Fascinating 36 minute video of Dr. Roberts on why Germany lost World War Two.





If you have some spare time, this is a most excellent watch.

Will watch later.

I wish I could find that video about Hitler's weird "industrialized economies can't feed themselves" notion that led him to attack the east.  It was based on a book that, again, I can't recall the name of.

You're referring to the "shrinking markets theory"

That's IT!  Thank you!


For those that haven't seen it, this is fascinating.

Hitler lost because he was a dumb ass Nazi plain and simple.  Had the just wanted land and weren't governed by their shitty ideas they may have "won."  Here's Dan Carlin's take on it:

He could have 'won' easily if he had declared victory in 1940 after the fall of France.

Don't invade Russia, attempt a separate peace with Britain (or just ignore them) and spend the next several years creating a Fortress Europe Uber Recih of Germany + France + Belgium + Czech Republic + 1/2 Poland.  

At that point in the War, he had more then achieved 'liebenstraum' and had suffered minimal casualties, and had all of Germany's industrial base intact.

Their shitty ideas were kind of what led them to fight the war in the first place so...

Subscribed for later.

All the living space in the world won't fix retarded economic policies.   I think that much at least was proven by the 20th century.

Living space was just an early goal, world domination is what he was after.

Even if they had stopped, it wouldn't have lasted. They would have needed to continue to absorb other nations in order to sustain themselves.

Hitler lost because he did it in the first place.  No amount of planning would have allowed Germany to win.  None.

If only he'd watched man in the high castle...... on reel to reel film

And?  Are you disappointed that there probably isn't a scenario that involves them winning AND concentration camps?

Well yeah, duh.

Why do you think we have so much ADD/ADHD these days?


No concentration camps.

Winning a war is gonna be tough when your enemies can bomb your factories and you can't bomb theirs.

He was an egotistical micromanager. He went off on tangents like an ADD kid. He should have not invaded Russia nor attacked England and sued for peace after gaining control of mainland Europe

Will check this out later.

Interesting stuff

And there it is. Simple enough.

seen that several times and still watched it all , thanks.

That would have probably worked, but the conquest of Europe wasn't his goal.

The guy put his plans to paper years before, he wasn't stopping.

Over extend your armies and you lose. As for Russia, should have learned from Napoleons screw up.

Russia was going to smoke the Germans one way or the other. Being a Nazi retard did affect how poorly the Germans did but the outcome wouldn't have changed even if they'd have chilled out after absorbing Austria.

Imagine how different the world would be if we would've had to prop up German Nationalists to keep France from falling to the Russians. Crazy.

Attacking Norway, Britain and Russia. These were huge mistakes, especially attacking Russia. You dont need a Phd to figure that out.

He had all of western Europe. Thank God he was crazy. If he had slowed down after France and planned, he might not ever been removed.

He was a speed/drug addict which gave him delusions of grandeur.

So much of this is rubbish. IF the Germans hadnt of attacked Stalin in 41 likely Stalin wouldve attacked Germany by 43.  Both sides were planning it. Only the Germans had poor if any intel on the Ruskie build up, tech such as the 34 etc.

The final nail was Germany declaring on the US. Not a good idea. It wasnt guaranteed that the US would've fought in ETO. The final final crunch..was the Japanese refusing to attack Russia in Siberia and its eastern areas.  If the Russians had of had their crack ski units tied up with Japan, there wouldve been no salvation for Moscow.

Tag

Personally I think Hitler doomed himself on the eastern front. It’s been awhile since I’ve done much reading but I THINK between him delaying the invasion AND stopping the advance of the panzer divisions to allow everyone to catch up it allowed the Russian winter to set in and Moscow time to dig in.

What he didn’t know was basically nothing stood in his way between the front line and Moscow. Even though the Germans did make it to the outskirts once the cold arrived it basically shut everything down.

Ultimately because of this he couldn’t reach the factories further East with his bombers allowing the Soviets to get their shit together, produce a few tanks, planes etc..

Hitler lost WW2 because he didn’t listen to his generals. Another example was the placement of their armor leading up to D-Day. Him deciding to keep the armor in the rear and calling them up after the fact, instead of closer to the beach probably allowed the invasion to succeed.

All just my opinion of course.

1. Hilter was a murderous agent of the devil who sought mass death more than anything, including the mass death of his own countrymen.

