It was discussed among the Nazi leadership, but eventually it was decided that the Pole's were too attached to their Jews and would not give them up to be part of the German sphere.

Germany was kicking the shit out of the Russian Army (Russian soldiers refusing to fight for the czar and the revolution going on)  and gaining huge concessions from Lenin with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Lenin wanted to end the fight with Germany so that he could fight a civil war. it's a huge contributor to the stab-in-the-back theory in Germany post WW I.

They were mad at them still for Danzig and that corridor thingy weren't they? Let alone the fact they became a nation again after the 1919 Treaty and really had a personal race thing against them? I mean they killed what? 2 million Poles?

I was with you until that last statement.  I see no possibility of the Nazis getting anywhere along with developing nuclear weapons, even if there was peace on the continent by 1943-1944.  Especially at the same time frame as the US.

There is some very interesting research in the alternative media community that I dismissed for 20 years as "crazy conspiracy talk", that is actually quite compelling.  I started out reading it looking to dismiss it, then found I couldn't.  The more I read, and did my own reading about their claims, the stronger their case became.  

What is interesting is that the notion of the Germans having developed and not used a weapon is NOT widely dismissed in other countries as it is in the US and UK.  

US, British and one point Soviet historians have written about WW2 with an almost religious like dogmatic adherence to certain narratives.  Reading historians from other nations view of WW2 is quite eye opening.  Their theories don't have to fit into narrative boxes like what we are used to.  Reality seldom does.  

For example now that a Soviet narrative no longer beholds Russian historians, the facts have now led us to the conclusion that Stalin was about to invade Western Europe.  Viktor Suvorov has some excellent lectures on the motives of Stalin and his thirst for conquest.  Now that there is not a narrative to obey, this one fact alone changes everything we think we know about the motives for WW2.  The Soviets were preparing to come across the Fulda Gap in 1941!

So much of what we think we know in the US and UK, we don't know.  

If I sound reasonable up until that point, I suggest holding your judgment and keep an open mind.  For further reading:

Igor Witkowski

https://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Wunderwaffe-Igor-Witkowski/dp/1618613383

Joseph Farrell

https://www.amazon.com/Reich-Black-Sun-Secret-Weapons-ebook/dp/B00F55BWBG/ref=pd_sbsd_14_2/144-2230110-8905745?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00F55BWBG&pd_rd_r=9320d6fd-1e3e-4c90-a833-b844ca077972&pd_rd_w=3Z0Ij&pd_rd_wg=ZR9Kq&pf_rd_p=2c2d0d3b-b3c5-4110-93fa-2c1270309ac1&pf_rd_r=55EES22XBWKJ6MD0DB7N&psc=1&refRID=55EES22XBWKJ6MD0DB7N

Carter Hydrick

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Mass-Germany-Surrendered-Enriched-ebook/dp/B01IJ6WXOM/ref=pd_sim_351_22?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B01IJ6WXOM&pd_rd_r=c162b2a1-59b6-4a70-83fd-6866f26b3c9e&pd_rd_w=kjcQZ&pd_rd_wg=sh15Y&pf_rd_p=9fec2710-b93d-4b3e-b3ca-e55dc1c5909a&pf_rd_r=QZJZGR3VTW00E3MHVE74&psc=1&refRID=QZJZGR3VTW00E3MHVE74

Carter Hydrick gave a lecture about this at Oak Ridge:



What you have to understand is that if this is true, the British and Americans would naturally do everything in their power to suppress this from ever coming to light.  

We also have to understand there is a politically palatable aspect to this part of history.  We were all taught that because Hitler hated the Jews he drove away some his best Jewish scientists and that stopped him from getting the bomb first.  Translation:  Racist = Stupid

What if the truth is Hitler was anti-Semitic genocidal asshole, but his own German nuclear physicists that remained were actually extremely competent, and critically had a 12 month head start on the British and Americans.  

Shit that upsets a narrative doesn't it.

There's a very good reason men like Einstein and many others in the British and American nuclear physics communities were panicking at the very real possibility that the Germans might split the atom first.  Germany after all was the world leader and birth place of this new type of physics.  

For those saying if they had them they would have used them, that also makes 0 sense.  They Germans had something like 5,000 tons of Tabun stockpiled at the end of WW2 and the V-2 to deliver them.  A dozen of them would have killed almost everyone in SE England.  Far more potent than any early nuke.  They had the capability to kill every living organism within V-2 range of German occupied territory.  This capability was never used.  

