I think we can safely discount any information gleaned from the website you have referenced; it is clearly an anti-Semitic Holocaust-denial site and purveyor of general conspiracy theory views.
I’m not sure what you are contending, but there is absolutely no question that many German Jews, and Jews of other nationalities, who, up until 1934, had worked as university professors and researchers in Germany were forced to leave their jobs by the actions of the Nazi Party. It is too well documented by reputable historians such as Richard Rhodes, David Cassidy, Adam Tooze, and many others. In addition there is the testimony of the people who were forced, or chose to leave, themselves. People of such repute as Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Theodore von Karman, and Lise Meitner. Their stories are corroborated by Germans such as Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, and Wolfgang Pauli.
The knowledge of Hitler’s determination to deny Jews any employment in the German Civil Service in 1934, and the subsequent exodus of German nuclear scientists and researchers to Britain and the US, is key to understanding why Germany fell behind in the field of nuclear physics after enjoying such a commanding lead in the 1920’s, and goes a long way in explaining Germany’s subsequent poor performance in the race to achieve an atomic bomb.
But it is only part of the full story. Nuclear Physics had never been monopolized by any one country; rapid progress in this field owed much to the open and free communication between large numbers of researchers in several countries including Germany, France, Denmark, Britain, Belgium, the United States, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and many other countries. This international collaboration continued after Hitler came to power, but because of Hitler’s treatment of the Jews beginning in 1933, nuclear researchers began to exclude German scientists remaining in Germany for fear that Hitler might benefit from the advances others were making in understanding nuclear fission. This caused nuclear research to suffer somewhat, but the huge number of scientists who had concentrated in the US and Britain continued to trade information among themselves and this was enough to make it inevitable that the Allies would have the atomic bomb first.
I can’t help make a comment on this, are you sure that is an antisemitic website?
I was looking carefully for any signal of it and what I found was advertising of tours to Israel and sale of religious objects.
If what you speculate about the imposibility of Germany to get a nuclear bomb before 1945 is correct, then, England invasion, the U boats, the Persian Gulf, Russia, Malta, everything, is completely irrelevant, Germany would have ended distroyed by nuclear bombing of its cities.
Well, it would certainly seem that way if you read some of the other articles on the website. Personally, I don’t really care whether it is anti-Semitic or not; I lost interest when I looked at the titles of the other articles posted on this site. There is a whole list of articles purporting to prove that the attack on the World Trade Center was a conspiracy hatched by the US and designed to justify an attack on “peaceful” Islamic countries. Then there is the listing of Auschwitz “death certificates” demonstrating that the majority of victims were Catholics or Eastern Orthodox sects. Or the claim that the moon landing was a hoax. Or the article claiming that the Holocaust is a “Jewish lie” and that the pictures of emaciated German Concentration Camp victims was actually due to a Typhus epidemic in just a few camps.
Any site that posts these types of articles is relying on a general gullibility of it’s readers and shouldn’t be referenced with any expectation of the accuracy of it’s data.
I didn’t say it was impossible for Germany to develop an atomic bomb before 1945; only that due to a weak economy, severely constrained industrial base, and the deliberately forced departure of many German scientists of Jewish origin in 1934, it was highly unlikely. As it turns out, the other “possibilities” mentioned; a German invasion of England, the U-boat campaign succeeding against Britain, Germany being able to seize and exploit the oil of the Persian Gulf region, are so highly unlikely as to be within the realm of fantasy, as well. It’s my contention that nothing which Hitler was reasonably capable of during the 1930’s and WW II would have given Germany any significant chance to win the war.
I think it is pretty obviously a site that is a clearinghouse of what Penn and Teller would call “bullshit!” to any discerning person who isn’t completely gullible. But you really do seem driven to push the boundaries on such subject matter. Don’t you?
Kurt, the site is pure, and simple rubbish. You cant possibly expect anyone to give any credence whatever to the utter crap posted on it. Nor can you expect anyone to believe that you are in earnest in your posts, or your responses to the members, and staff of this site.
Note to members: Kurt has been permanently banned for continuing with the anti-Semitic trolling after having previously been banned for a period of time. We’re pretty tolerant of most things, but Nazis tend to get one chance before being awarded the order of the Golden Boot. Kurt ignored his chance, and is now no longer with us.
I heard the point that Germany endeed had a good chances to build a a-bomb first but Hitler rejected any essential research in this field.He simply didn’t believed in fast effect.The GErmany has a lot of brilliant non-jewish physics-scientist like Werner Heisenberg.And their industrial and technological base were much larger that USSR had in 1949(the first sovet bomb was build).
