He lost it because if his ideals he could have taken Russia easly if his ego didint get in the way. He had to many Commandrs sacked because they didint think he any good ideas. He lost because he meant to torture the Slavs because at first they welcomed the Germans but then they were tortured and killed thus forming partsian bands. He lost because of the manpower eating battles of Kursk and Stalingrad.He lost because he didint defend Berlin well. Helost because he didint strike down Britain fast enough. He lost because of Japan and its war a the US. He lost because of his belive in Wunderwaffen. He lost because of his lack of tactics. He lost because he couldent defeand the reich.
Yes the German military was a well oild machine its only flaw was Hitler and the Nazis.
I just happened on this topic and decided to cut and paste bits and pieces of a reply I made on another subject. My two cents:
Hitler’s biggest mistake (among numerous big mistakes) was picking too many fights with too many opponents at the same time**, and those opponents each had greater resources than he did. And his so-called allies were not that much help, either. Consequently, from 1943 onwards Germany was, for all intents and purposes, fighting defensively in a reactive mode still, Hitler refused to surrender long after the handwriting was on the wall.
**It’s like walking into a Biker Bar alone on Saturday night and yelling, “Harley-Davidson and anybody who rides one, SUCKS!!!” You may know Kung Fu and be armed to the teeth, but eventually, innevitably, you are going to get your ass kicked.
Values are for GDP in Billions of 1990 dollars. The Allied/Axis totals are weighted rather than pure adding up (e.g. France is included in both Allied and Axis columns, depending on year).
Just a cursory glance comparing the US figures alone with those for the whole of the axis demonstrates rather nicely that no matter what the Axis did, the US would crush them like a bug as soon as it got going.
Source is Harrison, Mark, “The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison”, Cambridge University Press (1998), via Wiki.
There is obviously a lot more to it than those figures would suggest, for a start if Britain had been overwhelmed in 1940, the Third Reich might well have then gone on to defeat Russia [ NB I am not saying that a defeat of Russia would have been dependent on an occupation of the United Kingdom by the Third Reich ], the USA would have been sandwiched between Japan and a Third Reich that could draw on the Soviet Union’s vast natural resources. On the other hand the figures are accurate in that with Russia and Britain undefeated, the odds were massively stacked against the Axis once the USA placed her economy on a full war footing and committed her armed forces to combat.
It gets worse once you realise that the US never fully went to a war economy. Yes, there was a mass conversion to a war footing, but it never went as far as in e.g. the UK (where women were conscripted from 1940 onwards). The war making potential of the US in the 1940s matches that for the rest of the world put together, and over the course of the war this imbalance just got worse.
Hi, I think it is a fair comment to call Hitler a nutjob or suchlike, but when one gets in to the arena of medical terminology I think one should try to get and get at precisely what sort of person he was.
In my view Hitler’s life and activities are too complex and too directed over too long a time to support the view that he was a paranoid psychotic in that he does not seem to have been driven by fear nor does he seem to be out of touch with reality, there are certainly elements of the psychopath about Hitler and I think that is the personality type which comes closest to him. One does not have to anyway agree with Hitler’s thinking and ideology to allow for the possibility that he might well have thought himself a highly honourable person trying to achieve some positive good. If one blends a psychopathic personality with an intense motivation to achieve a common good that could account for Hitler’s life story. Many of Hitler’s actions were highly intelligent and he succeeded in in a relatively easy defeat of several States and caused a complete and rapid collapse of what was at the time regarded ( though wrongly ) as one of the foremost military powers in the World in the shape of France and he came very close to defeating both Britain and the USSR and had he done so, I personally believe it is highly likely he would have then gone on to defeat the USA. One of the critical problems that Hitler had was that apparently believed in what he was doing e.g. a serious fascist dictator would have dropped the whole anti-Jew thing like a hot potato after he had secured power and in the event of War with the Soviet Union would have presented the Russian people with a plan for representive National Government and been precise to instruct German troops in Russia to treat civilians and POWs with respect and humanity in order to draw a distinction between “civilized” fascist German “liberators” and tyranical Communist bandit overlords in the Kremlin. Because of Hitler’s ideological hobbyhorses [ which made bringing the bulk of the Russian population on-side a non-starter ] once committed to War with Russia, if he could not finish off Russia in a quick campaign he was sure to invoke ferocious resistance from the Russians. The large Russian population and the size of the country would then make a decisive victory over the Soviet Union almost impossible and so anything other than a quick and decisive victory over the USSR spelt doom for the Reich, in that Germany would be hard pressed to fight a War against Russia and Britain and would be totally overwhelmed once America’s industrial economy was to fully harnessed to military production and the US troops became battle hardened.
