# What was Hitler's biggest blunder? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 14, 2007, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277 "2007-02-14T23:31:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 7:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/21 "2007-02-15T07:27:38Z")
[QUOTE=treis] What would that have done? Obviously it would be a big moral hit, but 350,000 British soldiers is really nothing more than a drop in the bucket. It was the Navy and Airforce protecting Britain at that point. Losing the army would not have changed that. [/QUOTE] Less troops for the 8th Army, thus maybe Rommel wins? ---
**Author:** ![slaphead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9bcb4/32.png) [@slaphead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/slaphead)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/22 "2007-02-15T13:33:30Z")
[QUOTE=John DiFool] The canard about the “delayed” Barbarossa, and how the Balkan campaign may have contributed to said delay is a false one. The mud season lasted late into spring that year and they basically had to wait for the roads to get dry. I’m not sure, aside from the morale hit, if taking Moscow would have really made that much of a difference in the long run. Come 1942 you still have a Russian empire mobilizing its huge reserves of manpower and natural resources. I don’t think the Germans had the logistics to go significantly beyond the Moscow perimeter in any event. … In my view after all I’ve read on the subject, I really don’t think there’s any way to rescue Barbarossa from a military point of view. Just about all long-term trends were running against the Germans from day one. The biggest mistake was doing the invasion in the first place. [/QUOTE] I think that’s pretty accurate - the Germans weren’t ready for a slogging match, so any failure of the Blitzkrieg to kill the Soviets quickly would have left them thoroughly screwed. I came across this [interesting article](http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/99spring/hooker.htm) from the US Army War College that made a reasonably good fist of arguing that with a bit more common sense a dash for Moscow could have knocked the Soviets out of the war - fortunately Hitler was too much of a barking loon to let the professionals have their way, or to enlist the Ukranians and Poles against the Soviets, or any of the other numerous smarter things he could have done. These threads always seem to end up the same way - concluding that Hitler’s biggest blunder that kept him from winning the war was that he was crazy, but if he wasn’t crazy he would never have started the war. It’s a circular argument. ---
**Author:** ![iano](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9de053/32.png) [@iano](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iano)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/23 "2007-02-15T14:00:12Z")
I don’t think any of the mistakes so far would have changed the war’s conclusion. It was decided by production numbers, and so I would say only that Germany should have gone to a total war production setup before 1943 and that Hitler shouldn’t have pressed his luck on Poland, as he intended to go to war in a few years with a better economic and military base. Loss of the Sixth Army and delays and so on are bad, but it would only delay the inevitable given their being outproduced 4:1 in armor etc. :smack: ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Nuggets](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a87d85/32.png) [@Mr.Nuggets](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Nuggets)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/24 "2007-02-15T14:49:22Z")
[QUOTE=The Dumbest Guy in the Room] Devoting a large percentage of his military and resources to the extermination of a people who weren’t harming his war effort [/QUOTE] Yes, but would we really have gone to war with him if not for the Holocaust? ---
**Author:** ![David\_Simmons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9de053/32.png) [@David\_Simmons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_Simmons)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/25 "2007-02-15T14:58:17Z")
[QUOTE=Askance] Invading Russia, while virtually certainly doomed no matter what he did, was not a mistake - it was his entire reason for going to war, [http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-](http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-) [/quote] OK, so it was a planned mistake. Sort of like GW’s war in Iraq. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![FRDE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e68b1a/32.png) [@FRDE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FRDE)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/26 "2007-02-15T15:15:53Z")
I’m with stopping in the Ukraine and recruiting - Napoleon got stuffed - he could have learnt from history. My view is that Dunkirk was a nearly ‘hands off’ operation, they could have killed them, personally I would have had Oxbridge English speaking Waffen SS (Guards) organising the evacuation. ---
