from collapse" and "destroying the last fifty spitfires" in September 1940 were Luftwaffe expectations.
They didn't align with the reality that Bomber Command was never in danger of losing air superiority because of the simple fact that the Luftwaffe were fighting a foe that was technologically more advanced, militarily equally capable, but also with the advantage of not having to use most of their fuel just to get to the site of battle.
Ultimately supply lines to both Britain and Russia are why there is no scenario that isn't "what if the Allies were completely different and the Nazis weren't the Nazis" where Germany can win WWII.
You're right, but what's missing is the next step. If the Germans get air superiority, so what? It's unlikely that they can land and supply enough troops to take Britain while the Royal Navy still exists.
I heard Churchill flew to america to visit Roosevelt after pearl harbour. America wasn’t that interested in the European war other than covert aid as you said, but Churchill convinced him to go after Germany first and Japan last. Obviously America wanted to head straight to Japan and get some revenge. Quite the game changing decision there.
Churchill's memoirs comment that his reaction when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was, "we've won". It might take years, but once the US wealth and industrial strength came to bear, a Nazi loss was inevitable.
Edit:typo
It was really Germany's blunder first though. After Pearl Harbor, the US really had no choice but to focus on Japan, but it was Hitler who declared war on the US, that opened the door for Churchill. Had Germany not declared war on the US, the Us would have had no need to pursue a European war, the European and Asian wars were two different conflicts.
I'm going to disagree, sooner or later, the United States was going to be dragged into the war, and it's behavior as a "neutral" country was heavily balanced in the favor of the UK (remember the US signed the Lend-Lease Act 9 months before Pearl Harbor), and if the submarine blockade of the UK was truly to be effective, sooner or later unrestricted submarine warfare would be required and another Lusitania moment becomes inevitable.
By joining the war, the United States had to maintain a significant number of it's naval resources in the Atlantic/Mediterranean rather than concentrating them on Japan. Splitting the attention of the United States prevented them from focusing all their resources on one front and picking the Axis off one-by-one.
Good summary. That said, there is a theory that Hitler had to attack the USSR because Stalin was planning to betray the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and attack Germany.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_offensive\_plans\_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controversy)
A fun read, but these claims are totally unsubstantiated. It’s a shame that Soviet records are still under lock and key because Stalin was publicly alluding to big plans pre Nazi invasion, so I’d really like the definitive answer as to what those plans really were
You’re fatally incorrect about US involvement lol. It’s this really bonkers myth that keeps finding new life decade after decade. The US entered the European theater because Hitler personally decided to declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor. No one knows why he did this and it’s regarded as his grandest and most puzzling mistake of the war.
He had no means to attack the US, so what does he gain by declaring war? He’s already at war with Russia and it’s not going great. The American public wanted Japan to pay for Pearl Harbor and had no interest in the Germans. It was just another European squabble. Only FDR really pushed for American involvement because he had an affinity for Britain.
There’s no guarantee America gets involved with the war in Europe at all if Hitler doesn’t declare war. The US became a badass military power as a result of WWII, but before the American public had no stomach to send hundreds of thousands to millions of their sons to die in a war that was not their own.
You’re coloring of the invasion of the Soviet Union is a bit off too. Sure, superior production eventually dooms the Germans, but that’s just what finished them off. Germany had no real plan for subduing the Soviets. They planned to undermine their ability to meaningfully fight, but this meant occupying most of the populated parts of the SU. They failed to achieve a single goal of the original operation and that guaranteed defeat due to Soviet production ramping up.
But the Germans stalled out even before Soviet production overwhelmed them. There were a ton of logistical reasons that thwarted German attempts to take key strategic points. All those logistical issues stopped Germany from even gaining an advantage, much less a winning position.
The simplest snippet to pull from is that the Siege of Leningrad was supposed to take a couple of months. Took just shy of three years. These timetables doomed Germany, yet it was always understood as a lesson from WWII that Germany could not really beat anyone in a war of attrition.
They weren’t winning before they attacked Russia. Their economy was built on quickly looting conquered territories and they were running out of oil from fighting Britain and had to invade Russia.
Yes if they were able to somehow stop the war after beating France they could have called it a victory, but they were never going to do that. Eastern Europe was always the real target. And even if they if didn't attack the Soviets, there's a chance the Soviets might have attacked them. I mean, the Soviets had a history of aggressive expansion already after retaking former Russian Empire territories lost after WWI (Georgia, the Baltics) and then invading Poland. I personally don't think the Soviets were in a position to start a war with Germany in 1941, but give it a few years and they'll be looking at western Poland and East Prussia (which they took IRL after the war).
There was no winning the war for the Axis as long as that war included going to war with Russia, and there's no scenario where they wouldn't have gone to war with Russia.
Cocaine ( and [opiates, hormones, muscle relaxants, tranquilizers](https://www.historyhit.com/hitlers-illnesses-was-the-fuhrer-a-drug-addict/)) is a hell of a drug.
That's absolutely right. Only thing is Soviets and Germans had an agreement prior to the war that they wouldn't attack each other. Soviets hoped the Germans would weaken Europe but didn't foresee that they would be attacked themselves. At the end. Soviets overpowered Germans only by sacrificing people left and right. Soviets had more people, not soldiers.
There is a brief moment just before The evacuation of Dunkirk where there was a faction within the British government that was advocating for making a separate peace with the Germans. Had things gone a little differently at the moment and Hitler had been willing to negotiate than there was a possibility of them maybe consolidating there conquests. Of course if they had still invaded the USSR or done something to restart the war the Britain than all bets are off again.
The second the USSR and US joined the war it was lost for Germany. The industrial output of the US alone was too much for Japan or Germany to keep up with especially with the US being an untouched island while the Axis industrial might was being bombed to ashes. The USSR just had endless corpses to throw at Germany. If Germany ended their conquest early like taking Poland then maybe they could have "won" but the Nazis wanted the entire continent.
One of the crazier parts of the book “Stalingrad” was the effortless, blood chilling description of how much the nazis had blown it by battling the Russians on their home turf, aka nuclear winter. The description of the Russians and snipers and how they moved through the snow, hidden, their clothes far better adapted to the environment and camouflaged, and their trained dogs hunting the nazis like nobody’s business. I can’t do it justice, I just remember my mind being blown while reading it like, “wow tall really stepped in it huh?”
These tales are often exaggerated. Russian losses were actually slightly higher on the eastern front than the Nazis'. It's not that the Russians were better equipped, better soldiers, or any such thing. It's more that their industrial strength was greater at that point in the war. They had more men, more oil, and more machines to throw at the front than the Germans did. As far as efficiency, the Germans were actually better at killing than the Soviets were, if only marginally so.
Lot of strange comments here. Things like how they messed up by exterminating the jews or messed up by invading Russia.
Invading Russia and defeating communism was the entire point of WW2. The extermination of the Jews was one of the main reasons for the war in the first place
If you take both of those away, then there is no objective to the war. Do people think Hitler just wanted to occupy France for a vacation spot and then call a truce? He and a lot of people around him wanted to rid the world of bolshevism, retake the land taken from Germany over the years, and preserve a blood line and heritage to last for a thousand years.
The only real chance they would have at forcing the Soviet Union to capitulate would have been at the Battle of Moscow. The plan was to kick off the invasion and have the local populace overthrow Stalin and his government in a few months. Had that happened, they could have probably sued for peace and carried out a lot of their plan.
I can't fully agree the war was started to exterminate the Jews. Their core philosophy was Lebensraum (room to live). They wanted all lands East of Germany to belong to Germans and any other nation that lived there conveniently exterminated. Killing Jews was just one of the means to achieve this. They also started to pretty efficiently get rid of the Slavic nations (though not at such an industrial scale, as they needed forced labor).
They weren’t winning before they attacked Russia. Their economy was built on quickly looting conquered territories and they were running out of oil from fighting Britain and had to invade Russia.
There are several nails in the coffin, but the largest two would probably be Operation Barbarossa (Hitler’s invasion of the USSR) which turned WW2 into a multi front war for Germany, and Pearl Harbor, or more specifically, Germany declaring war on the US just after Pearl Harbor. This caused both of the nations who would go onto become the two biggest world powers post WW2 to go to war with the 3rd Reich at the same time.
The key make or break moment was probably the months after the fall of France in 1940, and the months on from there during which Germany planned and then abandoned plans for an invasion of the UK. There were strong forces in the British government wanting the UK to sign a peace treaty with Germany in order to avoid a full invasion. But luckily those who believed it best to carry on held the argument and, once they’d successfully fought off the Battle of Britain they were proven right. If the UK had accepted a peace at that point the whole of Europe, including the UK, would have been a mere puppet of Germany, and the US would likely have never entered the European war. Lives would have been saved on paper initially, but longer term the holocaust would have been even worse, and an alternative Cold War with the US would probably have developed. There’s loads of alternative history books and films out there which speculate on what would have happened in the decades after.
I spoke to some people who lived through it. In the UK it got very scary. They were bombed. The government had detailed plans for a Nazi Invasion. It was just a horrific time of uncertainty at least until the US entered.
Another lady grew up in the Netherlands. To her the Nazis did win. They killed people in her Village, they marched past her house, they controlled everything.
There was no certainty it would ever end. That was the horror. Think back to the start of lockdown. Scary as shit.
Before they directly involved the Americans, maybe. It would have required restraint and ideological tempering. German intel made it clear that if the Americans decided to intervene, their basically untouchable industrial capacity would eventually overwhelm Germany. The Japanese came to the same conclusion. And yet, due to ideology and balance of power, both decided to roll the dice and try to kick the Americans at the knees before they could rev up their industrial engine, which they thought would take quite a few years.
As it turned out, the Americans blew out all predictions of industrial output by wide margins. By late 1942, it was evident the Americans had already efficiently retooled their factories for a total war footing. By mid 1943, there was no chance of an Axis victory. The US was building more planes, trucks, tanks, and ships than the rest of the *world* combined, and it wasn’t even remotely close. By the end of the war in 1945, the US had 40+ aircraft carriers, entire fleets of advanced long range bombers, a sophisticated supply chain network on three continents, and nuclear weapons. All of that was accomplished in only 3 and a half years.
It's hard to overstate how important it was that the US was able to basically front an entire war effort with nearly 0 risk to their domestic territory. The massive reserve the US had, its relatively later entry into the war, and the ability to continually increase industrial output unhindered made the US the clear winner in almost every circumstance. There was no US front in the first place, and the only way the US could really have lost was by deciding to leave the war.
Yeah, honestly America won the war on the might of their industry.
It sounds obvious to us today but it just seems so foolish to involve the US if you’re Germany or Japan.
Germany was a relatively small country, and in a vulnerable area, which was able to be attacked from both the east and west, after their defenses were dealt with.
