I don’t know whether the word “proection” is warranted or not, but for well over 60 years the USA has worked tirelessly, passionately and at great sacrifice to fight against fascism in Europe… We mostly only prop up fascist dictators in Central America and the Middle East and places like that.
They didn’t ask George V/VI for permission on what to do. Edward VIII reigned for less than a year and it is unclear whether he would have supported Hitler post-36 and it is unclear how the would have impacted public opinion.
Perhaps you believe that the views of the crown have no influence on public opinion in the UK and that public opinion has no influence on the workings of parliament?
This seems to be the opinion of those who grew up under Elizabeth II. They believe that what the crown believes does not matter and it never will. They’re only a tourist attraction. They might be right. I just wish they’d recognize that it has not always been this way.
The Germans had every chance of taking Moscow and victory before the end of 1941, even without Japan’s intervention in the East. The advances since the start of Barbarossa had flummoxed Stalin, he was always caught out, having absolutely no grasp of strategic matters, unlike Hitler who, whilst obviously not the world’s best tactician, could at least push markers around his maps with no small measure of success.
As Operation Typhoon commenced, to take Moscow, Stalin was dithering, he still had no real idea of how to respond. October 1941 saw Stalin evacuate the Party HQ, the General Staff and most of the government, and this was seen by Muscovites, who had been digging in their defences, as a sign that Moscow was about to fall.
Stalin’s train was all ready to leave for safety further East. In November 1941, Stalin asked one of his most capable generals, Zhukov, if Moscow could resist. Luckily for the Soviets, Zhukov said the city could be defended, albeit only with reserves. Had he given a less positive answer, Stalin would have baled out there and then, his authority would have been in tatters and the Russians would never have been able to form a cohesive defensive (and then offensive) strategy, at least not this side of the Urals. The Germans would have just mopped up a headless Russian army at their leisure in the Spring. Stalin would have been “just” another defeated despot, rather than the Mega-Tyrant he became.
However, Stalin stayed at his desk, the city’s morale stabilised, and with the onset of the snows and arrival of Siberian reserve troops, Moscow, and Russia with it, was saved. It was close though, Stalin had asked Zhukov for a straight, no BS answer to his question, even though he wasn’t exactly known for listening to subordinates or tolerating differing opinions to his own. If Zhukov had been more concerned about brown-nosing Stalin, he might have advised differently, and that would have been that, game over. The Germans had gambled on a quick win, hadn’t anticipated the huge numbers of prisoners and large distances they would be able to travel, and so the ball was dropped, at the whim of Luck.
I’ll agree with the poster that the Germans were never lured into any over-extension traps, the Russians weren’t that savvy, they even had their own re-supply mishaps and advances ground to a halt, even when the Germans were in full retreat. Right until the end of the war, wherever German counter-attacks were launched, they often drove the Russians back in disarray. Unfortunately for the Germans, lack of men and materiel meant these counter-attacks were never afforded adequate resources, so any successes were limited, never able to be fully exploited, and ultimately threw away valuable troops.
At the end of the day, the Russians succeeded through the sheer brute force of overwhelming odds, in the same way that humble ants will always overwhelm a mighty elephant. That, and the bloody-minded stubborn attitude of Stalin (along with Western Allied pressure, strategic bombing etc), and a large helping of Good Luck.
There’s the question you asked: what did Hitler believe? and the question you didn’t ask, which would also be interesting: What would have been logistically, realistically possible?
To answer your question, Hitler believed in his biologic racism, therefore, he saw the British (and Americans), Northern and Middle Europeans as more or less Arians and expected them to be on his side, once they saw the truth. They would need to be purged from the Jews, communists, social democrats etc., to get rid of their lies, influence and propaganda, and then the rest, the Nordic and Aryan races, would join as allies his dream.
Like many other Germans at this time, he admired the British for being Gentlemen and that stuff - this is partly why he made the military mistake of letting the British escape at Dünkirk, because he believed they would join him or at least stop fighting against him - and was disappointed and couldn’t grasp why the rest of the European countries didn’t join.
With the US, he saw a much stronger influence from the Jews there and more mixing of races, but still the basic same idea: purge the bad seed, and the left-over Aryan races (lots of German emigrants, remember, and WASPs in the US) would see the light.
And yes, while I can’t remember any definite declaration of Hitler similar to Bismarck’s “The Reich is saturated”, the push to eastward was with the aim of giving each poor German suffering from the slavery of capitalist Jews a farm of his own. Except instead of killing Indians for his homestead act, he killed Slavs.
