Assuming we start after Germany succeeded in its invasion of Poland and WWII was on was there ever a time that Germany could have sued for a negotiated peace?
Or once it was on was it a to-the-death kinda thing?
For the sake of this argument assume Hitler would go for it to achieve the best result, hindsight from today being 20/20, that Germany could hope for AFTER they had started things by sacking Poland and the war had started.
Probably some time around November 1941. This was before the United States entered the war and before the Soviet Union was able to stop the initial Barbarossa offense outside Moscow.
After Stalingrad and the destruction of the Sixth Army.
The Russians would get all the occupied land back, plus half of Poland, plus the Baltics, plus probably chunks of Finland, plus disarmament guarantees that would make a new war more difficult. Both sides would be spared a long hellish slog the width of European Russia.
It might even have been possible in late 1943, after Kursk. The casualty rates were staggering. No one really wanted it to continue. But the later it got, the more dire the surrender terms were going to have to be.
Still, if someone with a halfway rational brain were in charge – and not that Hitler buffoon – talks would have been held.
I don’t know. I don’t think Stalin would have been willing to co-exist with a still active Nazi Germany. After Stalingrad, Stalin knew he would beat Germany eventually. And he didn’t care if a few million Soviets died doing it. Even if Hitler had agreed to pull all the way back to his 1939 border on the east, I don’t think Stalin would have been willing to stop the war. He wanted the Nazis destroyed.
After Leningrad and Stalingrad, I can’t imagine the Soviets being willing to negotiated with the Germans. They wanted revenge. Or would vengeance be more appropriate?
I suspect it might have been earlier, once Germany attacked Russia the character of the war changed completely from expanding the Third Reich through conquest and occupation in the West to a ‘War of Annihilation’ in the East, which was also visited upon the civilian population. There was pretty much no going back on the Severity Order and the Commissar Order, issued in October 1941. It did not leave any room for negotiation, none of the usual deal making and territory trading between nations that had characterised conflicts in the past.
Barring changing historical events, for example no US involvement, I don’t think there’s any room for negotiation / surrender after the Nazis stepped in Poland. It Hitler would have stayed out of Poland I think Germany would have retained their borders even up to now.
What I’ve oftern thought about is what happens if German aggression ends after the annexation of Czechoslovakia does the 50s onwards become a tri-polar world, or do Axis powers still end up in some kind of NATO-like alliance against the Soviets? And if not, how much does that alter modern history.
Britain was not willing to negotiate peace even after France had fallen and the war was horribly against them. The Soviet Union could not co-exist with Nazi Germany in the long run, an assumption they and the Nazis had both made even before they started fighting. There was never a point a negotiated peace would have happened.
Germany and the USSR, or simply Hitler and Stalin? A quick assassination or coup in either country could have changed that calculation pretty quickly.
I’d have to say Germany had a chance of winning and surviving only by not invading the USSR, and by not declaring war on the US, maybe even only the first.
War with the United States was inevitable by that point; the two countries openly hated each other and were already engaged in warfare on the high seas. Even if the USA’s entry into the war was delayed by a few months, it’s likely D-Day still happens on June 6, 1944.
The only way the Nazi regime survives the war is by not invading the USSR, and even that’s a maybe, since maybe the USSR invades Germany in 1943 or something. War between them was itself inevitable. War was the Nazi raison d’etre.
Quite literally. The National Socialist movement arose specifically in reaction to Germany’s surrender in the First World War. The Nazis tapped into widespread public sentiment that the German government had surrendered before the country was really, truly beaten; that they could have (should have) struggled on through even ghastlier losses in an attempt to break the will of their enemies in a bitter, all-out fight to the death.
When that’s your psychological starting point, before the increasingly savage and desperate fighting and annihilatory attacks on civilian populations th hat characterized the Eastern Front, it’s impossible to envision any compromise surrender that left any trace of Nazism in existence.
I am split on this.
I have seen it said that war between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia was a forgone conclusion. They signed a peace treaty prior to WWII but mostly it was for both to buy time to prepare to murder the other one.
I wonder though if the Soviets would ever have initiated a war? Remember at the outset of WWII the Soviet military was a shambles (because of Stalin’s purges). All they had going for them was size (population and land) which Stalin was all too happy to trade. The Nazis had the better military on all counts through most of the war but attrition…massive attrition…won the day for the Soviets/Allies (mostly the Soviets).
Without Hitler attacking would Stalin have ever whipped his military into shape? We can never know but I suspect he would not have. It was only the existential threat that was the invading Germans that forced him to allow strong generals to emerge.
Also, at the outset of Barbarossa I seem to recall that some Russians and/or Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators. Stalin had robbed them of food and they were starving. They had no love for Stalin or Russia. Could one not then suppose Hitler could stop there? Stalin would not like it but given the choice would he have insisted the war continue?
Stalin was every bit as big of a prick as Hitler was, maybe even more, but he would do what was in his self interest and it seems to me there was room at the beginning for him to back down.
No, that’s not true.
The Soviet military lacked good officers in key roles, that’s true, due to the purges. The military was, however, not a “shambles.” It was a huge and extremely well-armed military, one of the most powerful ones in the history of the world, and where it had good officers it fought well. The Soviets crushed Japan in 1939. Much of the failure of mid-1941 was due to errors on the design of Soviet defense that probably wouldn’t have been any different no matter who was commanding.
This, too, is simply not true. Yes, the Soviets had a massive advantage in numbers - and that didn’t stop them from suffering horrific losses when they did not use them correctly. If all you have is numbers, all you’ll get are casualties. Soviet success came when they had good leaders executing good plans. A mob does not beat an army.
