A part of me wonders how the german generals accepted the plan to conquer all of Europe, England, most of Africa, and the Soviet Union almost at the same time. Did they really think this was doable? Granted, they had some real victories early on, but the US as well as the Soviets werent really going to put up with that much longer.
The difficulties of a “two front war” was the German high-command’s “boogieman” going all the way back to planning for WW1. There were alot of misgivings about the invasion of Russia for that reason (Ribbentrop was particularly aggrieved, thinking that the non-aggression pact he’d organized was a master stroke that ensured the “two front war” wouldn’t happen this time around). But questioning of authority was not something that was exactly encouraged in German military circles, even in pre-Nazi days.
As for the Soviets “not putting up with it” even with hind sight thats a questionable statement, as the Nazis did come very close to victory in the 1941 and 1942. In the winter of 1940, when the great powers of Europe had been wiped out in a few months of campaigning, its far less obvious.
The decision to involved the US was not a military one, but a diplomatic one, so the generals had nothing to do with it. And again with hindsight its possible to see that getting the US invovled was fatal for the Nazi cause. But in 1940 the US army was comparable in strength to Romania’s, if you’ve just conquered all of western europe, that doesnt seem to scary.
Hitler attacked in the east in mid June 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour almost six months later. Even assuming he knew of Japan’s plan, Hitler expected Moscow to have been captured in December/January and for the back of Soviet resistance to be broken - and why not, Barbarossa was the greatest military operation in all history.
Even if the war against the Soviets got delayed, there are several if’s that need to fall right for the USA to be armed to the teeth and set on Normandy three years after he invaded the Soviet Union. You just wouldn’t have conceived of it.
Nice summation griffin. But I have a couple of points to add as well.
One is that the Army General Staff had rather strenuously opposed a number of previous operations. This included the occupation of the Ruhr, the occupation of the Sudetenland, the invasions of Denmark and Norway, and even the winning operational plan against France in June 1940. While Hitler didn’t come up with all of these, he did force them into being against the advice of the General Staff. And in each case he was proved right. This left Hitler with the impression that his General Staff had no strategic vision. And it left the Staff with no room to argue against further plans. So when Hitler said that the USSR was going to collapse if you gave it one hard kick no one was able to convince him that it was the terrible idea it proved to be.
It is also worth remembering that the army was never very happy with Hitler. Of the 17 (I think) assassination attempts against Hitler, all but a very few included army officers. And there were at several points fairly advanced coup plans drawn up. Some as a contingency in case the Ruhr or Sudetenland occupations went tits up. They planed to offer Hitler up to Great Britain and France. Hitler was aware of this, at least on a general level and looked at as any opposition as a sign of plotting against him. In response he always kept sufficient loyal forces handy. This helped keep the generals from getting too vociferous in their objections.
There was no such plan, those things were not all done or attempted at the same time, and the generals weren’t given a say - as with most regimes the decision of who to make war with and when was a political one, the military just had to carry it out.
The European campaigns were just that - separate campaigns. Hitler tells the army to be ready to attack Poland in, say, 3 months, they do it and win. He then tells them to attack France/Belgium in 6 months, notices the Allies are making noises over Norway re Swedish iron ore, he tells them to do Denmark/Norway first, they do both. Italy decides to grab glory in Greece, starts losing, the German step in to help them out, then bounce on to Crete. The Italians start losing on North Africa, Rommel goes in to help them … and so on.
At no point in say 1938 does he sit them down and roll out a grand plan for conquest, for the reason that he basically made it up as he went along. And, as the others have noted above, the generals disagreed with almost every decision Hitler made, but after they were proved wrong a few times early on, Hitler got the victory disease and began believing he couldn’t lose.
For a detailed answer I would suggest the Axis Forums a great website/forums for any WWII buff and they cover a lot more history than WWII.
Generally Hitler had only an idea of what he wanted to accomplish and that was outlined in Mein Kampf.
Hitler had a few errors, first of all he seemed a bit stunned by the speed at which France fell. It seemed to almost catch him off guard.
