Which Germans, which jig? Any German views, and World War II.
Although they fought until the bitter end for a variety of reasons, there must have been a point where most Germans (except the Nazi fanatics who believed in Hitler no matter what) admitted privately to themselves that the war would end in defeat for the Third Reich, even if they didn’t admit it in public for fear of being denounced as a defeatist.
Do we know when Germans first started to doubt endsieg was possible and why? I’m interested in any contemporary German view from whichever position, from the higher ups, Generals, Wehrmacht soldiers to civilians.
I would say December 1941. That is when General Guderian determined that Russia could not be defeated. The German invasion of Russia had gone well-except that German casualties in the first 6 months exceeded 400,000 (250,000) dead. 1942 would bring a lot of German victories, but Russia would become stronger and stronger.
The Normandy beachead was secure. The breakout was imminent. Operation Bagration destroyed the most powerful German formation in the East and indeed the entire German Army. In Italy the Allies took Rome.
In the East, the Marianas campaign destroyed the remnants of Japanese Naval airpower. In Burma the Allies advanced for the first time.
Before these months, the Germans could realistically hope to perhaps earn enough battlefield success to perhaps come to a negotiated settlement.
Certainly, December 1941 is a turning point. However, as to when the Germans realized their fate, I think it depends on which Germans one would have asked. Generally speaking, one would think the civilian population saw things differently than Erwin Rommel, for example. W/regard to the latter, it wouldn’t surprise me if he personally questioned the outcome when the U.S. entered the war. Being kicked out of No. Africa would have the last straw. Assuming this to be the case, I can’t imagine him confiding this to many of his peers. W/regard to the civilian population, I think it’s hard to say because it’s more than likely they were being fed a picture rosier than reality.
Remember that up until the last few weeks of the war, Hitler was promising new super weapons were about to be deployed that would turn the tide of the war.
And a lot of people believed him. A lot.
The charismatic hold that guy held over people right up to the end is astonishing.
While many generals knew that not only was the war lost, but that the end was quite near in summer 1944, that wasn’t generally known to the populace.
It wasn’t until late very early 1945 that the realization of what was about to happen started to penetrate the propaganda soaked mind of the average German. The East Prussia Offensive started Jan. 13 and soon thereafter people started to fully contemplate that the Russians weren’t going to be stopped at the borders and the implications of that. But still many clung to the hope of super weapons and such.
So: December 1941, they realize that their overall scheme of conquest is screwed. Summer 1944, they realize that holding onto at least some of their conquered territory, and Germany itself, is probably screwed.
And it wasn’t merely fantasy either. The truth is that Germany was working on several innovative weapons, including a thermonuclear bomb (but not making progress as fast as the US was) and they actually did develop a dirty bomb using radioactive waste and conventional explosives to scatter it but they never got a chance to use it. Right at the end, they put a dirty bomb into a submarine and sent it to Japan, intending for Japan to use it against the US, but the submarine was sunk en route, discovered many decades later with the bomb still intact on the ocean floor. And Germany had been developing a new submarine which used Hydrogen Peroxide as fuel, allowing it to run much faster when submerged than diesel electrics can run when using battery power only. They built a prototype but it was never put into service.
If Germany had developed their Hydrogen Peroxide submarine just a bit sooner, and used it to deploy a dirty bomb to London, and then followed that up with a thermonuclear explosion in New York six months later, that could have turned the tide back the other way and Germany actually could have won the war after all.
Unless you have cites I’m unaware of, Germany got nowhere near a working nuclear bomb (far less a thermonuclear weapon, which even the US didn’t complete until six years after the war). Their program was small and largely theoretical, and they had no facilities for producing bomb quantities of either U-235 or plutonium.
Had they started at about the same time as the US and thrown even almost-comparable resources into the problem, they might have won the race. As it was, the German program never got much past what a few universities contributed to the US program. I’m not even sure they had a full-scale cyclotron at any point, only the room-sized ones that produced microscopic amounts of elements for analysis.
In the end, Hitler was too obsessed with other “superweapons” to give a nuclear program much credence, funding or support.
A dirty bomb is a zilch-tech weapon requiring only a pile of radioactive material (plentiful even before the war) and high explosives.
ETA: a super-sub wouldn’t have changed the picture, either. Any of their existing subs could have made a successful stealth run to the US coastline. It’s only when they needed to get close to shipping and battle groups that they were at risk of detection.
The stories of the V-1 and the V-2 capsulize all the German Wunderwaffen.
