By: Bill The Butcher
Statutory disclaimer: The statements made in this article are my own and are a statement of my beliefs and the fruit of my research. As usual, though, I am in no way responsible for any fights, quarrels, disagreements or fallings-out as a result of discussions arising from this article, on this website or elsewhere. Also, as usual, my sources are linked to in the body of the article for the convenience of the reader.
As everyone who has been reading me for a while is aware, I’m fascinated by Hitler and the Nazis, to the extent where if I were an academic historian I’d have specialised in the Third Reich to the exclusion of pretty much any other topic I can think of except maybe the reign of the Tsar Nikolai II.
While there are so many things to talk about where Hitler is concerned, the main facts are pretty well known: he took over Germany, made himself dictator, militarised the country, tried to wipe out the Jews, Communists (as the Jews and Communists were often the same people, this was kind of like killing two birds with one stone), Gypsies, Social Democrats, trade unionists and anyone else who even thought of disagreeing with him, and then went and started (well, not technically, since Britain and France actually declared war on Germany, but he was directly responsible for creating the circumstances for said declaration) a war with half the world that ended in his shooting himself in a bunker while Russian shells were falling outside the door.
In its essentials, those facts are completely correct.
But the question is: how is it that Hitler actually lost the war?
Think about it a moment. Here’s a man who had absolute control over his people, his nation and his armed forces. He had more absolute control than other dictators because he had succeeded in achieving a kind of Godhead status amongst his people (more about that in a moment). His General Staff was completely beholden to him, and every general who even thought of treason had been co-opted or purged. His armies, even in their last days, were technologically superior to all their enemies. And, militarily speaking, by 1942 he was unchallenged master of everything between the river Volga and the English Channel. How could he possibly have lost?
Yet, as we know from history, he did, completely and catastrophically.
I believe, and in this article I shall endeavour to show, that Hitler lost because, subconsciously, he was determined to lose.
I know that this will be a controversial statement, and will likely come in for some derision. However, I believe that there are grounds that enable me to reach this conclusion.
If you look at Hitler’s conduct of the war, you can hardly avoid noticing a glaring fact: he kept missing golden opportunities. For a man who, for all his failings, can be described (at least in the early stages of the war, before he began micromanaging everything) as militarily a competent strategist, such blunders are inexplicable. Let’s just look at a few:
The pre-Munich phase: Those of us who know a bit about history will remember that the Second World War actually almost began in 1938, when Hitler demanded German-inhabited areas of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland). War seemed inevitable – a war Germany was even more unfit to fight in 1938 than it was in 1939 – but Hitler was adamant. His own army generals were seriously considering a coup d’état to get rid of the suicidal government, but then Britain and France signed the Munich Agreement, which ceded Sudetenland to Germany, handed Hitler an enormous bloodless victory, and swiftly checkmated opposition in the generals’ ranks. Yet, had Hitler actually started the war in 1938, even if he hadn’t been toppled by the military, he would have faced a strong Czech army (the Czech fortifications were all in the Sudetenland) and British and French armies which were at least much stronger than the Wehrmacht. It wasn’t Hitler’s fault that he didn’t lose the war before it even began.
Going to war: What isn’t much known except to those who are familiar with the history of the Second World War is just how it started. The end of the First World War cost Germany eastern territory, which was sliced off to Poland, a land-locked entity at the time. In order to give Poland an access to the sea, a strip of territory (called the Polish Corridor) was handed over, which had the effect of cutting off the large and very important province of East Prussia – home of most of the German warrior caste – from the rest of Germany. At the eastern tip of this Corridor was the city of Danzig, with an almost entirely (about 95%) ethnic German population, which was cut off from East Prussia as a “free city”. The Danzigers wanted, by an overwhelming majority, to be part of Germany. The Germans wanted, in the meantime, a road through the Polish Corridor so that the two parts of Germany were connected by other than sea or air. So, Hitler demanded Danzig and the road through the Corridor. By Hitlerian standards, in fact, these demands were rather reasonable.
What was not reasonable, however, were the circumstances. By August 1939, Hitler had long since betrayed the terms of the Munich agreement. He had seized all of Czechoslovakia, and Austria had also been incorporated into the Greater German Reich. In an act that was militarily meaningless but politically powerful, Britain and France had pledged to go to war if Germany attacked Poland. Negotiations had failed to create any breakthrough, and to any normal person it should have been obvious that war was imminent if Germany did attack Poland. Yet, Hitler went ahead with the attack, and did not call it off even after France and Britain issued ultimatums, making a general European war inevitable. As Hitler had no reason to want war with either France or Britain, this was even more inexplicable.
At this distance in time, it’s tempting to think of the German war machine in the early stages of the war as an unstoppable juggernaut. It wasn’t. The German armed forces were being built up on the supposition that a major war was unlikely before 1943-44. The Panzer divisions had to go to war (vide Colonel General Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader) with light PzKw I and II tanks, meant for training. The navy had only a few small U Boats with poor and unreliable torpedoes, and was unable to launch effective amphibious assaults, as it learnt to its cost during the invasion of Norway. The Luftwaffe’s Stukas, Heinkel 111s, and Messerschmitt 110s were unable to stand up to serious aerial opposition. Although some of the armoured units were mechanised, most military transport was still horse drawn. It was only because of innovative Blitzkrieg tactics and invading the neutral BENELUX countries that the Germans even managed to achieve their initial successes of 1939 and 1940. If the Allies had been better prepared tactically, Hitler could have been fought to a standstill if not completely defeated in Northern France. It was certainly not Hitler’s doing that he wasn’t. Yet, when he did have victory in his grasp, he let it slip away at…
Dunkirk: With the British Expeditionary Force cut off in Northern France, along with a substantial part of the French Army, Hitler (who had aggressively followed the Blitzkrieg tactic of cutting off enemy forces and destroying them at leisure) held off his advance and allowed them to escape. Even though Hitler had no desire to fight Britain, for which nation he had an enormous admiration, and it might be that he imagined that “magnanimity” might bring peace feelers from the British side, his own military doctrine did not allow for such acts of mercy. Also, politically, a weaker opponent is more likely to talk peace than one whose forces have just managed to escape essentially intact in terms of manpower.
The Battle of Britain: There’s some little doubt about this one, basically because there’s not much clarity on what Hitler’s actual intentions towards Britain were. If there is one thing that we are absolutely certain about, it’s that Hitler admired the British, idolised the British Empire, and thought war between the Germans and British was a tragedy. He was perfectly ready, as he said, to “guarantee the British Empire” in return for a dominant role on the European continent. Most certainly, he never had any serious intention of invading Britain. Operation Sealion, the projected Nazi invasion of Britain, was never going to happen. The German Navy (Kriegsmarine) didn’t have any amphibious capabilities, and would have had to use Rhine river barges to transport tanks across the Channel. The Luftwaffe, whose fighters lacked the range to stay and fight over British territory for longer than a few minutes, could never have gained operational control of the British skies, and what tactical advantage the Germans had, they squandered by – at Hitler’s insistence – shifting their air offensive from knocking out RAF bases to bombing British cities.