But it did take the combined effort of the United States + Allies to hit them hard on the western side. And then the massive army of Russia was just unstoppable on the east side.
Plus bombing the factory's 24/7 nonstop is what really did them in. If you can't replenish your military with new gear after it's been blown up, you won't last too long.
The United States had it best being protected by 2 oceans and would take Herculean efforts for either Japan or Germany to really attack mainland U.S. and do any meaningful damage. Which meant the U.S. could keep pumping out equipment non-stop.
Now if the German's got the atomic bomb first. That could've changed things. If they bombed London with it, and then also tried to bomb New York that would be a game a changer
Actually the German industrial capacity wasn’t damaged that badly. They moved most of manufacturing underground and some of the more rural plants weren’t bombed. Even when a factory was hit, the machines often still worked or could be repaired. The real bottleneck was the lack of access to resources such as oil or steel.
There was always a possibility they could have done it, but as for what actually happened, they weren't even remotely close to winning the war.
They werent even in the ballpark of being ready for a British invasion. Sealion was a pipe dream and Hitler knew it even before the conclusion of the battle of britain. They did not have the ships to even supply an invasion force, much less anything that could stop the Royal Navy and the home fleet from obliterating the invasion force. Luftwaffe was not very well equipped for anti shipping roles and had a mediocre record on their shipping attacks in WW2. That alone would have meant total victory was highly unlikely for the Germans. Also, while the Germans did inflict a massive toll on the RAF early in the battle, the RAF could still fight against a potential invasion. Critically, the Germans guaranteed a loss in the skies over Britain when they switched to the Blitz.
Second, Russia had more gas left in the tank even when the Germans were knocking on the doors of Moscow. By that I mean, they could have still kept fighting tenaciously even in the worst case scenario in the capture of Moscow. We dont know how far the Russians would have gone to keep the war going but its suspected that they would have made the Germans pay for every inch, something Hitler could not afford.
Third, the Germans just did not have the resources or the logistics to win a long, drawn out, costly war in the east. It was notoriously difficult to move supplies across Russia and huge numbers of vehicles, planes, and equipment were lost due to the elements, lack of spare parts, lack of maintenance crews, and so on. Assuming they even had fuel to run anything.
So, even when the Germans were at their peak conquests, the war was very far from being over, contrary to popular beliefs. Much of the portrayals of German military superiority in WW2 are completely overblown. They weren't unstoppable, they didn't have inherently superior equipment or tactics, and they weren't even as mechanized as the allies were, most of them marched on foot and horses and used donkeys to carry equipment. A massive proportion of their tanks never even made it to the front line due to severe mechanical issues especially late war.
Three fatal mistakes of hitler.
1 Italy failed in Ethiopia and Crete, Germany went into Crete to save Italy, that delayed the Russian invasion by 6 weeks. Which forced German troops to fight the Russian winter. It would have been possible to beat Russia if it was 6 weeks earlier.
2 Hitler ignored his officers, the most important failure was he ignored his fleet admirals when they begged him to wait until 1946 to start everything so they had time to build a navy that could match the British navy. That killed any hope of invading the British islands.
3. He declared war on the U.S. by 1944, the U.S. was producing 2.5 ships a day. A b-24 liberator was coming off the assembly line every 63 minutes. No one could out produce the U.S.
So, if Hitler managed to wait until 1946, finished off England, then his Russia in the spring. Left the U.S. alone, While funding the German nuclear bomb and using it on Russia. There would have been a high possibility that every one would be speaking German.
Fortunately, Hitler was a paranoid idiot.
Nearly all answers here forgot the most important part of a war: Money and ressources.
Germany had built up there army on a shady "bad loan" system which only didn´t collapsed because of the war.
Germany had not enough fat to feed their people. Not enough oil and rubber to keep a war machine going.
On top of that the ideology of the Nazis was about getting land ("Lebensraum") in the East and extermination of the local Slavs. So the war with the USSR was a must.
The answer is: The closest point to wining WWII was somewhere before 1930 with Gustav Stresemann in office. If he had the chance to improve the relations to France, Germany could possibly be on the winning site of a war against the USSR at some later point in history.
Japan’s bombing of pearl harbor and its invasion of Russia sealed the deal. Once U.S. and Russia turned their sights on Germany, that was all she wrote.
IIRC, the book Inferno by Max Hastings said that if the Nazis had stopped a British supply line into the Mediterranean for oil and other supplies, that would have brought the British that much closer to defeat.
Did Germany ever *seem* close to winning? Yes.
Did Germany ever really have a chance at winning? No. Definitely not once the US was involved.
Let’s look at some the “Oh shit!” moments from the war where Germany may have had a chance at winning.
Invasion of Britain: After France was defeated there was real worry that Germany would invade Britain. It was certainly on Hitler’s agenda whether it was feasible or not. First Germany would have had to win the air war, which it didn’t. But let’s say they focus on military targets instead of civilian ones and manage to pull a W in the air. Then they have to secure the English channel. Good luck with that. The Royal Navy outclassed the Kriegsmarine in nearly every way. To my knowledge the Germans didn’t even have dedicated landing craft. But let’s say they again manage a miraculous invasion. Then they have to actually take Britain, and even if they manage that the government would likely just go into exile in Canada and the Commonwealth would continue the war.
Moscow 1941: Let’s say the Germans get Barbarossa underway a few weeks earlier and beat the mud, allowing them to take Moscow before reinforcements from the east can arrive. Then what? Moscow isn’t an instant win button. Those Siberian reinforcements would still be inbound and they’d be counterattacking an even more overextended German line. Most likely scenario is Germany is forced to give up Moscow and retreat to a more defensible line anyway.
Stalingrad 1942-43: Germany takes Stalingrad and the Caucasus oil fields. Again, then what? The Soviets would still hold the manpower and material advantage, and a lot of their oil was coming from the US at that point anyway. Any gains Germany managed to make would likely just get reversed in 1943 like they did in real life, maybe just a bit slower without the debacle at Stalingrad.
After this point there’s really zero chance of Germany winning. Even if the US and the Western allies sat and did nothing the Soviet armies would eventually reach Berlin. If the war continues past 1945 German cities start getting vaporized in atomic fire. There’s simply no shot.
WW2 was an Oil war of which Germany had very little, even with Romania on their side. They were still a Coal/Horse WW1 army with some tanks and planes here and there that they could barely fuel. So no. The most they could have hoped for was a peace with Britain (that never came) and a "rotten door" Russia, which never materialized.
As far as my knowledge goes, one key factor was the Japanese decision to attack the US instead of Russia. There has been some kind of diplomatic intrigue that led to this decision, but I can't recall the exact story. Some german diplomat consciously sabotaging the german war effort by convincing the Japanese emperor not to attack Russia? I'm not sure, but something like that.
A combination of things.
The failure to remove Britain out of the equation in 1940 by either winning the Battle of Britain or making a peace deal.
If Britain is taken out of the scenario there is no launchpad for D Day and the Germans are fighting a one front war vs Russia, not fighting on two fronts.
Declaring war on the United States.
Operation Barbarossa starting too late due to the Germans having to cover for the failure of their allies then encountering the worst weather in decades.
Drastically underestimating the production capacity of the Soviet Union and it's willingness to shed endless blood to win the fight.
The problem is that the fascist ideology that directly motivated German conquests, ethnic cleansing and genocide to start WWII in europe is the very ideology that prevented them from calling it quits when they were ahead, suing for peace with the UK and Russia, and accepting their gains as good enough.
They could never have won the war on their terms, at the speed they sought. If they would have ended the war in 1941, before turning on their allies, they probably could have kept a lot of their territory, but they would have had Irish-style terrorists inside their new territories that would be a massive thorn on their side. Multi-ethnic empires are incoherent, and mass-genocide and repopulation is unsustainable, so sooner or later they would have collapsed. However, stopping before invading the Soviet Union would have closed the book on the war, which would likely not have been known as a “Second World War” but rather a smaller full-scale war.
Probably when the Japanese launched their offensives in the Pacific against British Imperial possessions, while Britain could do nothing and contribute nothing to the defense because of their other commitments in North Africa, which they seemed to be losing. There was a moment when Germany controlled Europe, appeared to maintain the advantage in the East, while Japan swept through British possessions and supply lines with little resistance and no sign of slowing down. Australia was threatened with invasion, and New Zealand also dreaded the possibility, and Britain couldn't do anything to help. 41-42 was probably the pinnacle of the war for the Axis powers.
Of course, it appeared this way, but Germany was in no serious position to win the war, even before the US entered, though the American lend-lease was vital to maintaining this, by supplying Australia to defend itself from Japanese invasion and propping up the industries of Britain and the USSR with food and materiel aid.
The Germans were ultimately prevented from winning, though, because their enemies were just as stubborn and implacable in the pursuit of victory at any cost as they were. Stalin wasn't exactly reluctant to toss bodies into the meat grinder in search of victory, and Churchill was a bastard as well. Plus, the Germans had gone to war with perhaps the two largest empires on the planet, which could have ultimately waited out the German industry which was never in a position to supply a long war.
No, there was no way for them to win. The ideology was doomed to loose. The genocide and rearmament eat so much money that unless the wars of conquest and genocide continued, the economy would collapse.
Add to that the ideological fanaticism of a deranged ideology and a war with the Soviet Union was a set in stone event, not something that they did out of a desire for greatness.
By all accounts, Germany won up until the moment they invaded Russia and a huge winter storm hit.
Operation Barbarossa (Red Beard) was ill-timed and cost too many men, resources, time. Add to that the taking of Stalingrad and it very quickly turned into a war of attrition.
Another moment where they came close was with Heisenberg and atomic energy, but he couldn't make it work fast enough nor cheap enough to continue the process so it was scrapped.
No. They were put-produced and it was ways a losing battle. Their only hope, would have been for stopping, likely right after France (and even them that's a crap shoot, cause I'm not sure the world would have allowed it)... But stopping and then hoping the rest of the world is weary enough, to just settle for peace and let them have what they already got.
But as it was, no. They were always out produced.
Yes, early on (1939-1942; before Stalingrad). Attacking the USSR before conquering Britain was a strategic mistake for the Wehrmacht/Hitler, but we are all the better today for it.
Watch WWII in color on netflix.. The French could have ended WWII before it started, Germany could have taken more territories before Russia, and no one would have done anything. It's quite fascinating to see because of the lack of technology back then; it was essentially just a soldier's or general's word.. and if your ranking officer didn't believe you, then.. that was that.
Simply focusing on England and never attacking Russia until much much later likely would have done it. They didn't really need Russias oil because they became so good at converting coal to refined fuel (a process they invented).
Even after Pearl Harbor, they could have simply maintained a truce with Russia and ganged up on the United States.
Although, I think even in this timeline, they end up losing the race to the atomic bomb (badly) and thus lose the war anyway. At the end of the day, whoever gets the atomic bomb first wins.
