If Hitler had been smart, would Germany have won?

Of course there were the paths he chose in political field with the exception of the muenich beer hall putch(?). How he brought the NSDAP party up and became chancellor. Than of course in the military field he chose to attack France through Ardennes. He also knew how to gain more territory for the Third Reich with peaceful means prior to the war. So he had diplomatic skills in that way. And aiding Franco in the Spanish civil war was too a good decision. German troops gained battle experience and because of that were superior early in the war. Alliance with Japan was also a good decision. Only Japan didn´t help Germany much because of their own plans of world conquest. For example if Japan attacked the Soviet Union together with Germany, the Soviets would have been in trouble. The winter-equipped divisions the Soviets pulled from the Japanese border, wouldn´t have been able to come for Moskow´s defence and the Germans might have taken Moscow. If that would have happened, the morale of the Soviets would have fallen down and the Operation Barbarossa might have been succesful and thus a good decision. The Japanese were just too megalomanic with their world conquest plans called the Tanaka memorial given to the Emperor in 1927. Of course the Japanese got stuck with the second step of world conquest. China. And when that didn´t go as planned, they continued with other steps. But for some reason skipped the step where they would have conquered East-Russia and went of with conquering pacific islands and Southeast-Asia and of course attacking the USA. But as for Hitler he did do some good decisions.

BM

2 key reasons why Hitler lost.

1. He, by that i mean the german military, only planned for and expected a 6 week war.

2. Hitlers obsession with bombers of all shape and sizes. not enough effort was provided for long range escorts of fighter planes, so all his precious bombers got shot down by allied fighter before reaching their targets. (this being after the battle of britan when german fighter production ran into a trickle).

"At the initial stages of the Continuation War, when an offensive of the Karelian army towards Lake Ladoga and the River Syväri was being prepared, Mannerheim issued the Order of the Day number 4 of the Commander-in-Chief, in which he referred to his promise of 1918, to expel the Bolsheviks out of Russian Karelia, to liberate the Karelian nations and to accord to Finland a great future. He said that the Karelians? own battallions were marching in the ranks of the Finnish army, which was a reference to the so-called tribal battallions assembled in Finland.

In Mannerheim?s view, his proclamation was in accordance with the ideas of the administration of the state, reflecting even a wider public opinion. This sort of an Order of the Day, in which aspirations for territorial expansion, for Great Finland, could be read in between the lines, aroused attention ? negative as well as positive ? among the political circles both in Finland and elsewhere in the world."

The Order of the Day of the Sword Scappard

BTW, Finnish leadership swore allegiance to Germany until the Soviet major offensive in june of 1944 after which they had no other choice than initiate peace negotiations with the Soviet Union if they wanted to maintain independece.

These are major mistakes he made which cost him the war.

1) Going back on his agreement with Stalin and invading Russia. Even if he had won Stalingrad, the terrible conditions wiped out a lot of his army.

2)Unconditional alliance with Mussolini. Because Italy stuffed up a lot of the african campaign, Hitler had to deploy much needed troops to Africa to take back strongholds, the italians should have hld.

3) His obessession with wiping out the european jewish race. When the germans liberated the Ukraine when invading Russia, there was a huge army of ukranians ready to side with the germans to take revenge for years of russian brutality. Instead of taking advantage of this, Hitler did his standard procedure of sending a lot of the army(which was jewish) to the concnetration camps. This army would have been invaluable with manpower and also knowledge of russian conditions.

1. Declaring war on the USA! An incredible blunder.

2. NOT concentrating on a FEW good aircraft designs (Speer was NO Beaverbrook)

3. Insisting that NO ground was ever given up - this hamstrung his generals...who he ignored most of the time

4. Not by-passing Stalingrad

5. Insisting on the Me 262 being converted to a BOMBER

6. Not knocking out the Chain Home and Chain Home Low stations in 1940, and mismanagement of the Battle of Britain through Goering

7. Cancellation of the Ural Bomber project

The list is endless.............thank goodness!

Hitler's greatest mistake was in the power granted to the SS. The existing civil service was gradually replaced by the arms of the SS as the war went on and factions within the SS fought each other to achieve more and more power.