It is possible to imagine a scenario in which Hitler continued fighting Britain to a conclusion, but that scenario would involve strangulation by convoy attacks and fighting British forces elsewhere they could be struck, for instance, North Africa (and I’ll be talking about that in a moment). But as far as an attack on the British home islands is concerned, that was never going to succeed, and there is no evidence that Hitler ever intended it to happen.
Yet, instead of either making peace with Britain or fighting it out to a conclusion, he shifted his attention elsewhere. Though the First World War had taught the Germans that fighting on two fronts was a very bad idea, he went and attacked the Soviet Union.
Barbarossa: If there is one single action, more than any other, which doomed the Nazis, it was the invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941. Yet, strange as it seems, and suicidal as it appears, there is hardly any invasion which was more predictable. Hitler wasn’t interested in occupying Western Europe. He wasn’t even interested in Alsace-Lorraine, the German-speaking territory contested between Germany and France over the course of nearly a century and two wars. What he was always interested in was Lebensraum in the East, and even in his last will and testament he continued to urge Germany to occupy territory in the East. However, it seems incredible that he would attack the USSR without first making some kind of peace with Britain. It is, of course, perfectly possible that Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess (or Heß) was sent to England by Hitler on a peace mission, but long before the invasion of the USSR was launched, Hitler must have known that said peace mission had failed. And still he went ahead – went ahead without any real appreciation of the scale of the problem, or acknowledgement that the Russians could beat the Germans simply by outlasting them. As they did.
Actually, economically speaking, the attack on the USSR was from the beginning a liability for Germany. Stalin was already supplying Germany with oil and raw materials, thus allowing Hitler to circumvent the British blockade which had helped to starve Germany in the Great War (vide William Shirer, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich; Shirer gives detailed figures). Once Hitler declared war, not only was that supply cut off, but the Soviets left only “scorched earth” behind them as they retreated, destroying everything that could not be shifted eastwards away from the Nazis.
There was also the slight problem of Hitler’s systematic sabotaging of any rapprochement with Stalin. Stalin had, via his foreign minister Molotov, offered an alliance against the Western Allies, with the end objective of carving up the French and British colonial empires between the Axis members. Hitler made sure this did not happen by offering Stalin nothing substantial (Shirer calls this an attempt to fob off Stalin with talk of Russian aspirations “in the general direction of the Indian Ocean”) in return. It’s difficult to see how a Soviet-Nazi alliance could possibly have been defeated; the war against the USSR could have been left to a later date after settling scores with the Western democracies. But Hitler was not interested.
According to some anti-Communist revisionist historians like Constantin Pleshakov, Hitler launched a pre-emptive strike against the USSR because Stalin was planning to attack him. This is unlikely to the point of an absurdity. The Red Army of the time had been decapitated by Stalin’s purges, and had suffered tremendous losses in the war against little Finland. It was in the middle of a modernisation programme. The army was armed largely with old T-26 tanks, which had no radios and since they were deployed for infantry support, not for fighting against a Blitzkrieg assault, their ammunition was high-explosive; useless for fighting against other tanks (vide Alan Clark, Barbarossa). The air force had old Polikarpov I-15 and I-16 fighters, so ineffective against the Luftwaffe that they were sometimes used in kamikaze-style ramming attacks as the only way they could bring down the German machines. The Soviet Navy was a joke, with primitive battleships and submarines which could hardly sink anything. It would have been at least a couple of years before the USSR could have posed any kind of offensive threat to Germany, and Hitler must have known that.
Then there was the actual fighting. From the beginning, the Soviet resistance was of a kind that the Germans had never encountered before. Even surrounded and bypassed soldiers didn’t surrender – they vanished into the forests to carry out a guerrilla campaign against the German rear. While tens of Soviet divisions were destroyed, there were always new ones to fill the gaps. And even if the German plan had proceeded perfectly, it would have been of no use, since the Soviets were prepared to retreat across the Urals if necessary and counterattack from there when the Germans were weakened.
In other words, Barbarossa was doomed before the first shot was fired.
Even then, there are so many blunders that Hitler made in Russia that they would probably fill volumes, but I’ll just name a few obvious ones:
1. The Battle of Moscow: This was the first serious defeat the Nazis suffered, anywhere. On any front. Ever. And more than a little it was the fault of Hitler himself, who delayed Barbarossa in order to invade and capture Yugoslavia, a delay long enough to force his troops to make their final push for Moscow in the teeth of the Russian winter, and allowed Marshal Zhukov to plan a massive and successful counteroffensive.
The really interesting thing about the Battle isn’t the German defeat, though; it’s Hitler’s orders to the German troops to stand fast at all costs. This may have saved the Germans from a general collapse of their lines, but if the Soviets had enough forces (as they had later in the war) they may have been able to destroy most of the German Army in one single operation. It’s certainly not to Hitler’s credit that they didn’t.
2. Stalingrad: In any discussion of the Greatest Battles Ever Fought, Stalingrad comes high, high on the list. But few know that it came close not to being a battle at all. Throughout the summer of 1942, Hitler kept changing his mind about the main target of his summer offensive. He couldn’t decide on the Caucasian oilfields, or the Volga, and his forces kept getting shunted from one to the other until he decided to try and take them both. The Soviets took the opportunity to set up a defence at Stalingrad, which ground the Germans to a halt. And, while the Wehrmacht was fighting a street-by-street battle in the ruins of the city, the Russians prepared a colossal counteroffensive against the weak Nazi flanks. In November, they launched this offensive and cut off the Sixth Army.
Even then, Hitler could have retreated. The Germans had enough strength to break through the initial encirclement. But Hitler forbade any attempt at retreat, and condemned the quarter of a million soldiers in the Sixth Army to destruction.
It’s impossible to put the blame for the destruction of the Sixth Army on anyone but Hitler. And it’s equally impossible to understand just why he did it, unless he had a death wish. But if we are to talk about death wishes, we should consider the next battle, probably the most decisive of all the battles of the Second World War…
3. Kursk: By July 1943, the war on the Eastern Front was in stalemate. The Germans had won a military victory on the Donets River, bringing the Soviet advance to a halt. The two sides faced each other along a front that strongly resembled the trench systems of the First World War, and might have remained thus faced off for the rest of the year. But some of Hitler’s generals proposed an assault from north and south on a bulge of the Soviet front line around the cities of Orel and Kursk, to be known as Operation Citadel (Fall Zitadelle).
Let me stress that Zitadelle wasn’t exactly a military masterstroke. It was, in fact, so obvious a move that the Soviets were already digging in for a German offensive before the Germans had decided on the offensive. So massively had they fortified themselves that there was no way the Germans had a hope of success, though they were about to throw in their new Tiger tanks and the Elefant tank destroyer.
Now, one must understand that the Soviet preparations weren’t unknown to the Germans. So well-known were the Soviet preparations to the Germans that they delayed the offensive in order to further reinforce their panzer armies. Even Hitler frankly admitted that the very idea of attacking in the “East” in 1943 “turned his stomach” (vide Clark, Barbarossa; Clark gives an excellent and detailed account of the German indecision over Zitadelle) – yet he went ahead with the operation anyway, even though just about everyone knew in advance it was pretty much doomed.
