What were Hitler’s long-term goals?

Factual Questions
61

Accusing historians of being apologists is an accusation akin to accusing biologists of advancing Intelligent Design - it goes contrary to the ethos of their profession. Sure, there are revisionists and apologetics out there, no doubt - but in circles of history professors?

I don’t know if this is related to the weird system the US has for the colleges and universities, with many different levels of quality - but in Germany, if you are a professor or a doctor, that means a minimum of professional approach to science. Of course, history is not a natural science, but a paper subject, and starts with sources that are mostly tainted because most of them are written with a specific agenda, so teasing out the objective information from subjective sources is a difficult task. Add to that that not all sources are available, having being destroyed or lost - sometimes one find decades later turns a lot of established theories simply on their head - its difficult for historians to be objective.

But to accuse them all of not even trying by being apologetics - again, you need serious proof of intent.

So you rely on Keegan, who relies on Hanson. And from that you declare it’s the major established historical opinion? Not buying yet.

You also haven’t answered that your own linked cite doesn’t support what you say.

What I believe most likely is that, regardless of what the spring weather was doing in Russia, the German High Command had no frikkin idea about, and would have been unlikely do delay a campaign for something like … mud. Not the guys believing in their superior technology. The early German tanks had small tracks, opposed to the superior Russian T34, who had wide tracks esp. for the mud*. The German Army had neither packed nor ordered any winter supplies, because the war would be over by winter, and … is there winter in Russia? :smack:

  • The advantages of the T34, which even the late improved German model didn’t adapt beside the wide tracks for mud were:
    sloping surfaces, which meant that tank grenades would roll off
    a Diesel engine, better suited for the cold temps. in Russian winter
    one model, instead of competing makes from different companies (even the last German tank had two add-ons from different companies, Porsche and Heckler-Koch, not compatible with each other).
62

Part of the fear (in the German planning staff) for both WW1 and WW2 was the ticking clock. The Germans felt that the Russians/Soviets were rearming, and so they attacked while they still had the chance of winning. According to one WW1 book I read, the German Army staff calculated that Russia would be unbeatable by 1917 or so, based on their estimates.

63

As purely a strategic exercise*, my friend and I discussed this (he knows more about military history than I) and came up with the following steps:

instead of going all-out confrontational at the Munich conference - which tipped of the Allies to start arming - act generous and demand only independence for the Sudentenland. Or, equally good, demand a referendum like similar ones (Saarland, Danish-German border) and tweak it (by gerrymandering, majority or percentage counting etc.) so that it is added to the Reich.

Improve - under one director, so that all parts are compatible, see the point made by a doper about different early tank models from different companies - the research into tanks; bombers; jet fighters; submarines; a-bomb.
Aside: Don’t waste any effort on gathering Jews; don’t let any intellectuals or Jews leave. Treat them nicely and use their findings.

Then attack France like in reality, and carve it up: give indepence to Korsika, Basque, Brittany and Aquitaine, then leave (with a puppet govt. if necessary, but no soldiers standing around). The people will be too happy about their indepence to organize a unified resistance.

After that, attack the UK, without mistakes like Dunkirk, and split them up likewise into Ireland, Wales and Scotland, each with indepence. No occuping force, but keep the British Navy. If they make trouble, they get reprisals, but otherwise, they can live in peace. Again, a large chunk of population will be satisfied.

Then, only now, attack Russia in a straight march-through to the Moskau valley with all the factories. The oil valley can come later. Free the different ethnics (Ukrainians, Belorussians, Balts…) suffering from oppression to starvation/ extinction to an outright war - from the Soviets / Russians. Don’t declare them sub-humans slavs, make them honorary Nordics or mid-level races. Give Finland a chunk from Russia, give Ukraine and the others a chunk.

The world would applaud you as liberator from the scourge of communism, as freeing oppressed peoples. Then you can build that wall of forts (like in the US Wild West) to guard against Soviets from across the Ural, and declare the Reich satisfied - no enemies to guard against, enough land to live on.

