To a member of the German Army General Staff, by mid-1943 it was clear-the war was lost! German cities were being burned to the ground, as the USAAF bombed by day, and the RAF bombed by night. The german submarine fleet was being decimated, and the Luftwaffe was being ground up in Russia. the plight of the Wehrmacht was even worse-mounting casualties in russi, and reversals as the Russian superior armor (T-34s) shot the German llines to pieces.
So , given the bleak scenario, why didn’t Hitler halt the whole thing? He might have made a truce with Russia, and bought himself enough time to repair his shattered economy. He might even been able to go on the offensive again in Afrca…and at least prepared humslf for the comimng Allied invasion.
Hitler was prone to grandiosity, but I don’t think he was all that stupid…or did he have a death wish?
Or did he still believ that vistory in the East was still possible?
I once read that others in the Nazi hierarchy started making their plans for an escape at this point. Supposedluy, Martin bormann, Eichmann, and others were planning escape routes to Argentina, Bolivia, etc., by mid-1943…they knew that germany could not win the war.
Anybody with a sense of realism would have known the same…so did many high-ranking Nazis begin to exprees doubt to “der fuhrer”?
Doubt him? Some of them tried to blow him up!
My suspicion would be that Hitler was deluded. He may have been under the impression that he knew better than the general staff, since in the first few years of the way his unconventional tactics worked (perhaps against the experts’ advice?). Speer was of the opinion that Hitler had a tendency to value amateur or self-taught judgment over professional judgment, or so he described in The Third Reich.
Oops, I left out the first words of the title.
Inside the Third Reich
Sorry. How embarassing.
I say Hitler was unquestionably deluded. Basically, he had lost all touch with reality when he attacked the USSR. Had Hitler had any common sense, he’d have realized that this would be biting off more than he could chew. Hitler could have come to an agreement with Stalin "I won’t attack the USSR, and let the USSR take over those Eastern European countries that they would reasonably want to have as a buffer zone. With the USSR leaving to the Nazis to do what they wanted with the other parts of Europe the Soviets didn’t consider important, and could possibly win. Instead, Hitler decided that he wanted all of Europe (shared a bit with Italy), and somehow deluded himself that he could pull it off. ALL kinds of difficult given the size and manpower of Germany.
The only thing I can’t understand is the alliance between Germany and Japan. Both Hitler and the Japanese leaders had to be crazy to make war on the US. Attacking Pearl Harbor??? I see little evidence that the US in early December, 1941 gave much of a damn what Japan was doing in their part of the world. The US population was overwhelmingly of European descent, and the concern was the hostilities in Europe. To me what Japan did was roughly the equivalent of a white guy like me in the US going to an all black neighborhood, kicking the ass of some scrawny black guy, and then going on a rant “All niggers are scum, and deserve death!” If I did that, it would basically be suicide. In short order the locals would just overwhelm me, and hand me my head. Justifiably. Considering how WWII went, I can only conclude the Japanese leadership had FAR less of a clue about the reality of the world than I do.
A good question, let me give you along-winded answer.
Again and again in human history we see the same thing. My favorite is why didn’t the Confederacy give up in 1862. People do not realize they are in deep trouble until it is much too late. This would also explain a lot of divorces.
In all of history only one country ever surrendered ‘in time,’ although I am willing to be corrected on this. That country was Germany at the end of WWI. They proposed an armistice (a ceasefire) of equals to allow a treaty to be drafted.
The Associated Powers (the ‘Allies’) required Germany to hand over huge amounts of stuff (guns, railcars and so on) as the price for even talking about peace. That done they imposed a horrid victory upon the Germans.
So history showed the Germans that surrendering in time simply allowed the Other Guys to win. Fighting on gave you some sort of chance.
Maybe, maybe not. There’s many levels of losing, after all.
Same thing happened to England. I don’t recall the Brits rolling over. Beisdes, the Strategic Bombing campaign was fairly ineffective until very late int he war.
But not destroyed, and improved versions were being developed. What the Germans didn’t know was that their securoty had been compromised.
Actually, the Luftwaffe wasn’t doing so badly there. They didn’t completely dominate, but they had several advantages.
But the Wehrmacht had already faced superior tanks and to them, a superior tank was just one soon to be made obselete by the next tank development by your side. (Never really ended up happening, though).