So, by the time Hitler bowed to the inevitable and called off the offensive, the Germans, after the greatest tank battle in history, had lost half their armour, and had utterly failed to even cut off the Kursk salient, let alone breach the Soviet front. If Stalingrad meant that the Soviets couldn’t lose the war, Kursk, which shattered the panzer armies beyond recovery, meant that the Russians would inevitably winit.
Yet, the offensive was the single most unnecessary attack ever launched by Germany on the Eastern Front, and possibly in the war. Hitler, who was in full command of the German Army, and who was used to ordering his generals around (as at Stalingrad), and had no desire to launch this attack, went ahead and let it happen anyway, despite knowing it must be defeated. How does one explain this?
4. The refusal to talk peace. By 1942, with the defeat at Stalingrad, it was obvious to the Germans that victory against the USSR was no longer possible; it was a question of staving off defeat. Hitler’s generals were already urging a separate peace with the Russians, allowing the war to be focussed on the British and Americans. Stalin was always far and away the most pragmatic of all the major leaders of the war, on either side. It is highly likely that at that stage of the war, when victory was still far from assured, he would have jumped at the chance for this separate peace, with the withdrawal of German troops and some kind of compensation from Berlin, probably in territorial terms. But Hitler refused even to try.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the war:
The Alliance with Mussolini: I’ll intrude a personal note here – I could never understand just what Hitler wanted to ally with il Duce for. The Italian armed forces of the period were a joke, with biplane fighters, tanks that could not withstand machine gun fire, and soldiers so demoralised they surrendered in thousands the first chance they got. The Italians had, in the mid-thirties, taken many months even to defeat Ethiopia, whose army of the time still carried spears. Mussolini was a vainglorious blowhard who dreamt of recreating the Empire of the Caesars, but had neither the ability nor the resources to do so. He brought absolutely nothing to the table. By allying with him, Hitler merely made Italy’s problems his own. That is not normally considered intelligent strategy.
The War on America: Another of Hitler’s spectacular blunders was declaring war on the United States. Now it is certainly true that by mid-1941 the US was effectively already at war with Germany. American destroyers were escorting British convoys, the US was handing over warships to Britain on lease in return for bases in British colonies, and Franklin Roosevelt was obviously itching for a way to enter the war formally. Yet, when the opportunity came, it was against Japan, not Germany. Hitler could have sat out the US-Japan war; however much Roosevelt wanted a war with the Nazis, he couldn’t have jumped into that war of his own volition while already engaged in a full-scale war against Japan. Hitler gave him what he wanted by declaring war, while already at war with Britain and just having been fought to a standstill before Moscow…almost as though he was intent on antagonising as many countries as possible, and sealing his own fate.
North Africa: Despite all the talk of how the tide of war was turned at El Alamein, North Africa was essentially a complete sideshow, of little or no importance in the scheme of things. Yet, Hitler could have turned it into a victory. When Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was desperately asking for reinforcements, he didn’t send them, and an underarmed, undersupplied Rommel lost a head-to-head butting contest with a far stronger British force at El Alamein. With more armour, artillery, and soldiers he might have taken Egypt, pushed into West Asia, cut off British oil supplies, and threatened Iran. Instead, within six months of El Alamein, the last German forces in North Africa had surrendered.
It’s actually worse than it sounds. Hitler, who had refused Rommel reinforcements when he needed them, sent them in droves when the German-Italian Army (of which the famed Afrika Korps was the most important part) was fighting desperately for survival, against the British in the East and the French and Americans in the west. In the end, Germany actually lost more soldiers in North Africa than it did at Stalingrad – and this was a sideshow of the war, with little or no effect on the eventual outcome.
The Final Battles:
In the final throes of Nazi Germany’s war, there were two major plans which played significant roles in hastening Germany’s defeat. The first was the Ardennes Offensive, the December 1944 attempt to break through the Allied lines in the west and regain the initiative, perhaps recapturing the Netherlands, Belgium and part of Northern France. You’ll notice that even at the most optimistic, this offensive did not envisage winning the war or even driving the Western Allies back over the Channel. In the event, though there were initial advances, the final result was a mauling that cost the Germans much more than they did the Allies, and won precisely nothing.
A few months later, when Berlin was threatened by the Red Army, there was another, major counteroffensive planned – the so-called Steiner attack. It was meant to be launched by SS General Felix Steiner, and was Hitler’s last throw of the dice. But the Steiner attack never occurred, for the simple reason that there were no forces to carry out the offensive – something that was perfectly well known to the German High Command. Yet, not only did they carry on with the charade of this nonexistent counteroffensive, they withdrew forces from other parts of the front around Berlin to support the attack, therefore weakening their own defences, at the direct insistence of Hitler. It’s like throwing down your dagger during a knife fight in order to reach for your gun, while knowing that you don’t have a gun. Not sound strategy for survival.
It’s telling that (Antony Beevor, Berlin, The Downfall 1945) Hitler’s generals had begun to feel he was subconsciously trying to lose the war.
The War At Home:
There isn’t really space in this article to catalogue all of Hitler’s blunders on the Home Front, if one can call them blunders, that is. Some of them are relatively trivial, and some of such importance that they can’t be discussed in detail within the framework of an article of this type. But we can mention these:
1. The Holocaust and the Final Solution: This is the Big One, and the most often misunderstood. The Holocaust, as used as a term for the systematic and organised attempt to exterminate the Jewish (and, let’s not forget, Romany) people of Europe, and also Communists, Social Democrats, and anyone else who was a dissident, didn’t start with the concentration camps and the ghettoes. To be sure, the Jews in the concentration camps were maltreated and killed casually, but such killing was less intentional (on an organisational basis) than incidental, until the decision was taken in January 1942 for an Endlösung (“Final Solution”) to the “Jewish problem”. It was only after January 1942, or in other words after the Reich had quite signally failed to beat the British or the Russians, and in addition had just acquired a powerful new enemy in the US, that Hitler (by way of Himmler, Heydrich and the SS) began a campaign of systematic extermination. It was only then that vast resources of manpower were put into manning the concentration and extermination camps, and research that might have been better used in trying to find ways of winning the war were squandered on such things as efficient gas chamber design or trying to make soap from human fat.
2. The war industry: One of Hitler’s pet theses was the “purity” of the German woman, whose place was in the house to breed Aryan warriors for the Reich. Unlike all the other major combatant nations, German women weren’t put into the factories to speed up the war effort. Instead, Hitler even disbanded forty divisions of troops in 1941 to provide manpower for industry, while using slave labour from occupied nations to make up the shortfall. He was even reluctant to halt the production of civilian luxuries. If, as Stalin said, modern wars are won and lost on the factory floors, Germany didn’t even begin to have a chance.
3. The Miracle Weapons: One of the strangest and most baffling features of the German war effort of 1944-45 are the “miracle weapons” – not that they were produced, but that they were so appallingly misused. One classic instance was the Type XXI and XXIII U-Boats, submarines so far ahead of anything the rest of the world had that over ten years later scuttled Type XXIIIs were recovered and put back into service by the new West German Navy. These subs were fast, silent, and virtually immune to being hunted down, but they were practically unused. Only one Type XXI ever went on a patrol, right at the end of the war, and it returned to base after cessation of hostilities without carrying out a single attack. The fate of the Type XXIII was only slightly better, though one did sink the last Allied ships in the European War.