2. If you need to go beyond that, Germany grossly overextended itself way beyond its capabilities to support armies.

His easiest path to victory would have been to goad Russia into attacking Poland and then heading East with Poland as an (albeit temporary) ally in the fight against Bolshevism.  The rest of the Western powers almost certainly would have stayed out of it.

In 1939 and with no Allied support for the USSR, the Wehrmacht would have very likely made it through Moscow and beyond within 2-3 months.

With no threat of a two-front war, the ETO is a whole different ball game.

The Japanese fought the Russians early and discovered that Russians on land were a wholly different proposition than Russians at sea.  They wanted none of it after that.

that misses the entire point of his ideology.  He didn't want to conquer France, he wanted to conquer the USSR.  France and UK declared war on Germany after his invasion of Poland, so he was forced to secure his western flank before his drive into the USSR.

Haven't watched the video yet, but to me his biggest strategic mistakes were
1.  declaring war on the US and thus dragging us into the European Theater
2.  missing 6 weeks of good fighting weather before the invasion of USSR by bailing Mussolini's ass out of the Balkans
3.  constantly fucking around with armaments, to the point that the Wehrmacht had how many different variations of tanks and guns?

Maybe he talks about the failure to invade/conquer Britain, but that just wasn't going to happen on the fly.

Iirc Hitler sued for peace after defeating France and Churchill refused and opted for capitulation of Germany instead.

Regardless of what Hitler should or should not have done I think we can all agree that he did NAZI defeat coming.

Focusing on bombing London instead of the airfields and factories was another screw up of Hitlers. The RAF was on the verge of collapse when he switched tactics, allowing them to train new pilots, repair the airfields and get production back up. It also helped to unite GB.

  You entirely and comprehensively misunderstand German goals. There was no desire for Western Europe to be part of the Reich,the only reason they went west was an attempt to avoid a 2 front war and be able to focus on Russia.
 I have no idea how many times I have read "the world would be speaking Russian" and silly nonsense about a German invasion of the US. Germany didn't even want to occupy all of Russia,let alone North America.

  Conflict with Germany was inevitable,the Soviets were going west. A German defensive war against Russia in 1941-1942 is another huge "what if" scenario.


     In a protracted war with a United States and UK absolutely determined that Germany could not win,Germany could not win. However,I do believe Russia could have been defeated either in 1941-1942.
  Not wasting so much manpower and machinery in the Battle of Britain. An additional 1900 aircraft would have been incredibly valuable in "kicking down the door".
  Even more so,not bailing out Mussolini in his stupidity. The Balkan campaign and North Africa diverted a huge amount of effort that combined with the Battle of Britain losses may very well have provided the  force needs to tip the balance in Russia.


   The main thing about asking how Germany could have won a limited victory is that it always come back to "the Nazis would have had to have stopped being Nazis" though and this ranges from giving Speer control of the economy in 1938 to never carrying out the Holocaust to not having absurd ideas on just what they were going to do with all that living space. This is the fundamental single thing that so many don't understand:there is this vision of Germany as being highly industrialized and technologically more advanced but the end goal was an agrarian society of farming German peasant warriors in the east. It really was just bonkers,or in short Nazis were Nazis.

Anne frankly I agree with you.

Had he not micro managed the war and let his very capable generals do their jobs the war may have turned out very different as well.

Up until June 22, 1941, Hitler was winning the war.  He had overrun most of Europe, he had Europe's most powerful war machine, he had reestablished the German Empire and unified the German-speaking peoples of Europe.  Had he stopped there WWII would have ended differently.

The minute the first Panzer crossed the Russian border he guaranteed he wouldn't be able to win a quick victory.  The minute Germany declared war on the US he guaranteed he wouldn't win unless Germany developed nuclear weapons.  At that point it became a war of logistics, and Germany simply couldn't keep up with the Allies.

Its pretty nuts they did as well as they did IMHO for a single country whose armament rebuild from the first world war was hindered by the Treaty of Versailles

Throw in "Hitler Declares War against America" ...

After Pearl Harbor, FDR was in a pickle.  America would definitely fight the Japanese, but as much as FDR hated Hitler, we didn't have a caucus belli for declaring war against Nazi Germany.  

And then Hitler went solved FDR's problem by Declaring War against the largest & most productive industrial power on the planet.  