If the US - unlikely, given the attitude of the population, and also, without Britian, no lend-lease, so no gearing up of arm factories, and no landing point near Europe; I don’t know if the Nazis could have managed to run an economy successfully, but if they could, they could offer the US help with the depression by lending money.
Still, if the US wanted to make gestures, then the Reich could say “You know, we have an atomic bomb, and a bunch of submarines that can reach your coast, leave us alone or we will bomb NY and Washington etc.”

  • Delaying or drawing out the war with a few strategic good decision would have made it more likely that the US would have used the A-bomb on Europe, too, which would have been worse for the civilians there.

And we are glad that the Nazis lost. This is like the board game Risk about conquering what countries how, if you assume a leader willing to listen to advisers first, ideology later, not about wanting the Nazis to win.

64

Way to go off on a tangent, but: huh?

65

Keegan is very good.

Uh, I said I don’t have a good online citation at the moment. The cite you’re arguing about was part of showing that I’ve said this on the SDMB before, lots of times, and am surprised to be having an argument about it now, instead of the first few times. But maybe nobody reads me. :slight_smile:

I don’t get this. Why would it matter whether the German high command could predict the weather? They could not start without good weather. The very best plan they could make is to be ready in case the weather breaks, and adopt a policy of wait-and-see. I think that’s more or less the reality of what happened.

That you would say this shows perhaps where the misunderstanding is. The term I have used, rasputitsa, is a Russian word usually translated as “roadlessness.” We’re not talking “just” mud. It’s a phenomenal event. The ground becomes deep, sticky mud, on a continental scale. You can’t just drive to the firm ground; hundreds of miles of front are completely impassable to vehicles. Campaigning has always stopped during the spring and fall rasputitsas; not even the Russians themselves try it.

For the German high command to have been unaware of this would have been flat-out dereliction of duty, not just an oversight. Germany herself had previously made war in Russia within the lifetimes of the generals in question, not to mention Napoleon’s invasion and other historical accounts well known to military historians.

In case it’s not immediately apparent, it was a good thing for the Germans they did delay. The largest offensive in history, heavily reliant on mechanized forces, would have bogged down instantly in the rasputitsa, but the attempt would have given Stalin a warning even he couldn’t have ignored. Instead of forward-deployed Soviet forces being surrounded i huge pockets by deep-penetrating, fast-moving German columns, there would have been a static artillery duel until the roads dried out – just the sort of fighting General Manstein tried so hard to avoid later in the war, because it played to Soviet strengths. It would have been impossible for the Germans to win such big early victories, and it might have even turned into defeat of sorts, certainly a harsh check.

But they didn’t attack during the rasputitsa, because, whether they’d scheduled a date or not, they couldn’t physically move vehicles, guns, and supplies until the weather broke.

I’m personally quite certain the German general Staff understood this limitation of the terrain. My point, however, hasn’t been about their intentions or their scheduling. It’s widely agreed that the rasputitsa lasted longer than usual that year – you don’t dispute that, do you? My contention has been merely to point out that Keegan (among others) has noticed this sometimes-overlooked “long” rasputitsa, and drawn the conclusion that sideshows in the Balkans and Greece cannot have mattered, because Barbarossa was physically impossible until the roads dried out.

The fighting in Greece (and the almost-total lack of fighting in Yugoslavia) did not “save” Russia in any way, because the “delay” in Barbarossa’s start time, that year, was inevitable, not subject to the whims or actions of man.

66

Not a bad set of plans; I have always been of the opinion that, had the Nazis simply kept to the plan of offering ethnic protectorates, at least until the war was decided, they would have had a considerably better shot - many Soviet ethnicites would have been more than happy to participate (notably Ukrainians), having suffered horribly under Stalin’s rule.

However, being Nazis, they did not even make a creditable attempt at this - though some Nazi planners where working on it, they were swept aside by the Nazi descent into barbarism, enabled from the top.