It became harder and harder for the country / economy to be run as the SS became more involved Germany became less efficient.

A similiar thing happened to the armed forces. Soldiers loyalties began to be pulled all over the place as the SS began to mesh themselves into the chain of command.

I don't have the reference in front of me at present but I read a book on the allied capture Bridge at Rentmagen (sp?) that detailed the chain of command that the officer in charge of the bridge had to work with and it was crazy.

The problem at Remagen was the there were no resources to destroy the bridge. The corps command (which i believe was LXXXIVth Corps) simply had no resources to respond, and at the bridge itself, there were insufficient explosives, and those which were available were industrial grade, not military grade. Your statement about the Remagen bridge is a naive oversimplification of a complex situation. More than anything else, Lt. Timmerman's men were willing to make the sacrifices necessary to get across the bridge, while the Germans simply were going to pieces, and unable to effectively respond.

I consider your remarks about the SS to be ill-informed as well.

I just checked my facts (always a good thing to do). The area of responsibility was LXVIIth Corps. General Botsch, who had until recnetly commanded LXVIIth Corps, had only recently taken command of LXXXth Corps, and had not had the opportunity to brief his successor on the bridge and it's defenses. The local commander was Captain Bratge, and the bridge itself was in the command of an engineer, Captain Friesenhahn, who was unaware that most of the charges had not been placed. He only became aware of this when he checked on his own initiative on the morning of March 7, 1945, as the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion, Combat Command B, 9th Armored Division entered Remagen. Capt. Friesenhahn was in a tunnel in the Erpeler Ley, across the Rhine. When, at about 12:30 p.m., he was informed that the Americans were in possession of most of Remagen, he tried to blow the approach causeway to the Ludendorf Bridge, but only partially succeeded, and then learned by personal inspection that he had only industrial grade explosives. Lt. Karl Timmerman (who had been born nearby, ironically) lead his Company A into Remagen, and secured the approaches to the bridge. When Brig. Gen. Hoge, commanding CCB, learned that the bridge was standing, he ordered the 27th to seize the bridge. Timmerman's company was badly bled-down, and although their casualties were not heavy, they still only managed to put 15 men across the bridge. But they hung on, and even though the Germans had nominally 200 men in the Erpeler Ley tunnel, many were Volksturm, and many of the rest were demoralized and unwilling to fight. Both Capt. Bratge and Capt. Friesenhahn had been wounded in the fighting for the bridge approaches and the bridge, and they eventually surrendered.

In March of 1945, neither LXVIIth Corps nor LXXXth Corps existed as coherent military organizations, their component units existed on paper, but it was a toss-up whether any particular unit existed on the ground. The chain of command of any German unit was very coherent and efficient--but without troops, a chain of command is meaningless. By the spring of 1945, few German divisions could muster even a battalion strength, and even those units often lacked basic arms, ammunition and supplies.

You have a grossly inflated view of the significance of the SS.

Kaldish has indeed.

I did say that I didn't have my Remagen book to hand and I did not blame the chain of command for the failure to blow the bridge but my weak and feeble memory suggests that Bratge was under orders from something other than LXXXth Corps.

I still stand by the SS replacing the civil service and making it less efficient

Hans Buchheim "3rd Reich - its beginnings, developments, its end" published as "Der dritte reich" in 1958

Ill paraphrase to prevent typing pages...

The first political assignment undertaken by the SS was race and resettlement. This was a police power and gave way to an SS political police. The head of this was linked to the SS Reichfurher which took power away from the ministry of the interior and handed it to the SS. The transfer of police powers to the SS away from the Ministry of the Interior until the summer of 1943 when it was fully taken over by the SS.

The furher would inform a regular administrative agency that its function was being taken by a special deputy who was subordinate and directly responsible to Hitler. In time the super structures conflicts with the traditional government led to a chaos of overlapping competances - of functions that duplicated and cancelled each other.

- thats what I was trying to say - that letting the SS loose in the inner workings of government was a huge mistake. Well a mistake anyway if 'grossly inflated' is correct.

As far as I recall Buchheim (I only read the German version), he said that the police forces became a SS-infested civil service.
Which certainly is true.

