There's merit to these claims, of course, though agreement among historians as to their relative weights of importance on the grand scheme of things is by no means universal. These arguments cut both ways, mind you. What if peace in Chamberlain's time ended after the Austrian Anschluss or Munich crisis? What if Hitler squared off against a France that actually had the will to fight and fight hard as it theoretically could have, or at least wasn't caught off guard by Hitler's implementation of Manstein's strategy of striking through the Ardennes forest? What if Stalin hadn't ignored the numerous warnings of Hitler's impending attack, and what if he hadn't so thoroughly thinned out his officer corps or not been in the process of reorganizing his forces, possibly in anticipation of a surprise attack of his own against Germany because he damn well knew the Germans were planning one, when Barbarossa was launched? Blunders are not restricted to one side or the other in war, and a fair treatment of the 'what-ifs' has to allow for both sides not making their worst mistakes.
So it's not so clear that defeat for European fascism boiled down to this or that strategic or tactical error. Some would suggest that the war was unwinnable from the get-go, or at least from the time of Operation Barbarossa. Perhaps the disparities in population, territorial size and resources enjoyed by the USSR vis-a-vis Nazi Germany were simply insurmountable. But the problems that the Axis had went beyond the more obvious factors of demographics, supply, logistics and command.
Germany had the most potent military machine in the world at the outbreak of hostilities. The commanders, troops and equipment of the Greater Germanic Reich were top rate and it didn't face adversaries who were simply impossible to beat. Despite being larger and more populous, the USA and the USSR were far from unbeatable, and both were defeated or at least fought to a standstill in the 20th century by relatively minor powers, so it's not like the military machine that the likes of Rommel and Manstein commanded could not possibly have beaten them. Victory in war is not all about comparable sizes in population or resources, though these are doubtlessly important. The will to fight is crucial, and not something that either postwar superpower was always able to create and sustain indefinitely, as the Americans later discovered in Vietnam and the Soviets learned in Afghanistan.
The problems this caused began well before the war. Consider the fact that up until 1933, the world center for nuclear research had been in Gottingen, in the German state of Lower Saxony. The leading physicists involved in nuclear research were predominantly Jewish and not sympathetic to Nazi thought. Thus they were expelled, or fled voluntarily to the United States. The Jewish man whose name has become a byword for intelligence: Albert Einstein, immigrated to the USA after the man whose name certainly is not be a byword for intelligence: Adolf Hitler, came to power in Germany.
Well, perhaps that's not entirely fair. Hitler was not unintelligent. He had, among other mental gifts, an almost savantish memory when it came to technical facts about weaponry and hardware: the water displacement of ships, gauges of trains, maximum ranges of various weapons and similar things. Nor was he strictly speaking irrational - at least not until the very end of the war when he ranted and raved in his bunker and issued orders to units that no longer existed. Hitler was not always the military imbecile his generals would later make him out to be. He sometimes supported the good decisions of his generals, such as Manstein's plan to have the main thrust against France be through the Ardennes Forest, and was not incapable of strategic and tactical soundness.
Hitler was neither insane nor stupid. He was something worse than either. He was an ideological fanatic, who was utterly convinced that the ends justified any means used to achieve them, and created about himself an echo chamber of sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to know. At times he even evidenced a sort of messiah complex, and claimed that he was chosen by "providence" to achieve his extremely lofty and ambitious goals within his own lifetime. His uncanny successes in the 1931 to 1941 timespan seemed as if to conspire with this illusion, and so it should not surprise us quite so much when the entire nation drank the Kool-Aid, as it were, in the early to mid 1940s.
For his part, Einstein would later go on to affix his signature to a letter advising President Eisenhower of the potential of nuclear weapons, resulting in the eventual development of the Manhattan Project.
This and this alone may well have made world war unwinnable for Hitler. A decisive advantage would be gained by whichever power first developed nuclear weaponry, and because the virulent anti semitism of Hitler and his Nazis drove the best and brightest nuclear physicists off the continent, that power was to be America, not Germany. So at best, a cold-war style stalemate with the US is the very most that Nazi Germany could ever have hoped for.
This same antisemitism alienated not merely the nuclear physicists, but the millions of other Jews who had been patriotic enough during WW1. This same antisemitism that drove the SS to divert an admittedly small number of its own forces, though a force still more useful actually fighting in the war, to slaughtering in the millions people who otherwise could have shored up declining industrial production at precisely the time when it was most needed. To say nothing of the rail and industrial capacity similarly wasted on mass slaughter rather than supplying and reinforcing his forces.
Hitler would later claim that posterity would thank him for his efforts against the Jews, and hopefully be willing to carry on his work. One wonders whether the hosannas sung to der Fuhrer on 4chan's politically incorrect forums or in YouTube video comments sections are worth the destruction his genocidal mania wrought on millions of innocent people, including his own who lost the war as a result? Do antisemitic idiots raving on social media about cultural Marxism make it all worth while to old Adolf, in whatever corner of Hell he happens to be burning in?