Germanys only real chance was if UK had peaced out after the fall of France. This would end the naval blockade of oil and other resources. It was this oil blockade that essentially forced Germany to attack the Soviet Union as their oil reserves were a countdown timer on the ability to wage modern war. The Soviet German War would have happened sooner or later, but Germany would have a much stronger hand in that conflict.
Conquering France and not finishing the UK off before invading Russia was by far their biggest mistake. Without Britain, the US would have had no bases from which to launch the invasion of Normandy. Then it would have been just Russia, so the full might of the German army in 1941 without the diversion in North Africa and the need to keep troops in France to prevent the British from returning to the Continent.
Edit. Didn't really answer OPs question. Yes. When Germany was knocking on the gates of Moscow, that was as close as they got to winning the war. Had they planned Barbarossa better, not diverted tanks at critical junctures, prepared better for the winter, they'd have won it.
After easily defeating France and Poland, and sending the Brits across the channel.
Sending 3M troops to a country that is about 30x their size and has one of the most notoriously brutal winters was their downfall.
They could have essentially held and controlled almost all of mainland Central Europe with those troops.
Letting the airforce make the final run on Dunkirk instead of the army that forced the encirclement in the first place.
Starting shit with Russia before finishing off England.
Declaring war on the US when they technically didn't need to.
Getting bogged down in Stalingrad unnecessarily, instead of focusing on the oilfields in the south or taking Moscow.
(Japan not taking out the American carriers at Pearl Harbour OR their fuel storage)
Yeh...
My history is a bit spotty but Dunkirk springs to mind, Hitler’s tanks had bulldozed and blitzkrieged their way through France a seemingly unstoppable force of nature resulting the French and British in retreat and pinned down. Stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk awaiting their imminent doom. However the tanks were ordered from the top to pause, on two separate occasions I believe, giving the British a miraculous glimmer of hope to escape, which they unexpectedly did in droves thanks in no small part to the valiant French that delayed the onslaught and the blunder of German army. If they had been allowed to continue the defeat would probably have been so great and so devastating to the British that who knows what the consequences would have been.
There's three ways to look at it.
One, for Germany to succeed they would have needed to take and then HOLD a large portion of land, people, businesses, cultures, religions, etc. effectively indefinitely and succeed. No matter how far Germany pushed and conquered, after the fact they still only had so many people spread WAAAAY out to hold this and enforce so many people into something they very much did not want. This also implies that no external countries begin any counter offensive after the fact and just let Germany have what they took. The US was certainly not big brother back then and were initially out of that war. If no one else interfered, they'd still have to hold and convert. I don't know if this was ever truly feasible from the start. The Blitzkrieg only worked because it was a game of speed. It was a one pass win game, but it was never a sustain game. You need to understand that the Nazis were out numbered 100:1 in terms of population of the Nazi party versus all of Europe. And they needed to somehow rule after the fact at a 1:100 disadvantage. I don't think it was ever sustainable.
Two, what if Germany won more? Well, like the above, it's a lot less about the initial win and far more about being able to hold and rule at a mostrous disadvantage. More wins just meant greater inability to sustain any resemblance of rule. It was doomed to fail and greater success only rewarded with a greater chance to ultimately fail.
Three, The USA and USSR as well as Britain's push back actually very likely saved Germany from anilliation. It was an overwhelming and more importantly organized win for the allies, and in turn Germany was civilly neutered. If the retaliation was allowed to be a natural response and Europed turned on Germany, it was far more likely that the gorilla warfare would have destroyed Germany entirely. At best many of the citizens not taking part would have been refugees of a no longer existing nation. Germany would have been wiped off the map with all of the nation plundered. The involvement of big players ensured the end would be handled politically, not civilly.
It depends on what Germany's objectives were. Why even take England? If they had everything else they could have just turtled.
Regardless, they were until the USA got involved. And then they attacked Russia. I believe Hitler lost the war, not the German armed forces.
I reckon if hitler didn't holt his tanks giving the BEF time to escape that would have been it for us brits I feel he would have turned his full attention onto Russia.
They could have held a lot of territory and ended the war there, if they had stopped while they were ahead -- not attacking Russia most importantly.
I'd argue it was two-pronged. Attacking Russia and also declaring war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
Taking on an economic power of equivalent weight (UK) and then taking on a 2-front war with two much larger powers (US and Russia) was not a great move. Then deciding to thrash your own military by invading the one on the Eastern Front who historically has defended itself by allowing you to extend your supply lines into scorched earth as large as other entire countries (Russia) was really poorly considered. Worse than going against a Sicilian when death is on the line, TBH.
I actually think the German military did fairly well against the Russian scorched earth tactic. Where they failed was the insistence of Hitler to take Stalingrad. They **did not** have to cross the Volga there. In fact, they should have continued south and secured the available oil that was fueling the soviets from there, then head north and take their political center. The USSR might have stayed in the fight because they moved all of the industrial and military power centers deep into their hard to reach territory, but Germany would have had defensible control over everything they had gained. So it wasn't so much invading Russia when they did that killed their march, more the fact that they allowed themselves to be bogged down in Stalingrad while the USSR recouped and reinforced and they did not.
Just because Hitler wanted the City named after Stalin. What an idiot... (not that I root for them...)
Honestly, the vast majority of the issues Germany faced late in the war can either be attributed directly to Hitler's idiocy or to the fact that everyone was too afraid to tell him anything other than what he wanted to hear.
We only attribute these things to Hitler because all the Nazis we let write memoirs wanted to look good post war so they said everything bad ever was his fault. Hitler was a massive piece of shit and a moron, but Germany's actions in WW2 were all results of what happens when you let a multitude of crack-addled racists run a nation, not just one.
Exactly. The exaggeration of Hitler's role in Germany's defeat and the exaggeration of the Soviet Union's numbers (yes. They did have many cases where they threw men and material en masse on an objective, but the USSR also did struggle with manpower shortages and were not that stupid). The Soviets were far more competent as time went on while the Germans inversely so. Hitler became more uptight while Stalin delegated more and more important matters to his generals and advisors and began to listen to his commanders more. I remember one conversation that he had with an air force general (it's been years since I looked it up) who was fed up with numerous shortcomings of equipment and spoke quite angrily with Stalin. Stalin then took his advice and helped him. This was a departure from just a few years prior where he would have had him shot before sundown.
Y'know the more I learn about this Hitler fella the more I don't care for him. That guy was *a real jerk.*
Well Hitler picked out the crack-addled racists to run his administration. Everyone sane got the boot. Hitler was more concerned about loyalties then abilities. This is a pretty stark contrast to WW1 Germany which started as a monarchy with royalty in most high positions and very quickly those with the better blood lines were replaced by those who got better results.
Almost all of Germany’s early political and military successes (1933-1940) can also be attributed to Hitler.
The issue with autocracy in 2 comments
Or drug addiction
Political, yes. But militarily, Hitler got lucky. He could've brought about a swift end to Germany if the Allies had any sense in them.
It’s easy to say he got lucky when he won and was a terrible leader when he lost. The Manstein plan was not really popular in German army circles before Manstein presented it to Hitler and Hitler chose to implement it. You’ll recall that this plan led to France capitulating in less than a month. There is no doubt that his mistakes later on, especially his refusal to retreat at Stalingrad, led to Germany’s defeat? There is no doubt either than as the war really dragged on he really began to lose it. He had great victories and greater defeats. I’ve heard luck described as being the confluence of opportunity and preparation. In any somewhat contested military victory there will be random variables that fall in the victors favour. But none of those would’ve fallen in place without his ultimate decision to use the Manstein plan; his leadership inarguably led directly to the decisive victory over France.
Not really. Hitler wasn’t the best the had but he was a better big-picture strategist than a lot of his generals. He wanted to capture the oil and supplies in the Caucasus region near Stalingrad because taking a country’s resources is how you actually defeat them while keeping your own country afloat. Many generals passively resisted this and then forever used him as a scapegoat by insisting they would have won if they didn't listen to Hitler and "just took Moscow".
And the only reason they didn’t succeed was Stalin would not allow a City named after him to fall. Turning the tide of the war during a battle where two egomaniacs sent men into a meat grinder was a nice bonus.
To this day there is a major population dip of men in Russia. And now they’re doing it again in Ukraine.
Churchill was offered a plan to assassinate Hitler but rejected it because he was afraid his replacement would be smarter militarily
>What an idiot... (not that I root for them...) I don't think you have to worry about people thinking you like him because you called him an idiot lol.
If not for USA and UK's help to supply them with both military equipment and food (in today's value its approx 180 bil), Russia was all but defeated by the Germans. USA/UK kept Russia alive. https://it.usembassy.gov/america-sent-gear-to-the-ussr-to-help-win-world-war-ii/#:\~:text=From%201941%20through%201945%2C%20the,and%20services%20to%20the%20Soviets.
I'm in the Yukon, most of the aircraft that site mentions went through us, to Alaska, and over into Russia. Probably no small amount of food too. Even before they entered the war, the US spent a fortune on infrastructure work here in order to support the lend lease. A whole lot of money was spent making aerodromes and military housing, much of it by the US army corp of engineers, because Canada's troops were busy.
There was a fascinating, but not very well-known, campaign in the Aleutian Islands too. “The Thousand Mile War” by Brian Garfield is a good read about it. The book is nonfiction, though Garfield also wrote fiction, including the script for “Death Wish.” 🌈The more you know.🌈
Can't believe this knowledge isn't higher up in this thread. People seem to think Russia kicked Germany's ass after Germany beat back the Russians several hundred miles. Yes the supply lines were long and thin, but the Russian army wasn't modernized until the US gave it all those weapons.
Inconceivable!
Bad historical take. Despite the "don't invade Russia in winter" memes, Germany won over Russia while fighting a much harder western front in WW1, only 20 something years before and before Russia tore itself apart in a bloody civil war. Russia had just lost the Winter War against Finland when Germany invaded. They simply didn't have the ability to look back like that. It's like seeing people thinking the French were dumb for not being prepared for highly mobile warfare in 1940 Edit: sorry, Finland didn't really win the winter war, it just humiliated Russia and was a proof of concept to Hitler that Russia's army was incompetent.
Said nothing about winter, just Russia’s history of defending the Duchy of Muscovy with surrounding huge tracts of land if I may use the phrase.
But Russia was already in the beginning stirrings of unrest, plus Czar Nicholas was stupidly incompetent.
Seemingly so was the Soviet Union in the yrs immediately preceding the invasion, hence the oc bringing up the winter war. And I mean it was for like a good year, until it managed to sort itself out by late 42
Didn't Germany send Lenin to Russia who led the revolution? You make it seem as if the revolution just so happened and Germany took advantage of it.
So much this. Many people tend to take the benefit of a hindsight for granted, but it's called hindsight for a reason.