Bratge had no orders concerning the Ludendorf bridge, and both he and Friesenhahn were certainly not acting under orders from LXXXth Corps--they were in the LXVIIth Corps area of responsibility. My remarks were in response to your statement that: ". . . but I read a book on the allied capture Bridge at Rentmagen (sp?) that detailed the chain of command that the officer in charge of the bridge had to work with and it was crazy." I have disputed this on the basis that German command control was crumbling all along the western front.

As for the paraphrase which you have supplied, it makes no distinction between the authority of the Gauleiters in newly acquired territories (there were five such "gauen" administered by these appointees) and the growing power which Himmler acquired by inserting the SS into police districts within the gauen, and only much later in the Landen into which the rest of Germany was administratively divided. This was internal politicking, and has little to do with the lack of competence of the Gauleiters and the other administrative officials of the NSDAP.

The question of this thread is whether or not Germany could have won the war had Hitler been "smart." Apart from the rather vague concept of what makes someone "smart," the obvious answer is that the war itself was not a "smart" idea, and once Churchill was installed with a National Union government, and the Soviet Union was invaded, the only question was how long it would take Germany to lose. In your paraphrase you jump from remarks about the police powers which Himmler engrossed for the SS to a statement about "a chaos of overlapping competances (that should read competancies)." The very incompetence of NSDAP officials assured the eventual disintegration of the machinery of state. Competent individuals such as Milch, and brilliant individual such as Speer served to delay the day of reckoning. As for the military aspect of the war, the excellence of the command system, and the Frederician emphasis on individual initiative at all levels of the Wehrmacht also served to postpone the reckoning.

Once again, it is my opinion that you overrate the significance of the SS. Most of the "race settlement" actions of Himmler's organization were undertaken by a subordinate bureau of the SS, the SD, which also administered the camps. The majority of SS members were in fact engaged in direct combat with Germany's enemies, and were widely recruited in the occupied territories--i have read estimates that 50,000 of the Dutch served in the SS, and there was a French SS Charlemagne division. The SS was not a simple, monolithic organization. I think that you are correct to view their influence as significant, and you might engage in further study of the organization, and the growth of its power as Himmler worked to extend his "turf." I do not for a moment believe that the defeat of Germany can be laid at the door of the SS, however.

It is entirely possible that Hitler could have won the second the world war. Probably the biggest blow to his war effort was his failure to invade Britain. Adverse weather conditions halted him from launching operation Sea Lion, at subsequenlty, the war against the UK was fought in the skies in the Battle of Britain. However, if Hitler had succeeded in landing troops in Britain and eventually occupying it, this would have effetively ended the war in Europe and meant victory for Hitler for a number of reasons.

1. As Britain was the only nation in Europe not occupied by the Germans, it served as the launching base for all allied operations in Europe. If it had been occupied by Hitler's forces, the D-Day invasions could not have been launched, nor could any other allied landing operations.

2. Britain served as the main supplier of equipment for the resistance movements throughout Europe. If Britain had been occupied, it would have meant the end of effective resistance throughout Europe.

3. If America had still become involved in the war, it's only logical chance of landing in occupied Europe would have been through the south. Given that Britain was occupied and there was no chance of an allied landing operation in the north, he could have turned his active divisions in Normandy and Pas de Calais against the troops coming up through Italy and other areas in the south.

4. Probably what is most important is that Britain helped delay Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union by launching a counter-attack through Greece against the Italian army. Hitler was forced to send troops to re-enforce Mussolini, and as a result, Operation Barbarossa was launched six-weeks later than originally planned. Hitler's troops ran into the brutal conditions of Russian seasonal weather. Eventually, the Russian winter forced his army to a halt at Stalingrad, and it was there that the war turned against him. If he had been able to launch Barbarossa on time, the wehrmacht would have had enough time to push all the way to Moscow without being delayed by the winter. It's likely Russia would have fallen within eight or ten weeks.

