Could Hitler have succeeded in World War II if…

In My Humble Opinion
21

Yes, he temporarily defeated France & the Low Countries.

Had he quit with he and Mussolini’s Italy in control of western continental Europe while UK, US, & SU sat out he could have sat there on those holdings for maybe 10-15 years before the cost of subduing all those restive populations became unbearable and the various guerilla actions to oust the invaders got out of control.

Hell, the 1970s / 1980s Soviets couldn’t hold onto eastern Europe which was smaller than what the Nazi’s wanted in western & central Europe. And Eastern Europe was more Slavic than western Europe was Nazi / Aryan / Germanic. And 1980s SU was vastly more powerful and populous than 1940s Nazi Germany.

The era of permanent long-term conquest ended with the industrial revolution. Certain dictators and wannabe dictators just haven’t quite twigged to that reality yet.

And this is the real point IMO. You say “when all the rest of Europe is united against them” Whereas I say "when most of Western Europe is actively or sullenly trying to throw off the Nazi yoke while the Nazis have to fight off the UK/US/SU once any/all of those decide to act while simultaneously continuing on a daily basis to struggle to hold down the countries they already occupy and administrate.


My bottom line IMO:
Yes, a country totally can force regime change in another country if they’re big / bold / ruthless enough. But they can’t control what happens next, at least not long-term. Absorbing land and populace so they become sources of increased strength, not crippling cancers on your own power is 19th Century thinking.

22

Germany’s strategic problems were more due to a lack of resources and factories than a lack of scientists.

Suppose all the refugee scientists had remained in Germany rather than fleeing to Britain or America. Would Germany have been the ones dropping an atomic bomb in 1945? Probably not. Even if they had the knowledge of how to build a bomb, they lacked the resources to actually build them.

23

I’m not sure this is true. The era of far flung colonies might be over but annexing neighboring countries has generally been fairly successful unless a major power got involved to stop it. E.g. Tibet, Western Sahara, East Timor, etc.

It’s just its been generally frowned upon in the post WW2 era(as those are the kind of small wars that easily turn into big wars, and there a ton of nukes around now) so it’s rarer than it used to be.

24

The V-2 was pointing in the direction of future warfare. But it wasn’t a good weapon in World War II.

The V-2 delivered 1000 kg (2200 lbs) of explosives to its target. Once. A B-17 could deliver 2200 kg (4800 lbs) of explosives to its target. And then do it again the next day.

Or look at tanks. People argue the German Tigers were the best tanks of the war. Even if that’s true, it’s on an individual tank-vs-tank comparison. But wars are won by tanks not by a tank. Germany produced less than fourteen hundred Tiger I’s and less than five hundred Tiger II’s during the war. The most common German tank was the Panzer IV, of which Germany built less than nine thousand. The Americans built forty-nine thousand Shermans and the Soviets built eighty-four thousand T-34’s.

25

If he hadn’t attacked the Russians, they might very well have attacked him (especially once he was distracted in North Africa and the Balkans).

26

I think the counter example that shows this is not the case is what happened in eastern Europe post WW2. The Soviet union absorbed a few places outright (e.g. Kaliningrad) and ensured the rest had friendly puppet regimes, and the system lasted for most of the 20th century.

27

I suppose at that point we’d be arguing debating about what “permanent” or “long-term” means.

The SU controlled eastern Europe for ~40 years; 50 if we want to be generous. And at the first opportunity they all scrammed in the other direction. Ditto Central Asia. Reinforcing the idea that the SU may have had control, but they had not assimilated those places.

The only exceptions are the countries ruled by strongmen propped up by Moscow. And of those who’ve had strongman turnover in the last 10-15 years, they too have been edging away from Putin’s / Russia’s orbit.

28

Since we’re playing “what if” I guess anything can be put out there. What if immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack Hitler declared war on Japan and told the U.S., “If you help us take care of the Jews we’ll help you take care of the [insert derogatory term for ethnic group of your choosing here]s.”