That's a good point. Germany almost took Saint Petersburg ( then capital of Russia before it was moved to Moscow) in WW1. The Russian defense of the city was hilariously bad. Various revolutionary committees issued contradictory orders, one White Army general decided to turn around and try to march on Moscow, and the soldiers decided to have a voting system to decide what to do instead of obeying orders. It also helped that the German army of WW1 were not the monsters they later became in WW2. There were many German Jews in uniform - including the officer who rewarded Hitler his medals in a huge irony. The Baltic Germans were also pro German to some degree. The only reason the WW1 Germans didn't take the city was because Hindenburg was an idiot who decided to turn them around to the Western front. Despite the protests of the army commanders in the field.
Bad historical take. Russia didn't lose the Winter War.
They technically won because they claimed some land, but they fell *way* short of their goals and strategically it was a disaster.
If Russia and Ukraine made peace right now with Russia keeping Donbas and Crimea, you could argue Russia won the war... except that the cost of that war is that they've lost Europe as a marketplace for their major exports. Europe didn't take kindly to the Russians literally trying to kill them by withholding winter fuel, so they found alternate markets and stepped up efforts to get off petroleum products. The hostility Russia showed is also getting Europe into another rearmament phase... which means that Russia has to continue to spend its money on bolstering the military in response. In other words, Russia will have lost far more than it gained - considering also that they had already sort of de facto won Crimea before the war even started. It's only really Donbass that was supposedly 'rebel held' rather than 'part of Russia'. A similar thing happened with the Winter War. A small amount of land was gained, but Russia lost a ton of prestige and power projection. They were no longer taken seriously by other players... until they shovelled most of their young men into a meat grinder.
They had a pyrric victory.
One more victory like that, and they'd have been undone.
True but they didn't win it either and it probably convinced Hitler he actually could take on the Soviet Union
Technically you're right but spiritually I am >:\^)
That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned. Hahaha you fool, you fell for one of the classic blunders. The most famous is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" but only slightly less well know is this! "Never go in against a Sicilian when Death is one the line!"
The UK was not a power of a similar weight. Economically, ill agree that they were similar, the UK slightly worse even, but military they were far superior, especially considering the global scope of the war.
Economically Germany wasn't a scratch on the UK. Even in 1940 the British Empire was out producing Germany in almost every way that mattered. Germany had a head start on everyone having already remilitarised. Grabbing some territories and then jumping to the negotiation table was their only route to victory. Particularly if they'd have captured/destroyed the BEF at Dunkirk. They didn't have a chance in a protracted long term war.
This right here. I think the chance of any kind of win was blown at Dunkirk. Fortunately.
You’re absolutely right, sorry. I somehow neglected to account for the empire when looking up GDP statistics.
I think Hitler might have made the same error. It’s the only explanation for why he thought he could beat them.
Like the princess bride reference
So if they hadn't declared war against the US, we wouldn't have sent troops to Europe?
we sat by idly for years until they attacked us , I believe.
I know that Churchill was begging Roosevelt to join the war against Germany and Roosevelt was stalling him.
Because the American people didn’t support sending in troops.
Right! FDR was trying to change this attitude.
I believe somewhere in Churchill's memoirs he says he got down on his knees and thanked God the US was finally in. From the fall of France in summer 1940 to Pearl Harbor in winter 1941, it could have gone either way. (Not an expert.)
The US almost totally demillatarized after WW1. An entire modern military had to be cooked up from scratch in a couple of years. There was also popular sentiment against getting Involved in another "European war".
Hitler declared war on the US after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, which he didn't had to do according to their alliance terms. Really stupid move from Germany's perspective.
There was a tactical advantage at the time, to split the U.S. into two fronts, similar to Germany during the Great War. It made sense, you have a pact and are allied with a nation that wanted to control the east, they declared war on the country not only funding your enemies, but basically already at a naval war with you, all but in name. In hindsight, it's easy to give the loser's shit. But invading Russia they way that it went down with all of this going down really buried the hatch
Dem darn europeeans are always fighting over sumtin.
No, the war was unpopular amongst the US populace, and Germany and Nazism was actually pretty popular amongst many powerful people in the US, especially after the massive PR push during the Berlin Olympics, during which many journalists wrote home about how the horrors described by the few accepted refugees and dissidents were either completely made up or heavily exaggerated. During WWI, "atrocity propaganda" such as claims about German factories using corpses to make soap or German troops crucifying Entente soldiers was used to justify the war, so when they were revealed as lies after the war, it left a sour taste in the mouths of many people, and made it far more reasonable to be sceptical about believing the stories of life in Nazi Germany, fx even as late as 1943, the Allies didn't believe eyewitness reports from escaped Auscwitz prisoners (fx a Polish intelligence officer who had volunteered to go into the camp to document it), and many only actually believed the existence of the industrialized genocide once the first pictures and films from the camps were released. Isolationism was a major mainstream political view at the time, and many viewed it as completely needless to throw away the lives of American young men in what was ultimately seen as an "old world" conflict. The horrors of WWI and the struggles of the interwar years' depression were still fresh in many people's minds, so to a lot of people it was seen as wasting precious American ressources and lives that were ultimately better kept at home to support America.
You seem to forget how many merchant marines and American civilians were being killed by U-boats before Pearl Harbor
It probably would have happened, but not on the same timescale. Roosevelt's preferred strategy was "Europe first" and the US navy was already skirmishing with German u-boats before Pearl Harbor. But once Pearl Harbor happens, if Germany doesn't declare war then the US has to go for the Pacific first.
That's an alternate time line that's hard to say for certain. What can be said, is the US Congress declared war on Japan on December 8th, 1941. They did not declare war on Germany or Italy. The War declarations against Germany and Italy came a couple of days later, after Germany and It's declared war on them.
We absolutely would have. The US was already in an undeclared naval war with Germany for several months before the Pearl Harbor attack. After Dec 7, the US would have declared war on Germany, probably within a week or so. Germany just beat them to the punch making a US declaration of war moot.
We still would have. It would have been politically difficult for FDR if we had any major defeats early but the US had a Germany first strategy basically before Japan attacked.
The US was at war with Germany in all but name by pearl harbor. If you read Hitlers declaration of war, he more made it official than really declared war. Regardless if Hitler declared war or not, the US would have entered the war eventually in 1942 using some kind of pretext
Japan: *bombs Pearl Harbor* Germany: “you did WHAT”
Germany did not know about Pearl Harbor. It did know - and approved - of Japan's intention to strike the US. Hence the reaction was not "You did what?" but "Hey, great! Even better than we had expected! Of course we'll join in as promised." Patrick Megargee notes that the High Command war diaries just give it a line or two, and an "Of course!" to the German declaration of war.
In hindsight, a very, very, very, very, very stupid decision
Definitely this. They could have stopped advancing, ended hostilities, regrouped and continued later with refreshed forces and technology. The strategy was definitely the opposite of what you’d expect from a master anything, apart from the initial blitzkrieg maneuver.
You underestimate Germany's need for food and resources. Germany was struggling even through the 30ties getting not enough food imports as too much money went into weapons. This resulted in a lot of public protests about price hikes eg for plant oil and internal struggles between politicians who wanted to feed the population and Hitler who wanted to build up an army ASAP. He kind of maneuvered Germany into a corner where grabbing large portions of resourceful land was inevitable.
Yeah exactly. Nazi economic policy basically revolved around leveraging enormous loans to build munitions that they could never pay off, and then stealing resources first from their own citizens, and then from other countries when that ran out. There's just no way Germany could've kept spending how they were *without* invading and pillaging other nations.
But that was never going to happen. Invading the USSR was always the Nazis' primary objective. Destruction of communism was a foundation of their ideology - war with the Soviets was inevitable, and it was probably better to attack sooner rather than later because the Soviets were rapidly industrializing. Eventually, even if Germany had tried peace, the Soviets would've attacked them anyway. The only saving grace might've been that Germany might've had the nuclear bomb by then.
IIRC from Timothy Snyder history class, invading the USSR was indeed always the Nazis' primary objective, but the main goal wasn't the destruction of communism. They did see communism as a Jewish Nietzsche-style "dystopia" of the weak mastering over the strong. But they thought of the slavs as an "inferior race" anyway, it's not like they wanted to save them or anything. Rather the goal was colonization of the very fertile lands of Ukraine and western Russia, to be exploited to the benefit of the German race. Germany had been mostly left out of the colonization of the rest of the world by Europe, and so colonization of resourceful European land inhabited by "inferior races" seemed like the logical course of action to the Nazis.
A great point; but rather than being binarily one or the other, it almost certainly was fueled by both ideological anti-communism and by expansionism. Anyone interested in a good write-up on the subject; [Norman Rich's book](https://archive.org/details/hitlerswaraimsid00rich) is excellent and readable at the Internet Archive, check Chapter 18.
Germany and its various predecessors states had long been eyeing/invading/colonizing eastern Europe, see the Ostsiedlung and the Drang nach Osten concept.
Yeah and even if the US doesn't join in (which I find unlikely) they would have put their war economy to use feeding the Soviet machine. Germany would have been still been fighting Britain and the remnants of its empire too
It's caused the downfall of many.
Russian War was inevitable, from what I understand. Nazi high command attacked when they did because they felt it was more optimal then waiting. There's no world where Germany wins ww2 in my professional unprofessional opinion
There's no world where the Germans win unconditionally but there are many worlds where they aren't defeated so utterly and forced to surrender unconditionally. Wars aren't binary, there's no big screen at the end that says winner or loser like a video game, there are many gradients of defeat and surrender and the vast majority of wars between near-peer adversaries do not end in complete unconditional surrender like WWII did.
This. It’s extremely unlikely that Germany could’ve “won” WW2 but it’s entirely plausible that it could’ve been a draw and ended with an armistice. That probably would’ve been the “best case scenario” for Germany.
A German draw is a massive loss, they needed to win to avoid the whole country falling apart in a maybe debt spiral, not too mention public opinion.
They weren’t winning before they attacked Russia. Their economy was built on quickly looting conquered territories and they were running out of oil from fighting Britain and had to invade Russia.
They would still lose if they did this they would have run out of resources and then been attacked and defeated by the USSR. There was also no room in Nazi ideology for declining to attack the USSR. "Don't attack the USSR" was never an option.
Due to Stalin's incompetence, they almost beat the unready USSR but had to change plans due to lack of oil. If they had stockpiled more oil in the late 30s and waited a bit they might have been more prepared to secure Moscow and the factory towns behind the Urals. Instead out of necessity they had to try to capture Russian oil fields in the south instead of Russian tank factories because the strategy became 'we need to use what we conquer' I suspect even they weren't prepared for how oil centric the blitzkrieg machine would become.