Or continued the center of gravity on bombing the RAF aerodromes instead of losing focus to prove a political point by intensifying the attacks on UK population centers…
Errr… no. The radar stations were important to minimising RAF attrition, but the point everyone misses about the Battle of Britain was that the RAF were a sideshow. To successfully invade, the Germans had to negate the Royal Navy. The plan to do this was to use the Luftwaffe instead of the Kriegsmarine, on the grounds that the Kriegsmarine had been slapped stupid in the Norwegian campaign (in large part by the Norwegians, it has to be said) and were incapable of meaningfully engaging the RN. Now the problem with this plan is, to quote Blackadder, is the fact that “it was bollocks”.
At Dunkirk the Luftwaffe demonstrated that they were only very marginally capable of hitting destroyers which were parked in harbour loading men, and a year after the proposed invasion date they were only marginally capable of engaging moving destroyers during the evacuation of Crete.
Worse still, the Luftwaffe in 1940 didn’t have any armour piercing bombs as would be required to engage the RN home fleet, and the number of torpedo carrying aircraft was extremely limited (IIRC to a small number of seaplanes). In practice all the Luftwaffe could do to anything larger than a light cruiser in 1940 is make rude gestures out of the cockpit windows!
Destroying the port infrastructure is valid, but was attempted as part of the Battle of the Atlantic. The Silvertown area of London (the worst hit at the start of the Blitz) was after all the biggest port in the UK at the time. Nonetheless, they still failed to make a strategically significant dent in imports.
I agree to an extent. But if the RAF had been overwhelmed, the Germans could have compensated for the inherent weaknesses in the Kriegsmarine via submarine blockade and possibly through the use the new generation of guided missiles and bombs. Armor piercing bombs are hardly difficult to develop and produce!
I do think a “Sea Lion” attempted without complete neutralization of the Royal Navy would have resulted in tens of thousands of drowned Wehrmacht in the English Channel, and a precarious, at best, beachhead at Dover if not a major victory for the British Army. But if the Luftwaffe had achieved air superiority, all bets were off…
Nope. U-boats have effectively no capability against targets moving at high speed and zig-zagging unless they get some pretty extraordinary luck. They would have virtually no capability against the Home Fleet, which would be going at ~30kts in and around the channel.
Not in 1940!
Yet, despite the plan which calls for the Luftwaffe to neutralise the Royal Navy they didn’t produce them. Which suggests either a lack of capability to produce them, that the Luftwaffe was below something else in the priority tree, or they simply didn’t appreciate that they needed armour piercing bombs against armoured targets.
It was war-gamed repeatedly after the war at Sandhurst, with the parts largely played by people who had been there at the time. The best the Germans could do was a small enclave near Deal which was effectively starved into submission over the winter.
Hi, Paranoia is an ir-rational fear, so that if one was say a US Navy air-sea rescue pilot in the pacific in WW2, it would make sense for one to seek to effect the rescue of ship-wrecked sailors as quickly as possible for amongst other reasons, the threat of shark attack to men in the sea and such a concern could no way said to be paranoid. On the other hand, the story of the person in the Midwestern USA town, who locked themselves in their house, after seeing the Jaws film [ if true ] is a good example of paranoia. Hitler’s activities against the Jews in my opinion, do superficially resemble that of a person in a paranoid state but I do not think he was actually afraid of the Jews but merely regarded them as negative e.g. if one has a cockroach infestation in one’s house, it does not follow one would be anyway afraid of the cockroaches, one would call in the extermination company and they would get rid of them. NB I am not equating Jews with cockroaches, I am merely trying to put myself in what I was presume was Hitler’s way of thinking.
I agree with Adrian, somewhat. Hitler is probably best described as a meglomaniacal tyrant, which describes most tyrants. One definition of a tyrant, “Anyone who exercises authority in an oppressive manner; cruel master”.