Asking why Hitler invaded the USSR before having first subdued Great Britain misses the whole point of why the war was fought as far as Hitler was concerned. This question assumes that one is looking at the war from a military strategy rather than a Nazi ideological standpoint, and der Fuhrer was using the later lens. His real objectives, as outlined in Mein Kampf, were these:
- Living space in the east.
- Toppling the bolshevik government in Russia.
- Ethnic cleansing of the Jews
All of these objectives were central to Nazism, and depended upon one another. There's a certain intersectionality, if I may borrow the term, about these goals. They intersect on the need to invade Russia in order for them to be accomplished. It should also have been easy to accomplish, or so they thought. After all, France was far tougher to beat in WW1 than Russia, and France fell easily enough in 1940 so how tough could Russia possibly be, especially with unmanly and non-Aryan Judeo-Bolsheviks running the place? Following the Wehrmacht's sterling performance in Poland, Norway, the low countries and in France especially, in contrast to the Soviet Red Army's shameful performance in the winter war against Finland, I suppose you can't blame the Germans - notice I didn't say Hitler specifically, for his high command was much less opposed to the idea than their postwar alibis would have you believe - for thinking it was going to be a cakewalk.
Hence, why it didn't matter if Great Britain were knocked out of the war or not, nor how this was to occur. The USSR was sure to fall easily, and this would cause Churchill to come to his senses and sue for peace, so that the British Empire, of which Hitler was fond due to its being white anglo-saxon, could live in peace with a German hegemony on the continent. Or so Der Fuhrer thought and hoped. Like so many of his thoughts and hopes, it would turn out to be catastrophically wrong, and rooted in the absurdity of racial ideology, not reality.
This is also why diplomatic means were eschewed in preference to raw force and brutality, especially once the eastern campaign began. There was no consideration of allying with the Poles, Ukrainians or even disaffected Russians in a campaign aimed solely at taking down the deeply unpopular communist government in Moscow and replacing it with something everyone could better live with, or some other rational and attainable goal. As far as Nazism is concerned, anticommunism was never really about being opposed to communism as a system of government or economics - "national socialism" was actually quite a close cousin to Stalin's take on communism, "socialism in one country." Note the fact they're virtually identical linguistically. To the Nazi mind, from the pages of Mein Kampf to the edgelords of 4chan, communism was always a codeword for internationalism, effeminacy and cosmopolitanism. Themselves, in turn, code words for Jewishness.
The master race does not ally with inferior slavs. Rather, it forces their backs to the wall and thus motivates them to fight to the last and fight hard to drive out the hostile invader. One wonders how hard you have to try to bully and abuse the Ukrainian and Russian peasantry into actually preferring Stalin; famines, purges and all, over your own invading forces? Yet hats off to Hitler and his SS for actually managing it. Thus the war in the east was condemned to become a meat grinder that naturally could only be won by the side that had more manpower, resources and land to sacrifice on the altar of attrition warfare.
That side was not Nazi Germany, especially after Stalin began getting his act together militarily, after Stalingrad.
Everything that followed was ancillary to those core points, and would merely have hastened or delayed the inevitable, as the case may be. August of 1945 is the deadline on any other outcome post December of '41, whatever other decisions could have been made and outcomes achieved by anyone. For reasons outlined above, this is when the bomb was ready for delivery, and Fatman and Little Boy would most likely have been detonated over German rather than Japanese cities by that point.
The core tenets of Nazism, inseparable from Hitler's character which was so instrumental in his rise to power in the 1930 to 1940 timespan, wherein he was fortunate enough to not face unified and determined opposition, condemned him to bloody failure from 1941 onwards, when he did face determined opposition.
The core tenets of Nazism, inseparable from Hitler's character which was so instrumental in his rise to power in the 1930 to 1940 timespan, wherein he was fortunate enough to not face unified and determined opposition, condemned him to bloody failure from 1941 onwards, when he did face determined opposition.
Yet even in the face of defeat for reasons that would be obvious to anyone with the slightest bit of military acumen - the populations and economies of the UK, USA and USSR make quite clear why their victory was inevitable - Hitler's coup-de-grace, delivered amidst his infamous deluded rantings (Fegelein! Fegelein! Fegelein!) was to condemn the German people to death and desolation for their failure to achieve his absurd and atrocious goals. The so called Nero Decree, issued in March of 1945 and fortunately deliberately disobeyed by then minister of armaments and war production Albert Speer, was to destroy all German facilities and infrastructure in advance of the coming allies, along with forced marches of his populations from west to east, where hopefully (in his rotting mind) their surrender would be to the advance of the harsh Soviets, rather than the relatively more lenient western allies.
That's what happens when you're not the master race and fail in your historic destiny.
Something to consider before you start thinking Hitler might be edgy, or even that he did nothing wrong, even if it is "Just about the memes, bro."
No comments:
Post a Comment