**Author:** ![Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/73ab20/32.png) [@Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alive_At_Both_Ends)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/27 "2007-02-15T16:08:39Z")
[QUOTE=Mr. Nuggets] Yes, but would we really have gone to war with him if not for the Holocaust? [/QUOTE] Since the extermination programme didn’t start until 1942, the answer is clearly “yes”. ---
**Author:** ![Zeldar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/b77776/32.png) [@Zeldar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeldar)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/28 "2007-02-15T16:14:57Z")
[QUOTE=silenus] Not re-applying to Art School. [/QUOTE] I second this one. Just saw an interesting movie starring John Cusack as _Max_, a fictional art dealer who tried to convince Adolf to express himself more openly in art. But the fledgling Nazis persuaded Adolf that his proper calling was politics. Maybe a 3-star movie. ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/29 "2007-02-15T16:26:13Z")
I’ve got to go with invading the USSR, for reasons previously cited. Perhaps his biggest mistake was not delegating authority, we often hear how the Panzers couldn’t beat back the D Day invasion because nobody dared wake Hitler up to authorize it. Not a major issue, but growing that ugly mustache wasn’t a bright move, either. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/30 "2007-02-15T19:07:24Z")
[QUOTE=Mr. Nuggets] Yes, but would we really have gone to war with him if not for the Holocaust? [/QUOTE] Actually, it’s the other way around. I believe that if Hitler had been content with Austria, Bohemia, western Poland, & some strong political influence over eastern Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, & Romania, he could have killed every Jew in those territories without the English-speaking countries going to war to stop him. And if he’d waited to do that until getting a resolution with the USSR–or, disturbingly, even if he hadn’t–he might have gotten a lot of support from the west in any rivalry with the Kremlin over influence in the Balkans due to western distrust of Stalin & of Bolshevism. His strategic error was not in slaughtering Jews in his territory. That was a moral error. His strategic error was in antagonizing or invading almost every one of his fellow European Gentile neighbor states. The closest he could get to cooperation in the end was “Let us stand together to kill the Asiatic Jew, false European that they are!” but he’d already proven that he had no real sense of European brotherhood, nor tolerance for cooperation with anyone else as an equal. Also, geopolitically, he reached too fast for too much. If you’re building a Thousand-Year Reich, you have decades, even generations, of time in your plans to accrue & assimilate territory. The Romans took generations to build their empire, & assimilated conquered people into Rome. Even the Yankees colonized North America more slowly than what Hitler tried to do against stronger opposition. Adolf, the fool, wanted to be Genghis Khan, & grab a whole empire at once. Some will say that he had to go fast like lighting, to take it all before resistance developed. But then there is no Thousand-Year Reich, only an unstable temporary empire. In the end, there was no serious long-term viability to this plan, anymore than there was for Napoleon. (And yes, it did work for Genghis Khan, but we can’t all be Temujin, & in any case, the Mongol empire went through the same pattern of disintegration that Alexander’s did, if a bit more slowly.) ---
**Author:** ![BMalion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/e274bd/32.png) [@BMalion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BMalion)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 8:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/31 "2007-02-15T20:58:00Z")
Bombing Pearl Harbor. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/32 "2007-02-15T21:17:01Z")
Yeah, I gotta disagree that “invading Russia” counts as a blunder. Invading Russia was the whole point of WWII for Hitler. Any scenario where Hitler doesn’t invade Russia means you don’t have Hitler anymore, but some other guy with the same name. ---
**Author:** ![KarlGauss](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/karlgauss/32/3713_2.png) [@KarlGauss](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KarlGauss)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 9:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/33 "2007-02-15T21:17:16Z")
[QUOTE=Askance] - there was no choice about declaring war on the US, they were obligated by treaty with the Japanese. [/QUOTE] As mentioned in another thread a week or two ago, that is wrong. The treaty only obligated Germany to declare war on the US if the US attacked Japan (not the reverse). ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/34 "2007-02-15T21:20:47Z")