Essentially, the invasion of Britain would have assured victory for Hitler in Europe. As for the United States, the wisest course of action would have been for Germany to appeal to the U.S. for the signing of some sort non-agression agreement. However, if Germany had declared war on America, WWII would likely have dragged on for much longer. Germany did not have the capacity, nor a suitable launching base for landing troops on American soil. However, they had developed long-range bombers, v-2 rockets, and battleships which could have been used to hit the eastern and southern coast of the United States, and it's most likely that long, drawn out air and sea war would have ensued.

Eventually, with the advent of atomic weapons, the air and sea war would probably cease and America and Germany would most likely be caught in a nuclear standoff, the ending of which is anyone's guess.

Nonsense--Germany was doomed from the time they crossed the border into Poland.

Welcome to A2K, prometheus13.

You represent there a - mildly spoken - very singular view of Germany during WWII.

I'm sorry. I don't quite understand what you mean by singular point of view.

As for the issue of crossing the Polish Border, I agree that ultimately going to war with Russia was a foolish decision, but that doesn't rule our the possibility of a successful invasion. The main reason for the failure of the invasion was the poor timing. Hitler had planned to launch the invasion in May, but it didn't happen until June. Still, the German Army managed to advance as far Leningrad and Stalingrad, but because the winter slowed them down, this gave Stalin enough time to regroup his forces and mount a counter-attack at Stalingrad. If the wehrmacht had continued to advance, they most likely would have overwhelmed the Red Army.

And I'm sorry that I couldn't find a second such opinion.

I'm sorry, but my lingusitic skills are not the best and I still fail to grasp your point. I'm not mocking you, I really just wish to know what you're telling me.

When Germany invaded Poland, they forced France and Britain to declare war on them. The Soviet Union subsequently invaded Poland as well, to erect a buffer between themselves and Germany. That the military response of France and Britain was initially pathetic does not alter the fact that Hitler had attempted to annex Poland, and present it to the rest of Europe as a fait accompli from which Poland's erstwhile allies would then back down. He badly misjudged the English. Although the allies missed a golden opportunity during the "sitzkrieg," they eventually got their act together, and put of a pretty good fight in Norway, despite the logistical difficulties they faced, and the logistical advantages which the Germans enjoyed in that campaign. As it was, the German navy sacrificed nearly their entire destroyer force in the fight for Narvik. Each further step down the road of war took them that much closer to destruction. Hitler was a good judge of gutter politics, as i have mentioned time and again, and he correctly judged the lack of will on the part of Le Brun and Chamberlain in the 1938 Czech fiasco. But he was completely unable to understand the British, and what their reaction would be to the fall of France. Churchill mystified and enraged him.

That war with the Soviet Union was inevitable should not be doubted: Hitler had already told in Mein Kampf of his plans to find "living space" for the German people in the Ukraine, and Stalin accepted it as a given that the Germans would invade. Recently released documents show that Stalin believe such an invasion would come in 1943, and was therefore caught unprepared, while he was fighting the Finns and the Japanese. (See Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Montefiore.)

The title of this thread suggests that a "smart" Hitler could have won that war. I consider that nonsense. With the invasion of Poland, Hitler assured that Roosevelt would eventually find a way to come into the war against Germany. That Hilter was not smart, and in fact was stupid, is evinced by his declaration of war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Hawaii. Had he done nothing, Roosevelt would have had to play a waiting game, seeking a provocation for a declaration of war on Germany. Admiral King and Admiral Kimmel were wrangling over ship assignments in the Atlantic and the Pacific even before the United States entered the war, because the administration was actively helping the Canadians to patrol the northwest Atlantic, so as to get the convoys through to England. When the English decided to go after and sink Bismark, American Coast Guard search aircraft, operating out of England tracked her down. American Coast guard weather ships left their stations to track Bismark so that the English would not lose her. The United States was already involved in that war in 1940, and American naval officers in the Atlantic sourly referred to it as "waging neutrality." Our "lend-lease" agreement with England gave the United States control of the English naval bases in the Carribean, the purpose of which would be to establish forward bases to combat the German submarines which would inevitably attack American coastal shipping. The Boeing 299, which became the Army Air Force's B-17, was shipped to England before we entered the war (although their pilots did not like it, and the asked for no more of them). The United States routinely sold Curtis Kittyhawk and Tomahawk fighters to Canada, which were then shipped in their original crates to England.