Supposing Hitler would ever have stopped there is not much removed from supposing Superman would have used his superpowers to kill Hitler, or that Winston Churchill could have invented phaser rifles. Hitler wouldn’t have stopped there because the entire point of the invasion was the extermination of everyone in the USSR. The long term plan was to kill almost the entire population, retaining a fraction of them for use as slaves. It was assumed by the Nazi leadership that the USSR had to be stripped of its food to feed Germany itself, and therefore all the Soviets had to starve.
The extermination of the Soviet people was a fundamental part of Nazi ideology. You can’t think of the war in terms a modern, sane person would understand, like “well, if they take Ukraine and Poland, that’s a huge win,” like playing Europa Universalis. That’s a view of war as an extension of politics. To the Nazi, war was not an extension of politics; it was the natural state of the world. ALL politics was war. All nations of the world were perpetually in a state of conflict with one another, and the entire purpose of society, and its apparatus of government, was war, both internal and external. Eventually, the strongest societies would win, so the government’s fundamental job was to prepare for and wage war, endlessly. At any given time an enemy had to be identified and destroyed, and to Hitler and his minions, the biggest and most dangerous enemies of them all were Jews and Bolshevism.
You can’t construct a scenario where Nazi Germany’s enemies make peace with it because you cannot make peace with a Nazi state, not really. A Nazi state exists for war. You can come up with a temporary peace treaty, as the Soviets in fact did for awhile, or a truce, as the Nazis would love to have signed with Britain, or you can stand at the right hand of the devil instead of in his way, as Hungary, Bulgaria and a few other countries did. But war had to go on and on and on until the Nazi regime creased to exist.
Chief among those errors was Stalin’s insistence on defending all of the newly-annexed territory in Poland and Eastern Europe. This positioned the Red Army on a much longer, politically-determined front line instead of a militarily rational one. The emphasis on forward positioning also left the troops vulnerable to the particular strengths of blitzkrieg (penetration and envelopment). It was a problem most armies fell prey to when first facing that new style of warfare–not just the Soviets. But Stalin’s dispositions made it worse in this case. Not really (or not entirely) the Red Army’s fault.
I have to disagree with both of these. I don’t think a negotiated peace between Britain and Germany was impossible. Hitler wanted it after France fell and there were certainly prominent Britons who were willing as well. By Hitler’s standards the terms would have been fairly reasonable: British recognition of German control of the continent and no British interference with German rule in exchange for Britain retaining her independence and empire and no German interference with those. Basically, an end to the war with both sides agreeing to ignore the ongoing existence of the other.
The only thing which prevented this from happening was Churchill and his supporters. Churchill wanted to keep fighting and he was in a position to get his way. But it’s not impossible to imagine a minor change of circumstances - even Churchill, in private, was willing to contemplate the possibility of a negotiated peace if Germany’s successes had continued.
War between Germany and America was, in my opinion, even less inevitable. The majority of Americans didn’t see Germany as a threat. They felt Britain and France could contain Germany and the Atlantic Ocean kept America safe regardless. So most Americans felt that Hitler and Germany could be ignored. (It was only after the sudden defeat of France in the summer of 1940 that the American mood changed and Germany began being seen as a threat.) There was only a small minority which disagreed and saw Germany as a serious threat to America prior to 1940. But Roosevelt happened to be one of that minority and he acted on it as much as possible. However, as above, it’s not hard to imagine a minor change of circumstances which either removed Roosevelt from power or made him unable to act on his beliefs regarding Germany.
So the stories of them being under equipped to the point two men went forward with one rifle and one clip where the second soldier was expected to scavenge the rifle and ammo from dead soldiers was not true?
Officers shooting anyone who retreated is not true?
The Soviets needing massive support from the US in terms of things like trucks so they could build weapons was not true?
Germans having a 10:1 kill ratio at the outset was not true?
Seems to me the Soviets were steamrolled at the outset. It was only by virtue of their size and the willingness of Stalin to feed the meat grinder that let them absorb the blow.
But a mighty blow it was and the Soviets seriously sucked as a military at the outset.
So you’re saying that when the Red Army was shocked by the initial attack, they **were losing. ** Kind of puts the kibosh ion the idea that numbers were all that won the war for the USSR, doesn’t it? Do you think the Red Army in 1944 was just as poorly equipped and led, and suffered a ten-to-one casualty ratio?
*The rifle scavenging thing is probably more a World War I thing, though.
I agree with you on this. I went with the idea of Germany seeking a negotiated peace because it was the premise of the thread. But realistically it was never going to happen. Hitler didn’t want peace so there were no conditions which he would have considered favorable for it. (At least as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. I think Hitler would have been willing to negotiate a peace with Britain and America if the terms had been right.)
Of course, Hitler was as mortal as the next man. If Hitler had died during the war, his successor (Himmler? Goering? Bormann?) might have had different priorities.
I agree that a peace with Hitler & co. in charge was impossible and could not have been done under any scenario.
What about a peace after a successful Army coup - like the ones factions of the army were continually plotting unsuccessfully?
Say, a group of officers succeeds, as in the “Valkyrie” plan, in killing Hitler and his top Nazi henchmen. Historically, their goal was peace with the West so as to concentrate on Russia - but let’s suppose their purpose was a negotiated peace. I think everyone would agree that when the actual Valkyrie plot was executed, that goal wasn’t possible - but was there a point at which it was?
By the END of the war the Soviets had a very good military. They had some good generals and were well equipped and certainly well experienced.
But the end is not the same as the beginning.