His big failure was to see that Britian would not surrender. He expected them to and it arguable (though not certain) that had it not been for Churchill a negotiated settlement may have happened.
Hitler’s other weaknesses were his loyalty to Mussolini and his loyalty to Japan.
His greatest blunder was to underestimate America. He simply did not have any concept of America’s industrial strength.
Lend lease is what won the war for the Allies. A massive stalemate would’ve resulted without it. Germany couldn’t defeat the UK (her navy was much too weak) and it could only push the Soviets as far back as the Urals even in good times.
The SU and the UK would’ve just fought on and eventually worn down Germany. But it would’ve taken ten years to do it, one could make a case Hitler wouldn’t have lived that long even if there was no war. He’d have likely been dead or incompacitated before 1949.
America by 1944 was producing more goods and industrial products than the rest of the world PUT TOGETHER. The industrial strength of the US hadn’t even been tapped. While the UK, the Soviets, the Germans and the Japanese, were starving having limited or no food, the Americans were simply substituting chicken for beef.
Hitler put much faith in u-boats which worked well, except that the US was making so many ships to carry good to Britian that for every ONE ship the u-boats got THREE MORE, made it throught. The US would simply bail out of the sinking ship, rescue the sailors and put them on a new ship. Then make new goods.
When a German ship was sunk, it’s sailors were killed or captured.
The Germans in Africa were a large part because of Italy. Of course Italy was weak. Hitler was trapped between Italy on his side, Vichy France, (Which in many ways was stronger than Italy) which could’ve been brought over to the German side, and Spain, which crafty Franco was able to play off one side against the other. Hitler remarked dealing with Franco was worse than having a tooth pulled.
Hitler never seemed to come around to accepting his conquered people wouldn’t just love him the way the Germans loved him.
This is a way oversimplification, but it’s almost like Hitler from Austria came and the Germans welcomed him (again way oversimplified) and he seems to assumed every other nation would do the same.
It was also pretty stupid of him to kick out all the Jews, given that so many of the best scientists were Jewish. (Something like 3/4 of the Manhattan Project leaders were Jewish.) He might have been able to build a nuclear bomb if he had kept the Jewish brainpower.
^
He won’t have been able to. He never had the industrial capacity to do so. It was a loss, but not a fatal one.
The argument doesn’t make enough sense.
The Battle of the Atlantic was won by *defeating *the U Boat threat. Reference the development of ASDIC/Sonar, breaking Enigma, longer range support aircraft, better and more convoy escorts.
I don’t think people have a good understanding of the intentions behind attacking the USSR.
People criticize him for the stupidity of opening a two front war, but he didn’t really. Our perspective is informed by the long, arduous, total war that Barbarossa had become, not the plans/expectations when the invasion was launched.
Germany had defeated the French, arguably with the greatest army in the world, in a matter of weeks. They had conducted many other campaigns with similar efficiency. They did not completely annihilate these countries in total war - but rather destroyed large parts of their armies early on and gained an advantageous position. Worried about the prospect of a protracted, bloody war like WW1, the countries surrendered rather than choosing to fight a total war.
So when Barbarossa was launched, the expectation was the same. Germany was not planning to fight a 4 year total war as they had - they expected that their doctrinal and experience advantage would procure them a quick victory like it had so many other times. So essentially the sentiment commonly expressed is “Hitler was foolish to launch a 4 year existential total war” - well yes, obviously, but that wasn’t the expectation at the time.
So the expected duration of the campaign was somewhere on the order of 6 months. During that time, the US and Britain were irrelevant - they posed no threat to Germany during this time period - so for the expected duration of the campaign it effectively wasn’t a two front war. And if Germany had expected the campaign to take longer than that, then they wouldn’t have launched it. This also explains why Germany didn’t give their troops much in the way of cold weather gear - had they expected the campaign to last that long, they wouldn’t have undertaken it.
Obviously it didn’t work out that way. Where other countries gave up after their nose was bloodied (to one degree or another - Poland fought much harder than France did) and the Germans had a clear advantage, Russia did not. They decided that they were facing an existential threat and that they would fight to the last man.