It is not justifiable in my opinion to suggest that the Germans could have taken Moscow, even if they had launched their invasion on the originally scheduled time table. German armored vehicles were not designed to operate in those conditions, and the example of Leningrad strongly suggests that they could not have successfully laid seige to Moscow even if they had made it that far. Stalin was able to transfer troops from the far east to confront the Germans because the Japanese had negotiated an armistice with the Soviets--which just underlines what an idiot Hitler was to delcare war on the United States on behalf of his Japanese "allies," who did absolutely nothing for the Germans in that war. The Germans were not prepared for the winter of 1941-42. Their vehicles were not winterized, their troops were not supplied with winter clothing, they made no effort to improve the road network on which their communications depended in anticipation of the coming winter.

After Napoleon defeated Kutusov at Borodino in 1812, he waited around for a day to accept the surrender of Moscow. It never happended. While his badly battered army licked its wounds, and he wrote yet another phoney bulletin, Kutusov marched right through Moscow, past the Kremlin and across the river. When the bridges over the Moscva became jammed with civilian as well as military carts, he lined up his artillery, restored order, and then allowed one civilian vehicle to cross after each military vehicle. Kutusov then moved by his left to put himself between Moscow and his base of supply in the south. When Napoleon finally entered Moscow, there were, perhaps, 10,000 people left in a city which had held two days before, more than a million souls. Most of those left were the aged, the homeless, the infirm and the insane. It is a mistake to believe that taking Moscow would have resulted in a German victory any more than that was true for Napoleon. By the way, the Germans did not reach Stalingrad and the Volga river until the late summer of 1942, they were no where near it in 1941.

In 1708, Charles XII of Sweden marched into Russia. He could have moved by the Baltic coast, which would have given him excellent logistic support for a move to take St. Petersburg, a city which was then only five years old. He could have moved by Novgorod thereafter to take Moscow. That likely would not have resulted in a Swedish victory, however, especially in light of the character of his opponent, Petr Alexeevitch. Instead, he foolishly placed all his bets on the renegade Cossack Hetman, Mazeppa, and marched into the Ukraine, and to his destruction at Poltava in 1709.

When Napoleon crossed the Vistula, he disposed of more than a half million troops. He could have marched by the Baltic coast on St. Petersburg as well. He would not have had control of the Baltic as Charles did in 1708, but he still would have had a short, secure supply line. Instead, he marched by Smolensk on Moscow. Along the way, he left increasingly large garrisons, because of the partisan activities of Doctorov and Davidov and a host of other Russian aristocrats who were willing to burn their own estates to deny support to the invader. When he finally reached the defensive redoubts at Shevardino, he tried in a ponderous and clumsy fashion (due to the incompetence of Jerome Bonapart, commanding his right wing) to move around Kutusov's left. Prince Bagration was a fearless and tenacious fighter who managed a brillian career without a strategic clue--even he saw through Napoleon's manoeuvre, and moved to conform. Kutusov was a lot sharper, and as soon as the French were gone from the front of the redouts at Shevardino, he rushed the rest of the army behind Bagration's line and conformed in time to meet the French attack the next day. After the long grind from Warsaw to Borodino, Napoleon's half million was reduced to about 150,000 after subtracting garrisons and "wastage" due to partisan attacks on his communications and line of march. During the day long nightmare of Borodino, the flower of the Army which had not already been sacrificed at Wagram in 1809 was destroyed. Lannes had been killed at Wagram. Desaix had died much earlier when Napoleon abandoned him in Egypt. Louis Davout was just about the only competent Marshall still commanding troops in the field for Napoleon by then, and even he could not break the Russian line. (And he was the only man i know of in history to have successfully enveloped both flanks of his enemy, even though the Prussians at Auerstadt outnumbered him two-to-one!) By the time the Army retreated back to the river Bug, there were just 10,000 men left, and those were only saved because Davout commanded the rear guard.

I do not believe that Hitler could have taken Moscow, and even if he had, i do not believe that that would have knocked Stalin out of the war. Like Charles XII before him, Hitler went off on a wild goose chase in the Ukraine, and to his eventual destruction. I don't think it matters, though. He was already doomed.