Then as now WMDs are far more useful for blackmail and bargaining.  

Where's the remains of the German Manhattan Project?

I rest my case.

Bullshit.

The war was won in 1940.

France was conquered. England was defeated. America was sitting at home watching baseball.

Idiotic diplomacy lost them WW2 like it did WW1. They should have looked up to Bismarck more than Fredrick the great.

The mongols waited for winter so they could go across lakes and rivers easily.

The Russians were ruled by the Mongolians for hundreds of years after that campaign.

The German program was never able to conduct a single successful criticality test.  That's kind of an important step. How the hell are you supposed to make a bomb out of material you have no idea whether or not it's sufficiently refined to achieve critical mass?

But sure.  They had nuclear bombs.  They just didn't use them because reasons and the Brits and Americans covered it up.

lol

You are dismissing evidence before even reviewing it.  It's ok I did the same thing for 20 years.  

Watch the lecture in my previous post.  

Why didn't the Germans use their combined Tabun / V-1 / V-2 capability.

In 2011 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste were discovered in an underground salt mine near Hamburg.  

The Auschwitz synthetic rubber plant was using more electricity than the entire city of Berlin, but it never produced any rubber!

Read the book:

https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Mass-Germany-Surrendered-Enriched/dp/1634241177

On the first page critical reviews:

"The best primary source research I have seen in a long, long time."
Gordon Fowkes, Lt. Colonel, US Army Ret.

"The electrical consumption that I.G. Farbe's directors described at their buna plant at Auschwitz is very much in line with the huge electrical requirements for electro-magnetically enriching uranium."

"The facts that the uranium captured from Nazi Germany was:
1) stowed in gold lined containers that
2) were cylindrical in shape
3) each possibly carrying half a critical mass
4) that were described as becoming 'sensitive and dangerous' when opened
5) should be handled like TNT

Certainly leads the experienced physicist to believe the material was enriched uranium.  I cannot fathom anyone at the time taking such careful precautions, or claiming such danger, about comparatively harmless natural uranium."
Dr. Delmar Bergen, retired former director of Nuclear Weapons Program, Los Alamos National Laboratory

I've watched this before, but I gave it another go this afternoon.

The only things I agree with him on is the mistake of declaring war on the US after the Pearl Harbor Attack and the lack of coordination with the Japanese regarding a Siberian front. There was practically no major Nazi/Japanese coordination at all. Hitler didn't even know the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor. Not declaring war on the US and allowing the US to focus exclusively on the Pacific would have been better for Germany. The USSR having to fight a 2 front war would have been good for Germany. A Japanese presence preventing US materiel to getting to the USSR would have been good for Germany.  

The things I don't agree with him about -

1) More U-Boats - Cool, but at what cost? That material, manpower, and manufacturing effort comes from somewhere. Resources are finite. You could make the argument that it is easier to build up a land force than a naval or air force, so go ahead and say you get your U-boats at the expense of the Heer. Does the Heer have the manpower to remilitarize of the Rhineland and deter an intervention from some combination of France, UK, and Belgium? What about intervention after the Anschluss? Would the Munich Agreement have even happened if Germany didn't have a large land force to intimidate the European powers? Do you have the armor needed to invade east? Approx. 3,500 tanks is what the Germans had available at the start of Barbarossa, the vast majority of those being Panzer 3 and earlier models which were already outclassed by the T-34 and KV tanks.

2) The Hitler Could Have Won If He Didn't Treat The Baltics and Ukrainian People Like Shit - Might have some merit, but the whole point of invading east was to obtain Lebensraum for German and Aryan people.  These two things seem incompatible.  If you don't need Lebensraum, then you don't need to invade east and if don't get rid of the indigenous population, then you don't have your Lebensraum.

3) Shit gets cold in Russia during the winter - I've never understood why this is brought up.  It has always gotten cold in Russia in the winter, so it isn't like the winters from 1940-1945 on the Eastern front were some anomaly. The real issue here is logistics, which the Germans were simply not good at. You can see that with most German engineered things where perfect becomes the enemy of good enough. The same goes for a lot of the Wehrmacht and SS's major end items and even their individual equipment. I can't find the exact quote, but even Rommel for all his genius, said something during his North Africa efforts to the effect of it isn't his job to worry about logistics because that was a responsibility for OKW or OKH. "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics," and all that jazz. The Germans didn't comprehend this.