Then there was the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter, an aircraft that could fly rings round anything the Allies had. This wonderful plane, a potential war-winner, was virtually crippled by Hitler’s demand that it be developed only as a bomber. By the time its spectacular unsuitability to the bombing role was manifest, and it was finally used as a fighter interceptor, it was far too late for it to turn back the Allied bomber streams over Germany.
There was the Nazi atom bomb, crippled by the “Aryan” Deutsche Physik’s deriding of nuclear physics as “Jewish science”, and plenty of other similar stories. It seemed that anytime the German designers created a potentially war-winning weapon, Hitler would go out of his way to sabotage it, just as he went out of his way to sabotage his own strategies.
One can, therefore, make a reasonable case for the belief that Hitler was less than fully committed to winning the war. One might go as far as to say he was subconsciously determined to lose. The question then arises, why might this be so?
In order to find an answer to that question, we would have to look at the very nature of the Nazi regime.
It’s tempting to think of the Thousand Year Reich as a totalitarian regime, but actually it wasn’t. As Hugh Trevor-Roper pointed out in The Last Days Of Hitler, the only way to see the Nazi regime is as a medieval court. Just as in a court, power was distributed between competing factions, each of whom was primarily concerned with currying favour with the man at the top more than anything else, including the prosecution of the war. And since that man at the top was concerned with not allowing any of his subordinates to become so powerful as to threaten his own position, he made sure they competed against each other constantly. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, for instance, said during his trial at Nuremberg (Nürnberg) that the Foreign Ministry was supplied intelligence by thirty competing agencies.
This made, of course, both for extraordinarily inefficient and unwieldy administration (but, as I’ll discuss in a moment, administration was never a priority for the Nazis) and a severely hampered war effort. A classic case is the tale of the German aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, which never got completed, mainly because Hermann Göring refused to allow the German navy (Kriegsmarine) to have its own aeroplanes.
Even at the end of his life, Hitler had no desire to dispense with the court he had created. In his last will and testament, he appointed Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as President of the Reich – but Josef Goebbels as Chancellor and Martin Bormann as head of the Nazi Party. This way, even in death, he planned to maintain the system of divide and rule which had served him so well and Germany so badly.
This system of a medieval court was closely allied to the defining factor of Nazism, its close identification with mythology. It’s impossible to understand Nazism without taking into account its association with what Trevor-Roper calls “bestial Nordic nonsense.” That this mythology of a pure Aryan race, superior to all others in the world, sits strangely with Hitler’s alliance with the very Latin Mussolini is not significant as far as the Reich itself goes; the target of the “bestial Nordic nonsense” was not the Gallic French or the Latin Italians, but the Slavic peoples of the East, most especially the Russians, whom the Nazis didn’t even consider human. They were Untermenschen, “subhumans”, creatures of a lower evolutionary order entirely.
One of the many interesting things about Nordic mythology is Ragnarök, what Richard Wagner called Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, when Valhalla burns and the reign of the gods ends. This concept, of burning everything down, is allied to the Viking funeral tradition of cremating a deceased chieftain with his longship. Since the Nazis considered themselves Nordic successors of the Vikings (the SS even had a Wiking division comprising Scandinavian volunteers), Hitler’s desire to burn the Reich around him to mark his exit from the scene is easily understandable. His megalomania was such that he thought himself the equivalent of the gods, and could not bear the idea that the Nordic tribe – the Volk – of the German people could survive him. He wanted to go out with the most terrific bang possible, not with a whimper.
That there would have been a whimper of an exit if Hitler had not entered into a war, or if Hitler had won the war, is without a doubt. Another thing which one must keep in mind about Nazism is its inherent militarism. The Nazis worshipped the uniform, to an extent where the various parts of the military machine – the Heer, or Army, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine and the SS – became the foremost arm of the state, the apex of the military-industrial complex. That military-industrial complex was also very powerful. Armament manufacturers like Willi Messerschmitt and Baron Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach benefited mightily from their association with the Nazis, with slave labour being provided to their factories and a guaranteed market for their products in the armed forces.
Dovetailing with the existence of the military-industrial complex was also the need for an enemy. Nazism is like all extreme political philosophies in that it is not introspective. The blame for all failure, all problems must lie elsewhere, not in the Party and most especially not in the Führer. The enemy within might be the Jews, a group both historically despised and having committed the unpardonable crime of being economically successful; and the Communists, bitter ideological enemies, and their brethren the trade unionists and other sundry left-wing scum. But once the internal enemy was conquered, and being unarmed and easily targetable, the Jews and left wingers were easily conquered, who was left to blame? Someone must be responsible for the failures of administrative policies, after all.
If we have learned anything from much more recent history, it’s also that a military-industrial complex requires war. In fact, the only circumstances under which a military-industrial complex is viable is one of unending war. If there are no enemies, enemies have to be invented, and if there is no war, a war has to be started, if need be under completely fabricated pretexts. When the military-industrial complex cohabits with heroic mythology and a belief in racial supremacy, aggressive war becomes inevitable.
It would not be wrong, therefore, to claim that the entire existence of the Third Reich prior to September 1939 was geared towards preparing for war.
Therefore, we have a state ruled by an extraordinarily inefficient competing cabal of courtiers, which in turn is highly militaristic, has an ideology based on mythology, and has a flourishing military-industrial complex. Such a state, obviously, is not one where daily administration is a priority. Hitler hardly involved himself with administration. But the absence of administration did not bring about the lack of need for administration, and repression by such means as the Gestapo is not a substitute for administration.
As I’ve said elsewhere, unlike any other ideology one cares to name, from laissez-faire capitalism to Maoism, Nazism is the only system which has absolutely nothing positive to offer. Whether you agree with Adam Smith or Karl Marx, and whether their followers stayed true to their beliefs or not, both were concerned with the ultimate betterment of the human condition. Nazism, however, had nothing but itself to offer. It had the worship of Hitler as a semi-divine figure speaking directly to God (as one of his staff said, “the Führer has a telephone line direct to God” – does this perhaps sound familiar?). It had the myth of the Aryan Superman. And it had…well, that’s actually pretty much it. There was nothing else.
Therefore, imagine a scenario where there was no war or Hitler won the war. How long before, in the absence of enemies internal or external, the contradictions in the body of the Nazi state would have recoiled on it? How long before the endemic squabbling of the courtiers for power brought the edifice of the government down in ruins? How long before, instead of worshipping the Great Leader, people began cursing him? Hitler salutes and swastika badges can’t feed, clothe and house people or take care of their other needs.
This is also another factor one should understand – the Nazi state was Hitler. He was himself acutely conscious of it, as he should have been, because it was a situation he had deliberately contrived. He was the state; he was Deutschland, the German nation (although, ironically, he was actually an Austrian). The German soldier, at induction, swore a holy oath to Hitler, not to Germany. When the German armed forces were defeated in combat, they had failed him. When Germany was in ruins, it was because the German people were unworthy of his genius, and had accordingly lost the right to exist. (These are actual Hitler quotes; I am not making them up.)