Indeed, ideological hatred of Slavs aside, the very structure of the Nazi empire made following any such coherent self-interested plan difficult. Far from being a united totalitarianism, Hitler’s empire was seemingly designed to pit one set of internal power-holders against all others - the notion being that if the Wehrmacht was fighting the SS which was fighting the Abwher which was fighting the Gauleiters etc., Hitler would maintain control.

Problem was, each of these groups had different ideas about how to treat conquored peoples and even in the absence of Hitler’s malign direction, there was a tendency to a ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of brutality.

67

Of course it’s tempting to look at the time line now and say “The German forces were only two weeks away from Moskau when the autumn mud began; if they had started two weeks earlier, they would have conquered Moscow and War would have been over in Russia”, and it might have gone wrong for some other reason like getting stuck in the spring mud with an earlier start.

Or the internal bickering between High Command and Hitler about whether to march to Moscow or to the oil fields might have cost valuable time. We can speculate how it would have been different; but we do have the papers from the High Command, and if they don’t mention mud / rain as reason for delay, than that wasn’t the factor for them.

It’s interesting that on the one hand, the outcomes of Wars overall are mostly determined by numbers (like in the US civil war, all the numbers were in favour of the North); but individual battles can indeed be decided by small things (For want of a nail), and a cascade of battles gone the wrong way can tip larger things, like capturing factories for war material or raw resources.

68

I don’t remember the exact details because I’m not a car driver, but basically, once it gets below -25 C (-13 F), both diesel and gasoline engines have a hard time driving or getting started, because of chemical or physical processes in the fuel*. Diesel has different, also not problemfree, reactions to cold than gasoline, but overall works slightly better than gasoline despite the drawbacks.

*A seperate problem are the batteries, which also don’t like cold

The Germans took to heating fires under their tanks to keep the gasoline liquid and the batteries working, which is a bit of a problem in the Russian winter to find fuel for, and also not recommended for engines. von Gersdorff describes the problems encountered in the winter part of the campaign, and how the Russians were better equipped in all details dealing with it, while the German High Command had scramble to find solutions when confronted with temp.s far below ever encountered in Germany, which affected material all across that did fine up around - 20 C.

69

That just wasn’t going to be in the cards for Hitler. At all.

Might as well speculate on what would happen if Germany never broke it’s treaty with the Soviets, and instead the Democracies faced the unholy alliance of fascist and communist, which would be equally unlikely.

The Basque’s maybe. But the rest? No. I don’t think there were any seperatist movements in those areas.

:confused: No one’s “satisfied” after losing a war, and I suspect that a forced partition of Great Britain would not be popular, especially since it was forced upon them by outsiders. The RN would scuttle itself, just like the high seas fleet did in 1919. Or go to Canada.

Only if Germany doesn’t attack the Democratic west (France, UK).

The Nazi never did manage their economies all that well. Not disasterously, but not well, either. During the early war, war booty and confiscating jewish wealth helped paper over the weak spots. Speer tried to reform the industrial sector in '44, but by then, the war was pretty much lost.

If Germany remained at (relative) peace through the early forties, I don’t know how their economy would be shaped like by the later forties. What they had (administratively) in the thirties was probably not sustainable. Some kind of reform was needed.

70

Or it was a factor so well-understood it was taken for granted and did not merit special mention.

71

Not “predict the weather”, but “have information about the weather”. I don’t think that the Army High Command had a lot of low-level intel of the sort “what’s the current weather in Russia like?” in those days; the intelligence service might have, but not shared, or not considered it important.

They were surprised by a lot of things they encountered, and were not prepared at all for Russian winter. Even considering that Blitzkrieg worked before, that’s incredibly dumb, because even in case of victory, they would have needed to station a force for at least over the winter to get things in order and set up, probably longer to build little forts. Yet even the occupation force had no winter coats, special gloves, special guns that wouldn’t freeze up or become brittle, etc.

I can only conclude that somewhere - maybe because of all the infighting and replacements (Stalin wasn’t the only one with purges, though Hitler did it on a much smaller scale) - massive incompetency was happening.

I know that it’s not simply mud; I was trying to guess the Generals attitude towards it. Or maybe Hitler didn’t believe that mud could stop German high-tech. He believed the Slavs to be subhumans, so if they had trouble with roadlessness, that didn’t mean that he believed superior Germans would have.