Later, while the war was going on, certain areas of Russia were targeted for the natural ressources - oil fields esp. But that was not the aim at the beginning.
A strong factor for Hitler to declare war against the US despite it being a military mistake (never get involved in a 2-front war, the huge disparity in resources) was his obsession with the Nibelungentreue (German) - based on the song of the Nibelung where King Gunther does not hand over Hagen, although it spells certain doom for all of them, and although Hagen committed the crime of murder without previous approval of Gunther. (The whole second part of the song, Kriemhilds revenge, is about conflicting loyalties).
Therefore, Hitler felt bound to be loyal to his ally Japan, just as earlier, he felt loyal to help Mussolini, although that delayed his own operation Barbarossa against the USSR; the resulting two-month delay in attacking Russia had serious problematic consequences for that campaign from the start. So a lot of tactical blunders because of his ideas and emotions.
Stalin was not a good ally; in fact, a lot of loyal partymembers believing the ideology on both sides felt incredibly betrayed by the declaration of strategic alliance, because each side regarded the other as evil incarnated. From the beginning, it was clear that this wouldn’t last one minute longer than politically or military advantegous, and it’s amazing how much faith a paranoid, irrational madman like Stalin had in another paranoid, irrational madman like Hitler keeping his word. (Personally, I believe it’s because Stalin, as megalomanic madman, didn’t want to admit the possiblity of a mistake ever, so if he picked the pact with Hitler, it was good until Stalin might decide to break it, because Stalin believed himself to be so smart).
Hitler didn’t declare war on the US for any military or logical reason, but out of loyalty for Japan.
Realistically, it wouldn’t have worked. But that didn’t prevent Hitler from believing it.
Besides, times were different in the 30s. There were strong anti-semitic trends in both the US and Britain. Remember that at the beginning, the US was pro-Hitler because of the anti-communism.
If Hitler hadn’t been such a rabid ideologue, or had listened to practical advisers, and not waged war in such a stupid way, he might have conquered a good part of Europe first, before tackling the USSR; and if he hadn’t declared the Slavs as sub-humans, the partisans would have flocked to him against Stalin, as happened in the first days when the German army was greeted with flowers as liberators from the oppression of communism. This changed only when food was taken, young people deported as slave labour and the population oppressed anew.
If he had stopped after “liberating” the USSR from communism, and said he wouldn’t set foot out of Europe, no matter what Japan did, and if he hadn’t let the Jewish scientists leave - with an A-bomb to back up “keep your hands off, US”, I do wonder if the US would have considered it worth the bother.
Wow, lots of great info.
I don’t think it would have been logistically possible unless you ended up in a situation where the US, UK and Russia/USSR all went with his anti-heck of a lot of people ideas. The more people he decided to . . . purge, the harder it became to keep a secret. Eventually people would decide he had gone too far. I hope.
The disturbing thing that just occurred to me is that if he had managed to at least stalemate the war and have his “purging” going for a generation, you would have the entire military run by people born into his Nazi ideals. From what I’ve gathered many of the people saw the war as being for Germany, not for Hitler, and weren’t totally happy with everything going on. (Feel free to correct me).
Question: Were the people below Hiter (Doenitz?) as dedicated to his plan? What would have happened when he died?
It’s almost as if the Russians had more people than the Germans had bullets.
Now I’m off to read The Song of Nibelung, constanze
From all I’ve heard, the US population was extremely reluctant to get involved in a war in and for Europe again, and Pearl Harbor was necessary to get them involved with the Japanese. So - if Hitler had managed to quickly take Britain, and occupy the mainland Europe, and keep peace for a while, promising to be good and nice, would the US have wanted to get involved in an attack? Selling arms to the Brits, maybe at reduced rates, was one thing, an all-out war another.
Keep in mind that I’m only a layman, though, not a historian or military tactican. I may be seriously underestimating the troubles involved with occuping central Europe for longer, or with actually conquering the British Isles, if Dünkirk and other mistakes hadn’t happened.
On the other hand, one of the problems of Nazi Germany was that the whole economy was geared towards war. The first improvements in the lives of ordinary Germans after Hitler took power came from two sources: dispossessing the Jews = stealing, and kicking them out of certain jobs, creating opening for Germans; and ramping up production in preparation for war. Several historians in the past decades have looked at the claim that under Hitler, the economy was doing great and found it was feet of clay and lots of waste because of bribery and inefficient, double bureaucracy.
