How (if?) could Germany win WWII?

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#1

Hello everyone,

I’m a new user and I registered mainly for the purpose of discussing the question that fascinates me for a long time - if, and if yes, how could Germany win WWII?

Now I know this horse has been beaten to death ten times over, but come on, it’s still interesting.

So here’s my version of my speculative history:

  1. Suppose Hitler were replaced in beginning of 1930s by someone more moderate in ideology (like Goering), but with competence of Speer. Say, a Night of Long Knives failed or someone survived that replied Hitler successfully in kind.

  2. That guy immediately starts diplomatic efforts to mediate with UK as much as possible, all the while pouring as much money as reasonably possible into R&D of new battlefield technology and forces:

a. developing faster, armoured, more capable replacement for Stuka
b. standardizing & expanding fleet of military trucks
c. developing better technology for quick laying railroads and expanding industrial base that could be geared towards war purposes.
d. developing real naval aviation, for purpose of bombing shipping and naval reconnaisance
e. investment into radar comparable to the British and US effort
f. providing better working conditions, more investment & sustained programs to scientists and engineers instead of ad-hoc efforts
g. NOT involving in the rocket research that burned off lots of resources while providing little real value
h. letting Speer fully militarize German economy in 1936-1937.
i. mandate massive production of 88 mm gun not just for AA purposes, but mainly for antitank role.

  1. Seeing that war with Soviet Union is inevitable - if Germany doesn’t attack SU, SU will attack Germany - this guy mandates developing real panzer forces instead of providing jokes like PzKpfw I and II in place of real tanks to the military. That means massive production of Panther-like tank a few years before WWII. This was certainly possible, since Soviet Union pulled of exactly such a stunt by producing T-34 while having less technical talent & worse industrial capacity than Germany.

  2. After conquering France, not getting into aerial war with UK, leaving it alone and letting on isolationist sentiment erode British will to fight instead of as it turned out, bombardment doing little but making British pissed off and resolved to defeating Germany. This does not necessarily exclude submarine warfare against shipping going to UK.

  3. After launch of Barbarossa, treating Russians and other people in the East decently, at least for some time. Some historian wrote that if Hitler gave each Russian a loaf of bread and let him go back home, Germany would have won war in the East without much shooting. At the time, near anyone was better to Russians and Ukrainians than Stalin. Hitler due to extreme stupidity rivalled Stalin in being opressive. This did not have to happen. There were many Nazis that were even more radical than Hitler was, but there were also many more moderate and cleverer than Hitler.

  4. After conquest of France, Germany could demand free pass from Spain in order to conquer Gibraltar with promise Spain would get it after war. If Spain didn’t agree, just conquer it immediately instead of releasing much of German army back home. Spanish military wouldn’t be much trouble.

  5. Keep Mussolini from stupid adventures in Greece and Northern Africa, or alternatively, let his ass be beaten in North Africa, it’s not like sand on North African coast is of strategic value.

  6. Get Turkey into alliance before WWII and use it as launching base for attacks into Iraq and Iran and grabbing their oil. This also would have provided the base for attacking Soviet Union from the south, where it was most vulnerable.

  7. Develop domestic oil exploration talent, get them to up to speed in Romania.

  8. Kick Guderian’s ass hard a few times so he behaves and puts his talent to achieving strategic goals instead of showing off.

  9. Bottle up Stalingrad and keep them surrounded by Romanians, and push East instead of grinding 6th Army down in city that was already a rumble.

  10. And finally, develop some strategy, with realistic goals and set out to achieve them.

All of this has to be balanced against a single factor that could still in my view kill Germany:

Industrial capacity of United States.

Did Germany still have a chance? What do you think?

#2

Probably not.

Something that is invariably overlooked is that Germany relied on horse transport more than any other major combatant, with consequent logistical burdens and movement limitations.

It’s hard to win a mid 20th century war with 19th century lines of communication.

#3

How :)? Put me in command :smiley:

#4

U give me a f 15 and some bb guns and i could have beatin stalin

#5

Hi.
Oh it easy to answer :slight_smile:
If Poland joined to the Axis they could beat the Bloody Russians together:)
And liberate the Europe from the bolshevics and …jew:)
Beside the Poland could get the big part Ukraine land from a Hitler:)
BTW you are no a first pole who such worry that germany losed the ww2?

#6

This is the first of your three utterly silly comments. Try not to make it four.