So, how could Hitler risk peace, where his position as God Almighty’s Representative on Earth and Ordained Ruler of the German People might be threatened? He couldn’t; not even the peace of victory, because there is no “happily ever after” outside fairy stories. Once there was no enemy to blame, the military state would become an economic millstone round the nation’s neck, the administration’s incompetence would be manifest, and there would be only one person to blame, the demigod at the top.
Hitler could not risk that happening, and this is why he chose to lose. It explains everything about him, right up to and including his decision to die in a Viking funeral in Berlin, destroying the city along with himself. He could not escape elsewhere and carry on the fight. He could not even allow a strong successor who might intrude on his own glory. He had to lose. There was no other way.
Obviously, this is not to say that Hitler chose defeat consciously. As far as conscious decision making went, he was probably as intent on victory as any of the soldiers, sailors or airmen who fought for him so magnificently. But we have known at least since Sigmund Freud that the conscious mind is a slave to the subconscious, and that’s where the seat of our motivations lies. That Freud was a Jew, and that Hitler had only contempt for “Jewish science”, makes no difference at all.
It’s just a bit of delicious irony.
Subversify Staff
Excellent, well written.
I couldn’t find anything with which to disagree.
One vague thought, couldn’t a Nazi style empire coast for a while similar to the Roman empire?
Well, maybe not, given your points on a lack of administration, etc.
Well done.
“Hitler (who had aggressively followed the Blitzkrieg tactic of cutting off enemy forces and destroying them at leisure) held off his advance and allowed them to escape.”
This is a widely held misconception. The original halt order was called by the German High Command because the panzers were running too far ahead of the rest of the Army and supplies. It was confirmed by Hitler when Goering offered to finish off the apparently encircled French and British Armies by air attack – which he then tried to do very unsuccesfully. The halt order was in fact rescinded on the first of the ten days of the Dunkirk evacuation, but the tanks could not in any event operate in country where the sluices had been opened and was substantially boggy and flooded. The tanks were withdrawn from the operation round the Dunkirk perimeter in preparation for the operation across the Somme to finish off France. None the less there was a stiff battle round the Dunkirk perimeter by the German infantry, assisted (when weather allowed) by the Luftwaffe. The 350,000 British and French troops were not ‘allowed to escape’. It was a fighting retreat. Hitler and the German High Command believed the allied forces were encircled and trapped against the sea and could be finished off at leisure. They had no concept of the flexibility of sea power and the possibilities of seabourne evacuation. Even Churchill in his most optimistic moment only thought 50,000 could be gotten away. In terms of your article, it was in fact another of Hitler’s mistakes.
Hitler was to power hunger and did not believe in the real God Wotan did not save him He had mental disiese and took his folks to Hell with him
Moggy – thanks for the correction. However, the Luftwaffe did prove utterly inept at impeding the evacuation, which does hold true to the original point that Hitler was neither capable of an invasion of Britain nor seriously planned one.
Mark Speer: ?????????????
Wow, this was really good, great work!
While I can see why you would come to this conclusion, it operates on the assumption that Hitler always had a rational explination for his actions – something I don’t believe a power-mad dictator to be capable of possessing (power has a funny way of eating away at people’s grasp on reality – you know…): all I see is an ambitious madman who bit off a lot more than he can chew by instigating simultanious wars against both the Soviets and the Western Europeans (to be fair, the Western powers wanted war as well – they knew that a strong Germany would be a threat to them if they didn’t kill it right away).
And really, I don’t think it would have mattered all that much even if he did pull off a victory of some kind (ex. suing for peace with the West and beating the Soviets in the battle for Eastern Europe): the over-arching drama of human history (one of the powerful repressing the weak and exploiting them for labor and resources) would not have changed significantly – only the role of oppressors would be filled with different names in the history books…
Fascinating! In my recent comic fantasy satire Adolf Hitler in Oz I submit that as a boy Hitler was severely punished by his father but protected by his mother. Thus after he grew up he kept committing greater and greater crimes, unconsciously hoping that someone sometime would punish him to make him stop. The novel ends with his Oz jailer, Tollydiggle, who becomes his therapist, asking, “Why do you want to be punished?”
Bill, a very interesting article indeed, and something I’d love to read more about. Is it discussed in any other sources?
I do have one question for you, though: is it not simply possible that Hitler was incompetent? He was a masterful orator, so he would have been very good at making luck seem like a plan. Is it not possible that he was was giving the impression of strong leadership when, in fact, things were just somehow stumbling in the right direction?
James, i think you make a good point. Jung was criticized for being a Nazi sympathizer when he declared Hitler was the mouth piece of the German people. He explained later that wasn’t his point at all, but that Hitler articulated the sentiments of a growing movement in Germany. If not for Hitler, there would inevitably have been someone to take his place.
The insane aren’t marked by a lack of intelligence. They are marked by a pattern of doing illogical, irrational things. They lose the connection between cause and effect, which is an iffy statement because a lot of people have that problem, but to give it a bit more perspective: a sane man will realize the fire in his trash basket was caused when he accidentally threw a lighted match into it, whereas an insane man will believe the trash basket intentionally caught on fire to harm him. Hitler was insane. He had cunning. He had drive. He had ambition, but all of it was used to drive his country into insanity.
Karla: I’ve never felt the “insane Hitler” hypothesis merited serious consideration. Yes, Hitler was a megalomaniac in the sense that he had extremely grandiose schemes, but he was about as far from insane as Alexander of Macedon was when he set out to conquer the world. Hitler was evil, manipulative, and a tremendous opportunist, but so are most politicians to a greater or lesser degree. What he had was some amount of strategic talent (Clark is one author who – while clearly anti-Nazi – openly says that Hitler was more often correct than his generals were) and a sense that he was the centre of the universe. Even towards the end of his life, he was still given to flashes of reality more acute than those of his acolytes who were urging him to withdraw to Bavaria or Austria and carry on the struggle from there. Hitler’s problem was possible syphilis, possible Parkinsonism, and very most definitely neurological trauma following the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on him. He also had a drug problem due to the daily injections of “medicines” pumped into him by the quack Theodor Morell. Hitler sacked Morell in the spring of 1945, saying that he no longer needed drugs to see him through, and in the last days of his life was definitely detoxified – cold turkey.
James: I’ve stated at the start of the article that these are my conclusions. In fact, i haven’t found anyone else who’s come to similar conclusions, but from the available material on Hitler – and there is so much of it out there – I feel that mine is a reasonable conclusion to draw. (I’m also aware that I’m not a professional historian, but that shouldn’t be an automatic disqualifier.) What I’m looking for is a serious discussion on this topic with input from those who are qualified to discuss it; the academicians.
I think Hitler’s political career was very strongly influenced by methamphetamine. I believe his soldiers were also taking meth.
So, on the one hand we have soldiers that don’t sleep, don’t eat, don’t get tired, hungry, bored or lonely and take a stimulant that induces powerful euphoria on a daily basis, in a mood of war. (ie. running around killing people)
I imagine war would be exceptionally fun if you’re on meth. But not so much after a while.
Then we have opposing combatants that aren’t on crazy stimulants, and actually feel fear, fatigue, hunger, etc.