Most people don’t appreciate how close Russia came to surrendering during the first few months of the campaign. Stalin was nuts and in disbelief - there was a point where he locked himself in his room for several days and panicked, unsure of what to do. The Soviet leadership was very close to crumbling. Germany was conquering land in Russia at a rate never before seen in history, with few casualties to themselves. It looked like it was all over. Germany came very close to a Russian surrender. If they weren’t such massive dicks and didn’t make the issue an existential ones for the Russians, they probably would have won.
I think this downplays the casualties from U-Boats. The U.S. could certainly replace the goods, but rescuing the sailors was not a given.
In other words, being a merchant marine sailor was more dangerous than being in the Army.
Why was this? I haven’t heard of this before.
To add to the points made by others, Hitler expected the Russian campaign to be another short, sharp blitzkrieg - that he would be in Moscow in a short time.
He knew that the Russian army officer corps had been purged in the late 1930’s, and had been seriously weakened. The German army was content to retain non-Nazis, if they were loyal Germans. The Communists had removed and in some cases executed non-communists, seriously damaging the Red Army’s structure, and its ability to react to attack.
As I understand it, Hitler also believed that the winter of 1941 would be mild. Meteorology was in its infancy, and the advice he received was that conditions would be easy. So, the Germans were ill-equipped for winter warfare, when the winter turned out to be more colder than average.
Still, remember that the Germans reached the outskirts of Moscow. The Revolution parade through Red Square went straight to the front outside the city.
And, as we are discussing in a parallel thread, the Soviet Union simply threw bodies at them - suffering appalling casualties, but stopping the attack until “General Winter” could act.
It cost them twenty million people. A democratic country could not accept or even create that level of casualties.
With respect most of the above is palpably wrong
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The winter helped the Germans as opposed to hindered them. The autumn rains had made roads muddy and impassable. The coming of snow in the last two weeks of Nov '41 helped solidify the roads and the German armour spearheads were unleashed and they went from 200 miles to 30 miles from the Kremlin within a week. On 28th 7th Panzer Division captured a bridgehead over the Moscow-Volga Canal, the last defendable obstcale befoe Moscow (and incidentally entered into the Moscow area proper). Heavy counterassualts by the Soviets prevented the bridgehead from being expanded and eventually was the bridgehead was destroyed completely. Around December 5th German attempts to breakthrough had failed in all sectors and the offensive was stopped. The worst of the winter came in thye second week of december coupled with Zhukov’s counterattack is what pushed the Germans back (although the last soldiers were not eliminated from the Moscow area untl late 43). The winter in other words came at a time when the German goose was well and truly cooked.
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Please lay off the "democratic"hype. If the US or UK or anyother country had a genocidal war imposed on them, they would be willing to take as many if not more casualties.
So, you disagree with the normal view that the weather of 1941 was an issue.
It is open to you to do so, if you wish, but perhaps more politely. We are just describing two sides of the same story from different viewpoints.
No one denies that the Red Army stopped the Germans, with huge sacrifice of manpower. Their casualty figures were a multiple of the German casualties. However, it is commonly agreed the weather was a major factor from which the Germans never recovered, and that the German campaign plan had assumed good weather.
No serious historian doubts that the Red Army stopped and ultimately destroyed Hitler. That is not fully understood by many people in “western” countries, who learned a different history of the Second World War.
I stand by what I said about the Red Army officer corps. Stalin’s purge had seriously weakened the army structure, and it was a factor in Hitler’s decision to attack. As it happened, the Red Army managed to overcome this factor successfully.
I do believe that a state like Stalin’s could sacrifice men to stop the Germans, more easily than the western European democracies. Remember that Stalin’s state had killed more people than the Nazis did. We all know the horrors of Hitler’s regime, but we sometimes forget he had serious competition from Stalin.
And that is not to minimise the personal sacrifice of the twenty million Russians who died. I spend a lot of time with their survivors and their children, who still remember them with sadness.