So since war was inevitable, waiting another year for better conditions - for example developing better planes, rockets and the atomic bomb - might not have been possible.
Actually, that might have been more detrimental to military tactics and logistics. It’s one thing to conquer from a military standpoint; it’s another to kick people out because they belong to the wrong race even though they are talented.
If you mean the military itself, the Wehrmacht, some of that stuff was already said in the thread about Army veterans. Basically, because after WWI the Reichswehr was reduced, most of the officers came from noble families who felt their duty and obligation to serve in the military (just like the US has families that served the military for several generations), and were conservative right, but not Nazis (some even monarchists, many protestant Christians - see the Stauffenberg circle). Hitler was afraid mostly of assassination attempts by military, that’s why the SS, originally his bodyguard, was so strong. (And in fact many attempts were made on him by officers - they had both the weapons and easy access to Hitler because of strategy sessions).
Reading for example the memoirs of von Gersdorff, he did his duty as officer to carry out orders and did his best to protect his subordinate soldiers from dying unneccessary in wasteful or idiotic orders. He reports the problems when high-ranking officers tried to convince Hitler that a particular tactic was stupid, because Hitler was convinced, based on his own experiences in WWI, that all higher-ranking officers had no idea whatsoever on how to lead a war, being removed from the trenches and reality, and that only lowly lieutenants similar to what he was had the real insight (the common soldier of course was too dumb and directly involved to know anything, either). After all, according to the Dolchstosslegende, it was the Generals (and politicans) who wasted German victory in WWI (not in reality, but the right believed it).
In fact the Resistance of Kreisauer Kreis tried to get into negotiations for a cease-fire with the Western Allies when at the end of 1944 it became clear the war was lost; but the Allies had agreed to Stalins demand of no seperate peace, and also - partly because of the Dolchstosslegende!, in bitter irony - wanted a thoroughly, visible, “Germany lost the war”, not “Germany ended in a honourable truce”.
Doenitz was an Admiral, I don’t know enough to say for sure, but my impression is that he was not a fervent Nazi.
Also, more land. They could have retreated behind the Ural - nobody wants the desert - and either stayed there reduced, or maybe come back 20 years later. But the main strategy of the Russians, because it worked so nicely, was simply to retreat and let the German walk themselves tired (and train partisans behind the German front - people parachuted a 100 km behind the German front for that.)
If you want to [strike]waste[/strike] spend more time, don’t forgetTV Tropes.
It is clear that US intervention did protect democracy in western Europe at the end of WWII. However, I share your view that it massively encouraged right-wing dictators all round the world. And that included large chunks of western Europe like Spain, Portugal, Greece. Once the dictators promised to oppose communism and assist US business interests, the US did not care about namby pamby stuff like human rights for their citizens.
Indeed, if Hitler had played the game differently, history might have recorded that the USA was his ally in destroying the USSR
I read the wiki article, so that should be good enough.
I once read a compelling argument that the Nazi Party was nothing more than a ponzi scheme that needed to expand to be maintained. The amount of jingoistic nationalism at it’s core was necessary for it’s popularity but required war and expansion to maintain momentum.
So Hitlers goal then was simply to achieve power and then to maintain it.
I’ll see if I can find the article.
Stalin felt in his bones that Russia could have avoided WWI if it hadn’t antagonized Germany by stacking their mutual borders with troops. He wanted war with Germany as little as France and Britain did at the time. It was because of this basic assumption that Russia was so defenceless so early during Barbarossa. Well, that and Stalin’s belief in purges to maintain control.
It is a mistake to call either of them irrational madmen. Handwaving away their motives as simply the proclivities of crazy tells us nothing.
For an interesting look at what Hitler might’ve done if he’d conquered Great Britain and Western Europe, continued a low-level conflict with a rump Soviet Union and reached a detente of sorts with the U.S., see Robert Harris’s excellent alt-history novel Fatherland, set in 1964.
They were irrational in that both went against advice of the experts (Stalin ignored Richard Sorge, for example) because of their belief. And had people killed for minor reasons - not the ideological purges, but small stuff.