4) The German logistics expanded on the Holocaust and wasting the German-Jewish intelligentsia - so basically if Hitler wasn't a Nazi there would be some Jewish scientists there to help his effort?  See point #2.

36 minutes to say "invading Poland"??

Look, I get that you have a strong fetish for Nazi era Germany, but you're spinning straw out of conjecture and poorly or not at all cited bullshit.

We have a fairly good idea of how the German nuclear weapons project went.

Heisenberg and other physiscists:  Hey Government man, you know this nuclear fission idea could be used to make some really nifty power sources right?  And even incredibly destructive bombs.

German government: Lol, we don't need that.

By the time Germany actually did start a weapons program in earnest (ie when it looked like they were going to need a miracle to win), they didn't have the manpower or resources or time to do it properly.   They had the entire economy focused on struggling (and failing) to make enough gasoline, bullets, interceptors, and tanks.  Which was why they didn't take nuclear research seriously when Heisenberg first brought it to their attention.  

Add to that the herculean amount of time and resources they spent to develop rockets that were only good for lobbing potshots at London and killing a few civilians.  In retaliation for the bombing raids Goering was 100% positive could never take place because Allied fighters would never have the range to make escort (lol).  

Sorry, but the idea that Germany somehow had a successful nuclear weapons program is ludicrous.  What the hell did they use to build it?  Pure force of ubermensch wishful thinking?  They started the war with a manpower and materiel shortage and in most respects it only got worse as their shit got pushed in.   Meanwhile, the USA never had any of it's manufacturing base destroyed, started the war with a massive industrial advantage over Germany (which only increased as time went on) and still barely managed to squeak successful nuclear weapons in at the end of the war.

Here's another thing to consider.... what were the Germans going to use to carry their supposed nuclear weapons?  If they didn't have the time or wherewithal to develop a delivery system for any theoretical nuclear weapon... what makes you think they had the wherewithal to actually make nuclear weapons?   And no, the V2 was never going to carry nukes.   Nor did the Germans seem especially interested in that possibility, considering they damn near executed Von Braun for not being politically reliable enough.

But you have books with unsubstantiated eyewitness accounts and conjecture by experts.  Ok.  "That shit had to have been yellowcake!  Nobody would treat ordinary nuclear waste (which we know Germany had plenty of prior to the war) with kid gloves!"

There's a massive amount of evidence that the German government:

A.  Didn't take nuclear research seriously enough
B.  Didn't have the resources to pull a weapons program off in time
C.  Had most of their physicists who would have been engaged in such research doing other things.

So either it's an elaborate coverup that no one has been able to overturn with any real proof in 75 years... or these theories have no merit.

The invasion of Norway. During the battle the Kriegsmarine got its teeth kicked in so badly that it ended any possibility of carrying out Sealion. Coupled with the aerial losses of the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain it ensured that Britain would remain safe until the inevitable entrance of the US into the war. If the Germans had attempted Sealion with the full strength of the Kriegsmarine during the height of the Battle of Britain when Fighter Command was largely on the ropes and the troops evacuated after Dunkirk were still largely unarmed, the invasion would have had a decent chance.

Had Britain fallen no American invasion of France would have been possible. Gibraltar and Malta would have fallen, along with Northern Africa and Syria/Transjordan soon after. The Med would have been an Axis lake. At that point about the only real choice would have been to funnel US troops and equipment through Murmansk to fight side by side with the Soviets on the Eastern Front.

But if Britain had fallen would we even have had the political will to enter the war?

After reviewing the primary source documents author Carter Hydrick found, the former director of the US nuclear weapons program at Los Alamos thinks the Germans developed weapons grade uranium.  He is not the only nuclear physicist who believes this.

But you know more than one of the most qualified men on the planet about this?

GD delivers!

Any sane person would listen to what that man has to say.  You know maybe even read the book first before jumping to conclusions.  Novel idea, I know.

You can’t even address why the Germans didn’t use their massive Tabun stockpiles.   Which was hundreds of times more lethal.

I don't know why the Germans didn't use their massive Tabun stockpiles.   Why didn't they?   More importantly, why do you think that's even relevant?

Have you ever read up on what a monumentally expensive and complicated task the Manhattan project was?    The dire straits Germany was in and the size and scope of the task we're talking about is not an easily glossed over issue.

Which primary source documents lead Carter Hydrick to believe the Germans had enriched weapons grade uranium and why?   Lets not use an appeal to authority.  Lets look it up for ourselves.

