Politically, sure. Economically, not really. Militarily a genius? Not even close. Barbarossa didn’t exactly achieve its objectives. His no retreat orders left German troops out on the lurch to be surrounded and destroyed, starting with 6th Army at Stalingrad and the surrender of 275,000 German and Italian troops in Tunisia. His orders were at times completely out of touch with reality, down to the final days of the fall of Berlin when he was giving orders to formations that existed more in name than in reality to relieve Berlin.
This has been done to death. If the Nazis weren’t planning on committing genocide on the Slavic peoples (see Generalplan Ost), they wouldn’t have been the Nazis. And if the Nazis aren’t the Nazis, Germany suddenly has no reason to invade the USSR, the whole point of which wasn’t anti-communism but to gain lebensraum for the Germanic people in the East by killing off the people who happened to already be living there.
Hitler was a terrible military strategist. He and his generals thoroughly distrusted each other, he thought they were a bunch of lazy hacks, they thought he was a corporal elevated beyond his talents. On D-Day there was no German counterattack. The one general who tried to order reserve Panzer divisions to the coast was refused because the Panzers could only be moved on Hitler’s personal order, and Hitler was still sleeping and nobody had the balls to wake him. He slept until noon, and when he woke up was dumb enough to be delighted by the news that the Allies were landing on the continent and coming for him. Then he used ten V1s to attack London, and only one actually hit anything. If he’d used them to attack the ships and beachhead at Normandy they might have done some damage, but he had a gift for making crappy military decisions.
I am surprised that no one has mentioned Napoleon. Surely he achieved more than Hitler did, without ever proclaiming that French genes were better than any others. If he had wooed the Prussians a bit more, we might all be speaking French today, and Hitler would have remained a nonentity.
Part of the reason that Hitler was so successful in the short run was that he tended to do things that people didn’t think he would be stupid enough to do.
Invading Russia, for example. Logistically doomed from the start. So the Russians were caught completely flat-footed when he went ahead and did it anyway. He lost in the end, of course. But if the Russians had known in advance that he was stupid enough to try it, he would have lost right at the beginning.
A major theme in Star Trek was reason (Spock) vs. emotion (McCoy) and how to balance the two (Kirk). “Patterns of Force” had nothing to do with history and all to do with a society the failed to find the right balance. The writers thought a society that was too rational and not emotional enough would be efficient but brutal. You know . . . like Nazis!
This thread amply demonstrates that real Nazism was too emotional and not rational enough.
Yes, I doubt it. I don’t see what difference it would have made, since Caesar won virtually every battle he fought. I guess it would have helped him if he had carried it into the Senate on the Ides of March.
But surely “a box of clips” would have been used up within a year or two, and Rome continued to expand long after Caesar’s death, so I can’t see what mowing down some Gauls in 47 BC would have done to prevent Rome’s fall, centuries later.
The v1’s accuracy was measured in miles. It would’ve taken pretty incredible luck to hit a ship, or even a beachhead. As you say, even targeting something the size of London was iffy.
Given that the Battle of Britain (and the subsequent Blitz bombing campaign against British cities) was effectively over months before Hitler turned on Russia, I would confidently assert that it would have made no difference at all. Hitler was unable to defeat or even begin to invade Britain even during the period when Britain was, to all intents, his only significant enemy.
Incidentally, Caesar’s role in expanding the Roman Empire was not all that significant, and he played essentially no role in determining how the conquered lands were governed. Rome’s empire had been steadily expanding, and its colonization policies were established, since long before Caesar’s time, and it continued to expand after his time. Caesar’s main historical importance had more to do with his political acumen than his generalship, and lay not in territorial conquest (though he did make some conquests), but in bringing Rome’s long series of civil wars almost to an end (the process being brought to completion by his heir, Octavian/Augustus).
I understood your premise; I just don’t see any way to separate the racism inherent in National Socialism and yet still have a political organization motivivated for pan-European conquest.
There’s an alternate-history anthology called Arrowdreams whose best story (I figure) is “Misfire”, in which Manfred von Richthofen (aka the Red Baron) survives WW1 to train and lead the Luftwaffe in WW2, winning the Battle of Britain in late 1940, before the Americans or the Soviets become involved.
Something akin to this is one of the few plausible (albeit still unlikely) scenarios where Germany wins (at least in the short term and assuming they aren’t subsequently stupid enough to take on the Americans or Soviets, let alone both). But Hitler was stupid and he did take on the Americans and Soviets while Britain was still undefeated, and thus had no chance at all.
If I understand Kershaw correctly, not all far right nationalist parties in Germany (pre-1927) were anti-semitic as a matter of policy. That came later, when more and more of the nationalistic parties allied (or merged) with the Nazi party. Pre-1925, pro nationalist/expansionist did not have to be wed with anti-Jew.
In Bavaria (and Munich), where Hitler had his strongest early following, crass anti-Semitic diatribes was the stuff that got them all worked up.
However, in 1926, when Hitler himself started to get more involved in expanding the Nazi party into the more northern areas (and the Ruhr) of Germany, he knew that that approach would only turn off the upper class & buisness elites. The approach he used on them focused on making the Marxist/communist ideologies the “boogeymen” (with the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate messages inherent in those ideologies being what the buisness leaders were most concerned about).
In Hitlers view, Bolshevism, Marxism, Communism, and “Jewry” seemed to be all the same thing, so he didn’t feel to be betraying his own ideals, but he was still savy enough to change the rhetoric, depending on who his target audience was intended to be.
Stalin was not a Russian. Not even slightly. So if he did “hold similar views about true Russians”, he was a self-hater. But, of course, there is no indication that Stalin held such views.
If the Rome of Caesar’s time had possession of WW2-era weaponry, then they would have turned that same weaponry on themselves during their multiple civil wars, which would have turned them into a smoking rubble that the Germanic barbarians could have waltzed into and occupied.
Eh, no. I think Franklin D. Roosevelt was better politically and economically, even if he had some structural advantages here and there.
Hitler was in position to seize the most advanced country in the world (advances he did not make, did not quite understand, and was in no position to make), and run it into the ground by invading almost all its neighbors. Hitler was incautious and overeager.
Napoleon and Bismarck, who’d somewhat successfully reshaped Europe before Hitler, were probably both smarter than Hitler, and wiser.
Caesar could have had a thousand AKs and a million rounds of ammo, and Rome still would have fallen right on schedule. You know nothing of history, OP, do you?
No it didn’t. The French army was larger, better armed, and had better technology. It’s a complete myth that German troops had advanced technology. In most cases German weapons and equipment were below what the Russians, Americans, French and British had. They had a very small amount of high quality tanks and guns and planes, but these high quality items were only produced by skimping on everything else.