Churchill said that when he heard that the USA was IN the war, he slept well that night knowing at that point that the Allies would win WWII.

Lol, no.  The Soviet Union was a basket case militarily; their only advantages over Germany were their almost-endless resources and huge population.

The Soviet Army had virtually collapsed by October 1941.  Only the fall rains and a hard winter, combined with poor planning on the part of the Germans, saved them.

Mostly this. Hitler chose between turning Germany into a mercantile/financial/trade based power and trying to become a Superpower. He chose Superpower. Post-war GDP data is all fucked up because Europe got all fucked up, but France, Benelux, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and half of Poland would not compete with USA or USSR. He needed more people and more shit to make it to something like the Cold War era as a major player.

It's a very good thing he didn't have access to enough oil and was sorely lacking in a few other ways.

Socialism at  it's finest.  I have search for years at the difference between socialism and communism.  No difference.  Nazis vs Stalinist Communism.  One difference and it is racism socialism vs complete socialism.

Stalin was going to invade Western Europe in late 1941 - 1942.  

Barbarossa was a pre-emptive strike.  

He didn’t have a choice in attacking the Soviet Union.

They cheated. Like, a lot.

Russian winter will always remain undefeated in conventional warfare.

The Japanese Army in WWII was not a modern mechanized army like those of Europe.  They had very little armor and what they did have was outclassed by even the worst tank in the Soviet arsenal.

They had excellent infantry, and little else.  In a tank battle against even the incompetent Soviet commanders they were at a huge disadvantage.

When is ARFCOM Goering to stop these horrible puns?

Failure at Dunkirk set all else in motion.  Practically everything afterwards is irrelevant.  

Most of the British government except Churchill was in a panic as the French disintegrated and the bulk of the BEF was pinned against the coast.  Lord Halifax, who had been an architect of the appeasement policy, had just declined to be Prime Minister - in my opinion because he intended Churchill to eat the shit sandwich when the BEF was captured and the British were forced into a humiliating and costly peace, at best.  Lord Halifax would then be the logical choice to pick up the pieces and work with the "new normal" of a German superpower; he thought they had lost and he'd rather rule in hell.  Halifax was now foreign secretary and attempted a coup in the war cabinet by convincing them that the war was lost, which would tie Churchill's hands and set him up for the fall.  (This is strikingly similar to the successful Petain/Laval bloodless coup in France that resulted in the armistice and the collaborationist Vichy regime)  But Churchill saw Halifax coming and tripled down on continuing the war with a speech that rallied the war cabinet on May 28th, while the odds of a successful evacuation appeared slim.  Then the BEF slipped away and Churchill's position as PM and his policy of total resistance for the duration was set in stone.  

Results are that the Luftwaffe was badly weakened by the Battle of Britain; the Kriegsmarine was bottled up and global resources were denied to Germany; Spain stayed out of the war; U-boats fought a costly and ultimately failed war against the convoys; the Germans poured panzers into North Africa and lost because the British were sinking their Mediterranean convoys; the Americans would have an unsinkable aircraft carrier from which to bomb Germany without mercy and ultimately to invade North Africa, Italy, and France; a huge portion of the Luftwaffe and millions of men working hundreds of thousands of guns would be diverted to resisting the bombing campaign; a large number of laborers and troops were forced to build and man expensive fortifications; the extraordinarily expensive V2 program drained strategic resources; on and on.  

Britain would probably have had to pay significant reparations in cash or strategic resources that would give the German economy a steroid boost and provide protection to German merchantmen.  Britain exiting the war almost certainly would have freed up enough resources to take Moscow.  With no easy way to get at each other and no convoys causing an ongoing exchange of fire it's less likely that Hitler would carelessly declare war on the US and Roosevelt would have a hell of a hard time politically declaring war on Germany since the difficulties of strategic bombing or invasion would have been magnified a thousand fold.  Germany would end up taking and keeping the Soviet and Middle East oil fields and become energy self sufficient.  Most likely result is that a US vs Germany cold war fought in Asia would develop while both sides lacked the conventional arms to fight a decisive war with each other and this would settle into a long term nuclear-armed cold war.

He fell victim to one of the classic blunders.

Lol, you haven’t read very much.

Nazi = National socialism.

Communist = International socialism

Massive difference in ideology, if you have actually bothered to read about them.

The only things they share in common are genocide, totalitarian control and the name socialism.