29

the main reason why Hitler lose WW2 is industrial: production in Germany was not on a war-foot until 1943!
German workers did their 40h week of work, resting the weekend, whereas the British did three 8 h shifts a day; 7/7.
In June '40, Germany had 10 Panzer divisions, with about 200 tanks each (mostly light tanks, 35-t or 38-t or even Pz II)
In June '41, they had 20 Panzer divisions. So how many tanks did they produce in a year? You’re saying 2 000?
Well you’re good at math, but no. Each '41 division had only 100 tanks and the ten more were made by splitting each existing in two. They produced 320 tanks in this year, less than one per day…
Judging by their '44 production rate, they were at 10% of their production.
If they managed to ramp up on industrial total war by September '39, they could have won…only with a more collaborationist politic in URSS( Ukrainians and Baltes were at first really happy to see the Wehrmacht drive the soviets away)

30

The Tiger Tank is often the classic example of how to lose a war with better weapons. The Tiger was a heavy tank and the U.S. Sherman was a light tank, so a direct comparison isn’t exactly fair, but when Shermans came up against Tigers, things didn’t usually go well for the Shermans. The Tiger could punch holes right through the Sherman, but the Shermans couldn’t penetrate the thick armor of the Tiger. So the only way a Sherman could take out a Tiger would be to get around behind it and shoot it in the backside, where the armor was thinner. This meant that it would take on average 4 Shermans to take out a single Tiger, so you’d lose a lot of Shermans but one of them would eventually manage to get behind the Tiger and take it out.

But here’s the thing. For the same cost and labor effort as it took for the Germans to build a single Tiger, the U.S. could build 10 Shermans. Yes, it sucked to be a Sherman tank crew, but for the same amount of production effort, on average the U.S. had easily more than double the number of Shermans required to take out all of the Tigers. There was no way that the Germans were going to win that battle. It took so much effort to produce Tigers that the Germans were never able to field them in large enough numbers to be useful on the battlefield, and the Germans would have been much better off if they had never produced the Tigers, and instead had focused their resources on larger numbers of much less capable tanks.

The Tiger was also in many ways an over-engineered nightmare, which made it difficult to maintain and horrible to repair. For example, the interleaved wheels on the Tiger worked great for spreading out the load and giving the Tiger better traction, but if you had to replace one of the inner wheels, you had to remove the two outer wheels blocking it first.

The Me 262 was another “wonder weapon” that Germany would have been better off not producing. It had a lot of teething issues (as all new weapons do) and thus was fairly unreliable during its time in use. Engine failures and collapsed landing gear were both common. It was extremely fast and was deadly in a dog fight, so by those measures it was easily the best fighter in WWII. But it was also extremely sluggish at low speed, which made it an easy target when taking off or landing. The materials required to build the engine were in short supply, so just building it put a huge strain on limited resources. The Germans switched to less expensive and more available parts, but the redesigned engine was even less reliable and had to be torn apart and rebuilt almost daily. While the Me 262 was extremely fast, it also sucked fuel like there was no tomorrow, which gave it a very short range and little endurance over the battlefield. It couldn’t attack bombers coming in at a distance. Instead it had to race up when the bombers and their supporting fighters were close, do what damage it could, and then quickly land before it ran out of fuel. Unlike piston engine planes, the Me 262 also required a good, long, concrete runway. It couldn’t take off from a grass field, so it could only be based out of airfields that still had good runways.

Like the Tiger, the Me 262 was in most measurable ways a superior weapon, but it couldn’t be produced in large enough numbers to be effective, and was too difficult to maintain. Even if the Me 262 had been fielded earlier, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference overall.

31

As was already mentioned, in the overall grand scheme of things, there weren’t that many resources going into the Holocaust. Over 13 million Germans served as soldiers in WWII. Tens of thousands of Germans actively participating in the Holocaust seems like a huge number, but it’s just a tiny drop in the bucket compared to 13 million.

