I love these kinds of debates - iron-clad, air-tight arguments irrefutably presented - on both sides.
My understanding is that the three main blunders committed by Herr Schicklegruber were
[ul][li]Not continuing to push at Dunkirk. He paused to regroup, rather uncharacteristically. If he had continued, he had a good chance to capture or kill some hundreds of thousands of British troops.[/li][li]Not concentrating on military targets in the Battle of Britain. If he had been able to knock out or significantly down-grade the RAF capabilities…[/li][li]Attacking the Soviet Union before he was ready. [/ul][/li]So I will assume Hitler didn’t do any of these things. If he was able to refrain from these blunders, and didn’t make any other new ones, I think he had a rather good chance of conquering Great Britain.
So there he is, in control of most of Europe. The US and Japan are at war. I seriously doubt if Hitler could have stopped himself from attacking the USSR then. He was as anti-Slavic and anti-Marxist as he was anti-Semitic, and he wanted the Soviets as slave labor after he wiped out all the Jews.
So Hitler would still have gotten bogged down in the Soviet mud. He still was going to treat the Slavs in the parts of the USSR he conquered like shit, instead of treating them decently and hoping they would join him in fighting the Bolsheviks. The US would still have formed the alliance with Stalin, supplied them with arms and weapons and assisted them in fighting the Eastern front, and I can’t imagine the USA would have been unable to defeat Japan in the Pacific while helping the Soviets keep the pressure on from the East.
It would not have made the war last appreciably longer, but it would have meant that a lot more people would have died. The minute the US developed the atom bomb, the chance for victory by the Nazis was over. Taking out Berlin and/or Hamburg would have decapitated the Nazi war effort as effectively as taking out Tokyo, and if the Nazis were not as obviously going to be defeated as the Japanese were in August 1945, there would have been even more pressure to use the bomb on Germany as there was to use it on the Japanese.
There just wasn’t any opportunity for the Nazis to take out the American industrial capability, which was the decisive factor in WWII. Germany had no strategic bombers capable of crossing the Atlantic, or bases near enough to North America to be able to downgrade our production capabilities. Even if Hitler refrained from declaring war on the US after Dec. 7, 1941, Roosevelt would have kept trying to provoke the Nazis into declaring war, or simply done so himself.
Hitler’s only chance of long-term success ended when he invaded Poland. He was a politician of evil genius, but as a strategic thinker, he was an excellent paper-hanger.
Regards,
Shodan