That’s the point, just because you have a nuclear capability doesn’t mean you are going to use it.  Just like they didn’t use their awful Tabun capacity mater with V-1 & V-2s.

They would have got 2,000 Lancasters with poison gas in reprisal.

MAD existed back then too.

My point is, that then as now, the main utility of nukes is for bargaining and blackmail.  Not in their actual use as a weapon.

I fully agree, it was a mammoth undertaking.  Germany would need its own Manhattan project in terms of scale.

What most people don’t know is that through the evils of the concentration camps the Germans had access to a slave labor pool of about 14 million people.  They also had the perfect security, as they could just murder any workers who had seen something sensitive.  Following the July bomb plot ALL secrets weapons programs were transferred over to the SS.

There was an industrial plant at Auschwitz with the massive electrical consumption needed to enrich uranium.  

The was a huge amount of nuclear waste found in 2011 in an underground salt mine that was previously never known about.

My point is this could have been a black project that actually stayed that way for a LONG time.  

Regarding the primary sources, read the book, they are all in there.

I understand your disbelief and incredulity, even the author felt that way in the beginning.

Great point and an undervalued moment in WW2, IMO.

The 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste was not discovered. It was interred there by the West German government starting in 1964. It was a radioactive waste dump.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

The Auschwitz Buna plant never produced any rubber, true. That was partially due to allied bombing before the rubber production facilities went online, and partially due to IG Farben switching their focus to producing synthetic fuels in 1942. By 1944 the Farben plant at Auschwitz was producing 15% of all the methanol - a base for synthetic gasoline and other fuels - output of the Reich.

Furthermore, the plant survived the war and fell into Soviet hands, and was producing 5% of all the world’s synthetic rubber in 2003.

If the rest of the book is as well researched as these bits, copies can be used to rectify the TP shortage.

This.

All this "could've, would've, and should've" shit is retarded.

All that would have happened is that Berlin would have been the first city to get nuked. The Krauts are actually lucky that Hitler and some of his lackeys were incompetent.

ETA: I've said it before and I'll say it again. These threads are usually thinly veiled "Man, wouldn't it have been cool if the krauts had won the war" threads.

"...thinks..."?  "Thinks" is not proof of anything.  It's an opinion.  An opinion of SME on the subject, but still an opinion.  If it existed, where did it go?  If it was made by the Germans, how did they make it?   Where are those facilities and what happened to them after the war?  The results of these questions would hopefully lead to "facts" that could then substantiated - unlike "thinks".

In all fairness, without Norway, Hitler might (probably not, but a tiny chance) have actually tried to push Sealion.  Given how badly the Kriegsmarine got handled with complete Luftwaffe air supremacy and the RN 1500 miles from base, and how many ships they lost to the pathetic Norwegian defenses, that's probably a GOOD thing for the German sailors.  Even a cursory look at what actually happened during the war shows that the RN would have gladly sacrificed every ship and man to stop Sealion, and almost certainly would have succeeded, regardless of the cost.

I always thought outran logistics, no long range bombers.

Even if the Kriesgmarine had emerged from Norway unscathed they still wouldn't have been able to carry out Sealion.  The Royal Navy was far superior; there was no way for the Germans to resupply an invasion force, assuming they even would have gotten close to the coast.

The Kriegsmarine - full strength without the losses in April - backed by the full force of the Luftwaffe - might have been able to force a Channel crossing. The Germans would have been able to bring a lot of air power into play for Channel ops that wasn’t available for the long range raids into Britain. All they had to do was maintain air cover over the Channel, with local air superiority. The RAF was already stretched to its limits dealing with the Luftwaffe raids. They couldn’t have dealt with the increased mission rate necessary to handle a cross Channel invasion. And with air superiority over the Channel the Luftwaffe along with german sub forces would have gutted any RAN sorties.

ETA: the only reason the Brits were able to pull off Dunkirk was because Hitler let them. He had the air and sea power to own the Channel at the time.

Sea Lion died when the Germans chose to allow Dunkirk to be evacuated. A shockingly high % of Brit military hardware was in Europe with the expeditionary force. If they had lost it all, the Germans wouldn't have needed a large mechanized force to invade the UK, infantry/air power could have got it done, largely. They almost certainly could have fought to London if they'd got a foothold. The Brit Navy was certainly superior, but max effort from subs, mines, surface vessels, luftwaffe, and shore-based weaponry could have probably kept the Brit Navy occupied / out of a small area like the channel long enough that nightly waves, if daytime ones prove impossible, of barges could have carried supplies / men across the channel.