That said, tyrants always need bogeymen to justify their actions ie: “Give me more power so I can protect you from the Bogeyman. I may be very bad, but the Bogeyman is much, much worse.” Hilter’s bogeymen were the Jews, the Bolshevicks, or anyone or anything else that could provide him with justification (it’s called, delegating blame for unreasonable behavior) for what he was really doing; acquring more power and control by conquest. And I don’t think he would have stopped until he “had it all”. You can see this same mindset today in liberal politicitians. Can you say, “Global Warming”?
Also, tyrants are typically cruel and ruthless, and they see anyone else, particularly any opposition or contrary view, as being just as cruel and ruthless as themselves. Therefore, better to do unto others, before they can do unto you. Is this a form of paranoia, or just a cunning calculation?
Albert Speer wrote is his book that Hitler would deliberately appoint people with equal rank and authority then, give them conflicting orders. That way, they would be so busy trying to follow the Furher’s orders that they wouldn’t have time to conspire against him. It’s amazing the Third Reich operated as efficiently as it did with Hitler at the helm. Like I’ve said before, if Hitler had let his generals run the war, things would have be worse for us. Not that the eventulal outcome would have been any different, just that it would have taken longer to get there, at a much higher cost.
Kent I appreciate your kind remarks, so I hope I do not seem too horrid in make comments on your observations. For sure Hitler was a tyrant, but I am not sure to add the word “meglomaniacal” adds very much to our understanding of him. Many of his projects such as the conquest of Russia and no doubt the entire planet, aswell as his extensive building plans for Berlin have all the hall marks of meglomania, but this is very much a value judgment based on the concept that what Hitler was doing was bad, now I am not arguing that was Hitler did was good but if e.g. he had not got involved with the Concentration camps gig and had confined his plans for a greater Reich to the annexation of the Sudetenland and Anchluss with Austria and had then gone on to invade the USSR win and installed a progressive Government in Russia, Hitler would probably be regarded as one of the great figures of the 20th Century and not a meglomaniac but somebody who was decisive and thought big.
Well what you say, would make sense in a properly Fascist state such as was run by Mussolini, in that Mussolini was dependent on others but in the Hitlerian Nazi state all power was vested within Hitler and therefor Hitler had much more scope to change policy, than say a fascist dictator like Mussolini. Mussolini had to justify his actions to others and justify his actions within the context of a fascist ideology, whereas in the Third Reich Nazism was whatever Hitler said it was, whenever he said it was.Therefor there was no inherent problem in doing 180 degree policy U-turns, so whilst e.g. whipping up anti-Jewish hate was useful to him in acquiring power, there was no need for him to continue on that path once he had secured power. As for the Soviet Union, it was murderous regime and given the nationalist sentiments of the Germans in the Thirties/forties, there was no need for him to present the USSR as a bogeyman, because that is what it was. As it so happened, given the excesses of the Third Reich in the USSR during the invasion, that is likely to have gained support for Hitler when the War started to go wrong for Germany, when it was realized that the Russians would be likely to come looking for revenge on German soil and better a continued support of Hitler than getting rid of him and a greater possibility of a Soviet occupation of Germany, but I don’t think Hitler planned that. As much as I find so called “liberal” politicians spouting almost Hitlerian pseudo science about global warming to be offensive, the case is radically different in that thse people engage in such tactics because:they have basically no power if they are out of office and even if they are the Government of the day, they have limited power. Hitler once he was firmly in power really did not need real or imagined bogeymen to do what he wanted, he had absolute power.
Well I believe, Hitler differs somewhat from either an opportunistic tyrant or somebody who is an position of great power and is suffering from a paranoid delusion of persecution. If Hitler was just being opportunistic as I said before, he would have dropped the whole anti-Jew thing like a hot potato once he was firmly in power if not before. For example Stalin who was a ferocious persecutor of Christianity, when he had his back to the wall during the early part of the Nazi invasion, re-opened the Churches in order to stiffen the patriotic morale of the Russian people. And I think the fact he [ ie Hitler] was not apparently in fear of the Jews disqualifies him from the label paranoid.
Well it was more that with several people given authority for the same areas and activities, they would be too busy fighting amongst themselves in their personal empire building activities to challenge Hitler’s authority.
The words Third Reich and efficency just do not go together, yes the German army as a fighting force was an efficent organization but the German War economy was a shambles.