I think it’s only natural that the meth guys would seem to be winning at first, but then they’d lose their minds and get really fucked up. (Think sniper on meth sitting motionless for five days straight, taking out hundreds of enemy troops before he hallucinates that he’s being eaten by toads.)
I also think it’s natural that a politician on meth would outmaneuver sober politicians at first. But amphetamines take their toll eventually, no matter who you are.
I don’t think Hitler and Alexander of Macedonia are in the same league.
I see Alexander as more akin to Marcus Aurelius, Diocletian, Julian and maybe even Belisarius.
Hitler seems somehow associated with the likes of Julius Caesar, Justinian and Tiberius to me.
Also the fact that Alexander succeeded where Hitler failed.
I want to point out that before WWI Poland didn’t exist as a state, having been devided and occupied by Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary for 120 years at the start of the war. Thus it was not a land locked country and the corridor was not added to the territory. Poland as a independent state was resurrected in 1918 as a result of WWI.
Hi,
I read your article, or essay, or whatever you want to call it. I’m impressed.
Do you think heis failure stemmed from his overconfidence and boredom. This will sound silly, but when I play Civilization 4, and sometimes I am bored, I just declare war to entertain me. Not saying Hitler didn’t really want to conquer but when you know you can defeat someone you take your time. I certainly have while playing my game. I think it’s the turtle and the hare store again.
On a more serious note… Do you think a lot of his poor decisions (which do seem like he wanted to lose the war) came from his serious mental medical conditions. Supposedly he had Parkinson’s and used drugs heavily, especially in his later days. I think that this aided in his destruction. What do you think? Do you guys and gals think this could have had something to do with all of this?
Just read this and I’m so glad to see someone questioning hitlers true motives. see to me to kill 70 plus million people , to completely bring a whole continent to rubble is the epitome of a sadist. And hitler was certainly that. What I wonder is not only did he intend to loose the war , but did he really believe in the ideology he promoted ? for example by feeding this idea that your countrymen believe in ,secures just current position of power. I wonder if he just intended on being evil and destroying as much of the world as possible, and didn’t have any ideology at all . first there is Dunkirk , then there is an irrational focus on Russia , and of course declaring war on America . That sounds to me like the mind of madman and I can’t be sure but when all this accumulates , surely he knew his time was up. Which makes me conclude that hitler always intended to loose , he just wanted to create as much destruction as possible while he could, because he was a psychopath with an incredible amount of power. Great read fella and sorry for my grammar Iv written this on my iPod.
hitler did not shoot himself he always had a plan to escape from the very begining he was living in argentina after the war
The idea that Hitler had a death wish is not new. It is advanced, for example, by J.P. Stern in ‘Hitler: The Fuhrer & The People’ (who himself comments that the thesis isn’t particularly novel). Of course originality concerning Hitler isn’t something that’s particularly encouraged. Indeed, since hate has become a crime there is one figure whom it is obligatory to hate. Along with this hatred comes the ability to understand the springs and motives of his psyche. Thus we see, for example, Joachim Fest’s uncanny ability, in ‘The Face of the Third Reich’, to divine Hitler’s thoughts with first hand acquaintance. Such a technique, however, is more akin to fiction than history. History, it has been said, is written by the victors; the pity is they have chosen to write it as a fairy story.
Accurate conclusion (Hitler deliberately lost the war), but faulty assertions (Nazism as a system offers nothing, has no future, Hitler was crazy).
If you understand the hidden history of the world, the inter-related secret societies of the “elite bloodline” and the occult…Hitler’s Thule society being connected, through the Palladium Rite, to other secret societies and the mafia (Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Golden Hermetic Dawn, Skull & Bones); their aim being the creation of a New World Order through a series of crises, the Hegelian Dialectic (order out of chaos); eventually subordinating us all to the fiat banking and drug cartel centered in the City of London (the cartel that funded, not only the Nazis, but the Bolsheviks as well )and its creation, the Zionist state of Israel.
A series of wars that were never meant to be won, conflicts required to pit people against each other, weaken the resolve of the people, the nation states of the world, reducing, subordinating nations to a fascist global governance. You can now see that WWII was just another stage of this process, along with other wars such as the Vietnam war, culminating in the so-called “war on terror” the clash of civilizations, that will eventually weaken and destroy nation states, democratic and religious institutions (Muslim vs. Christian); along with the concocted economic debacle now threatening the world, leading to a fascist global governance, with the occult as the religion of the NWO
Consistent with this idea of cooperating secret societies, I no longer believe Hitler died in 1945, but survived until 1962. If you read “Grey Wolf – The Escape of Adolf Hitler”, it makes a very plausible case that Hitler was allowed to escape, through the 33 degree Mason, Allen Dulles (OSS) who became the head of the CIA after Truman signed the 1947 National Security Act. If you recalled your hidden history, it was Dulles who allowed former Nazis (Operation Paperclip) like Josef Mengele, to come and work in the US.
absolutely fascinating. i never considered that hitler deliberately lost because of fears of future failures. and i cannot decide if it was sabotage or blunder that cost him decision after decision.. and yet i wonder how he could condemn his own ppl and soldiers to certain death time and time again without some hidden agenda. why would he do that? i love conspiracy theories, but i flat out refuse to believe that he went into the invasion of poland and subsequent war purposefully carrying out an illuminati agenda. and i know he was supposedly receiving injections that contained meth, and yes, at first that could have worked in his favor, but not for long. i still see that he was probably brilliant, not uninformed, and knew what the outcome of his ‘bad’ decisions would be, i mean he could not have been incompetent based on listening to him talk, reading his writings, he was competent, but there is just something elusive about why he would just deliberately march his beloved country, people, and militia into the fire.
I think the admin of this website is genuinely working hard in support of his
website, as here every information is quality based data.
I think the admins of this website are awesome too.
“he took over Germany, made himself dictator
He was voted in.
, militarised the country,
ONLY …AFTER….the French, Poles, Czechs, Engl. and the U.S. attacked Germany.
tried to wipe out the Jews, Communists (as the Jews and Communists were often the same people,
The jew/Communists/unions were rioting trying to bring down the legal gov.
The Communists had already taken over Russia, torturing, raping and slaughtering their way into power. The Germans were seeing this, wanted none of it.
this was kind of like killing two birds with one stone), Gypsies, Social Democrats, trade unionists and anyone else who even thought of disagreeing with him,
See above. The German People, did NOT want Communism.
and then went and started (well, not technically, since Britain and France actually declared war on Germany,
They were invading and attacking Germany First!
They declared and abut he was directly responsible for creating the circumstances for said declaration) a war with half the world
Germany was attacked by 56 nations, it was defending itself against savage WOLVES!
that ended in his shooting himself in a bunker while Russian shells were falling outside the door.
Hitler allegedly killed 6 million jews…which turned out to be 1.5, anyway.
But the jew/Communists/Soviets, tortured, raped, slaughtered over
100 MILLION non-jews.
Are jews more important than non-jews who died?
What was the point of the war, anyway, when the ENTIRE E. Eur. was given over to WORSE, the Soviets? The war was supposedly to defend Pol. & Czechvk, but it was given to the Communists, at the end. THEN was the REAL… HELL ON EARTH!
NOT under Hitler, but under Stalin!
Bonnie,
Yes, The Jews are more important.
