Hitlers' Greatest Blunder??

Hitler signed his death warrant when he entered the Rhineland. Neither Hitler, nor his Nazi bullyboys ever really had a chance to claim the victory of their fantasies.

The reasons for this have been hashed and rehashed often. Search the History threads here and read the postings if you want folks opinions. Setanta is an especially good commentator, read his many writings on the subject.

I know had a little debate with him on the "if hitler was smarter forum.




-Hans

Hitler was an opportunist with charisma, and a fantasy that played well with a defeated Germany struggling with the Great Depression and the threat of a Communist revolution. He was a military ignoramous who thought he was a genious. He was a rigid thinker unable to revise his ideas in light of changing circumstances. He totally misjudged what was necessary to conduct total war against the civilized world.

Asherman has it right there. There was no single "event" that Hilter could have somehow avoided.

Nobody, no nation, can commit to war against almost everyone and hope to win.

The Romans could have.







-Hans

They tried.

Where are they now?

their emipre faded due to bad leadership what if they had better ones...no one could have stopped them.





-Hans

I'd say, if you want to pick out a critical, war-shaping decision, Barbarosa, the invasion of Russia, was the deal-breaker ... and likely would have been even had Sealion, the invasion of England, gone forward and been successful (though I have the sincerest doubt Sealion had any legitimate prospect of success, but that's another story). Some argument may be made that Hitler's coming to Mussolini's aid, in Greece/The Adriatic and in North Africa, were major blunders, but I disagree with that for a number of reasons (a bit of pedantic trivia - Rommel's command was not The Afrika Corps, but rather Panzer Armee Afrika, of which The Afrika Corps was a component). While burdensome, and, in the case of Africa, ill-considered and all but doomed to failure, neither can be said to have been pivotal as regards the course of the war.

Getting back to the topic, operational planning for Barbarosa was woefully inadequate, leaving an astonishing number of extremely credible contigencies uncovered, contingencies which in great part did occur, much to the distress and inconvenience of the overall German warplan. Among other considerations was the inadequate allocation of assets, material and personnel, despite the fact just about everything available to Germany at the time was indeed committed to the effort. The Germans brought all they had to the fight, but it was not enough, as had been pointed out to Hitler by everyone from The General Staff to individual field commanders and industrial chiefs both governmental and private sector prior to and during the planning of the operation. The argument was not that Russia should be attacked, but rather that Germany's resources and capabilities were not yet at that time equal to the task. There also was argument centered on the inadvisability of opening an Eastern Front against The Soviet Union before deciding the fate of England on the Western Front, but that was in large, even chief, part ancillary to the "Not Never, Just Not Yet" argument.

Ignoring those advisors, Hitler persisted, Hitler failed. The German attack on Russia may be thought of as analagous to the Japanese attack on the US; it awakened a sleeping tiger and filled it with a terrible resolve, in the words of Admiral Yamamoto. Not incidentally, the case may be made that Hitler's attack provided a rallying point from which Stalin was able to secure and expand what arguably was in danger of becoming a tenuous grip on power - his purges and agricultural/industrial failures had generated considerable ill-will towards him within both The Communist Party and the military, all of which effectively evaporated with the German assault.

The Russian Campaign sapped Germany's fighting power. The Soviet Union was a power shredder into which Hitler poured men and resources to no significant German benefit. Some 5 times more assets and personel were devoted to the Russian Debacle than to theentire rest of the war, and something on the order of 4/5ths of Germany's total combat casualties were incurred in action on The Eastern Front.

With Russia, Hitler bit off far, far more than he could chew, regardless of the 2 front argument, and he did so against the advice of those who knew whereof they spoke. That pretty well fits the description of major blunder.

Two things come immediately to mind - allowing the BEF to escape France and return to England in 1940, and the conduct of the war in Russia. Millions of Russians volunteered to join the Germans in 1941, only to be treated as subhumans instead by the Nazi policies. If they had gone in as liberators instead of as slavemasters things could have been quite different.