I don’t know where you heard that, but it doesn’t seem to be true based on what I have read.
There was essentially very little real research in nuclear physics conducted in Germany after 1934. German scientists were supposedly the first to split the atom (some historians believe Fermi did it earlier), but they didn’t understand what had happened and it was one of the refugees from Hitlers anti-Jewish civil service law, Lise Meitner, who wrote a paper explaining the results of their experiment.
Werner Heisenberg was indeed a brilliant theoretician and made some important contributions to nuclear research, but he was not a particularly good experimenter. And what was needed were both theorists who proposed new theories and experimenters who could confirm those theories. After the advent of Hitler’s takeover of Germany, much of the research money that had been supporting German scientific research dried up; it had been coming from American science institutions, and they no longer wanted to support German research because of Hitler’s treatment of Jewish scientists. Thus, German science and technology, particularly in the field of nuclear physics, fell seriously behind that of Britain and the US.
Moreover, I very much doubt that Germany’s industrial and technological base was larger and more robust than that of the Soviet Union in 1949. From 1939 onward, Germany was fighting a war that very severely strained it’s entire economic and industrial base. Even if Germany had tried before 1939 to achieve an atomic bomb, Hitler’s rearmament programs made any extensive projects, such as the US Manhattan project, completely impossible. And Hitler wasn’t about to put all his eggs in a single basket, no matter important the potential weapon, when so many informed people had serious doubts whether an atomic bomb could ever be developed.
Heisenberg recognized that an atomic bomb was possible given unlimited money, and industrial support, but he also realized that would never be forthcoming as long as Germany had to fight a war. He therefore quite correctly concluded the only possible way for Germany to construct a bomb was with plutonium which could be created in a reactor. That was why both he and his rival, Kurt Diebner, focused on building a reactor that could support a sustained and controlled chain reaction. But lack of raw materials, an unsuitable moderator substance (heavy water), and lack of a dedicated industrial base, prevented either project from even being able to build a working reactor. Enrico Fermi accomplished that feat in late 1942, putting the Allies well ahead of the German researchers early in the race.
In 1949, the Soviets were able to build their first atomic bomb with the advantage of knowing that it could be done and knowing how the Americans had done it; this was something the Germans never had.
Hitler micro managed the war and in doing so removed one of his greatest assets. . . his skilled professionals. Hitler should have allowed his generals fight the war. Politicians make very bad generals.
That may be true…as far as it goes. But the fundamental economic, industrial, and demographic deficiencies which led to Germany’s defeat were far beyond the abilities of Hitler’s generals to remedy. At best, Hitler’s military leaders, had their advice been heeded, might have been able to avoid a simultaneous war with three of the world’s greatest industrial and military powers. But even Hitler’s “skilled professionals” couldn’t have done anything to avoid defeat once that war had been started.
It probably wouldn’t have gone as well as it did in the initial phases if Hitler had left it to his generals, while it is an oversimplification to lay all the blame for Germany’s loss on Hitler, as outlined here http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/hitler_commander_01.shtml which expands upon Wizard’s last post.
The author, Geoffrey Megargee, is a Hitler scholar and the author of Inside Hitler’s High Command so his is probably a well informed opinion (and one hopes better informed than his falling into the almost universal error of calling the German Army the Wehrmacht would suggest).
As will be seen in the last link, generals can be very adept politically but still be, for the nation, bad politicians and bad generals if allowed absolute control.
As MacArthur would have showed if given free rein during the Korean war.
However the opportunity to postpone a confrontation with multiple adversaries would enable enough time to research, produce and implement advanced weapons systems. Germany had no peer in regards to Air Force and their understanding of mechanized warfare. Time to consolidate their conquest and make up the deficiencies of raw materials.
That’s a very western point of view, since western military thinking of the time period envisaged only total economic warfare. The Anglo French alliance strategy hinged around being able to fight defensively from the Maginot line, for the two years their military believed they needed to fully mobilize their economies and military for war. They believed that with the Maginot line, they could defend against repeated German attacks and bypass the horrors of WW-I ‘trench warfare’, while the Allied bomber force hammered the Germans into ‘the stone age’, shortening the 4 years needed in WW-I to reduce the German war economy , down to two years. Meanwhile sheer allied naval superiority and ASDIC would truncate any U-boat threat and the allied fleets could blockade the German war economy by sea.
