Could Hitler have succeeded in World War II if…

In My Humble Opinion
1

Instead of devoting so much in the way of resources to murdering Jews, he had focused everything they had on the war?

I’m watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann film (it’s on Netflix if you’re interested), and I’m thinking about the crazy resources, in terms of money, men, time, transport, etc. devoted to murdering every Jew they could lay their hands on. Then I’m thinking, he came pretty damn close to getting what he wanted in terms of the war. If he hadn’t divided everything like that, maybe he could’ve won? Then he could’ve gone about murdering all the Jews.

Anyone have an opinion about this?

2

I feel that at a strategic level, the genocide had a fairly small impact on the war.

I think Hitler’s bigger mistake (in a strategic sense not a moral one) was murdering so many Soviets.

Stalin was a brutal dictator who had killed millions of Soviets. It would have been easy for the Germans to pretend their invasion was a “liberation”. They could have put forth propaganda saying that their enemy was the Soviet regime not the Soviet people. They could have turned their invasion into a civil war with millions of Soviets fighting alongside the Germans. Then after winning the war and securing control of the country, the Germans could have started implementing their real plans.

Instead Hitler started immediately acting like the Soviet Union was a conquered territory (before he had actually finished conquering it) and treating the people brutally. By default, the Soviets rallied to Stalin.

3

Yeah. Stalin was a murdering bastard too, but he was their murdering bastard, not some foreign murdering bastard.

4

Yes, if Hitler focused a little more resources on building airplanes he could have won Europe. The Messerschmitt Me 262 was the world’s first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft. It was introduced in April 1944. If it had been introduced in 1943 the war in Europe likely would’ve had a drastically different outcome.

5

It wasn’t that Hitler got distracted from his plan to conquer Europe by wasting his resources on the Holocaust, the Holocaust was the plan and from the Nazi perspective fighting the UK and western Europe was the distraction.

EDIT: Destroy the Soviet Union, wipe out the Jews and enslave the Slavs. That was Hitler’s big plan all along. Clear out eastern Europe for Aryan colonies.

6

One thing was that the genocide (and all the antisemitism that preceded it) drove away a lot of Jewish scientists who might otherwise have been loyal Germans working for the Reich in certain promising areas of weapons development.

7

I don’t think there is any scenario when the outcome of the war changes post-43 because of an increased focus on aircraft. Hitler’s goose was cooked by then but perhaps the length of the war is extended in that scenario.

I think he could have succeeded if a serious attempt to capture the BEF troops were made in May 1940. No “Dynamo” makes a peace deal with Hitler far more likely, therefore no BoB and no immediate second front for Hitler.

That gives him the full might of the Luftwaffe to deploy elsewhere and breathing space to develop it further. That, rather than any single aircraft, would be a huge boost.

8

Yeah the only real legitimate time Hitler had at winning the war was a seperate peace in 1940 with England. The Soviet Union and especially the United States just had too many men and resources to deal with. Hitler could then try to take out the Soviet Union without the constant distractions of the British pestering him on the North African, Southern Europe and Middle Eastern Fronts. Even then, the Soviets just had too many resources for Germany to knock over within a year like the original plan.

9

Overall the Holocaust was a minor sideshow logistically speaking.

Hitler lost WW-II the day he invaded Poland with the intent to keep going… There was simply no way Germany had enough resources and manpower to control all the lands Hitler wanted to control. To “win” he’d have had to stop invading places he could not later control AND also stop before he’d pissed off enough of the rest of the world that they’d unite against him.

IMO he could have taken rather friendless Poland, stopped right there, and lived to a ripe old age spouting his nonsense. Once he moved beyond that he was screwed. It would take the rest of the world a while to build up the necessary forces and deploy them, but his goose was already in the oven when he entered the Low Counties.

10

The Holocaust was not a bug, it was a feature. Had Hitler written down his war aims, ridding the world of Jews and Communists would have been top on this list. To imagine the war in Europe without the Holocaust, you must imagine a war without Hitler and the Nazis.

As LSLGuy pointed out, the Holocaust did not place great demands on the Germans. Killing unarmed people is easy and the mechanization of the process reduces costs considerably. The war in the East killed thousands of Germans each day and destroyed mountains of production. Not so with the destruction of racial minorities and the infirm.

All in all, once the Americans entered the war (or perhaps before) the Germans were toast.

Hitler simply did not think things through. He was motivated by hubris and emotion. All in all, the Allies were lucky he was in charge.

I recommend the very readable Hitler in Hell, it is the most painless way to begin to understand the man and his motivations. Get it on Kindle of course. You don’t want anyone to see the title on your coffee table.

11

The key is

knocking out Britain

Japan only attacking European colonies and/or the USSR

Do that, and a slightly earlier Barbarossa takes Moscow and the USSR falls.

Yeah the US has a mighty economy, but a transatlantic liberation of Europe is completely impossible

12

Whether or not Germany could have invaded Britain successfully or Japan played a different game is debatable.

Nazism = lebensraum + antisemitism
You cant really have a meaningful “what if” removing these.