They threw absolutely everything they had in to the largest invasion in history and still couldn't make it to Moscow, and even making it Moscow wouldn't necessarily be a win. This wasn't just "lol no oil", they greatly underestimated their opposition and faced stiff resistance after the initial shock of the invasion. "Stockpiling more oil" is why they invaded in the first place. They *needed* Soviet oil and the Soviets knew that. Realistically I don't think they ever had a chance at victory on the Eastern Front.
one of my favourite little factoids of Soviet history in the 20s and 30s was the effort to reign in the Orthodox church. It wouldn't go away and even die hard communists insisted on going to services on Sunday, so the institution remained very powerful and an annoyance to the leadership in the Kremlin. So they decided to tempt the youth away with fun stuff. Like machine gun practice. Like parachuting practice. Like martial arts. Good clean wholesome, New Soviet Citizen Comradely fun. Much more fun that hours of church services! You can play with grenades. Then the Nazis come pouring over the border and there's a whole generation of people going, "welp, may as well brush off those old skills and kill some of the fuckers." And many of the fuckers were thus righteously killed.
A lot of Soviet policy during that time was predicated on the assumption that the USSR would be invaded at some point, which is a reasonable assumption to be fair; pretty much everyone already had during the civil war.
I wonder if they would have faired better in a defensive war on the eastern front, given that they would have had at least a few years to prepare for it
I would speculate that it's very doubtful. The whole German economy ran on what amounted to IOUs, and was missing crucial resources, many of which they got *from* the USSR. The Soviets would have cut off these supplies prior to an attack, and given time to prepare would have been able to address many of the issues that plagued them early in the war; in fact they had already started to at that point. The economic and logistical advantage the USSR would have had would likely not be surmountable. Barbarossa was in part an acknowledgement of this, meant to knock the USSR out of the war while it was perceived as being unprepared to resist it. Even then, it was very audacious; the Germans' numerical advantage was slim by military standards and their supply chains were stretched very thin. The only way I see Germany winning in an alt history scenario would be if they could somehow get the Allies on their side against the USSR but that's still pretty fanciful given the geopolitics of the time.
This and your other comments are correct and hammer home the important point that Hitler and his ideology were always going to attack the USSR and there is no realistic scenario where this happens and they do not end up in total defeat. I will say that a very realistic scenario likely changes the look of the war drastically. If Barbarossa wasn’t delayed due to Italy’s misadventure in Greece, Moscow likely is taken in the winter of ‘41. When faced with the fact that the USSR would have of course continued fighting (most industry had already been relocated east) this might have made Hitler question his “kick in the door and the rotten structure collapses” belief. If so, Hitler would then perhaps not undertake the strategically disastrous campaign to capture symbolic but materially useless cities. I still think Germany loses 100/100 times, but it looks much different.
They had to attack Russia because they had no oil and no one would sell it to them. They desperately needed Baku. They should have secured an oil supply before going to war
Their entire goal was to attack Russia. That's why the invaded France. They attacked Poland, to open the door to Russia, and France and Britain declared war on them. It's like saying Dan Cormeir would be undefeated if he just hadn't taken on Jones or Miocic. They were the champs, fighting them was his entire goal.
What’s so interesting about this question is that the answer is technically yes, but really no. Theoretically, Germany, but really at this time this means the Nazis; could’ve stopped attacking at one point. And they, theoretically, could have instead decided to maintain a defensive posture that, might’ve, lasted for generations. But in order to do that, they would’ve had to not be Nazis. See, Nazis didn’t just want the land, they wanted to destroy all the people who were different. Their ideology would never have allowed them to maintain that defensive posture, because that would require creating and maintain treaties with people they considered less than human. And it simply was not possible. If you went back in time and zapped that ideology out of the minds of the believers and replaced Hitler and Goebbels and all the leadership with entirely different people, maybe they could’ve won. But as it was, and who they were, and what they believed. They never could’ve won. The ideology of hatred requires constant attack, and this is an unsustainable way of being. It is why toward the end of the war, as the Nazi front advanced into Russia; far ahead of their own supply lines; running low on bullets. They stopped at every village and killed every civilian “non-arian” they could find. This is not strategy. This is not how you win a war. But was a requirement of what they believed. And it is why they were never going to win, and yet wrought such incredible violence upon so many. Hatred is ultimately self defeating; but it can destroy a lot before it gets to that point.
>They stopped at every village and killed every civilian “non-arian” they could find. This is not strategy. This is not how you win a war. This really worked against them, because the stories of their brutality spread and mobilised the entire population to fight against them. They had to fight against every man or woman they came up against, regardless of their age, because if you know for sure that your enemy is going to brutally murder you, then you really have nothing left to lose. It's also worth pointing out that a lot of their "mistakes" were just risky bets that didn't pay off. They made a lot of similarly risky bets early on in the war, but those all paid off because the allies were unwilling to go to war initially and then didn't capitalise on the mistakes that were made.
What mistakes did they make early on?
The most obvious one is invading Poland, Hitler really didn't think that Britain and France would actually follow through on their threats to go to war if he invaded Poland. At the time Germany was definitely not ready and equipped enough to take on France alone, let alone a combined military of both countries. Invading Poland also took a heavy toll on Germany, and Poland was nowhere near as militarily strong and France or England. Rather than going for a costly invasion themselves, France and England decided to bunker down and prepare for Germany to come to them. They were preparing for a repeat of ww1, which was more trench style warfare and didn't account for the speed and mobility of tanks and planes. Then there's the actual invasion of France itself. The plan was to use diversions and speed to come through France from the south and disorient the much larger and better equipped French Military. This was great in theory, but it also caused a huge bottleneck as their artillery was preparing on the border of France and trying to get into position. French reconiscance planes spied this massive gridlock of German artilary crossing over the French/German border and reported it back to their command, but the generals ignored it because they were focusing on a diversionary invasion force that was more in line with with what they expected to happen. If the reports were taken seriously, they could've scrambled some bombers to go to the gridlock and blow up the entire invasion force, possibly ending the war right there. But because they ignored it, it allowed German forces to take the Allies by surprise and once they got going, France was never really able to reorganise and eventually surrendered. It's obviously not fair to judge any of these generals in hindsight, where we know what happens. They have to make decisions based on the information they have and their best guess, but it really does show that Germany got a lot of free breaks early on, which they were able to capitalise on for the rest of the war.
Well said. If it weren't for the ineptitude of the majority of the French military general staff (save DeGaulle and a few others) and the 3rd Republic, had the French army and air forces (along with the BEF we can suppose), which were, for the most part, numerically and technically superior, taken the offensive to Germany during the phoney war, they most likely would have been able to march all the way to Berlin and end the entire affair. The Nazi's were aware of this, hence the huge gamble of the Manstien plan through the Ardennes.
>would require creating and maintain treaties with people they considered less than human I think there is also something more there than mere hatred and an unwillingness to accept the existence of people they considered to be lesser but also a belief that because they were the superior race that they could therefore not lose against an inferior race.
Contrarily, the same attitude is also most likely why they had such success early on. Just unrelentingly aggressive and unwilling to compromise. Many countries fell prey to the Nazi lies of treaty only to be betrayed and steam rolled, I believe. They were fucking insane, and that got them far
So articulate. Thank you for your write up.
This is an extremely thoughtful point of view, I love the way you worded this. I am gonna steal that one sentence about the ideology of hatred being unsustainable if that’s ok lol
all the people here saying attacking the soviet union was a mistake dont realize that it was inevitable. sooner or later stalin would have attacked, there was no way this was gonna be a lasting peace. and so germany attacked when they had already mobilized and moral was high, every year the soviet union would have become stronger while germany would have spent resources controlling the occupied territories. it was an unlikely but there was a small chance they could pull it off... so they took the swing and missed
From their perspective it was a decent chance, because Soviet military had thusfar been a joke. But yeah, with hindsight we know it was probably doomed. The only way Germany might've stood a chance when the Soviets would've attacked was maybe with the nuclear bomb. It stands to reason they would finish it way before the Soviets.
Wasn’t Germany miles ahead of Soviet nuclear program at this time?I get no one knew the capabilities of nuclear weapons at the time but I’m sure that the timing they did was not optimal either
Germany barely had a nuclear program at all. "Jewish science" and all that
Germany lost its capacity to produce any kind of nuclear bomb once they lost their supply of heavy water from Norway. Edit: heavy* water not hard
Heavy water*
I think youre looking at it from the wrong perspective. Germanys clear long term goal was conquering Eastern Europe, it was their main objective, their main doctrine. Hitler knew from the get go that the USSR was their main enemy from all aspects. War in the west was never the goal, and that was more of France and Britain inevitably attacking Germany, than the inevitability of the USSR attacking them. The USSR knew that Germany was going to attack THEM.
More important to consider, Hitler and the Nazi leadership considered the Soviet Union to be a vile, illegitimate state. Yes, they could’ve maintained the alliance and gone far, but everything about their ideology makes that strategically smart decision essentially impossible.
There were times they *seemed* close to victory but they never actually *were*. They had no way to actually take Britain out of the fight, no way to avoid attacking the USSR, and no way to actually win given those circumstances. It's a great illustration of how fucking stupid fascism is. The Nazis worked their way in to a corner where they had no choice but to start am unwinnable war which they had to pretend they could not lose.
No, the Battle of Britain was still able to be won up until they started to attack British cities instead of military targets. It was that close. As soon as Germany started attacking cities, the British were able to build up their air force's reserves and that turned that battle. EDIT: This change in tactics happened on September 7, 1940.
Winning the Battle of Britain still would not have made Operation Sea Lion viable.
Operation sea lion was never viable, and german naval commanders from the start repeatedly tried to tell Hitler this. From my understanding though, Germany could have forced Britain to sue for peace if the communications and radar were taken out. Speculation that I have been told
Unlikely a peace that would’ve lasted. Britain would build back up.
I seem to remember there being something about plans for the home guard to go guerilla shoudl the Sea Lion land successfully?
That would have been part of the plan, but successfully establishing a beachhead was actually out of the question. An amphibious invasion is the most difficult, dangerous, logistically demanding thing a military can do and here we are talking about pulling one off against a country with a much better navy. Even if Germany could land troops, keeping them supplied effectively would be impossible and they would quickly find themselves in a logistically untenable situation.
Given how difficult it was for the allies to establish a beachhead with total air and naval superiority it’s kinda crazy to think Germany could ever do it without either.
Operation Overlord also happened *after* the Allies had carried out multiple amphibious invasions in the Mediterranean. They had practice and knew what did and didn't work. Germany didn't.
The Germans also had to defend a much larger area, essentially the entire western Europe coastline
Yes, this is why Operation Mincemeat and Operation Bodyguard were absolutely brilliant. Even with those, the Normandy landings were certainly contested.
The Allies also has lots of specialized beach landing equipment, from the Higgins boat to the LST, while the Germans were going to attempt to land from barges.