This way, after two years the allies could go on the offensive and end the war. They believed their superior weapons technology would hold the edge over the Germans long enough to win the war. But they were wrong on every count. Their weapons technology was not better than the Germans, the Maginot line didn’t hold the Germans back for more than a couple of weeks/days, and the allied air bombing campaigns were so poorly run they never even approached reducing Germany until nearly 5 years into the war. At sea the allies badly underestimated the ability of their adversary to work around the technological limitations they possessed. A flaw that still permeates through western military thinking to this day, they can’t adapt their prewar strategy to what an enemy might realistically be able to do to counter any advantage in weapons technology.
German strategic thinking prior to Hitler’s ‘1936 Four year plan’ , fully acknowledged their strategic limitations visa-a-vie their allies and planned for a fast short lighting mechanized war lasting about 1 year in duration. The prerequisites were a stockpile of a years supply of arms and resources plus the reservists to mobilize a balanced armed forces that mechanized a moderately large army to sequentially engage and defeat the armies of their enemies in campaigns of destruction n a mostly European war. They firmly believed it would take them until the mid 1940s to have built up these prerequisites for such a war.
But Hitler forbade this strategic thinking and imposed his half baked vision of warfare against the rest of the world, where you ‘make it up as you go along’. Instead he demanded a huge army at the expense of the other branches to occupy Europe, since he firmly believed the Europeans could not band together to fight his will power combined with his racially superior army.
Except that Germany could not simultaneously continue to both expand it’s political borders and avoid a confrontation with other great powers. Consolidation of Germany’s conquests in Western Europe did not solve any of Germany’s industrial, economic, or raw materials deficiencies. According to Adam Tooze, in “Wages of Destruction”, page 409, Germany’s attempt to consolidate France’s economy into the German military/industrial complex actually worsened problems in the long term; the production of coal for instance, and the allocation of industrial labor.
“The territories that Germany had conquered in 1940, though they provided substantial booty and a crucial source of labor did not bear comparison with the abundance provided to Britain by America. The aerial arms race was the distinctive Anglo-American contribution to the war and it played directly to America’s dominance in manufacturing. But though the disparity in aircraft deliveries was extreme it was not untypical. A similarly vast gulf was also evident in relation to energy supplies, the most basic driver of modern urban and industrial society. Whereas the Anglo-American alliance was energy rich, Germany and it’s Western European Grossraum were starved of food, oil and coal.”
Moreover Germany’s supposed technological superiority in aeronautics, electronics, and mechanization simply did not exist. Delaying a confrontation with the three great world powers essentially meant that the state of Allied rearmament would be greater, that the mobilization of American, British, and Soviet industrial and military might would be considerably advanced, and that Germany would face larger numbers of advanced aircraft, ships, and ground weapons.
The disparity between the industrial and economic resources of the Axis and the alliance of the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union was simply too great to be overcome by clever generalship, political sleight of hand, or luck. And, given the animosity that Hitler’s ideology aroused, there was no chance that Germany could fight and defeat each adversary in turn.
Nevertheless, it’s an accurate description of the reality that Germany faced and that Hitler ignored. True, the Allied strategy for the defense of France failed, but the conquest of France aided Germany only in the short-term, as I have noted elsewhere in this thread. Furthermore, the Western Allies outproduced Germany in aircraft by a margin of something like five or six to one, which allowed them to eventually deploy fleets of bombers and fighters that completely destroyed Germany’s air force and severely crippled Germany’s ability to carry out war production.
And the Allies superiority in naval forces did, in fact, stifle any attempt to isolate Britain from her empire and allies. As Clay Blair points out in “Hitler’s U-Boat War”, the Germany Navy never managed to come close to cutting Britain’s supply lines to the rest of the world, sinking, in their best monthly effort, less than 2 %, and less than 1 % overall during the war, of the Allied ships transiting the Atlantic.
While it may have taken longer than the Allies initially calculated, the Allied strategy, thanks to overwhelming superiority in industrial production capability, did defeat Germany and her Allies.
No, the Allies were wrong on only one count; the timing of the ultimate defeat of Germany. Though it was not apparent to the political and military leaders of the time, once Germany engaged the three great world powers in war, the defeat of the Axis was only a matter of time and the eventual cost.
German strategic thinking was flawed in believing that it could fight individual adversaries and defeat them in turn. Simply put, Hitler was mistaken in believing that he could control events to the point of choosing when, where and whom to fight and when, where and with whom to make peace.
First was Britain and France; France was knocked out of the war, but Britain, a sea power, supported by the US economy and industries, continued to fight. Germany had no effective way of defeating Britain since it could not bring it’s land-based power to bear against an island nation, could not defeat Britain in the air when Britain was producing more planes (and receiving additional planes from the US), and could not hope to match Britain at sea. Nor could it starve Britain out of the war, indeed it was Britain’s blockade of Europe that was the more effective.