No one in the world had the resources to complete EITHER the Manhattan Project OR the B-29 project. The US was able to do both, while also feeding, fueling, and supplying the rest of the allies and fighting it's own conventional 2 front far-flung war. That's what made the B29/a-bomb combination the most bad ass "finishing move" in the history of war.

Don’t forget Norway, the Germans conquered Norway prior to France for their iron ore.

The more I read up on him, the more convinced I am, that El Duce' was an absolute soul crushing, resource draining, pompous, arrogant ass.  What in the world made Hitler think that dude could be a decent ally.  Apart from a couple decent warships, that dude had a shit military.

The author of that book alleging the Nazis had U-235 on a sub, a fake synthetic rubber plant, etc. is nuts.

He clearly has no understanding of nuclear physics (nor a college degree).

By June 1944 we had 129,000 people working on the Manhattan Project with massive industrial plants. Nothing of the sort was found in Germany by the various missions sent to sweep up Nazi atomic secrets.  The secret was they had no cohesive national program and despite having some brilliant scientists, they had made fundamental early errors and didn't even have a working reactor.

If we had made a separate peace with them at this time in 1944, it would have taken the Germans another five years to catch up, especially having the math wrong on the physics package to start with. (That's how long it took the Soviets, who were not on the ropes, struggling with getting food and petroleum, losing the war etc.)

The publisher specializes in conspiracy theory books.  Have never understood the incredible attraction for the moist confluence of Nazis, the occult, Vikings, secret weapons, hollow worlds and flying saucers etc.  There's no there, there.  

The Germans designed or experimented with a lot of interesting technology, many of which were deeply flawed in weird ways, overly complicated, requiring excessive maintenance, or missed the mark with bad deployment or execution.

He brought the world Fascism. Hitler was a big fan.

They came up with their own Nazi physics. Which denied the validity of 'Jewish' physics.

Sea Lion was war-gamed at Sandhurst in the 1970s by the British and Germans who would have taken part in it.

They all came back and stated unequivocally that the German invasion would have been decisively defeated by the Royal Navy.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Germans never stood a chance of EVER defeating the British on their own ground.

Well, they would be fighting unarmed civilians mostly, so that would have helped. If they could GET to limeyland and resupply their invasion force, I believe they could have won. It's not like they'd need to storm the Scottish highlands. Just seige London and eliminate industrial production at a few other big cities and the UK would effectively be out of the war. Definitely wouldn't be the perfect unsinkable carrier at that point. The US couldn't risk a build up in the area, we'd have to use Iceland or somewhere else not nearly as useful as the UK.

If they could cross thousands of miles against a well equipped red army, they could probably fight their way to London against cops, farmers, and WWII vets. It's soooo close in WWII terms. Practically a stones throw.

Hitler kept claiming he was the peaceful one and other countries wanted war. Could you have imagined the shock he would of
gotten if he found out his lie was actually true. 1939 Germany invades Poland leaving very little to defend western Germany.
America, Britaina and France who have secretly been building a massive inventory of weapons and funding huge research projects in weaponry
since the end of World War One attack. Germany high command gets a call from the front line in the west reporting thousands of
bombers over head, fighters strinking everything on ground and a endless numbers of tanks attacking.
Then they find all communication is suddenly cut off in one German city after another. German radios start picking up a announcement
from the allies that they have a new and terrifying new weapon. They demand unconditional surrender and Hitler dead or the destruction of Germany.

You must be missing the points:

1). Britain is an Island.
2). After Norway they essentially had no surface Navy left.
3). The Royal Navy was the largest in the world at the time.

They would have been curb stomped.

The main strategic mistake was made by the allies at the conclusion of WW1 in not totally crushing Germany. The armistice set the stage for act 2.

I think you're missing the point. I wasn't disagreeing with your premise. I said IF THEY COULD GET THERE AND RESUPPLY their invasion force, they could have done it. Translation: if they'd been able to hold off the Navy, then...

As far as the Navy goes, it was much better than the Germans, but that showing against the IJN...yikes, pretty embarrassing. They are fortunate that Japan isn't in the Atlantic.