Hitler’s long-term plans for his eastern conquests were never crystalized in any obvious form, but more or less proceeded by ad-hockery and struggles between various Nazi factions. There were in fact three plans, engaged in more or less simultaneously:
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Create ethnic-nationalist Nazi protectorates, thus suborning the various ethnicities within the Soviet empire to the Nazi cause, and use 'em as cannon fodder;
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Create a class of slavic serfs, culled for docility, under a master class of Nazi landowners; and
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Ethically cleanse the empire of Slavs, replacing them with approved ethnic Germans.
The obvious problem is that these three plans are mutually contradictory. You can’t credibly suborn ethnicities to your cause while exterminating or enslaving them; you can’t create a slave empire and exterminate your slaves; and there simply lacked sufficient numbers of “ethnic germans” (no matter how that term was redefined) to inhabit all of European Russia, even if the Nazis won.
So their plans were somewhat flawed from the start, by lack of consistency and realism (the “suborning ethnicities” plan gave the Soviets the heebie-jeebies, as many ethnicities within the Soviet Union had ample reason to switch sides - notably the Ukrainians - but the Nazis screwed that up but good, through pursuing plans 2 and 3).
I recommend Kershaw’s book, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris: Kershaw, Ian: 9780393320350: Amazon.com: Books , which makes roughly the same point.
Hitler definately was a believer in the crap he spewed out. Marxist Socialism, Bolchevism, Germanic race/culture being superior, whatever.
After the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler became a believer in the power of the State. He therefore determined to achieve power for his party, and himself (after deciding and convicing others that he was the party, and the party was him) to achieve his (poorly defined) goals. He was passionate about what he believed in, and I assume a lot of his success rested in his ability to communicate that passion, if not the details, of his belief system.
But anyway, the goal of attaining and holding power became a goal in of itself, for without that power, the movement would not have been able to effect the changes it wanted.
If you’ve actually looked at any of a number of threads in which I’ve commenting on the British and earlier English monarchy you would note I have never said that the British (and earlier English) monarchs were always essentially irrelevant in terms of setting policy.
However, by the time of Victoria the monarch was already an entrenched figure head. The closest Victoria ever came to seriously having a say in government was when she resisted her Prime Minister’s attempt to decide who would be on her personal household staff, her resistance to this lead to his resigning. However even at that juncture the public mostly reacted negatively to Victoria’s resistance of the PM.
The last monarch to withhold Royal Assent was Queen Anne, and she’s been dead some 300 years. The three Hannoverian Georges steadily saw the power of the monarchy decline. By the age of George III the monarch regularly had to accept PM they openly disliked, even after repeated and outright attempts to maintain governments under their hand picked men. Even still, George III had vastly more power in government than his successors and a generation later Victoria had virtually none. By the 1930s the monarch was not materially different than they are today.
The heads of the British Military forces are appointees of Her Majesty and each and every Royal Soldier swears an oath to her. It may cause something akin to a constitutional crisis if the crown and parliament have a fundamental disagreement about foreign policy and the reaction to a foreign situation (see Edward VIII), but I hardly see how the fact that Edward VIII “lost” (for many reasons, really - not just because he was a Nazi who married an American movie star) proves that the Monarchy has no influence. I would argue that it proves quite the opposite. If Parliament had no reason to be concerned with Edward VIII then there wouldn’t have been any fuss and Colin Firth would still be just another Merchant Ivory bore.
Hmm . . . never heard that idea before. Interesting.
In that case the party would have collapsed under it’s own size eventually. You’re still better off stomping out Ponzi schemes when they’re young, though.
There’s certainly an element of truth to this. The Nazi Party did intentionally enact popular programs to maintain public support (they essentially invented modern poll-driven politics) and offer bribes to mute individual opposition while it was consolidating its power.
But the point was that it was consolidating power. When the good times ran out (sometime around 1942) it was firmly entrenched and had eliminated any group which could serve as an organizing point for overthrowing the Nazi regime.
All true. I highly recommend Iron Tears by Stanley Weintraub, about the American Revolution from the British point of view, which has a lot of insights into the political situation in London.
George III openly backed and funded parliamentary candidates who agreed with him, and Lord North, the PM during the war, definitely obeyed his wishes, rather than the other way around. After Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in late 1781, the King went so far as to draft a letter of abdication, since he was so closely associated with the failed war policy. He was talked out of it, but after that, he had to accept several PMs whom he loathed, since only they could command majorities in the Commons. With his later intermittent mental illness, his power - and inevitably that of his successors, since the Commons didn’t want to give up any power once it accrued - steadily dwindled.
George III was arguably the last politically-powerful British monarch, and even he had a very rough go of it.