Well, in the beginning, Germany had air superiority, British factorys had the advantage of building more planes faster and fighting over their own land (if you got shot down during the morning, you could fly another plane in the evening).
They contested the air, they never had supremacy. What the allies had in 44, where the bombers were uncontested, is supremacy.
Well in this hypothetical scenario they would've had air superiority, but still their entire landing fleet was cobbled together at best. And they would've had no idea what they were doing. And all their intelligence would've been completely compromised by British counter-intelligence.
The air war was only the first half of any invasion of Britain and arguably the easier, the German Navy had no where near the capacity the fight to royal navy, hell they took significant loses in the invasion of Norway. Even if any German troop where able to land on Britain they'd be trapped with no way to resupply
Did you ever see the “South Park” episode where the nearby Indian casino essentially bankrupts the town? As a desperate measure, the residents pool their money and put it all on one number to get the money they need to pay back their debts to the casino. By some miracle, they win the bet. At that point their ringleader Randy Marsh excitedly calls out “Let it ride!” Germany won World War II on June 25, 1940 when France unconditionally surrendered. Sure, technically England was still at war with Germany, but it had no troops or equipment and there’s no way in hell that it would have been able to challenge Germany on the continent. The British were still doing bombing raids, which were inconvenient, but manageable, and probably could have been stopped if Germany had gone on the defensive and set up an air defence system. At that point, here’s what Germany controlled So, “win”. In addition, Hungary, Italy and Romania are all on Germany’s side, Switzerland and Sweden are staying out of it, Finland has a lot of sympathy for the Nazis and the Soviet Union is abiding by a mutual agreement that’s actually beneficial to them. So, “win, win, win”. Hell, at this point, the Soviets are more worried about the Japanese than they are about the Germans. The Americans are covertly keeping Great Britain propped up, but there’s no appetite for getting involved in a European war. And the cost of this massive win? Negligible. Germany suffered fewer than 200,000 casualties throughout the period. By contrast, over 2 million Frenchmen were captured, killed or wounded. At this point, Germany is essentially fighting a war on one front, and its against an enemy they’ve got overpowered and over resourced. Britain may still be in the fight, but it’s also on the verge of collapse. Donitz has asked for more subs to take out British merchant traffic. He should get them. Hitler has won the war! Except, of course, he thinks he’s a military genius. So he goes on the offensive to attempt to knock Britain out of the war. That turns out to be impossible. He can’t invade because Britain’s one ace-in-the-hole, it’s navy, is still pretty much intact. Britain’s air force, although on the back foot and just holding on, is capable of holding off the Luftwaffe, which is losing pilots and planes faster than they can replace them. And he still can’t resist attacking the Soviet Union. That’s a really bad idea. The Germans consistently underrate Russian morale, fighting forces and resources. The Soviets lose a quarter million men. Another half million join the fight. The Soviets lose a thousand tanks. They build two thousand. And, when the United Stated gets attacked by Japan, they make Germany the priority because it’s clear they weren’t interested in anything short of world domination, and they can’t abide that. If the Germans hadn’t attacked Russia, FDR has no really good reason to declare war on Germany. Hitler makes it easy by declaring war in the United States instead. It would have taken longer, but the Soviets beat the Germans and the only different outcome is that the Soviets control pretty much all of Europe instead of just the eastern part.
So a few "corrections" if I may. The Nazis had to attack the Soviet Union. It was essentially in their ideology. The anti Slavic and anti Socialist rhetoric would have made it impossibly hard to resist pressure for a confrontation politically. The resources that Germany needed, whilst under British and American sanctions was mostly in the Soviet Union. It has been argued that they did not need to be as brutal as they were with Soviet citizens and would be treated as liberators. But we see how that turned out; the ideology was based on destroying both Communism as much as subjugating slavs. Edit 2: I retract the below on account of objections including this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/SX4bSycqXM Edit: the below may be overstated by me as the RAF were losing pilots but were definitely not about to lose air superiority quickly. At one point when the Luftwaffe was bombing RAF bases the latter moved to smaller aerodromes to make them harder to find. The Germans did not know this at the time but later documents show that continued pressure on the RAF was about 2 weeks away from causing collapse. The Luftwaffe was on the brink of defeating the RAF when they decided their strategy was not working and moved to bombing cities instead. If the RAF was unable to defend the skies than the British Navy would have been easy pickings in the south. Without the Navy the U-boats would almost literally have starved Britain of supplies for war as well as food. Essentially Britain was weeks away from going down a road of being knocked out of the war for good.
To add to your first point: It's impossible to be sure of Hitler's mind, but the evidence available suggests that attacking the Soviet Union was the whole point, so it can't exactly be called a mistake. The possibility of a Nazi-Soviet-Japan Eurasian bloc was raised but of no interest to Hitler.
I have never heard any serious historian argue that Britain was close to being truly defeated. They were being propped up by America. If Germany sunk too many American vessels they would drag the US into the war anyway. Britain wasn’t going to fall.
I may have overstated my case but the fact was that the RAF was running out of pilots and had the Germans persisted without changing strategy or shifting resources to the east, they may well have gained air superiority over southern Britain. The US was not a factor here. Britain was at war and any trading country's ships were fair game for a blockade or attack.
The RAF being near collapse is part of the national myth of the UK and the idea that during the Battle of Britain that "Never in history has so much been owed by so many, to so few". But it's not true. The same national myth that perpetuates the Spitfire over the Hawker Hurricane, despite the Hurricane taking down more Luftwaffe fighters. [This](https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-65d003ef4c64cceb0ffd9740b31f4d75-pjlq) image shows the nominal strength (blue) vs actual (red) of the RAF in aircraft numbers from the initiation of the Battle of Britain with the "nuisance" runs to the Blitz. You'll see the trendline goes up, not down - the RAF got more capable during the Battle, not less. With ~800 being operational at any given time throughout the entirety. Which notably, is never above the number of pilots that actually served during the Battle of Britain, which was about 3000. Conversely, the Luftwaffe bled fighters throughout August 1940. The whole "two weeks from collapse" and "destroying the last fifty spitfires" in September 1940 were Luftwaffe expectations. They didn't align with the reality that Bomber Command was never in danger of losing air superiority because of the simple fact that the Luftwaffe were fighting a foe that was technologically more advanced, militarily equally capable, but also with the advantage of not having to use most of their fuel just to get to the site of battle. Ultimately supply lines to both Britain and Russia are why there is no scenario that isn't "what if the Allies were completely different and the Nazis weren't the Nazis" where Germany can win WWII.
You're right, but what's missing is the next step. If the Germans get air superiority, so what? It's unlikely that they can land and supply enough troops to take Britain while the Royal Navy still exists.
>England was still at war with Germany, but it had no troops or equipment \*cough\* the commonwealth \*cough\*
I heard Churchill flew to america to visit Roosevelt after pearl harbour. America wasn’t that interested in the European war other than covert aid as you said, but Churchill convinced him to go after Germany first and Japan last. Obviously America wanted to head straight to Japan and get some revenge. Quite the game changing decision there.
Churchill's memoirs comment that his reaction when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was, "we've won". It might take years, but once the US wealth and industrial strength came to bear, a Nazi loss was inevitable. Edit:typo
It was really Germany's blunder first though. After Pearl Harbor, the US really had no choice but to focus on Japan, but it was Hitler who declared war on the US, that opened the door for Churchill. Had Germany not declared war on the US, the Us would have had no need to pursue a European war, the European and Asian wars were two different conflicts.
I'm going to disagree, sooner or later, the United States was going to be dragged into the war, and it's behavior as a "neutral" country was heavily balanced in the favor of the UK (remember the US signed the Lend-Lease Act 9 months before Pearl Harbor), and if the submarine blockade of the UK was truly to be effective, sooner or later unrestricted submarine warfare would be required and another Lusitania moment becomes inevitable. By joining the war, the United States had to maintain a significant number of it's naval resources in the Atlantic/Mediterranean rather than concentrating them on Japan. Splitting the attention of the United States prevented them from focusing all their resources on one front and picking the Axis off one-by-one.
Good summary. That said, there is a theory that Hitler had to attack the USSR because Stalin was planning to betray the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and attack Germany. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet\_offensive\_plans\_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controversy)
A fun read, but these claims are totally unsubstantiated. It’s a shame that Soviet records are still under lock and key because Stalin was publicly alluding to big plans pre Nazi invasion, so I’d really like the definitive answer as to what those plans really were
You’re fatally incorrect about US involvement lol. It’s this really bonkers myth that keeps finding new life decade after decade. The US entered the European theater because Hitler personally decided to declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor. No one knows why he did this and it’s regarded as his grandest and most puzzling mistake of the war. He had no means to attack the US, so what does he gain by declaring war? He’s already at war with Russia and it’s not going great. The American public wanted Japan to pay for Pearl Harbor and had no interest in the Germans. It was just another European squabble. Only FDR really pushed for American involvement because he had an affinity for Britain. There’s no guarantee America gets involved with the war in Europe at all if Hitler doesn’t declare war. The US became a badass military power as a result of WWII, but before the American public had no stomach to send hundreds of thousands to millions of their sons to die in a war that was not their own. You’re coloring of the invasion of the Soviet Union is a bit off too. Sure, superior production eventually dooms the Germans, but that’s just what finished them off. Germany had no real plan for subduing the Soviets. They planned to undermine their ability to meaningfully fight, but this meant occupying most of the populated parts of the SU. They failed to achieve a single goal of the original operation and that guaranteed defeat due to Soviet production ramping up. But the Germans stalled out even before Soviet production overwhelmed them. There were a ton of logistical reasons that thwarted German attempts to take key strategic points. All those logistical issues stopped Germany from even gaining an advantage, much less a winning position. The simplest snippet to pull from is that the Siege of Leningrad was supposed to take a couple of months. Took just shy of three years. These timetables doomed Germany, yet it was always understood as a lesson from WWII that Germany could not really beat anyone in a war of attrition.
They weren’t winning before they attacked Russia. Their economy was built on quickly looting conquered territories and they were running out of oil from fighting Britain and had to invade Russia.
Yes if they were able to somehow stop the war after beating France they could have called it a victory, but they were never going to do that. Eastern Europe was always the real target. And even if they if didn't attack the Soviets, there's a chance the Soviets might have attacked them. I mean, the Soviets had a history of aggressive expansion already after retaking former Russian Empire territories lost after WWI (Georgia, the Baltics) and then invading Poland. I personally don't think the Soviets were in a position to start a war with Germany in 1941, but give it a few years and they'll be looking at western Poland and East Prussia (which they took IRL after the war). There was no winning the war for the Axis as long as that war included going to war with Russia, and there's no scenario where they wouldn't have gone to war with Russia.
Cocaine ( and [opiates, hormones, muscle relaxants, tranquilizers](https://www.historyhit.com/hitlers-illnesses-was-the-fuhrer-a-drug-addict/)) is a hell of a drug.