A big factor though, was out of Hitler's control. That was his ally, Japan. Russia and Japan were fighting a series of fairly large battles in their frontier boarders between Manchuria and Mongolia in the summer of 1939. Stalin deliberately held back from invading Poland in 1939 until he was sure the fighting with Japan was over. I've often wondered why England and France declared war on Germany for invading Poland on 9/1/39, but did not declare war on Russia for doing exactly the same thing less than three weeks later. If Stalin had attacked Poland at the same time Hitler did, what would England and France's reaction have been?

Another item was Japan's timing of entering the war. If they had taken Singapore at the same time France fell, instead of waiting a year and a half, how would that have changed British resolve?

I tend to go along with the big bird here, while adding the caveat that no single blunder of ol' Adolf is really separable from the others. With a gutter politician's instinct for the spineless, and a bully's lack of comprehension of the courageous, he correctly assessed the weakness of Chamberlain and Deladier, and completely failed to understand the resolve of Churchill. In other threads it has been suggested that Hitler need not have attempted to implement his plan for the Ukraine, and that he could have "consolidated" his conquest of France, and the partition of Poland. Apart from ignoring that neither Churchill nor Stalin would ever have left him in peace, this ignores that his Polish adventure was the necessary prelude to the invasion of the Ukraine. For whatever propaganda was spread, he was following this plan from start to finish. Wanting to pursue such a plan, he convinced himself it would succeed, which accounts for his unwillingness to listen to contrary advice. Furthermore, he deluded himself that England would either capitulate (he could correctly judge Chamberlain, but Churchill simply infuriated him, because he did not understand him), or could be marginalized. He was constitutionally unable to look the prospect of failure in the face, and therefore never planned for it. England did not cave in, and no operational planning had been done and no logistical preparations made to invade England--and the crucial mid-summer of 1940 was the one shot available to him. The Italians botched their occupation of Yugoslavia, and Hitler decided to bail them. The idiot Moussolini then invaded Greece, despite Mataxas being the natural ally of Hitler, and the Germans had to bail them again. Hitler was out of his depth from the time he left the street gangs behind. He was incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his acts, let alone to prepare for and effectively deal with them.

He remained loyal to his Japanese "alliance," despite not one shred of support, even lip-service, from the Japanese. Their decision to conclude an armistice with the Soviet Union in fact hurt Hitler's plan; he decision to declare war on the United States (the only candidate for worst blunder other than invading the Soviet Union) showed he had learned nothing, and was diplomatically clueless as well as militarily.

From the Rhineland, through the Aunchless (sp?), Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, the Low Countries, France and North Africa, he confusedly made decisions thrust on him for which he had no answers, and struggled like a weak swimmer fighting the tide to follow his "lebensraum" plans. Without his knowing, every step he took, so long as the chimerical goal of a German Ukraine flickered before him, was one more step to destruction. Without his ambition to take the Ukraine, none of the other war plans were necessary; with that obsession in operation however, every crossroads, every turning in a dark forest of command decision was another trap for him.

Without his Ukrainian obsession, Hitler really has no reason to go to war with anyone. Without that dream/nightmare, all of the other questions of war and conquest are moot. Adolf's idiocy was born in a Bavarian prison cell in 1923, and it lead him directly and swiftly to a shallow pit in Berlin, 22 years later.

CONSOLIDATION
Regarding Consolidation:

Destruction of the B.E.F. puts the Limeys on the side-lines. With the Brits out of the picture, it would boil down to the Communists vs. the Fascists.

Church and Joe are not enough to take out the Krauts. Churchill would not have liked the Krauts running amok, but he would not have the resources to stop them anytime soon. Stalin may have wanted to annex the Krauts, but he would be going it alone. A review of the campaigns actually fought indicates that the Krauts, having a different strategic plan (defensive), would have given the Reds more than they bargained for.