Thank you.
There are so many lies on this thread I don’t know which ones to refute.
Stalin was definitely planning an attack on Europe – loads of evidence for this.
Yes, Hitler made many ridiculous decisions and it is no wonder that Germany lost because of this.
But Stalin would never have granted peace negotiations after stalingrad.
there are other claims in this thread.
The weirdest claim is that Hitler ordered the Holocaust. Do Jews run this forum?
Look – either have an open historical inquiry or admit that you are Jews / libtards.
One more thing = the Germans DID have an atomic programme –
that’s why Patton was sent south instead of to Berlin
use your heads, historians
Ive for a long time believed it certain hitler chose to lose the war and that is the reason they lost but obviously people generally reject such because they need to see the allies as heroes but I actually believe Hitler consiously wanted to lose ww2 and I quote a key comment of his as evidence “I will always have three levels of motive one for the public one for my intimates and one for myself”which I interpret as meaning he kept his real motives to himself ie they must of been horrific for him to do such ie obviously had he made it clear to all he wanted Germany to lose he wouldnt of lasted ten minutes and hed of then lost any chance to achieve them we see in his nero orders the real hitler someone who is against all mankind especially his own race Hitler is a warning to all there is no limit to how low a person can sink
Ive thought for many years that hitler wanted to lose the war but whenever you suggest such you just get shunned or told your mad to my mind the most convincing evidence he wanted to fail was his approach to the ME262
Many pre 1975 military history books were ignorant of the advantage the Allies had due to code breaking the Enigma machine early in the war. How could the Germans have never found this out? Why did this remarkable knowledge not speed up the Allied victory by a year or two at least?
My list of deliberate Hitler blunders is in rough chronological order – but more by subject. An asterisk indicates the decisions which were suspicious in the sense as being war losing decisions. One concludes that the Germans were such good fighters and so well led locally that they were very hard to beat anywhere in both world wars – but were always outnumbered. Ironically it was Hitler that gave Germans this belief in their own invincibility. So it is important not to get lost by mentioning all the things where Hitler helped the war effort, eg backing Guderian in the May 1940 Northern France campaign and shelving the Schlieffen plan which would probably have lost Germany the war as in WWI. Hitler wanted to lose but he wanted 5 or 6 years to get Israel going, Communism everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe and to maximise the damage done to Western democratic countries and white nations in general. Promoting Speer was another brilliant decision, prolonging the war – yet using German women as workers would have been more effective than slave foreigners, as the English were doing from the start.
In Mein Kampf (English translation) Hitler called “subhuman” all Slavic people, ignoring tens of millions of potential allies like the Christian Russians, Belorussians and Ukrainians who hated Bolshevism and the Jews that ran their countries and the slave Gulags. He called the USA a mongrel nation, alienating that vast country also.
He allowed the best and brightest Jews to leave who worked relentlessly against Germany from then on particularly those in the USA, and still do 80 years later. Many of these Jews helped to demand of Roosevelt, and to personally build, the first atom bomb which was always intended to be dropped on Germany – not Japan. Some of these Jew refugees were Soviet spies who stole the bomb for Stalin.
By killing some Jews he ensured the myth of the six million (as prophesised by Jews) would go down in history and force the Cosmopolitan Jews to leave the European cities they loved and live in a stony desert surrounded by hostile Arabs. Hitler was a Zionist, based on his actions.
Mein Kampf and his second book are misleading. What he said and wrote and later did were not consistent. Eg the military attacks on France and England, the alliance with the Soviet Union, allowing Jews to leave. He did attack the Soviets as promised but made sure his invasion would fail.
He appointed von Ribbentrop as UK Ambassador, who arrogantly offended the British at every opportunity. I.e. Hitler wanted to annoy the English rather than win them over to neutrality.
* He built a Navy unsuitable for challenging the Royal Navy. His submarine war efforts were a copy of WWI which also failed. * He built no invasion force capable of crossing the English channel – only 22 miles wide, and he never intended to do this.
* His newly built Air Force also was not suitable for fighting the British, or even the Soviet Union which vastly outnumbered the Luftwaffe (e.g. 20,000 Soviet planes fighting 3,000 German planes). The Royal Air Force defeated him over the English skies. His bombers had a tiny payload intended for tactical support of ground forces. * His jets could have been a war winning weapon even near the end of the war – but Hitler insisted these very fast and small planes should only be used as bombers. * The choice of the former fighter ace and drug addict Goering was a fatal decision in terms of winning an air war. Hitler maintained a loyalty to incompetent senior leaders like Goering throughout the war. Yet he would fire a competent leader like Guderian (twice) for telling him the truth. The Battle of Britain made no sense at all. Completely lacking was any serious attempt to defeat the British.
His expensive rockets were only of benefit to the winners of the war – not the Germans. The bomb payload was tiny and the high speed of the rocket meant the 1 ton bomb exploded underground with minimal damage. * He located the labs at Peenemunde then Nordhausen in East Germany – ensuring that the Soviets would capture much of the scientists, rockets and equipment – not the Western Allies.
* The “miracle” of Dunkirk is evidence that Hitler wanted the English to save face and win the war. The English in the UK were then almost without any weapons. An immediate make shift invasion after capturing the British at Dunkirk would probably have succeeded and worth the high risk. Less than the risk at Stalingrad and Tunisia to name two later battles. In any case had he captured the British then an armistice or peace may have been possible. He sabotaged his best chance to win the war against the British.
Hitler said many times he loved the British Empire. His war destroyed it, with the help of the depressive drunkard Churchill.
Why did he attack France at all, when his object was the East, as shown in the attack on Poland (and his book). The French and British were reluctant to attack and start a land war with Germany (Phoney War). The UK and France both hated and feared the Soviet Union, as Hitler claimed to. Only Hitler’s strange decisions could have forged an alliance between these natural enemies. From 1939 he always demanded too much when negotiating knowing that this would lead to diplomatic failure, I.e. war – after the brilliance of Munich and his Moscow Pact that is. * He wanted war – a war he could never have hoped to win in 1939. * In June 1941 he started a new war on a Second Front he had to lose, or stalemate at best. * Then another impossible war (a Third Front) in December 1941. Hitler always chose weak allies and strong enemies.
He could not defeat a tiny island – so he attacked the largest country in the world while that island still fought him – with the help of the entire British Empire – which he said he loved. He knew that Napoleon made the same blunder. In 1812 none of the distant colonies helped the British fight Napoleon. Hitler knew what would happen due to his WWI experience, facing the British Empire in Flanders.
He did not pressure the Japanese to help him destroy Russia – which would have solved Japanese supply problems (such as oil) without their reckless war against the USA and Britain – another guaranteed loss for the Axis. The Soviet Union was a hated pariah nation which should have been invaded by both Axis partners and broken up to share the spoils. USA, UK, France would not have liked this – but perhaps better than the mass murdering Bolshevism. They had their own empires already. Hitler could have pretended to “free’ these oppressed people as the USA has been doing for more than a century. Hitler was intentionally a terrible diplomat.