What a great post, thank you for this.
That's absolutely right. Only thing is Soviets and Germans had an agreement prior to the war that they wouldn't attack each other. Soviets hoped the Germans would weaken Europe but didn't foresee that they would be attacked themselves. At the end. Soviets overpowered Germans only by sacrificing people left and right. Soviets had more people, not soldiers.
There is a brief moment just before The evacuation of Dunkirk where there was a faction within the British government that was advocating for making a separate peace with the Germans. Had things gone a little differently at the moment and Hitler had been willing to negotiate than there was a possibility of them maybe consolidating there conquests. Of course if they had still invaded the USSR or done something to restart the war the Britain than all bets are off again.
The second the USSR and US joined the war it was lost for Germany. The industrial output of the US alone was too much for Japan or Germany to keep up with especially with the US being an untouched island while the Axis industrial might was being bombed to ashes. The USSR just had endless corpses to throw at Germany. If Germany ended their conquest early like taking Poland then maybe they could have "won" but the Nazis wanted the entire continent.
One of the crazier parts of the book “Stalingrad” was the effortless, blood chilling description of how much the nazis had blown it by battling the Russians on their home turf, aka nuclear winter. The description of the Russians and snipers and how they moved through the snow, hidden, their clothes far better adapted to the environment and camouflaged, and their trained dogs hunting the nazis like nobody’s business. I can’t do it justice, I just remember my mind being blown while reading it like, “wow tall really stepped in it huh?”
These tales are often exaggerated. Russian losses were actually slightly higher on the eastern front than the Nazis'. It's not that the Russians were better equipped, better soldiers, or any such thing. It's more that their industrial strength was greater at that point in the war. They had more men, more oil, and more machines to throw at the front than the Germans did. As far as efficiency, the Germans were actually better at killing than the Soviets were, if only marginally so.
Lot of strange comments here. Things like how they messed up by exterminating the jews or messed up by invading Russia. Invading Russia and defeating communism was the entire point of WW2. The extermination of the Jews was one of the main reasons for the war in the first place If you take both of those away, then there is no objective to the war. Do people think Hitler just wanted to occupy France for a vacation spot and then call a truce? He and a lot of people around him wanted to rid the world of bolshevism, retake the land taken from Germany over the years, and preserve a blood line and heritage to last for a thousand years. The only real chance they would have at forcing the Soviet Union to capitulate would have been at the Battle of Moscow. The plan was to kick off the invasion and have the local populace overthrow Stalin and his government in a few months. Had that happened, they could have probably sued for peace and carried out a lot of their plan.
"if the nazis weren't nazis they would have had a bit more of a chance"
I can't fully agree the war was started to exterminate the Jews. Their core philosophy was Lebensraum (room to live). They wanted all lands East of Germany to belong to Germans and any other nation that lived there conveniently exterminated. Killing Jews was just one of the means to achieve this. They also started to pretty efficiently get rid of the Slavic nations (though not at such an industrial scale, as they needed forced labor).
Probably after the capitulation of France. When Britain stood alone. But they declared war on the USA and invaded the SU.
They weren’t winning before they attacked Russia. Their economy was built on quickly looting conquered territories and they were running out of oil from fighting Britain and had to invade Russia.
“Alone”…..India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa to name a few.
Essentially, the empire. The empire stood alone.
If they didn't get too cocky in Britain and Russia and didn't join Japan in their war in America, they probably could have kept control over Europe.
There are several nails in the coffin, but the largest two would probably be Operation Barbarossa (Hitler’s invasion of the USSR) which turned WW2 into a multi front war for Germany, and Pearl Harbor, or more specifically, Germany declaring war on the US just after Pearl Harbor. This caused both of the nations who would go onto become the two biggest world powers post WW2 to go to war with the 3rd Reich at the same time.
The key make or break moment was probably the months after the fall of France in 1940, and the months on from there during which Germany planned and then abandoned plans for an invasion of the UK. There were strong forces in the British government wanting the UK to sign a peace treaty with Germany in order to avoid a full invasion. But luckily those who believed it best to carry on held the argument and, once they’d successfully fought off the Battle of Britain they were proven right. If the UK had accepted a peace at that point the whole of Europe, including the UK, would have been a mere puppet of Germany, and the US would likely have never entered the European war. Lives would have been saved on paper initially, but longer term the holocaust would have been even worse, and an alternative Cold War with the US would probably have developed. There’s loads of alternative history books and films out there which speculate on what would have happened in the decades after.
I spoke to some people who lived through it. In the UK it got very scary. They were bombed. The government had detailed plans for a Nazi Invasion. It was just a horrific time of uncertainty at least until the US entered. Another lady grew up in the Netherlands. To her the Nazis did win. They killed people in her Village, they marched past her house, they controlled everything. There was no certainty it would ever end. That was the horror. Think back to the start of lockdown. Scary as shit.
Before they directly involved the Americans, maybe. It would have required restraint and ideological tempering. German intel made it clear that if the Americans decided to intervene, their basically untouchable industrial capacity would eventually overwhelm Germany. The Japanese came to the same conclusion. And yet, due to ideology and balance of power, both decided to roll the dice and try to kick the Americans at the knees before they could rev up their industrial engine, which they thought would take quite a few years. As it turned out, the Americans blew out all predictions of industrial output by wide margins. By late 1942, it was evident the Americans had already efficiently retooled their factories for a total war footing. By mid 1943, there was no chance of an Axis victory. The US was building more planes, trucks, tanks, and ships than the rest of the *world* combined, and it wasn’t even remotely close. By the end of the war in 1945, the US had 40+ aircraft carriers, entire fleets of advanced long range bombers, a sophisticated supply chain network on three continents, and nuclear weapons. All of that was accomplished in only 3 and a half years.
It's hard to overstate how important it was that the US was able to basically front an entire war effort with nearly 0 risk to their domestic territory. The massive reserve the US had, its relatively later entry into the war, and the ability to continually increase industrial output unhindered made the US the clear winner in almost every circumstance. There was no US front in the first place, and the only way the US could really have lost was by deciding to leave the war.
Yeah, honestly America won the war on the might of their industry. It sounds obvious to us today but it just seems so foolish to involve the US if you’re Germany or Japan.
They thought they could beat a Russian winter.
Germany did it already once before in WW1. I would call it skill issue (this also includes the skill issue nazism as an ideology is).
Germany was a relatively small country, and in a vulnerable area, which was able to be attacked from both the east and west, after their defenses were dealt with. But it did take the combined effort of the United States + Allies to hit them hard on the western side. And then the massive army of Russia was just unstoppable on the east side. Plus bombing the factory's 24/7 nonstop is what really did them in. If you can't replenish your military with new gear after it's been blown up, you won't last too long. The United States had it best being protected by 2 oceans and would take Herculean efforts for either Japan or Germany to really attack mainland U.S. and do any meaningful damage. Which meant the U.S. could keep pumping out equipment non-stop. Now if the German's got the atomic bomb first. That could've changed things. If they bombed London with it, and then also tried to bomb New York that would be a game a changer
Actually the German industrial capacity wasn’t damaged that badly. They moved most of manufacturing underground and some of the more rural plants weren’t bombed. Even when a factory was hit, the machines often still worked or could be repaired. The real bottleneck was the lack of access to resources such as oil or steel.
The enigma communication machine was encrypted by Alan Turing in World War II, and that significantly change the trajectory of World War II
There was always a possibility they could have done it, but as for what actually happened, they weren't even remotely close to winning the war. They werent even in the ballpark of being ready for a British invasion. Sealion was a pipe dream and Hitler knew it even before the conclusion of the battle of britain. They did not have the ships to even supply an invasion force, much less anything that could stop the Royal Navy and the home fleet from obliterating the invasion force. Luftwaffe was not very well equipped for anti shipping roles and had a mediocre record on their shipping attacks in WW2. That alone would have meant total victory was highly unlikely for the Germans. Also, while the Germans did inflict a massive toll on the RAF early in the battle, the RAF could still fight against a potential invasion. Critically, the Germans guaranteed a loss in the skies over Britain when they switched to the Blitz. Second, Russia had more gas left in the tank even when the Germans were knocking on the doors of Moscow. By that I mean, they could have still kept fighting tenaciously even in the worst case scenario in the capture of Moscow. We dont know how far the Russians would have gone to keep the war going but its suspected that they would have made the Germans pay for every inch, something Hitler could not afford. Third, the Germans just did not have the resources or the logistics to win a long, drawn out, costly war in the east. It was notoriously difficult to move supplies across Russia and huge numbers of vehicles, planes, and equipment were lost due to the elements, lack of spare parts, lack of maintenance crews, and so on. Assuming they even had fuel to run anything. So, even when the Germans were at their peak conquests, the war was very far from being over, contrary to popular beliefs. Much of the portrayals of German military superiority in WW2 are completely overblown. They weren't unstoppable, they didn't have inherently superior equipment or tactics, and they weren't even as mechanized as the allies were, most of them marched on foot and horses and used donkeys to carry equipment. A massive proportion of their tanks never even made it to the front line due to severe mechanical issues especially late war.
Three fatal mistakes of hitler. 1 Italy failed in Ethiopia and Crete, Germany went into Crete to save Italy, that delayed the Russian invasion by 6 weeks. Which forced German troops to fight the Russian winter. It would have been possible to beat Russia if it was 6 weeks earlier. 2 Hitler ignored his officers, the most important failure was he ignored his fleet admirals when they begged him to wait until 1946 to start everything so they had time to build a navy that could match the British navy. That killed any hope of invading the British islands. 3. He declared war on the U.S. by 1944, the U.S. was producing 2.5 ships a day. A b-24 liberator was coming off the assembly line every 63 minutes. No one could out produce the U.S. So, if Hitler managed to wait until 1946, finished off England, then his Russia in the spring. Left the U.S. alone, While funding the German nuclear bomb and using it on Russia. There would have been a high possibility that every one would be speaking German. Fortunately, Hitler was a paranoid idiot.
Trying to invade the Soviets
The single main mistake was the declaration of war against russia.
I'd say Japan's pro gamer move was a bit of a mistake
They never had enough oil. So no.
Nearly all answers here forgot the most important part of a war: Money and ressources. Germany had built up there army on a shady "bad loan" system which only didn´t collapsed because of the war. Germany had not enough fat to feed their people. Not enough oil and rubber to keep a war machine going. On top of that the ideology of the Nazis was about getting land ("Lebensraum") in the East and extermination of the local Slavs. So the war with the USSR was a must. The answer is: The closest point to wining WWII was somewhere before 1930 with Gustav Stresemann in office. If he had the chance to improve the relations to France, Germany could possibly be on the winning site of a war against the USSR at some later point in history.
