Less troops for the 8th Army, thus maybe Rommel wins?
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 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.
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:
Yes, but would we really have gone to war with him if not for the Holocaust?
OK, so it was a planned mistake. Sort of like GW’s war in Iraq. 
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.
Since the extermination programme didn’t start until 1942, the answer is clearly “yes”.
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.
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.
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.)
Bombing Pearl Harbor.
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.
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).
Also, even beyond that, Hitler didn’t find himself all that bound by treaties.
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.
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.
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?
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.
According to the book **Who Cut the Cheese? **, 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 (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.