(I am putting this in GQ because I believe there actually may be a factual answer, or at least an answer based on fact!)
In any case, why did Hitler deliberately give himself a two-front war? Why not first finish things in the East and then go after France, England, etc? It’s not even impossible that he might have garnered some covert support from those, and/or other, nations in his fight against the USSR.
Especially given how he witnessed the Finns embarrass the Soviets in late 1939, it would have been obvious to him at that time just how feeble the USSR military was - so why wait until 1941 for them to get stronger? I suppose it’s true that Germany would get stronger as well but was there that much to gain by waiting?
If I had to guess, I would speculate that he waited in order to capture ‘vast swaths of territory’ and its people and their industry, i.e. to use the the latter in his war against the USSR.
Is there any historical documentation about his decisions? Is there any ‘scholarly’ analysis that explains them in retrospect?
…because Hitler was insane, over-confident, and too optimistic. The two-front war strategy still is a head scratcher 70+ years later. One would think that Hitler would have learned from the Kaiser’s failure in WWI.
Hitler armed the western frontier in defiance of the WWI treaty. Nobody did anything.
He marched into Austria. Nobody did anything.
He made noises about Czechoslovakia, and the British and Frecnh wrote sharply worded official diplomatic notes of concern. After negotiations, they gave him part of Czech lands. He occupied the entire country, nobody did anything.
He started making noises about Poland and the lands Germany was forced to give them after WWI. He got more sharply worded diplomatic notes from the usual suspects.
Maybe he didn’t expect Britain to declare war, maybe expected France to back off without Britain’s support. There’s the famous quote that he said “Britain won’t go to war over a piece of paper”, since the Brits had no great vested interest in Poland or containing Germany. Maybe he overestimated British sympathy for their brother Germans, or French bravery; maybe he thought he could squeeze one mor round of appeasement out of them; especially since he was splitting Poland with Russia, so he wasn’t the only bad boy. .
My guess is he fell into WWII a little earlier than he expected. If not, who knows what order he would have picked off the rest of europe… maybe some experts can chime in about his master plan.
Once he was down to a channel-watching game with Britain, he was free to spend most of his time and effort with the USSR.
Wasn’t it much easier taking on smaller, less well defended countries like Poland rather than going after The Bear right from the start? IIRC, Hitler’s big mistake was thinking that the UK would not come to Poland’s aid.
Is the OP under the impression that Hitler declared war on France and Britain? They entered the war after Hitler invaded Poland, and were massing their armies in France.
It would have been largely unthinkable to go east and leave the highly advanced and elite French army (seriously!) at their rear. On the other hand, they had a non-aggression pact with the Soviets and could go west without having to watch their backs too much.
I’m thinking the OP meant that Germany would attack Russia after it conquered Poland. I don’t know if France and Britain would have continued the Phony War during the attack on Russia or not. But they might have done so, since they had been passive up until that point.
If Germany were to attack Russia before Poland, it would pretty much have to be with the complicity of Poland – In 1939 the Polish armed forces were strong enough that you wouldn’t want them able to cut you off in East Prussia. If Hitler gave enough promises, Poland might have been lulled into a false sense of security.
The German attack on Russia in the summer of 1942 was aimed at capturing the oil fields. Southern Russia was not well defended, and the Germans got to the outskirts of Stalingrad with relative ease. The Soviet forces offered token resistance and large numbers of them simply fled in the face of the German attack.
As the Germans advanced, it became more difficult to maintain supply lines and to defend a rapidly growing swath of territory. Rather than reinforcing, Hitler drew troops out with the expectation that the Russians would not be able to mount a significant counter strike. The Battle of Leningrad proved him wrong, and the massive counteroffensive took them by surprise.
France and Britain declared war on Germany after Germany invaded Poland. How is Hitler supposed to attack Russia without first invading Poland?
So, you’re Hitler. You’ve invaded Poland, which is what really kicks off WWII. You’re now at war with Britain and France. You’re a co-belligerant with with Russia against Poland. Now, of course your main goal is to defeat Russia. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could knock France out of the war first? And so, before you attack Russia, you invade France, which as I noted earlier you’re already at war with.
And you succeed brilliantly. France is indeed knocked out of the war, and the British are kicked off the Continent. You might want to knock the UK out completely, so you spend some effort on that, but there’s this stupid English Channel, and it would be really risky to invade with the British Navy still intact. So you figure that the UK is a sideshow, and turn your attention to Russia.
And you invade Russia, and it goes brilliantly, then along comes 1942.
The point is, the war didn’t start with a sneak attack by Germany against France. It started with the sneak attack against Poland in September 1939. Germany didn’t invade France until May 1940, but it had been at war with France for months.