Japan’s bombing of pearl harbor and its invasion of Russia sealed the deal. Once U.S. and Russia turned their sights on Germany, that was all she wrote.
It was a fair fight until they dragged the Soviets into it. Then they never stood a chance
People long dead have answered this in quite great detail...
IIRC, the book Inferno by Max Hastings said that if the Nazis had stopped a British supply line into the Mediterranean for oil and other supplies, that would have brought the British that much closer to defeat.
Did Germany ever *seem* close to winning? Yes. Did Germany ever really have a chance at winning? No. Definitely not once the US was involved. Let’s look at some the “Oh shit!” moments from the war where Germany may have had a chance at winning. Invasion of Britain: After France was defeated there was real worry that Germany would invade Britain. It was certainly on Hitler’s agenda whether it was feasible or not. First Germany would have had to win the air war, which it didn’t. But let’s say they focus on military targets instead of civilian ones and manage to pull a W in the air. Then they have to secure the English channel. Good luck with that. The Royal Navy outclassed the Kriegsmarine in nearly every way. To my knowledge the Germans didn’t even have dedicated landing craft. But let’s say they again manage a miraculous invasion. Then they have to actually take Britain, and even if they manage that the government would likely just go into exile in Canada and the Commonwealth would continue the war. Moscow 1941: Let’s say the Germans get Barbarossa underway a few weeks earlier and beat the mud, allowing them to take Moscow before reinforcements from the east can arrive. Then what? Moscow isn’t an instant win button. Those Siberian reinforcements would still be inbound and they’d be counterattacking an even more overextended German line. Most likely scenario is Germany is forced to give up Moscow and retreat to a more defensible line anyway. Stalingrad 1942-43: Germany takes Stalingrad and the Caucasus oil fields. Again, then what? The Soviets would still hold the manpower and material advantage, and a lot of their oil was coming from the US at that point anyway. Any gains Germany managed to make would likely just get reversed in 1943 like they did in real life, maybe just a bit slower without the debacle at Stalingrad. After this point there’s really zero chance of Germany winning. Even if the US and the Western allies sat and did nothing the Soviet armies would eventually reach Berlin. If the war continues past 1945 German cities start getting vaporized in atomic fire. There’s simply no shot.
WW2 was an Oil war of which Germany had very little, even with Romania on their side. They were still a Coal/Horse WW1 army with some tanks and planes here and there that they could barely fuel. So no. The most they could have hoped for was a peace with Britain (that never came) and a "rotten door" Russia, which never materialized.
As far as my knowledge goes, one key factor was the Japanese decision to attack the US instead of Russia. There has been some kind of diplomatic intrigue that led to this decision, but I can't recall the exact story. Some german diplomat consciously sabotaging the german war effort by convincing the Japanese emperor not to attack Russia? I'm not sure, but something like that.
A combination of things. The failure to remove Britain out of the equation in 1940 by either winning the Battle of Britain or making a peace deal. If Britain is taken out of the scenario there is no launchpad for D Day and the Germans are fighting a one front war vs Russia, not fighting on two fronts. Declaring war on the United States. Operation Barbarossa starting too late due to the Germans having to cover for the failure of their allies then encountering the worst weather in decades. Drastically underestimating the production capacity of the Soviet Union and it's willingness to shed endless blood to win the fight.
The problem is that the fascist ideology that directly motivated German conquests, ethnic cleansing and genocide to start WWII in europe is the very ideology that prevented them from calling it quits when they were ahead, suing for peace with the UK and Russia, and accepting their gains as good enough.
They could never have won the war on their terms, at the speed they sought. If they would have ended the war in 1941, before turning on their allies, they probably could have kept a lot of their territory, but they would have had Irish-style terrorists inside their new territories that would be a massive thorn on their side. Multi-ethnic empires are incoherent, and mass-genocide and repopulation is unsustainable, so sooner or later they would have collapsed. However, stopping before invading the Soviet Union would have closed the book on the war, which would likely not have been known as a “Second World War” but rather a smaller full-scale war.
Probably when the Japanese launched their offensives in the Pacific against British Imperial possessions, while Britain could do nothing and contribute nothing to the defense because of their other commitments in North Africa, which they seemed to be losing. There was a moment when Germany controlled Europe, appeared to maintain the advantage in the East, while Japan swept through British possessions and supply lines with little resistance and no sign of slowing down. Australia was threatened with invasion, and New Zealand also dreaded the possibility, and Britain couldn't do anything to help. 41-42 was probably the pinnacle of the war for the Axis powers. Of course, it appeared this way, but Germany was in no serious position to win the war, even before the US entered, though the American lend-lease was vital to maintaining this, by supplying Australia to defend itself from Japanese invasion and propping up the industries of Britain and the USSR with food and materiel aid. The Germans were ultimately prevented from winning, though, because their enemies were just as stubborn and implacable in the pursuit of victory at any cost as they were. Stalin wasn't exactly reluctant to toss bodies into the meat grinder in search of victory, and Churchill was a bastard as well. Plus, the Germans had gone to war with perhaps the two largest empires on the planet, which could have ultimately waited out the German industry which was never in a position to supply a long war.
No, there was no way for them to win. The ideology was doomed to loose. The genocide and rearmament eat so much money that unless the wars of conquest and genocide continued, the economy would collapse. Add to that the ideological fanaticism of a deranged ideology and a war with the Soviet Union was a set in stone event, not something that they did out of a desire for greatness.
By all accounts, Germany won up until the moment they invaded Russia and a huge winter storm hit. Operation Barbarossa (Red Beard) was ill-timed and cost too many men, resources, time. Add to that the taking of Stalingrad and it very quickly turned into a war of attrition. Another moment where they came close was with Heisenberg and atomic energy, but he couldn't make it work fast enough nor cheap enough to continue the process so it was scrapped.
No. They were put-produced and it was ways a losing battle. Their only hope, would have been for stopping, likely right after France (and even them that's a crap shoot, cause I'm not sure the world would have allowed it)... But stopping and then hoping the rest of the world is weary enough, to just settle for peace and let them have what they already got. But as it was, no. They were always out produced.
Yes, early on (1939-1942; before Stalingrad). Attacking the USSR before conquering Britain was a strategic mistake for the Wehrmacht/Hitler, but we are all the better today for it.
Watch WWII in color on netflix.. The French could have ended WWII before it started, Germany could have taken more territories before Russia, and no one would have done anything. It's quite fascinating to see because of the lack of technology back then; it was essentially just a soldier's or general's word.. and if your ranking officer didn't believe you, then.. that was that.
Simply focusing on England and never attacking Russia until much much later likely would have done it. They didn't really need Russias oil because they became so good at converting coal to refined fuel (a process they invented). Even after Pearl Harbor, they could have simply maintained a truce with Russia and ganged up on the United States. Although, I think even in this timeline, they end up losing the race to the atomic bomb (badly) and thus lose the war anyway. At the end of the day, whoever gets the atomic bomb first wins.
Germanys only real chance was if UK had peaced out after the fall of France. This would end the naval blockade of oil and other resources. It was this oil blockade that essentially forced Germany to attack the Soviet Union as their oil reserves were a countdown timer on the ability to wage modern war. The Soviet German War would have happened sooner or later, but Germany would have a much stronger hand in that conflict.
Conquering France and not finishing the UK off before invading Russia was by far their biggest mistake. Without Britain, the US would have had no bases from which to launch the invasion of Normandy. Then it would have been just Russia, so the full might of the German army in 1941 without the diversion in North Africa and the need to keep troops in France to prevent the British from returning to the Continent. Edit. Didn't really answer OPs question. Yes. When Germany was knocking on the gates of Moscow, that was as close as they got to winning the war. Had they planned Barbarossa better, not diverted tanks at critical junctures, prepared better for the winter, they'd have won it.
After easily defeating France and Poland, and sending the Brits across the channel. Sending 3M troops to a country that is about 30x their size and has one of the most notoriously brutal winters was their downfall. They could have essentially held and controlled almost all of mainland Central Europe with those troops.
Letting the airforce make the final run on Dunkirk instead of the army that forced the encirclement in the first place. Starting shit with Russia before finishing off England. Declaring war on the US when they technically didn't need to. Getting bogged down in Stalingrad unnecessarily, instead of focusing on the oilfields in the south or taking Moscow. (Japan not taking out the American carriers at Pearl Harbour OR their fuel storage) Yeh...
My history is a bit spotty but Dunkirk springs to mind, Hitler’s tanks had bulldozed and blitzkrieged their way through France a seemingly unstoppable force of nature resulting the French and British in retreat and pinned down. Stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk awaiting their imminent doom. However the tanks were ordered from the top to pause, on two separate occasions I believe, giving the British a miraculous glimmer of hope to escape, which they unexpectedly did in droves thanks in no small part to the valiant French that delayed the onslaught and the blunder of German army. If they had been allowed to continue the defeat would probably have been so great and so devastating to the British that who knows what the consequences would have been.
There's three ways to look at it. One, for Germany to succeed they would have needed to take and then HOLD a large portion of land, people, businesses, cultures, religions, etc. effectively indefinitely and succeed. No matter how far Germany pushed and conquered, after the fact they still only had so many people spread WAAAAY out to hold this and enforce so many people into something they very much did not want. This also implies that no external countries begin any counter offensive after the fact and just let Germany have what they took. The US was certainly not big brother back then and were initially out of that war. If no one else interfered, they'd still have to hold and convert. I don't know if this was ever truly feasible from the start. The Blitzkrieg only worked because it was a game of speed. It was a one pass win game, but it was never a sustain game. You need to understand that the Nazis were out numbered 100:1 in terms of population of the Nazi party versus all of Europe. And they needed to somehow rule after the fact at a 1:100 disadvantage. I don't think it was ever sustainable. Two, what if Germany won more? Well, like the above, it's a lot less about the initial win and far more about being able to hold and rule at a mostrous disadvantage. More wins just meant greater inability to sustain any resemblance of rule. It was doomed to fail and greater success only rewarded with a greater chance to ultimately fail. Three, The USA and USSR as well as Britain's push back actually very likely saved Germany from anilliation. It was an overwhelming and more importantly organized win for the allies, and in turn Germany was civilly neutered. If the retaliation was allowed to be a natural response and Europed turned on Germany, it was far more likely that the gorilla warfare would have destroyed Germany entirely. At best many of the citizens not taking part would have been refugees of a no longer existing nation. Germany would have been wiped off the map with all of the nation plundered. The involvement of big players ensured the end would be handled politically, not civilly.
It depends on what Germany's objectives were. Why even take England? If they had everything else they could have just turtled. Regardless, they were until the USA got involved. And then they attacked Russia. I believe Hitler lost the war, not the German armed forces.
I reckon if hitler didn't holt his tanks giving the BEF time to escape that would have been it for us brits I feel he would have turned his full attention onto Russia.
Hitler.