#7

You propose a scenario in which German victory is much more likely. However, ridding the Reich of Hitler would not have been easy. IMHO, the best, most competent, most brillian subsitute to become ReichsPresident (not furhrer) would have been General Feld-Marschall Irwin Johannes Eugen Rommel. A supreme strategist and even better tactician, as cincOKW, priorities would have been straightened out, rivalries crushed and every one pushing for one goal instead of one man’s favor.
Interesting idea. Schwerepunkt

#8

Fortune favours the bold!

Rommel took chances and had his fingers burnt on more than one occassion. Being a good tactical leader in the field doesn’t necessarily translate to becoming a good political leader. Many generals turned politician and recieved a lot of flak for their shortcomings e.g. Scipio, Wellington, Eisenower.

#9

Exactly.

As for Rommel’s military ability, considerable though it might have been, he had no experience commanding the size of formations on the Eastern Front, which was a vastly greater tactical and staff exercise than anything he’d done.

He’s one of those characters like Patton. An able commander with a high public profile, which leads many to think he was the world’s greatest commander because a lot of noise was made about him. The difference between him and Patton is that Patton thought he was the world’s greatest commander (while MacArthur knew MacArthur was), where Rommel was less conceited. Probably one reason why Rommel was given active commands when there was a reluctance to give them to Patton.

As for replacing Hitler, this is fantasy stuff unless you get rid of Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, and a whole lot of other people and the organisations they controlled who would prevent Hitler being replaced by a given person.

It needs to be remembered that the Nazi Party controlled Germany. Unless that far-reaching apparatus could be overcome, the only people who were going to replace Hitler were people who were approved by the Party.

If von Stauffenberg had killed Hitler, thus demonstrating that he wasn’t the incompentent assassin and coup artist he really was, so what? The Soviets sue for peace? The Western Allies hop on ships back to Britain, sorry for troubling the French? The rest of the Party, and the significant military elements which supported, decide to throw in their lot with the coup leaders? I doubt it.

The time to get rid of Hitler with any hope of altering the course of events was before the Party was entrenched in Germany, which was well before 1939.

Edit. Substitute mid-1941 for 1939.

#10
  1. After launch of Barbarossa, treating Russians and other people in the East decently, at least for some time.

Agree. IMO, the easiest way for Nazi Germany to win WWII is to treat properly (at least until the war vs Soviet Union is finished) the smaller nations of the Soviet Union. Tell and show Ukrainians/etc that they will be free country, and use them as soldiers, and also to spread disintegration/distrust to the surviving Soviet Union.

I just cannot see any way Germany can be a true worldpower (=win WWII) without the natural resources of Soviet Union. So, controlling them is the key to success.

  1. Keep Mussolini from stupid adventures…
  2. Get Turkey into alliance before WWII

Question is: How?

Hitler tried to do both (putting a lot of pressure to Turkey - but so did the Allies, and talk to some sense to Mussolini) but failed ;-D

Also,
I think that Rommel is one of the worst generals ever: losing all the WWII campaigns, ignoring intelligence information, murdering his own soldiers by ignoring supply-troubles, spending too much time away from HQ, being a nazi propaganda puppet. He was a great captain, but he just spent too much time crawling around frontline pillboxes to be able to manage any larger force.

_

#11

i think hitler wasted a lot of resource on A-4 and long range tanks (useless in battle), he should imitate the soviet and tries to produce a tank that can both fight well and mass produced, like the T-34 tank. you are not going to win a lot of battle when your enmey out produce you 10:1.

#12

If Germany only had the A-bomb, the war would have been over much sooner. They were very close to developing it. Germany would have sent more than 2 measley bombs the way the Americans did. I think sending only 2 A-bombs sens the wrong message. The more the merrier!

#13

Then you get fallout from the blasts, kill everybody, including your own soldiers and civillians, and you get murdered for causing nuclear anarchy because the USA attacked you and blew your ass up like a baloon…

#14

A easy way would be to keep Britain and France out of the war in the first place.

A way this could have been done was in not taking over the remaining western part of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. It was this act which caused the British government to abandon its appeasement policy,( this part of Czechoslovakia had no German majority) and seek a treaty with Poland guaranteeing its borders.

If they hadn’t invaded Czechoslovakia, Britain would have not had any treaty with Poland so it would have been unlikely to have gone to war with Germany in September 39, and if Britain didn’t go to war, its probable that the French wouldn’t have either

#15

Could you expand with a bit more detail on that?

I’m ignorant in this area.

#16

We’re also assuming that the new fuhrer would have followed Hitler’s policies which led to WWII. I used to have a book (going back home this week, so I’ll see what I can dig up) that stated some other hypotheticals such as another authoritarian movement taking over, perhaps a dictator from the Reichswehr, with temporary under emergency powers or otherwise, taking over. The book also listed one or two other hypothetical candidates that could have supplanted Hitler and the Nat’l Socialist movement.