Yes I do and its not the view amongst any serious historian I have read. The winter hit in full force mid to late december, the German offensive was finished by the 5th of December.
Beleive what you wish to believe, that is your privilege. I howeverb find it impossible to think that citizens of any country whatever its political persusion would be so fatalistic and pathetic as to be unwilling to accept such casualties when the alternative is annhiliation.
And the world had seen proof of that in the Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. Yes, the Soviet Union had won, but they had taken very heavy casualties against a far smaller force. Part of that was that the Finns had strong leadership (Mannerheim) and fought like hell, but clearly the effects of Stalin’s purges of his military leadership were not helping.
If little Finland could almost bring the Red Army to its knees, surely it would be no problem for the might of the German military…?
As I think other comments have already made clear, the short answer to the OP is that Hitler’s initial plan was a lot narrower than what the war eventually evolved into. He didn’t necessarily anticipate war with Britain and France when he invaded Poland. He figured on ultimately going to war with and conquering France, (incidentally taking Belgium and the Netherlands along the way) but thought that he could make peace with Britain once France fell – that they’d find a continued war in Europe alone to be futile. Then he could concentrate on and conquer Russia.
The expansion of the war in unforseen directions (Norway, North Africa, the Balkans, U.S. intervention) and Britain’s resistance are what make the war look as overreaching as it does, instead of like an escalating series of planned, piecemeal conquests.
I question only a couple of Markxxx’s assertions:
I think Hitler had a sense that American industrial capacity and manpower were important in defeating Germany in WWI. However he overestimated US isolationism in the Depression era, and the extent to which the actions of the Japanese would distract the US from Europe. He also assumed that with France gone and peace made with Britain, the US would have no interest in intervening to save Bolshevik Russia. When the US did start supporting Britain meaningfully, it was too late to back down. Hitler blamed it on the “International Jewish Conspiracy” (consequently shifting the Holocaust into higher gear).
I don’t believe the Germans had any real problems with food in WWII, it was primarily oil that they were starved of. Also, since Hitler hadn’t anticipated a protracted war, and was uncertain of the population’s committment to it, he was slow to fully mobilize German industry. The US economy militarized almost immediately after Pearl Harbor. The Germans didn’t declare “Total War” and stop production of consumer goods until 1943. That doesn’t minimize America’s vast industrial capacity, of course, which was largely unimpeded by enemy action.
Hitler had little understanding of or use for naval power of any kind, and his original vision for the war had little role for it. It was only when the U-boats proved successful, and showed some hope of forcing Britain to sue for peace, that Hitler started committing serious resources to them, by which time it was really too late – US intervention and mobilization quickly overwhelmed the increased U-boat production.
One aspect that seems to have been overlooked is that it’s not as if the Germans had complete freedom to dictate whether or not they would eventually go to war with this or that country. In some cases war was viewed as ultimately inevitable, and the only question was the timing. The Germans had a headstart in arming themselves and preparing their military over some other countries, but other countries were trying to catch up, especially once the German aggressiveness began to manifest itself.
In sum, Hitler thought there would be a war with Russian anyway, and his military advantage over the Russians was maximized by striking as soon as possible.
I believe the same is also true of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Not only did the purges cost the Red Army valuable thinkers and good officers, but the internal structure of the Army at the start of the war was laughably inefficient. For example, in order to keep most forces in the hand of “trusted” or “ideologically pure” officers, requests for artillery or air support had to go up to higher echelons of the chain of command than in any other army (division, IIRC) before they were approved. This could take hours. More often than not, by the time the order had gone up, then back down to the batteries, the artillery strike wasn’t needed anymore, either because the Germans had overrun whoever was asking for support, or because the coordinates supplied were no longer valid - and the arty shelled empty space.
Same went for requests for reinforcements to exploit breaches in the line or counterattack - by the time they started moving, they were already too late to be of any use.
It all got streamlined over the course of the war, and by the end of it the Red Army was a well-oiled machine, but those early months were absolutely shameful.