Also, even beyond that, Hitler didn’t find himself all that bound by treaties. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/35 "2007-02-15T22:45:39Z")
But still, I’m morally certain Roosevelt would have declared war on Germany very soon. Hitler allowed him to avoid spending some political capital, but we were already fighting an undeclared naval war. The next time a U-boat sank a US ship Roosevelt would have called it an act of war and we’d be fighting against Germany. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/36 "2007-02-15T22:48:14Z")
If you go with Hitler (on invading Russia), I would say, he missd his main chance by requiring the panzers to stay with the infantry. Infantry can make about 20 miles/day-the panzers could do 100! The Panzer generas (von Kleist, Guderian) wanted the panzers to plunge deep behind the Russian lines, sowing panic and destruction. They could have captured Moscow, and gotten a revolt going in Russia. If you don’t invade Russia, he should have sent a whole army to Libya-he could have defeated Montgomery, and captured the Suez Canal. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/37 "2007-02-15T22:55:22Z")
[QUOTE=ralph124c] If you don’t invade Russia, he should have sent a whole army to Libya-he could have defeated Montgomery, and captured the Suez Canal. [/QUOTE] How does he get an army to Libya, and more importantly, supply it, past Gibraltar and Malta? Because there’s no way the Italians can sealift that much tonnage. And regarding the Panzers breaking through behind enemy lines without infantry support, that’s fine until they run out of supply or break down, which tanks tend to do with annoying frequency, especially over uneven terrain. And how do you capture Moscow with just tanks? ---
**Author:** ![David\_Simmons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9de053/32.png) [@David\_Simmons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_Simmons)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 11:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/38 "2007-02-15T23:21:41Z")
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing] And regarding the Panzers breaking through behind enemy lines without infantry support, that’s fine until they run out of supply or break down, which tanks tend to do with annoying frequency, especially over uneven terrain. And how do you capture Moscow with just tanks? [/QUOTE] Righto. Armor can only advance, on average, as fast as infantry can advance to protect the supply lines. Sure, tanks can make a short, relatively high speed dash to tear up the enemy’s rear, but in order to maintain an advance position they need infantry support. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/39 "2007-02-15T23:26:46Z")
[QUOTE=slaphead] … Hitler’s biggest blunder that kept him from winning the war was that he was crazy, but if he wasn’t crazy he would never have started the war. It’s a circular argument. [/QUOTE] > [@Joseph Heller](#): > > “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he [Yossarian] observed. “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![scotandrsn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a4c791/32.png) [@scotandrsn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scotandrsn)\ **Post date:** [February 15, 2007, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277/40 "2007-02-15T23:49:37Z")
According to the book \*\*[Who Cut the Cheese?](http://www.amazon.com/Who-Cut-Cheese-Cultural-History/dp/1580080111/sr=8-1/qid=1171582189/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-6189066-7897521?ie=UTF8&s=books) \*\*, it very well may have been being a vegetarian. And listening to quacks. The book (I don’t have it in front of me right now) quotes, extensively as I recall, the Nuremburg testimony of one of Hitler’s personal physicians. Hitler suffered terrible flatulence as a result of his particular vegetarian diet, and was prescribed a certain medication that reduced this effect. However, the meds had an occasional side effect of damaging one’s sanity. The doctor testified that he noticed Hitler’s increasingly erratic behavior, and advised him to quit use of the drug, suggesting a change of diet to curb his flatulence. Hitler would not hear of it. He continued use of it right up to his suicide. The doctor’s opinion was that Hitler’s erratic behvior late in the war was due entirely to this drug. (That’s what I recall from that book, and [here’s a Fortean Times article](http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/139_nazidocs.shtml) (registration may be required for multiple viewings) that gives more and varied details on Hitler’s doctors and their effect on his behavior.) Were it not for that, he might have retained the mental power to guide the German war effort more successfully. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-hitlers-biggest-blunder/392277.md?page=3)