The verdict was that they would have been far more moderate in regards to social policies and there would have been no Holocaust and less political repression. But on the flip side, they would have been much more competent, less ideological and more realistic, in regards to foreign policies. The overall verdict is that if it came to War, they would have been much more difficult to defeat. But, that all out war would have been far less likely, but hardly impossible given the economic state of Germany and the bitterness towards the French over Versailles and to the Poles for the border wars after WWI…

Then of course, they still would have been anti-Bolshevik --since it would have been the same Freikorp gang that fought them in 1919…

#17

Its about the German seizure of the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. It was this act which broke the Munich Agreement, and forced the British and French governments to accept that their policy of appeasement had failed.
In an effort to halt any further German aggression in Europe, they signed a treaty with Poland guaranteeing her borders later in the same month, in the vain hope it would convince Hitler that any attempt to seize more territory would be too risky as it would involve him in a war with both Britain and France.

My argument is… that if Hitler hadn’t seized Bohemia and Moravia, there would have been no treaty with Poland in place, and therefore no legal or moral requirement to declare war on Germany due to its invasion of Poland

http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/munich-agreement/

#18

Thanks.

But in the end, do you think that Hitler would still have gone to war in one way or another, over one thing or another?

Was seizing Bohemia and Moravia something that Hitler did because he sensed his opponents were weak; a provocation to test his opponents and gauge their reaction, in the nature of a probe; or something that he was always going to do?

I’m rusty on this, and obviously rusty shading into ignorant on the lead up to the war in Europe, but my recollection is that German troops disguised as Polish troops attacked a German radio station as the pretext for the invasion of Poland. If so, it demonstrates a determination to create the conditions for invading Poland anyway.

It also demonstrates German contempt for the Franco-British alliance with Poland.

Was Hitler betting on France and Britain not honouring their treaty with Poland, or was he trying to draw them into a war with Germany?

(I know I should know these things, but if ever I did they’re long gone from my ossified brain.)

#19

The German’s couldn’t do this. While planning the invasion of the Soviet Union they worked out they could only supply their armies by stripping the conquered countryside of its food stocks and other goods, leaving the people of these areas to suffer starvation and deprivation.

The following passage is from the book “Poland to Pearl Harbor: The Making of the Second World War”, by William Carr, 1985.

Page 123:

Simple arithmetic deluded many experts into the belief that a war of exploitation could solve their economic problems permanently. For example, pre-war Europe (excluding Russia) consumed 142.5 million tons of grain of which she produced 132 million tons. The shortfall was made up with 10.5 million tons of imported grain, not available in wartime. Russia produced about 100 million tons of grain of which she exported only 2.5 million tons. Goering’s economic experts planned to seize between 8 and 10 million tons of this grain to make up for the shortfall without any regard for the effect this would have on the Russian people. The Nazi leadership felt no sense of moral responsibility for the fate of ‘racial inferiors’ in the east; they were only statistics to be crossed off the ledger to maintain the living standards of the ‘higher’ races. Goering’s Economic Staff East, an office created in April 1941 to deal specifically with the exploitation of the Russian economy in the short-term interest of the Third Reich, spelt it out in all its stark brutality in a directive in May 1941: "Many tens of millions of people will become redundant and will either die or have to emigrate to Siberia. Any attempt to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany’s staying power in the war, and would undermine Germany’s and Europe’s power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood’.

#20

Yes, without question.

Was seizing Bohemia and Moravia something that Hitler did because he sensed his opponents were weak; a provocation to test his opponents and gauge their reaction, in the nature of a probe; or something that he was always going to do?

It was just unfinished business to him. He didn’t expect Britain and France to do anything about it

I’m rusty on this, and obviously rusty shading into ignorant on the lead up to the war in Europe, but my recollection is that German troops disguised as Polish troops attacked a German radio station as the pretext for the invasion of Poland. If so, it demonstrates a determination to create the conditions for invading Poland anyway.

Hitler did indeed want a war with Poland, it was a first step in gaining ‘living space’ for the Greater German Reich, and putting him in position to attack the Soviet Union, the next step in his plans.

It also demonstrates German contempt for the Franco-British alliance with Poland.

Was Hitler betting on France and Britain not honouring their treaty with Poland, or was he trying to draw them into a war with Germany?

(I know I should know these things, but if ever I did they’re long gone from my ossified brain.)
Hitler was convinced that Britain and France wouldn’t honour the treaty, and it was a total shock to him when they did do so.

When Hitler invaded Poland, he did want war, a Polish-German war, he didn’t want the war he actually got.