As for the H-Man: Political Genius, yes. Military Genius, no. Be glad that Hitler believed his own press and was the architect of his own demise.

//BW

I agree with the dunkirk disaster but also he should have actually landed troops in the UK.




-Hans

...
Be glad that there was never any plan or means to cross the Channel.

//BW

Re: ...


Oh, there was a plan, Operation Sealion, which called for some 160,000 troops to assault beaches and sieze ports over a 45-mile stretch of Southeast England. A cadre occupation government had been worked out, and some attention had been paid to the matter of locating and transporting back to Germany certain specific British Treasures. Operational planning was carried to the point of designating which units were to be involved, under what command structure, the assault targets, the sequence of steps required to facillitate the invasion, and even the designation of certain existing French medical facilities as primary receipt points for anticipated invasion casualties.

A number of things kept the plan from implementation. First, Germany did not possess the means to mount a Cross-Channel amphibious assault; at the very least, several thousand landing craft would have been required, landing craft for troops and equipment, and simply were not available, nor produceable in any timely manner. Even Hitler acknowledged the notion of using civilian canal barges, the only readily available alternative, was wholly impracticable. Secondly, German airpower and surface maritime combat capability were wholly inadequate to the task of defending a massed invasion fleet from the quite capable, and very present, British Home Fleet and the land based, also very present, RAF, in the first instance, let alone doing so while simultaneously providing naval and air support to an amphibious assault. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Hitler remained convinced The British would at the very least accept terms amounting to withdrawal from the war, thereby allowing Germany a free hand in continental Europe.

Incidentally, Sealion plans resulted in the confiscation of a huge proportion of French, Dutch, and Belgian canal barges, most of which remained idle under military control (though perhaps neglect might be a better word) throughout the remainder of the war, much to the detriment of Germany's war materiel transport capability.

There indeed was a plan ... there were not the means, and such was acknowledged; a year later, a plan without means was implemented, despite vigorous counteradvice, spelling inevitably The Third Reich's doom at the hands of The Soviet Union.

Well, as already said on other threads: my father crossed the Channel twice:
- the first they were said, it was the invasion (but actually no one believed that),
- the second time, he only took minimal first aid material, because he thought (correctly) that it only was an exercise for some hours.

I've seen the photos from the on or the other (or both?) crossings: landing crafts, soldiers ..... and the white cliffs in the very, very distance. :wink:

Well, as already said on other threads: my father crossed the Channel twice:
- the first they were said, it was the invasion (but actually no one believed that),
- the second time, he only took minimal first aid material, because he thought (correctly) that it only was an exercise for some hours.

I've seen the photos from the on or the other (or both?) crossings: landing crafts, soldiers ..... and the white cliffs in the very, very distance. :wink:

This is a response to timberland. You were right about the Nazi's having plans to invade Briton, this i know because of a program i saw on History Channel called "hitlers briton" were it says that not only was there plans for mass invasions and bombings of Briton(aside from BOB bombings) there were detailed plans of how Nazi occupation was going to be like (ie. Hitler wanted the Duke of Windsor to run Nazi occupied Briton) but he never ordered any attack and that is why it was his largest mistake.




-Hans

Instead of invading Russia, Hitler had focused on invading England, would the outcome of the War been different?

Some say, if he takes Britain, he takes the British Empire, and thus controls the vast worldwide resources, bases, etc., that encompasses.

Agree? Disagree?

for some reasons you are right. yeah the British Empire had the richest resources in the world, but the question is HOW?
It would cost an unprecedented navy that was larger and more powerful than Loyal Navy to fully control the channel to make sure that German army was able to land on England like allied in Normandy.
That means the hitler must give up his army and to establish a navy( one large battleship is equal to an army division).
But without army Hitler couldnt take France. And without taking France. How did the German invade the Britain.
You know, Third Reich wasn't very rich.

I think that is a trick made by God: Hitler couldn't be successful. lolllllllll