I don’t really believe the whole “Killing Hitler would have simply meant somebody more competent would have taken Hitler’s place” simply because the “competent” people also were also full of bad ideas that simply would have diverted resources in a slightly different direction. Germany’s position post-Soviet invasion was basically unwinnable unless they made serious attempts to negotiate a ceasefire with the Soviets in 1942/43 which even the “competent” German generals refused to consider.
‘Unconditional surrender’, absolutely. That, I don’t doubt.
I wasn’t clear but was getting at the statement “they wanted to be sure that both nations were ground down and thoroughly beaten”. I interpreted ‘ground down’ too literally perhaps, as in almost burnt down, or devastated, much like Berlin looked in May 1945. Maybe it’s just semantics but was the official policy to ‘devastate’ Germany? Or simply annihilate its armed forces? Maybe both?
The official policy was to do whatever was necessary to force unconditional surrender. Before D-day, the Western Allies were persuaded that area bombing was the best contribution they could make to that aim - and even after, it wasn’t easy to persuade those in charge of the bomber forces that anything other than area bombing might be more necessary. There was public debate about it in the UK, but majority opinion was a combination of “They’ve brought it upon themselves” and “This is the best way we can think of to finish it as quickly as possible”.
The Russians necessarily focussed more on grinding down the armed forces they were facing in open battle on their own territory, so that was a different means to the same end, with a much more ruthless overall approach.
The whole idea of what would come after unconditional surrender was predicated on making sure, not just that Hitler couldn’t happen again, but that all the underlying culture of militarised patriotism couldn’t either. How early that became a defined and operationalised imperative that would stymie particular operations like assassinating Hitler, rather than a vague-ish general ambition, is hard to say.
They had one until they invaded. What on earth could they offer Stalin to convince him it wasn’t just a breather while they got ready to invade again?
By ‘ground down’ I meant that their objective was for Germany’s (and Japan’s) armed forces to be utterly beaten and left unable to offer any meaningful resistance to complete occupation of the country, and that the population would know that this had happened. They absolutely did not want a repeat of the end of WW1, where German armies were on the point of collapse but didn’t appear beaten, almost no German land was occupied, and people like Hitler could easily sell the myth that the army was going to turn things around, but were prevented from doing so by a stab in the back.
There were advocates for permanently demilitarizing Germany, notably the Morgenthau Plan, but that never became policy.
(“it” being area bombing including civilian targets)
I’ll add that for Britain, a large part of area bombing’s appeal was that it was one of the only feasible ways of damaging Germany significantly. The UK couldn’t invade for a long time, and anyway a land invasion played to the Germans’ strengths. When it did come, Overlord was an enormous and very risky undertaking. Naval warfare, Britain’s traditional strength, offered little opportunity to materially defeat German ambitions, which were mostly land-based. So-called precision bombing required daylight operations, which the Luftwaffe had made prohibitively dangerous to undertake. So aside from preparing for Overlord in the future, protecting their own commerce from submarines, and running supplies to Russia, Britain would have been all but sitting out the war had she not put so much effort, blood and treasure into night area bombing.
I would also guess a decapitation plan would run into a basic problem - figuring out where the leader was, and then risking valuable manpower on a job that may or may not work, and then may or may not manage to shorten the war. Presumably the replacement for Adolph would be from the same basket of Nazi nuts who got them where they were. Spend all that effort and maybe take out Herr Schikelgruber, and you’re right back where you started. And if you fail once, and they figure that out, another try will be even harder.
And this is where you lose me.
Killing Hitler isn’t a decapitation strike. It doesn’t render the Nazi government headless, or incapable of making decisions, or even unsure of its larger aims. All it does is remove the man in the high castle, the one who is in charge of his immediate subordinates, who themselves have immediate subordinates, and so on. Unless you think killing Hitler would have provoked an internal civil war, distracting the government and rendering it unable to make decisions, all killing Hitler would have done would have been to install someone else in the top spot, and maybe they would have been more competent.
I’ll say this much: Killing Hitler before D-Day would have been a net loss for the Allies.
Yes, note that thanks to his propensity to not put things in writing, there is some reasonable debate how much Hitler knew the details of the holocaust. (I mean, seriously, he had to know. But there’s nothing in writing…) So there were plenty of toadies and evil ideologues to carry the torch if he did get knocked off, since they conceived the details of the holocaust for him and proceeded to put it into action. the horrors wouldn’t stop because one guy died. It was a significant part of the entire high command complicit in the whole enterprise.
If they assassinated him in late 1944, the new leader probably would not fought to the bitter end. I wonder what Russia would have done in eastern Europe - probably the same.
Frankly, “Kill Hitler and Germany Loses” seems like movie logic: Kill the big boss and the whole enterprise crumbles! Probably literally!
Germany kept fighting for a very brief period after Hitler shot himself. It didn’t amount to much, because by Spring 1945 Germany didn’t amount to much, but there was Nazi military activity until the actual end of the war, when the military was fully and finally defeated, and it’s probably only due to lack of planning that the Werewolf bitter-enders didn’t keep causing problems for the Allies even after the official surrender.
Heck, it wasn’t too long after the end of the Second World War that America created Continuity of Government plans, some of them written into the Constitution, precisely to prevent neat decapitation strikes, and I’m certain the Soviets did the same thing for the same reasons. There’s a whole Constitutional Amendment’s worth of careful wording which says that killing the bossman doesn’t end the game.
People often say this, but I don’t buy that whatever hypothetical leader took over would fight for significantly less time. Every group and individual that was plotting to take over intended to do something along the lines of ‘surrender to the Western Allies, then join forces to fight the Red Army, or at least cease fire with them’. I do not believe that any hypothetical leader in 1944-early 1945 would be willing to accept complete demilitarization of German armed forces and Soviet occupation of eastern Germany, including 3/4 of Berlin, but that was the only terms the Allies would accept.
While there were a lot of people skeptical of the USSR, the main worry of the Western Allies was that if they gave Germany another ‘stabbed in the back’ or a new ‘we finally convinced them to fight the REAL enemy’ myth, that they’d be gearing up for yet another war with Germany in another 20-30 years. Stopping that was by far the major policy objective.
A short assassin would probably have pretty much the same outlook.
Exactly!