Well yes and no, from a purely narrow military tactical point of view much of Hitler’s actions certainly in the early part of the War were genius, the decision not to finish Britain off before turning on Russia was a catastrophic mistake and from then on if Germany failed to secure a quick and decisive victory over the USSR the odds were then stacked against the Reich, regardless of whether Hitler or his Generals had led it from that point on [ ie after the initial attack on Russia had stalled ].
Well possably not, if Hitler had say been killed in a car crash and the Generals had taken over after the Invasion of the USSR they might have sought to develop a political alternative for the Russians that could mobalize significant Russian support, in effect turning the Nazi invasion in to a Russian civil war. And with a more favourable situation in Russia, they could have devoted more resources to neutralizing the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is not a very big place and a couple of Hiroshima sized nuclear weapons strikes would have very much degraded its potential both as an adversary and as a base for the US military, with the United Kingdom nuked, that buys time to bring the War in Russia to a sucessful conclusion. With a pro-Nazi regime in Moscow that would put Germany then in to a better position in terms of available resources etc, that she is capable of either frightening the US in to accepting a peace agreement or fighting her with some possibility of success if the US decides on War.
Thanx again Kent and your points are good and well made.
Adrian,
I believe you have to examine a person’s actions with respect to their intent. Is a particular action just a means to an end, or the end itself? Using that criteria, Hitler was anything but a benevolent dictator seeking to bring peace and prosperity to the German people, or anyone else that would follow him. The guy was just plain evil, and I truly believe he had supernatural help (not the good kind). It gives much insight into the reason he tried to eliminate the Jews, God’s chosen people. And his chosen symbol for the Nazi Party, the reversed Swastika, is the symbol for a broken cross. Ultimately, I trust in the words of the greatest judge of character the world has ever known:
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves. By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree brings forth good fruit; but the corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that brings not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Therefore, by their fruits you shall know them.
Well Kent I respect your opinons, but I don’t think I ever said he was a nice person, though I did imply he was a mass murdering pyschopath, which is hardly a charactor reference. That said from what I know of him, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt that he actually thought he was doing good. If somebody wishes to ascribe a supernatural involvement behind events, that’s fine, I personally would not but I have no problem with other people doing so. My view is that the devil, ( if that is who you are talking about ) gets blamed for a lot of bad stuff, that people are perfectly capable of getting up to on their own account. As for the Swastika, it is a much respected religious symbol and I know the point is made that the traditional Swastika is orientated differently but that sounds a bit too subtle a difference for the Nazis. Well, if Hitler was in league with supernatural forces of darkness a lot of organized religion does not come out of this very well either, in that the French catholic church establishment was a disgrace and the Croatian catholic church establishment should have been placed on a par with the SS in respect of their respective reactions to the Third Reich’s occupations of France and Yugoslavia. In fairness to the Wartime pope, much of the criticism of him is quite idiotic in the sense that the Vatican as a military force has only a tiny army in the shape of the Swiss Guard and the only thing he could do was exert a moral influence and to have gone further in criticizing the Third Reich than he actually did over its treatment of the Jews, probably would have achieved nothing except to strip away what little protection the Vatican could offer to Catholic clergy and nuns engaged in helping Jews. If the quotes you made are from Jesus Christ, I think he also said
Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. Luke 23:34
Which sounds to me patently idiotic. But maybe I reading it out of context?
As for being a wolf in sheep’s clothing, I think a wolf in a wolf’s clothing would be a better description of Hitler, in that everything he said he was going to do in Mein Kampf he did and as Mein Kampf was written by him and widely sold in Germany and translated in to several languages elsewhere in Europe, it was not as if the guy was keeping his plans a secret. As for the supernatural bit, if it is true it is true and even if is not true, if people wish to believe that for honourable reasons, that’s fine with me, [ and no personal criticism intended ] but I think it might suit some people in Germany to believe Hitler was in league with the Devil, in that if Hitler has the Devil on side, it makes those who thought he was the best thing since sliced bread ie the bulk of the German people of the Wartime generation somewhat less guilty. As for the Jews being “the chosen people”, that is phraseology used by non-Jews, personally I have never seen it used by Jews.
Anyway thanks for your comments and whilst I would not agree with them, I do respect them.
You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings, and brought you to myself. Exodus 19:4