* When Japan attacked Pearl Harbour Hitler declared war on the USA unilaterally. He got nothing from the Japanese, having asked for nothing. The USA would not have fought Germany except in the Atlantic until the Japanese were defeated say 4 years later. Plus this new war weakened the British dramatically e.g. Australian troops were recalled from North Africa. So Hitler decided to further disperse the German military and Navy even though the high point had already been crested. The UK was too weak to invade Europe without US naval ships and marine combat personnel. Of the 5 Normandy beaches in 1944, the USA were allotted 2 of them. They were also in overall command with the snail’s pace Eisenhower in charge (who was more interested in banging his young Irish driver for as long as possible – a long war was a good war for him – and Hitler).
* Admiral Canaris the head of the Abwehr (spy agency) was a traitor and an Allied spy. It is not possible that Hitler did not know this. He would have been informed of this via Himmler and perhaps others. Many of the rival fiefdoms maintained their own spy networks in competition with each other.
German espionage, spy catching (e.g. Richard Sorge) and code breaking efforts were weak compared with Allied successes. German hubris or Hitler treason?
Hitler’s six week delay in attacking Russia was not necessary. He invaded Yugoslavia and Greece and as usual the Allies were trounced by the Germans. But those hilly and backward countries were of no danger to Germany as the slow 1944 invasion via Italy later proved.
* German Armies were close to Moscow when Hitler diverted his tank forces to capture Ukraine instead. Then the “unimportant” Moscow was attacked for a second time with worn out tanks and exhausted crews. The first time, it would have fallen without Hitler’s sabotaging order. Which may have brought Japan in on his side and Pearl Harbour shelved.
Hitler then blamed and fired his able Field Marshals for his own blunders and replaced them with younger ambitious men – who would be afraid to question his orders as the Old School had done. Guderian was also fired.
The 1942 attack on the Caucasus was unrealistic. While this was happening, Rommel was winning in North Africa. * Hitler starved Rommel of support when he was invading Egypt. *When Rommel was losing and retreating, Hitler sent about 200,000 fresh German soldiers who were all captured in Tunisia – a loss as serious as Stalingrad which is ignored by most “documentaries” as it is not visually interesting like the Stalingrad winter. These 200,000 troops could (earlier) have captured Egypt, the Suez Canal, Palestine and Syria, linking up with the Germans in Russia.
* Hitler refused to allow von Paulus to break out of Stalingrad to the West. Which could have been done easily while von Manstein was attacking from the West. Hitler intentionally threw away the 6th Army when he could have saved it. Surely Hitler lost more “face” this way than by allowing the army to retreat and fight again? The perceived wisdom is instead that the name of the city explains it all. Could Hitler have had an operatic Valhalla plot always in mind – 1945 to be the Twilight Of The Gods?
*The 1943 pincer attack at Kursk was the most obvious counter attack in history and bound to fail. This battle alone lost the war for Germany by destroying his tank forces.
Hitler did everything he could to allow the Communists from the East to overrun as many Central and Western European countries as possible who then installed mostly Jewish Marxist dictators – people that Hitler claimed to hate.
* He withdrew troops and tanks from the East to attack in the West in the Battle of the Bulge – a waste of resources that Hitler knew could not succeed. Unless his intention was to allow the Bolsheviks into Prussia and Germany before the Allies could get there from the West. That is exactly what happened. Any normal pro European leader (say de Gaulle or Churchill) would have delayed the Soviets while retreating without fighting in the West. Perhaps even moving his entire army to the East in a strong defence and allowing the Allies a cake walk as far as mid Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia from June 1944. Only a Hitler would do as he did – a traitor to Germany and to Europe and a lover of Communism. Or an Anarchist perhaps. Hitler claimed his decisions would have the Allies and Soviets at each others throats – what he did achieved the opposite. Stalin would have been furious if Hitler had allowed the Allies to move quickly to Central Europe.
Once the war was lost – by 1943 – Hitler’s actions in prolonging the war against the Western Allies reveal his true pro Soviet motives. The Allies brutal “Unconditional Surrender” Clause led to the deaths of millions more and Hitler cannot be blamed for this.
* Hitler ordered the mistreatment of subjugated peoples which ensured a strong Resistance and Partisan warfare against his own soldiers, who were hugely outnumbered by their subjects. Lasting Empires are mostly built on cooperation, diplomacy and mutual benefits – not brutality.
Hitler in 1945 personally ordered the destruction of all German industry and power stations, consistent with the then secret US Morgenthau Plan.
Some claim that the shadowy Bormann was a Soviet spy. If so, Hitler would have known as Canaris and Himmler would both have told him.
* Hitler declined to conscript German women as a factory labour force even though he knew the British were doing this even in 1939. This decision alone was enough to lose the war. Just to “protect” German women, who he allowed to be raped and murdered by Soviet soldiers in the last months of the war? It took Goebbels to declare Total War in 1942 – where was Hitler on this vital issue? Did he ever want to win?
Hitler made no attempt to capture Gibraltar eg via paratroops. He also could have marched through Spain – it is not likely that Franco would have ordered his soldiers to fight the Germans. Hitler only had scruples about neutrality with ungrateful “friends” like Franco.
Hitler also made no attempt to invade Malta which was essential to win the war in North Africa. He was hardly interested in the North African campaign and was there just to bail out Mussolini. Rommel did as well as he did by disobeying orders from above, who gave him very little support.
At least one of the many who tried to assassinate Hitler pre 1939 was not executed until 1945. Perhaps many of these assassination attempts never happened at all. To build the Fuhrer myth. The July 20th bomb “shredded” Hitlers trousers as proved by released offical photos – yet Hitler had no leg injuries. He may not have been in the bombed room at all.
Overall, no man has done more harm to the present and future of the White Race than Adolf Hitler. He is so hated by the Jews (that run the news media and Hollywood) that the many truths he wrote in Mein Kampf are now treated as lies. Hitler was against abortion (and birth control), therefore abortion and birth control are good (but only for whites). He was against homosexuality – so that is good too. He lamented the Jewish bankers domination – therefore this domination is good. He was against race mixing – therefore race mixing is good. And so on ad infinitum.
Actually, something a lot of people also forget is that Hitler worked with the Haganah during the war, giving them gold, munitions, and weapons in return for information about potential insurrections in Germany that might undermine his authority. Also, since there were less than 4 million Jews in Nazi held territories during the war, and the incinerators and other cremation methods couldn’t have burnt more than maybe 1.3 million during their operation, the numbers given for the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust are suspect. It is thought by some that between these two facts, and several other occurrences, such as German soldiers being tortured into confessions regarding war crimes, that Hitler may have been operating at the behest of the wealthier Jews, who left Germany under The Haavara Agreement of 1933.
have you considered this possibility? that hitler intentionally lost because of his experience as a soldier in WWI. by wars end he was a bitter and broken man. he blamed the jews for surrendering to the allies. by extension he also blamed germany itself. hitler’s main object after the war was to punish germany and germans for failing the sacrifices made by the german military.
if this was his true objective then many of his actions make sense. build up germany. build up the german military. build up the german people themselves! after this building process the destruction began. starting a two front war. not allowing troops to retreat. failure to use german weaponry to their full potential. devoting huge resources, men and material to the ‘final solution’. if hitler ultimately wished for the total destruction of germany as revenge for WWI, it makes sense.