Then Germany attacked the Soviet Union without having defeated Britain, adding another adversary, this time a (potentially) great land power. Germany did not have the logistical capability, nor the demographics, to defeat the Soviet Union and the German General Staff knew it’s only hope was to shatter the morale of the Red Army in the first six to eight weeks of it’s initial offensive; if that failed, if the Red Army was able to retreat behind the Dnieper-Dvina River line, Germany would lose the war. Objectively, this was a forlorn hope and represented an almost suicidally desperate gamble on the part of Germany.
Finally, events far beyond Germany’s control conspired to bring the US into the war against the Axis, although it is arguable that such an event was inevitable by 1941 in any case. Once the US was in the war, nothing that Germany, Hitler, or his generals could do would have led to an Axis victory. It’s debatable that Germany could even have negotiated some kind of cease-fire that would have left the country, or it’s political leadership, intact. The Allies had the example of the First World War still very much in mind and were determined to deal harshly with the fascists in the Axis leadership.
So the two principles that I contend are in play are 1.) Germany severely miscalculated thinking that it could engage the Allies, the Soviet Union, and The US in sequential wars, defeating each in detail. That was just not a realistic assessment of the world situation in 1939.
The second principle is that, by 1938, delaying wars with it’s potential adversaries was not a viable strategy for Germany because the aggressive behavior of the Axis countries had provoked massive rearmament programs among the Western Democracies and the Soviet Union. Waiting only meant that the disparity in economic and industrial (and thus military) power between the Axis and the Allies would only increase in the Allies favor.
Wizard you are making the standard mistake most westerners make by interchanging Hitler- Germany and Germanys pre Hitler strategy. They were all completely different as I already pointed out. Hitler believed in his ability to wage ‘limited warfare’ based on a 'limited war ’ on a ‘shoe string war economy’ in a series of campaigns against the armies of his enemies and win.
However underlying all his motivation was his pathological need to eradicate the Jews and the Communists in Russia. This is the main reason he went to war in the first place in 1939.Nothing in heaven or hell was going to prevent him from attacking Russia. Worse He just as pathologically believed the UK were part of his secret Aryan race and would come to their senses and join in his grand alliances against the Jewish America. Since the foundation of his belief in military power was based on race, all the military calculations of the bean counters were meaningless. He was going to have HIS war His way, no matter what. Worse still, such genocidal wars are by definition wars of attrition, while paradoxically, the core of German interwar military thinking was to avoid wars of attrition by focusing on operational warfare as the mechanism of decision in wars. Historians to this day can’t seem to disengage themselves from this paradox to see WW-II in its proper context.
Hitler’s war ran completely counter to the German General staff strategic interwar war thinking. As I pointed out they envisaged a multi front total war based on the allied attrition model as completely unworkable. The European war they envisaged was sequential attacks or counter attacks against Poland and France leading to a wider European war. At all times two front war was to be avoided. Preparations for such a war would be based on the establishment of total war /economic mobilization that would follow a year of lighting campaigns against the allies. The prerequisite for any such strategy was the stockpiling of a years worth of armaments/supplies plus the resources needed to build the follow on year’s armaments/supplies. Between these two camps they would ‘prepare for the worse but hope for the best’. But Hitler forbade any such stockpiling in of arms or resources in his famous ‘1936 four year’ plan.
The German General staff strategy effort evolved around a ~ 75 division mechanized army for operational maneuver, not the 100-140 division WW-I style horse drawn ‘limited war’ army, that Hitler envisaged for economic/military wars of attrition. That means that , given the German General staff strategy , both the LW and the KM would not be sacrificed to further enlarge Hitler’s army as happened historically. Even in the last few years of the 1930s, all German warship building was setback a year or two in order to redirect labor, funding and resources, to achieve Hitler’s ‘1936 four year plan’ for war. More importantly what ship building and naval planning that did occur in the 1930s, would not have proceeded from Hitler’s mistaken belief that he could limit and prevent the need for naval clash against the western allies until the mid to late 1940s. As a result of this dynamic about ½ of the warships the Germans did historically build in the 1930s were built to fill auxiliary roles, rather than traditional warships. Most often, such roles are filled by re tasking older obsolete warships or utilization of chartered civilian vessels, instead of diverting precious warship construction industry.