Kinda hard to stop the Russian Steamroller, for one thing. Oh and he was insane. Perhaps you heard?
Not after Stalingrad. Hitler’s true hope was to make peace with the West and defeat the USSR.
Africa would have netted him nothing. There was only so much Germany could do to prepare for the invasion. Most of it added up to nothing or was worse than useless.
I’m sure he did. There was an outside chance that he could make victory so costly for the Soviets that they collapsed. But that would have exhausted Germany too.
As others pointed out, they tried to kill him.
As Paul points out, one of the main themes of Hitler’s rise to power was that the German government had quit too early during WWI and “stabbed the German army in the back”. Expecting Hitler to turn around and follow the same path was unlikely.
Another factor was the allied “Unconditional Surrender” policy which had been announced in January 1943. While this policy helped the alliance hold together, it was a windfall for Axis propaganda.
But probably the biggest factor was that Hitler retained power and kept on thinking he was going to win. The man did have an ability to ignore facts he didn’t want to face. The Germans who were seriously trying to end the war all agreed they had to eliminate Hitler as a first step.
Actually, the United States was very concerned about what Japan was doing throughout the thirties. While it’s true many average Americans might be unconcerned about foreign events, there was a vocal and influential “China Lobby” that opposed Japanese expansion in China. By 1941, the American government was essentially engaged in an economic war with Japan; they had cut off all shipments of oil to Japan in an effort to force Japan to withdraw from China. Japan couldn’t survive more than a year without imported oil so it had two choices - comply with the American demands or secure its own oil supply. They decided on the second option.
Once Japan decided to declare war on the United States, Germany figured it was in its own best interest to do the same. Germany realized that the United States would easily be able to defeat Japan if the two countries fought each other. And in the course of defeating Japan the United States would have built up its military forces. So Germany decided it was a choice between fighting the United States in 1942 when they were still weak and fighting with Japan or waiting until 1944 and fighting them alone when the United States was at its full power.
I think the unconditional surrender required of Germany before any peace talks would be considered had a good deal to do with it.
That would mean the occupation and forcible dismantling of the Reich. It also meant that many key members would be called up to answer for the aggressions. The atrocities of the Holocaust that were ramping up by this time would be exposed meaning the likely execution of the key party members, especially their beloved furher.
On top of this The USSR as an allied power would be demanding harsh punishments on Germany for the atrocities on their soil. Would Stalin have accepted a simple surrender without some sort of reprisal on the German people? I’d think it to be unlikely.
Also Hitler showed himself to be a (reckless) gambler when it came to military and political actions. He would have rather risked the total annihilation of the country rather than an ignominious surrender and possible public trial and execution.
Simply put the Nazis believed it better to keep fighting till the end hoping for some miracle to win the day rather than surrender. Even if there was a wide spread uprising by the Military heads the hard core Nazis in power using the SS and Gestapo would pressure the Generals to stay in line and continue the fight.
[ol]
[li]War can have dramatic turnarounds–witness Korea. UN/S.Korean forces were driven to the end of the penninsula, dug in, the Marines did the Inchon thing behind enemy lines, UN forces pushed em back right to the Chinese border, China jumped in, pushed the UN back, & we stall at the 38th. War can swing back & forth like a pendulum. Hitler knew this.[/li][li]Germany tried to forge a separate peace with the Western Allies, so Hitler could concentrate on Stalin. We weren’t buying any, & that was for the best.[/li][li]Hi Opal![/li][li]WW1 taught that you had to dig in & hold on at all costs. Shaking free of this mindset in WW2 was hard for the leadership of all nations.[/li][li]A new generation of German technology was being created, & this could indeed have turned the tide. But applications were screwed up. Jets were not developed for air defence, but were misapplied as attack bombers.[/li][li]Until D-Day, there were no troops on the ground in the West. And boots on the ground are what counts. Infantry holds & controls turf. Bombers don’t.[/li][li]Finally, much of Hitler’s gains came from deception, duplicity, diplomacy & assorted bullshitting. Why not stall for time? Something could turn up…[/li][/ol]
(The Marines and the Army of course. The Army has landed many more troops on enemy’s shores than have the Marines.)