The scientists scrounged parts for tests. The factories never had enough of anything to achieve production quotas. The bombs were constructed as cheaply as possible and had high failure rates. They were released so hastily that they were always in beta mode, and sometimes alpha. Making them stole away critical raw materials from other programs. More workers died while building them than civilians on the ground.
As the Manhattan Project revealed, a superweapon was far more the product of virtually unlimited money, workers, and materials than of the genius of a small team of scientists. Once Germany was in the war, it never had any of those. The demands of conventional war alone were greater than the increasingly limited supplies a ringed-in Germany could muster. It’s surprising that Germany had weaponry as advanced as it did. But that came at the cost of a starving population and an economy that did nothing but feed the war machine. The people would have broken down before the army did if the war had continued.
Germany’s winning the war is absolute fantasy without postulating fantasy-style miracles. Once you get into hypotheticals, miracles go with the territory. But in the real world, Germany had no more chance of winning the war after American industry got involved than the South had of winning the Civil War once Northern industry got involved. Industrialized war is won by industry, and WWII was an industrialized war.
One of the harbingers that indicated the ‘jig was up’ can be found in the actions of The White Rose group and its most famous member Sophie Scholl.
Although formed in 1942, the movement came into the Nazi public’s consciousness around February 1943, i.e. coincident with the defeat of the 6th Army at Stalingrad.
As far as I understand it, this was the first time that the man-in-the-street might have been made aware that the war was going miserably for the Germans (and, that under Hitler, the German armed forces had become an instrument of terror, oppression, and brutality - and not the brave, conquering heros the Nazi propaganda machine had led the German public to believe).
Even if this were possible, all it would have done would have been to ensure that Russia came to control all of western Europe rather than just the east. As noted earlier, the war was lost by late 1941. After that proceedings were a matter of the manner in which it was lost, who the victors were, and what the carve up was. As it was, at least half of the German nation lived to be very grateful that the US and UK still had significant military power as the eastern front failed.
Supper Sub.****
I am sorry but I can not give a site but I read a book about the U boat war in High School. It covered the u boats from before the war until the end of the war. It went into detail about the changes the U boats went through. The book also covered the “Walter Boats” I believe that was what it was called. I have forgotten what the number was. One was built and launched and sent on a war patrol. The war ended as the boat made contact with a fully escorted convoy. The captain made it to he center of the convoy, then surfaced and surrendered. He wanted to see if he could get past the escorts. I think the book was “DAS BOATS”. Sorry this is from memory about 50 years ago.
I can imagine what the average German thought-when the death/casualty lists started coming home from Russia-250,000 dead is an enormous number for an army that was less than 3 million. At Stalingrad, there were 38 year old privates! men were being drafted into the army as old as 40 years. So, not only were there lots of death notices, there were no young men around-and not a lot of middle aged men either. Despite all of Goebbel’s speeches, things were not going well at all.
Thanks for the replies, the defeat at Stalingrad may well have woken up a few who thought that Germany was invincible, calls for total war notwithstanding. Maybe the idea of vengeance weapons indulged a few fantasists who would have otherwise thought the war was lost.
I think the moment the tide turned in Barbarossa, the German high leadership knew or should have known the war was lost. Barbarossa was an all or nothing gamble.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase;18445836
Germany’s winning the war is absolute fantasy without postulating fantasy-style miracles.[/QUOTE]
Which preoccupied Hitler and those he could convince, right up until the end.
“Das new miracle weapons will win the war, just hold out a little longer!”
I’m thinking December 1941 is too early. Yes, the Germans got stopped at Moscow. But they were still deep inside Russia and they launched a major attack in the spring which captured a bunch more territory. And the United States joined the war in December 1941 but for the first few months, Japan was on the offensive and captured a lot of territory. So while a very perceptive person might have seen the signs of eventual defeat, the average person would look at what was happening through 1942 and still have felt that Germany and Japan were winning. It wasn’t until December of 1942 that it was clear that German troops were retreating in Russia and North Africa.
And what good would a dirty bomb do if the mass populace wasn’t going to freak out over radioactivity? It wasn’t until after Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the masses became truly aware of the threat of fallout and radioactivity.
It could be argued that a really perceptive observer would have seen the war was lost as early as July 1941, when Russia failed to collapse completely as expected, and began organising serious counterattacks.
“Four weeks into the campaign, the Germans realized they had grossly underestimated Soviet strength.”