13

Yeah there is no way the Holocaust was the deciding factor in who won the war. It may have hastened the end of the war (for all the reasons listed in the OP) but there is 0% chance it changed the outcome.

There are only two of Hitler’s decisions that decided the outcome:

  • Declaring war on America after Pearl Harbor.
  • Invading Russia.

Both of these go the other way and Germany wins. Either of them on their own potentially changes the outcome, but both of them definitely do.

You could argue the failures during the battle of Britain and Dunkirk, that prevented a German invasion (and allowed the British to keep their army). But thats a lot more debatable.

14

In the alternative, if Hitler simply ignored England and kept repeating that he was happy to control the continent and had no designs on the UK, AND had not tried to strangle UK with submarine warfare, then the UK & the USA might have sat things out for quite a while longer.

Meanwhile, as @nicky suggests, had Hitler started in on the Soviet Union right after Poland and before wasting a lot of men and materiel on taking and holding France and the Low Countries, they’d have had a better chance at taking Moscow.

Even that does not guarantee the disintegration of the SU. The government could have moved east, waited for another winter and lots of guerilla warfare to further sap Nazi power, then come back full force.

Now today we see that Russia is having a hard time subduing Ukraine given the help Ukraine is getting from 3rd parties. Imagine for a minute that last year instead of the war we really have, Ukraine had tried to invade and subdue Putinist Russia with little / no help from like-minded countries. That was the move Hitler tried to pull off.

There’s megalomania, and then there’s mega-mega-gigalomania. Hitler was definitely the latter.

15

Contributors to the Manhattan project included famous scientists driven out of Germany.

16

As well as the original calculation that started the process by showing a nuclear bomb could be created with a small amount of enriched uranium. That calculation was never repeated by scientists in Germany so they were still thinking in terms of tons of uranium when news reached them (in British captivity) of Hiroshima.

Though as other posters have said to prevent that exodus would not have required a single decision going differently but an entirely different political organization in charge, anti-Semitism was a defining characteristic of Nazism

17

The Me-262 had many technical problems, and it’s highly unlikely it could have been introduced in substantial numbers before it actually was.

The extent to which Germany was outnumbered by the Allies is hard to overstate. They were going to be crushed. They were much closer to winning World War I than they ever were the sequel.

18

Note many fought for the Axis anyway.

I have been doing grand strategic WWII games for 4 decades now (and am currently making a fine scale 12 mile hex European map for one game). The temptation is to think that, for want of a nail, the Axis could have done this, that, and the other thing, and won the whole shebang. For a wargame you can’t make it TOO one-sided, or people won’t play it (note, a gaming buddy and I discussed this topic just last night), so I’ve had to give the Axis a ghost of a chance more than they had. But the Axis were never much of a threat to control the world.

Oh, you can point to the huge swaths of territory that they controlled at their high-water marks, but that doesn’t show just how fragile said perimeters were, long before they finally cracked and collapsed. A lot of ink, and blood, has been spilled on the Atlantic convoy & Russian theatres, but UK was never in any huge danger of subs knocking them out of the war, not once US-made ships helped ensure more builds than sinkings.

The Russians likewise were going to be ok-it was a minor miracle that the Wehrmacht made it as close to Moscow as they did given their logistical shortcomings, but they could never take it in 1941 (at best it would have become the same kind of meatgrinder that Stalingrad did a year later, not a quick parade down Red Square and that’s that). In 1942 the Russians played the Germans like a fiddle, yielding ground without the huge prisoner grabs of the previous year, accumulated their forces, and waited until the right moment to spring their little trap at Stalingrad.

It it tempting to think that the Japanese could have won at Midway or in another big fleet clash, thus forcing the Allies to the table. That ignores the 2 dozen Essex class carriers which were then being built, and that the US still lost 4 of its first 6 modern carriers within the first year of the war anyway. Not losing the 4 IJN carriers at Midway likely would have prolonged things by 6 months at best-they were going to run out of pilots before they ran out of carriers in any event. Japan tried to invade China, but lacked the manpower and logistical means to conquer such a huge country.

So, the superweapons. They all had bugs and/or were not effective from a cost-benefit standpoint, or were just too late to make a difference. The 262 couldn’t have become operational sooner than it did because of its fragile engines; the XXI submarine needed a lot of teething time to remedy all the bugs that a new weapon system invariably has. The V1/V2 programs were resource sinks that had little effect on the Allies’ pace. The Germans built far too few of their supertanks, and they had bugs too.

19

Except for the small fact that he won. On paper the chance of defeating the western allies seems tiny. But that only shows the weakness of on-paper analysis. If Hitler doesn’t bring the US and the Soviets into it he’s won. There is zero chance of Britain alone reversing the situation (and only a fairly slim chance of them remaining in the fight at all once the rest of Europe is united against them and theres no US aid)

20

To answer the OP, I think that if the Nazis had not carried out the Holocaust, they do free up some resources, but still, not enough to stave off the double onslaught of the Allies from the west and the Soviets from the east. It’s still a numbers game that Hitler couldn’t win.

Cutting out the Holocaust might have prolonged the war, inflicted some more casualties on the Soviets, Brits and Americans, but the end is the same.