The second thing that you need to consider is that not all of the camps were execution camps. There were a lot of camps that were basically used as slave labor, which freed up huge numbers of Germans to be used as soldiers instead, especially when you consider that slaves weren’t restricted to 40 hour work weeks and could literally be almost worked to death. One slave forced to work 14 hour days 7 days per week is 98 work hours per week, which even if you factor in some inefficiencies caused by an under-fed, over-worked, and exhausted slave is still significantly more than what you would get from 2 civilian workers who each work 40 hours per week.

32

That’s a scary thought. Imagine Einstein working on the bomb for Hitler :scream:.

33

Einstein was a pacifist.

At the start of WWI, many of Germany’s cultural elite published a manifesto supporting German nationalism and supporting their military’s actions. Einstein not only refused to participate in this, but he also helped to create a counter-manifesto against the war. Few people know about this because no one in Germany would publish it as they all considered it to be anti-patriotic.

When Hitler came to power, Einsten wrote a letter (with help from a few others) to Roosevelt telling him that the Americans should start working on a bomb, but he otherwise refused to participate in the Manhattan Project. Of course the Manhattan Project didn’t really want him, either. They already knew about his anti-war activism and his strongly pacifist beliefs and weren’t about to give him a security clearance for the project.

I can’t imagine any scenario where Einstein would have ended up working on the bomb for anyone.

34

To put the scale of the war into perspective, when Germany rolled into the Soviet Union in 1940 they had 180 military divisions at their disposal. Their own intelligence suggested that the Soviets could only muster 150 fully equipped divisions tops in response. During the war the Soviets raised over 600 divisions. Oops.

35

I don’t think there was any way for him to succeed once the Allied wrath took shape after Pearl Harbor, which is in about 1941-42. Before that, he may have had a good chance taking England had he kept his alliance with Stalin. The cost of keeping the alliance with Stalin is maybe not accessing resources or taking territory in the USSR’s outsize sphere of influence, but he would have still managed to take all of Western Europe and the African countries under European occupation, in addition to terrorizing the entire Atlantic ocean with U-boat swarms.

36

If you’re saying that German workers had a shorter work week on average than their British counterparts, it’d be interesting to see your sources(s), as that doesn’t seem to be the case according to this one.

Based on a number of measures, British war production exceeded that of Germany, but whether that was due to their people working harder/longer is another matter.

37

The issues I have with this summary are

  • Most of the actually annexed territory, that was absorbed by the USSR at the end of WW2 rather than than setup as a client state, stayed annexed after the collapse of the soviet union. Only the Baltic states broke away
  • It’s not like the USSR was gradually brought down by decades of guerilla war in eastern Europe. The odd occasion they did need the intervene directly militarily (in a shooting war sense) the cost to the Soviets amounted to a small skirmish by WW2 standards.
  • Finally most importantly to the OP there is no sense that the collapse of the Soviet union a couple of generations later meant the Soviets didn’t “win” WW2. Similarly if counterfactual Nazi Germany successfully occupied Europe, kept the Soviets and the US out, then they won the war. Even if things went south over the ensuing decades (which i’m sure they would, the top of echelons of the Nazi regime made the Soviet politburo look like the ideal of benevolent government)
38

There was no way Hitler wouldn’t have attacked the USSR. Hitler hated Communism and the political left at least as much as he hated Jews, and he considered them both part of the same anti-Aryan conspiracy that he believed wanted to enslave/destroy Germanic peoples.

There is no possible scenario where Nazi Germany does not attack the USSR. Imagining that Hitler would maintain a non-aggression pact with the Soviets is as realistic as imagining that the US fought the war in western Europe with the help of Superman and Captain America.

EDIT: clarity.

39

The Nazis Holocaust also went against GLBT people, which united them (including those in other countries) to work hard against Germany.

One well-known example is Alan Turing, of the Allies codebreaking efforts – Churchill said he shortened the war by a year, Eisenhower said it might be closer to 2 years.

40

I don’t buy this. His hatred for communism does not necessarily map to the invasion of the largest European country with a reputation (since Napoleon) of being a grave yard for Western European invaders, at the very least not until Britain was out of the war.

It’s not like Hitler was some genius with a masterplan playing 12D chess, he was largely winging it, and (especially earlier on) did his fair share of listening to whoever happened to have his ear this week.