I’m just guessing here, because I haven’t read the documents between Hitler and OKH, but I don’t find it farfetched to believe that a handful of people in command dismissed serious concerns because of false beliefs. (Do you remember how people around Bush believed the conquest of Iraq would go like, and how more knowledgeable people tried to point out that “We destroy the Iraqui Army, walk into Baghdad, topple Saddam and celebrate with the population” was not a plan that would work in real life, but were ignored? There was no plan for afterward, and this was after the first Iraq war. )

Anybody who looked at Napeolons disaster in Russia and decided that a war against Russia was a good idea was already unwilling to learn from past mistakes. Lack of working tanks is just another indicator among many of how stupidity spread around (esp. when people who talk back risk serious problems because the leader is paranoid and has absolute power).

Anybody, for that matter, who looked at WWI and didn’t realize that a two-front war is disastrous was an idiot unwilling to learn. Yet that happened in WWII, too.

Which I have acknowledged several times: starting earlier the same year, if conditions were as you say with delayed spring, would likely have been disastrous for the Germans.

That is not evidence at all that this was the reason the OKH delayed the campaign, though. Which I thought was what you were asserting.

If your opinion, however, is that it didn’t matter why they were delayed, with the late spring and early autumn mud, they couldn’t have made it in 1941 anyway - that’s a slightly different issue.

I can’t comment on it, because I have never heard of it before. If somebody did go through the weather charts (somebody is always doing them , no matter what govt.) and shows this, then I won’t dispute it.

I thought the question was about Hitler’s idiotic actions that were detrimental to the war. If the weather was counterproductive, the smart thing would have been to delay for one year. (Though the advantage of the purges in the Russian Army wouldn’t have been so big later, and the Russians might have provided tanks to their cavalry. It’s not so easy…)

72

Heh. I quote the great sage Jon Lovitz, from his seminal historical work, Rat Race:

“Eh, they’re always pissed, Honey. They’re Nazis. It’s like it’s their job.”

73

:smiley:

In the case of Nazis, character really was destiny. :wink:

74

Actually, quite a few people who were half-Jews or had a Jewish spouse or problematic relatives could stay and work unmolested because their work was important. True, a lot of them actors, but also some in Research for the air force and elsewhere. Yes, the Nazis could be pragmatic. And the infighting between all the different branches could help in that regard, too.

Well, I hear secondhand that still today French people in Brittany and the other regions are unhappy about the centralist regime from Paris, where they feel mis-understood, ignored, snubbed etc. Just because there wasn’t an active seperatist movement throwing bombs like the Basques didn’t mean that people would have wanted to stay under Paris’ thumb if offered independence on the other hand.

Really? Would the Scots and Irish and Welsh not be happy at indepence from the English yoke at last? Esp. if they got better terms than before?

I assumed a Blitzkrieg, with air support. If it happens fast enough, the Navy might not be able to scuttle itself. Or the German submarines sink the RN, and only the German navy remains.

I don’t know how the rest of the world would react if they didn’t occupy them, but just carved them up into independent states and left. Would they really protest or accept a fait accompli? Against whom would they fight if there was no German occupation force, only a puppet/ Axis govt. in France and Britian?

Yes, I know their economy was bad, as in every totalitarian regime. That’s what makes this part of the thought exercise so difficult: if Hitler hadn’t been a fanatic, he wouldn’t have made so many mistakes - but he also wouldn’t have tried to become leader in the first place, either.

The only half-way valid scenario for a what-if I can imagine is that one of the early assassination attempts against Hitler - before 1938 - is sucessful, and somebody else from the higher-ranking Nazis who’s a cold pragmatist through and through succeeds him, using the established power structure and ideology as shell while quietly reforming things from inside to improve them. Somebody who’s not paranoid would eliminate the infighting and the double-bureaucracy layer to streamline things. Don’t ask me for names, though, I don’t have that detailed a knowledge about the top Nazis.