It also appears the Luftwaffe suffered similar shortages in production in order to feed Hitler’s demand for the enlarged ground army. Instead of developing a large balanced air force with long range multi engined strategic bomber force to deter any adversary plus a tactical air force to support both the army and navy, the LW was only able to focus on enlarged production of a tactical air force and pay lip service to the other two areas. Further all the high tech weapons that were in development to give the German armed forces a technical edge, were tuned to Hitler’s timing of a mid1940s war, not the war Hitler actually dragged Germany into. Consequently when war did began prematurely, they were all canceled and thus could not be ready even by the end of the war, despite the emergency revival efforts applied in 1942-44.
Finally any one who believes that England was immune to invasion or defeat, just doesn’t understand the chaos and shifting possibilities of real warfare in those first years of WW-II. It doesn’t take much to shift the actual historical scenario sufficiently to ensure a German defeat of the UK in 1940.
I’m making the same mistake most Westerners make? Gee, that sounds mighty authoritative and profound, but no, I’m not interchanging anything. All you have posted is beside the point. It doesn’t matter what Hitler believed or what was his motivation in going to war. It doesn’t matter what the German General Staff believed or what their strategy was. There was no way it was going to work once they failed to avoid war with the three great world military and industrial powers; Germany was doomed. Whether they thought a lightning war was best, or a war of attrition, it simply didn’t matter; they miscalculated very badly and paid a predictable price.
Oh? Then why didn’t Germany defeat Britain? You can speculate all you want, and claim that the difference for Britain between victory and defeat was a razor’s edge, but the reality is that Germany simply didn’t have what it took to defeat Britain in 1940, or later. Germany tried to defeat Britain in the air and got handed it’s butt. Germany tried to starve Britain out of the war with U-boats, but never even came close to to sinking enough ships. Germany concocted a half-assed scheme to invade with it’s Army, but never figured out how to get past the Royal Navy in the Channel. In retrospect, nothing Germany tried to defeat Britain had much chance of working. So no, it’s not at all unreasonable to claim that Germany couldn’t defeat Britain; at best it could achieve a stalemate that would last until the US came into the war and then it was game over for Germany.
Geez! Just forget about that German strategy gibberish and look at the economic, industrial, and population disparity between the Axis and the Allies. The total population of he Allies (British Empire, United States, and Soviet Union) was 829,000,000; the total population of the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) was 184,000,000. The combined 1938 GDP of the Allies was 1,842,000,000; the combined 1938 GDP of the Axis was 661,000,000. Germany was essentially a land power, and it’s lack of any significant navy confined it’s power projection capability to Europe (which was effectively blockaded by the Royal Navy). The Allies were land and naval powers with global access to raw materials and control of world-wide sea lanes of communication. Germany controlled less than 2 % of the world’s oil; the Allies controlled more than 80 % of the world’s oil. The Allies produced 647,000 aircraft during WW II; the Axis produced 207,000.
By any measure, the ability of the Axis to sustain a war effort was completely dwarfed by the capabilities of the Allies. No strategy could overcome such a disparity
I’d argue that it takes a huge and impossible shift, notably:
(a) A German invasion fleet with the capacity to (i) cross the Channel (ii) land sufficient forces to conquer Britain, and (c) provide logistical support to prevent the landed forces being marooned and reduced over time.
(b) Reduction by Germany of the Royal Navy to the extent that it could not reduce the German invasion fleet to the point that it was ineffective.
(c) Ditto, the RAF.
In practice, Germany failed on (a) and (b) and would have failed even more spectacularly on (b) if it had tried it.
Which systems do you have in mind, that would have given Germany the ability to defeat all three, or even two or only one of its major enemies after it failed to invade Britain in 1940?
Then why didn’t it develop heavy bombers to enable it to carry out its attempt to subdue Britain by bombing?
When did Germany ever develop anything remotely like the British and American heavy bombers?
Then why did the Heer remain so reliant on horse drawn transport, with all the logistical problems associated with feeding horses; resting them; caring for them; and their slowness and low carrying capacity throughout the war?
And the answer is, as Wizard has pointed out, to do with Germany’s limited natural resources and production capacity compared with its major enemies. Even Britain was more mechanized than Germany at the start of the war, and Britain wasn’t preparing to take over most of Europe.
If Germany had no peer in regards to mechanised warfare, it equally had no peer in failing to apply that understanding to the real world.
What raw materials could have been supplied from France that would make up for Germany’s hopeless deficiencies in, among other things, oil and rubber so that it could consolidate for its attack on the USSR?
I don’t have time to comment fully on your posts right now, but that’s a rather interesting statement; because I’ve read numerous examples here of you doing just that, ubc, and posting the typical revisionist, even apologist tripe. You make some points, but your statements are often fraught with quite a few internal contradictions from post to post…