And, of course, Hitler personally chafed under the Allies’ armistice requirements from WWI, and let everybody know about it in speeches and writings. He wouldn’t have let the Allies do that again.
Another factor that must have come into play: Hitler had already broken one treaty during the war, with the Soviets. Even he must have known nobody else would have wanted to trust a deal with the Germans after that episode.
Germany was not necessarily doomed in 1943, and it’s absolutely nuts to say they should have known they were going to lose to the Soviets when they invaded in 1941. People seem to forget a key fact:
GERMANY BEAT RUSSIA IN 1918.
It’s easy with hindsight NOW to say Germany never stood a chance against the Red hordes, but they were only 25 years removed from kicking Russia’s ass all the way to Brest-Litovsk. Their 1941 assessment that they would kick more ass was, for a year at least, absolutely correct. The USSR’s comeback was really quite remarkable and could not have been confidently predicted.
In 1943, Germany still had a stranglehold on Europe, was still fighting on Russian soil, and the strategic bombing campaign was not very effective. The end was not truly decided until the catastrophic summer battles in 1944.
You’re assuming the Russians would have accepted a peace deal if offered. I seriously doubt that could have happened. When Russians get angry, they get very, very angry. Do you really think that was diesel fuel propelling those T-34s towards Berlin? It wasn’t. It was pure, distilled fury.
I think you’re overestimating the decrepitude of the German war machine in mid-1943.
At that point:
The strategic bombing campaigns, while causing widespread damage, were suffering such losses that there were questions of whether the Allies(particularly the US) could keep it up. The air war was BLOODY, and until late 1944, the Germans gave almost as good as they got.
There wasn’t a second front- N. Africa wasn’t really that heavily contested compared to other theaters, and at any rate, didn’t surrender until May 1943.
The Germans held the strategic initiative in the East until the Battle of Kursk, at which point, they lost it, and were permanently on the defensive.
1943 was the year that the U-Boats got the short end of the stick, but it didn’t really pick up until about May (check uboat.net).
All in all, 1943 was the point when the wheels started to come loose on the German war machine, not the point when the wheels actually did come off. That was reserved for the summer of 1944, when the Soviets crushed the entire Army Group Center in Operation Bagration, driving the Germans back into Poland, when the Western Allies invaded Normandy. All of the other things mentioned just got worse from then on out, and resulted in the absolute collapse of German military power in February/March 1945.
My understanding is that Germany was committed to declaring war on the United States by treaty with Japan. Churchill and Roosevelt were very grateful that they did. Hitler knew the attack was a mistake, as did Yamamoto, but reneging on the treaty would have been a propaganda disaster.
Churchill wrote after Pearl Harbor that he knew the war was now won.
I agree that the German economy was not in bad shape in 1943. I believe war production was very little impacted. Remember they had almost all of Europe producing for them, not just Germany. I’m sure that they were able to convince themselves that an Allied invasion of Europe would fail, especially since they were never able to mount an invasion of England.
No, they weren’t. They would have been committed if the U.S. attacked Japan, but since it was Japan that made the first attack, Germany was not required to declare war on the U.S.
Zev Steinhardt
Actually, if memory serves, the declaration of war by Germany on America was part of Hitlers plan to try and get Japan to enter the war against Russia. I don’t remember all the details, only that it didn’t work…the Japanese kept shucking and jiving on the issue until it was moot…and then Russia declared war on Japan suddenly anyway and pushed them out of northern China.
As to the OP I think its been adaquately explained…Germany didn’t throw in the towel because they didn’t think they were going to lose at that time. It was simply the beginning of the end, not the end itself, and it wasn’t as obvious then as it is now that Germany had no hope. If you shift it to 'why didn’t they throw in the towel in ‘44’ then thats a different question with a different answer. Namely I don’t think by then anything but unconditional surrender would have worked (probably the same thing in '43 but then Germany probably still thought they could win)…and it would have been unacceptable for Germany to unconditionally surrender to the West…let alone to Russians. Even though by then it would have been pretty appearent to any but the most deluded that Germany was finished and it was just a matter of when.
-XT
But the United States declared war on Japan, which I believe triggered the treaty. You are correct that Pearl Harbor itself did not trigger it, but the inevitable response did.