So I guess those Germans never learn…
There’s also the much remarked upon story of the Oxford debate society resolution “King and Country” which the right wing delights in mentioning as a serious reason why Hitler thought the inclination of Britain was to not fight a war in Europe again.
Whether Hitler knew or cared about this, I have no idea. Based on the general discussion, what Oxford said about anything obviously does not generally represent the whole country.
Without the active participation of the USA, thanks to the Japanese, would the British have been as big a distraction on the western front? Or in north Africa? Would Hitler have done any better in Russia with more resources? Good question…
In fact, my OP was not clear - I assumed that Hitler would, indeed, invade Poland and then go on to the USSR. Whether Britain and France declared war on Germany in response to the Polish invasion is not relevant insofar as even if they did, Hitler wasn’t compelled to actually fight them at that time, i.e. he could ignore the west militarily until the USSR was kaput (I doubt that France and Britain would have marched toward and across the Rhine in the meantime) . Then, after defeating the Soviets, if there was still an appetite for it among the British and French, Hitler would strike them then (i.e. once the USSR was finished, France and Britain might have forgiven him and annulled their declarations), or at least he could wait and choose the time of his liking for an attack west. A stretch, I admit.
Hitler had always planned to attack the Soviet Union. However the West didn’t know this and Stalin ignored his own intellegence that said this would happen.
Germany wasn’t that strong in the fall of 1939. They got lucky and the Poles could’ve done better had the chose to abandon Warsaw and would’ve done much better if they only had to fight the SU. Indeed many Poles saw the Soviets as worse than the Germans.
The West could’ve found themselves at war with the SU had they aided Finland.
Hitler assumed Britian would seek peace. They did not. Hitler also didn’t realize he could not defeat Great Britian and its colonies, even all alone. At best it would’ve been a long, long stalemate that went on for five or ten years more in real time, had the SU and the USA stayed out of it.
That said, the British could not defeat Germany on their own either.
Without any additional nations, Britain and Germany would’ve fought till Hitler died naturally, probably around 1945ish and then they would’ve sought some sort of peace.
Remember in WWII everyone was out for themselves. It was one war and many little ones. Even Poland saw fit to take or take back (depending on your perspective) parts of Czechoslovakia during the Munich Crisis.
Germany could never have defeated the SU either. At best they could’ve driven the Soviets behind the Urals and then they would’ve had a stalemate in the East and West.
The real problem is other than the aims laid out in “Mein Kampf” Hitler didn’t really have any war aims. Despite Allied propaganda, there was never a greater goal to hook with the Japanese and Italians.
Hitler made a lot of errors such as helping the Italians and fighting the African theatre which would’ve been a non-issue had Italy stayed neutral.
Although they did NOT actually march into Germany (the so-called “Phony War”), it was not a safe bet that they wouldn’t. France, the victor in WWI, was believed at the time to have the largest and best-equipped army in Europe (assuming you count the USSR as “not Europe”). French tanks were individually stronger and more numerous than German tanks.
While French doctrine at the time emphasized defensive firepower and maintaining a continuous front, there was still offensive potential. It’s noteworthy that what ultimately undid them was an overly strong advance by their left wing into the Low Countries, which wound up getting cut off by the German thrust through the center.
I think Hitler could not have safely turned his back on France, especially for the purpose of sending all his armies into the USSR.
As others pointed out, he didn’t really have a choice about a war in the West. He pushed things one country too far. Hitler might actually have wanted to take Poland and then use it as a stepping stone to take Russia first, then worry about the western European powers, but once he invaded there it triggered a declaration of war and he didn’t really have a choice at that point. What’s a more interesting question though, to me, is why didn’t he finish off the UK first, consolidate western Europe under Germany and THEN go after the USSR?
Definitely, but once France and the UK had declared war he couldn’t ignore his back door and go after the Russians. The French would have pulled the trigger and invaded if a large part of the German army had marched off to Russia.
I doubt he would have succeeded. By the end of 1940 it was established that Germany could not achieve air superiority over the UK and so would have had a very difficult time invading, especially considering the strength of the Royal Navy. The UK was also not an ideological enemy of Germany so I’m guessing it wasn’t his priority even if it did make sense.
They shifted quite a bit of their air assets to the eastern front for their invasion of the USSR. The RAF was stretched pretty thin, and I doubt they could have maintained their efforts indefinitely had Germany just kept coming at them. Germany had larger reserves in planes and pilots than just the UK alone, and it’s possible that the pressure would have eventually forced the Brits into some sort of negotiated ceasefire, even without an invasion (which I agree probably wasn’t in the cards).
You are right that Hitler didn’t think of the UK as an ‘ideological enemy’, in fact he seemed to have thought that eventually they would come around or at least be neutral.