Managed to dig up my copy of Who Cut the Cheese:
Somebody in the Riechstaag should have lit a match.
Actually, I’ve been thinking for a while of changing my answer to “not reapplying to art school.”
Losing the Ark to Indiana Jones.
Runner-up: Keeping Colonel Klink in command.
Exactly. While the invasion of Russia could still be considered a blonder is some ways, it was central to the Hitler’s strategic goals. He didn’t want to fight the United States, he felt that Britain and Germany were natural allies. He wanted to destroy Russia. There is a second half of the question that usually isn’t asked explicitly but is still there. What was his biggest blonder, and could he have won if his avoided it. He couldn’t avoid invading Russia, because that was his reason for everything. It’s like saying the Confederates biggest blonder in the American Civil War was fighting the North.
But it was! 
Not true. The Tripartite Pact (Axis Treaty), which was signed in 1940 obligated the other parties declare war if a member of the Pact was attacked by a country not already involved in WWII. IOW, it was a defensive pact. Since Japan did the attacking of the US, Germany was not obligated to declare war on the US. The defensive nature of the Pact was the very reason Japan didn’t declare war on the USSR after Germany attacked.
And, of course, Hitler was notorious for ripping up treaties as it suited him.
Sua
Urmm… but he did, anyway. Which I can’t explain, except… maybe in his mind, the news of Pearl Harbor and the initial rush of Japanese invasions made Japan appear more invincible than it was…
Hitler, Stalin, and Tojo were all the same species of dictator in this regard.
Hmm. Do you think Hitler signed this pact (when he was already at war with France & Britain as major powers) with an eye to intimidate the US?
Could be.
Or was there some other reason?
- Maybe he thought that the Japanese would be willing to sign a more general alliance later.
Or
- Maybe he thought the Japanese would glom onto a war versus Russia (much like Italy did versus France), especially if it looked like Hitler was winning.
If I recall, Hitler claimed (and noone really believed) that his attack on Russia was defensive. (That they were massing troops and conducting over the border raids, much as he claimed Poland was doing.)
Other evidence (like his Mein Kampf manifesto outlining his true feelings and plans, as well as the apparent well prepared attack plans, and the extensive and time consuming redeployment of the Army to the Russian borders) proved that it was not a snap decision or reprisal.
It’s pretty commonly accepted that Hitler thought his generous declaration of war against the US would be reciprocated with Japan declaring war against Russia. No such luck.
Maybe he also figured that the US would be tied up fighting Japan and that declaring war would let him step up the Atlantic convoy attacks without the political cost of attacking US shipping or escorts?
My German history prof, was 1000% convinced that by December 1941, Hitler knew that Germany had lost the war, and by declaring war on the United States, we ensure the destruction of Germany, whihc he believed had failed him.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the non-implementation of Operation Sealion
Hitler saw that there were two possibilities once Japan declared war on the United States:
1 - Tell Japan good luck and stay out of it. Assuming that the United States didn’t declare war on Germany anyway, there would have been a major American military build-up to defeat Japan. Without any forces being diverted to Europe, the United States would have beaten Japan earlier. So sometime in 1943 or 1944, Japan would surrender to a United States. Hitler, who expected he would have defeated the Soviet Union and Britain by this time, would have faced on his own a United States which would have a huge army and navy.
2 - Join in with Japan. It was going to take the United States several months to a year to build up its military to full strength. Hitler figured if Germany and Japan both hit the United States hard enough in 1942, America would either be defeated or at least back down and be willing to negotiate terms with the Axis.
So while Japan’s decision to declare war against the United States was strategically wrong - (They’d have been better off bypassing the American bases in the west Pacific and occupying Indonesia without a declaration of war against the US. Regardless of the strategic implications of such a move, American public opinion wouldn’t have supported an American declaration of war to defend foreign territory.) - Germany’s decision was reasonable under the circumstances. The only thing I question was the details. Germany should have explicitly required a Japanese declaration of war against the Soviet Union as part of the deal and Germany should have held off long enough to see if the United States would have declared war first - doing so would have cost Roosevelt a lot of political capital and limited his warmaking power.
I have two problems with this. First, I’ve seen no evidence that Hitler was thinking that, but then again, I have seen no evidence whatsoever what Hitler was thinking vis-a vis the United States. But main concern with this logic is that Hitler had no ability to “hit” the United States at all. That is the crux with his decision to declare war on the United States to begin with. What was he going to do? Bomb the US? Nope. Invade? Nope. Attack commerce with U-boats? Doing that already. Even if the US hit Hitler themselves, as they did, they could stop on their own if it got too costly, with little concern.
Sealion was completely infeasible for lack of appropriate shipping. It likely would have been an utter disaster.
Given the information about his flatulence, I think it’s reasonable to say that a Hitler by any other name would smell as bad.
I am curious. What political cost?
Dang it. I hate it when I miss the obvious…
I dont understand what Germany could do to “hit the US hard”. Germany had to wait for US stuff to come into range of his military. He couldn’t bomb or invade the US directly. He can attack the US military and Lend Lease shipments, but “hit hard”?
Which does rather beg the question - what if the forces deployed against Crete had been sent to Malta instead? If they’d managed to occupy Malta it could have made life in the Med rather difficult for the Brits.
Ummm… assuming the numbers quoted here are correct, I think it may be fair to say that the Russian resources freed up by receiving a third of a million trucks are fairly significant - tens of thousands of tanks worth, at any rate. Add in the seven thousand tanks, eighteen thousand aircraft, two thousand locomotives and soon it starts to make a real difference.
Hitler possibly could have won various key battles, if things had gone a bit differently. But it seems rather foolish to think that the Third Reich could occupy the entire Soviet Union. From an Encarta article:
I don’t know the size of the USSR during the war, but it was probably not a great deal smaller than this. Hell, just Russia by itself is 6,592,800 sqare miles, which was about 3/4ths of the USSR. So yeah, maybe Hitler could have grabbed Moscow, but he wouldn’t have been able to hold onto it very long, much less the rest of the country. The damn thing spanned more than 180 degrees of longitude, for god’s sake.
I think this is one of those occasions when it’s too easy to get lost in the numbers. Most of the USSR (and Russia) was just empty. Knocking out european Russia west of the Urals would have meant capturing pretty much the entire heavy industry, the vast majority of the population, severing the flow of oil from the caucasus, and Anglo/British aid - leaving the remmnants of the Red Army stranded in the forests and steppes of Siberia and Central Asia, where they would have a hard time surviving without external aid, never mind attacking anyone.
Of course, capturing European Russia is not exactly a trivial task.