The allied blockade that continued AFTER the treaty was signed starved a LOT of German civilians to death and their economy was completely fucked. Not enough for ya, huh? Genocide is an interesting problem solving technique. It was actually the allies attempt to "totally crush" Germany that created the political environment for Hitler to come to power. If they had done things the US way (rebuild your enemy after the treaty is signed) WWII never would have gone down the way it did. There probably would have been some other horrible war...but who's to say.

The RN never had more than a tiny fraction of their forces in the Pacific till late 45.  They consciously wrote off everything east of India (though they didn't expect it to go do fast).  There were no engagements worth mentioning past early 1942.

Dolchstoßlegende

This was used to propel the Nazis to power and was only possible because of the armistice; not forcing an unconditional surrender and not destroying  the German Army directly led to WW2. Is what it is.

War is hell

The Treaty of Versailles was the impetus for Hitler coming to power and why the Western powers were so apathetic with Hitler's military adventurism.

Right up to Czechoslovakia. Which the Western Powers pretty much signed off on to give Hitler what he wanted- as their last attempt at appeasement. The Western powers weren't really concerned about Central-Eastern Europe.

Which was a shame. The Czechs could have given the Nazis a really hard time in their take over attempt by force. It was incredibly clever the way the Nazis used the minority status of Ethnic Germans to divide up the country.

As part of the Munich Agreement the Nazis insisted that the Poles and Hungarians also had rightful claims over their ethnic minorities in Czechoslovakia. The state pretty much disintegrated into ethnic enclaves with the signing of the Munich Agreement, setting the stage for the German occupation as a protector of the interests of Germans, Magyars, Hungarians, Slovaks, etc.

From there, it was a jump off point for invading Poland...

I recently read an article that said that one reason the Germans lost was that their Generals were great tactical leaders, but lacked strategic leadership.  I've got to look into that one more.

One reason they lost was Hiterl's stand and fight orders.  That lead to destruction of armies, corps and divisions.  If he would have allowed them to retreat, they would have given up territory, but the army would have been in tact.

Germany NEVER had the naval power available to "own the Channel" at any point in time.  The best they were able to do was occasionally slip a small group of ships past the British forces.  There is a reason that all the German surface raiders during the war sailed around the British Isles and through the Greenland/Iceland/UK gap, and it wasn't because they had the power to own the Channel.  The only significant victory the Germans had in the Channel was slipping a few of them through the British blockade to get them back to Germany, and that victory involved eluding the majority of the British forces, not slugging it out with them.  Only a few months after the Battle of France, the German Navy was certainly both outnumbered and outgunned in the waters of the English Channel. The loss of ten destroyers and a couple light cruisers in Norway were largely irrelevant, as the British forces were several times larger than that.

Deployment of the Royal Navy in preparation for defense against Operation Sea Lion:



Mike

The Germans invaded Norway because the British were already moving to occupy it (Operation Wilfred/Plan R4) in order to cut off Germany’s access to Sweden’s nickel. Basically Churchill’s attempted invasion forced Hitler to occupy it.

Which is very true. But the problem with this is that it wouldn’t have just been the RN going against the KM. They would have been facing the Luftwaffe based in airfields in Normandy as well. A lot of German planes which didn’t have the legs to participate in attacks on the interior of Britain would have been available to participate in anti shipping attacks in the Channel, and pretty much all naval vessels during the early years of the war were excessively vulnerable to air attacks because of their very limited AA armaments. Couple that with intensive Uboat ops against Britain’s surface fleet with maximum use of Fallschirmjager forces as was done in Crete to secure beachheads, and they could have had a chance.

But in the Norway invasion the Germans lost three cruisers, ten destroyers (half of what the KM had in 1940), six uboats, and a couple of dozen transports. That left only a handful of undamaged ships available to participate in Sealion.

Even with all of Germany’s resources intact it would have been a gamble and required a good bit of luck to succeed. But strategically Germany had no other choice if they were to have any chance of avoiding defeat. An intact and hostile Britain left them highly vulnerable on multiple fronts and forced them to fritter away valuable forces that they needed for the eastern front.

Hitler lost the war because he was a megalomaniac dumbass. If he hadn’t have lost the war the way he did, he would have found some other dumbass way to lose it.

I agree with you. Stalin was going to attack, if Hitler hadn’t. His mistakes that cost him were declaring war on the US, wasting resources on England, and delaying his Russian invasion. He almost took Moscow as it was. Russia was pretty much beaten, but what many don’t comprehend is the difference lend/lease made.

His numbers are rookie numbers compared to Stalins.