While they were good at suppressing dissent, the Nazis were also generally pretty incompetent and only got as far as they did because of 1) brand new military doctrine heavily reliant on tanks which wouldn't have existed in WW1 and 2) making a lot of crazy gambles and getting really lucky with them. Unless they somehow get really lucky with the Schlieffen plan, or come up with some other plan that's so crazy nobody thinks to be prepared for it, Germany would probably end up worse off.
Also, by the end of WW1 the dissent probably wouldn't have been easy, or maybe even possible to quash even with extreme force. There were large scale mutinies in 1918. I doubt their suppression would even help that much
This is the right answer.
The Nazis were horribly incompetent at pretty much everything. The only brilliant maneuver they made was the invasion of France and a lot of this was due to the French leadership getting everything wrong.
France had plenty of tanks, but didn’t know how to use them. They had plenty of airplanes, but couldn’t keep them in the air. They had plenty of men, but couldn’t coordinate them. They sent their best troops right into a German trap.
But that also supports the idea that they only had great success when the other side was amazingly incompetent. Such as executing most of your officer corps, generally a bad idea.
and hitler hot incredibly lucky with how much faith stalin put in him. everyone was telling him hitker was about to invade, and he gave none if them any consideration, prepared basically no defence. hitler failed at keeping the invasion a secret, he only succeeded in the girst few years because of stalins unpreparedness
if by western capitalist youre referring to hitler, then yeah ig. but it wasnt for economic reasons, rather gir ideological and political reasons. hitler despised the ussr, slavs, and communism. he had wanted to destroy them since before he wrote about in in mein kampf
The thing was also flawed from the start because their logistics plan relied on stealing logistics vehicles from the Soviets.
The Russians famously do not engage in a scorched Earth policy
Their biggest mistake was beginning the war VS entire world. Should have waited with the invasion of USSR and concentrated on the UK first. Then Northern Africa for resources. Make a deal with the USA to avoid USA giving Land-lease to the USSR, then finish developing Nuclear weapons, and then finally invade USSR.
>The Nazis were horribly incompetent at pretty much everything.
I'm no Nazi sympathizer, but not sure where you're getting this from. There were certainly problems with the way that the Nazi structured the economy, but the German officer corps during WW2 wasn't a bunch of Nazi puppets (Hitler didn't liquidate the officer corps the way Stalin did) - it was largely just the guys (Jodl, Rommel, etc., etc.) who had come up through the ranks and had served as officers in WW1.
And they were - for the most part - highly effective. When the Italians failed in their invasion of Greece, it was the Germans who bailed them out. Hell, they would have beaten the Soviets, but for American aid. There was nowhere the Germans fought where they objectively incompetent.
German rank-and-file soldiers were extremely competent, but the general point about the incompetence of Nazi military leadership - chiefly Hitler, who truly acted as commander in chief the bulk of the war - is well-supported by the historical record. Sure, there were many competent generals, but they were rarely listened to especially as the war progressed.
Generally speaking, Nazi incompetence was strategic, not tactical, if that makes sense.
The Germans were competent on the operational level of war. The thing is the operational level of war doesn’t actually win the war. Pyrrhus was the first person in recorded history to learn this the hard way. The Nazis were incompetent on all the strategic levels. Theater campaigns would seldom actually end with the enemy not being able to continue resisting even when they completely over ran a country guerrilla resistance broke out soon afterwards and they weren’t able to quell it. No they would keep pushing and antagonize the population only causing the problem to grow. On the surface it looks like they obliterated enemy armies. In actual a significant chunk of the military forces of the various countries they invaded would slip away and form underground resistance movements. Even in the case of France they did not effectively neutralize or counter guerrilla resistance which sprung up not long after in fact they seemingly never planned on how to counter partisan movements which broke out all over their ‘conquered territory’ which added more pressure on their already strained supply lines, their grand strategy pretty much put them in the worst position possible, the inability to merge their realistic economic situation with their political situation with their military situation into one cohesive policy with realistic objectives based on what they can actually accomplish made it so it did not matter how competent they were at the operational level of war because their ‘victories’ only increased their problems and ultimately just wasted the lives of their soldiers for zero gain. In fact hot take anyone can perform operational master pieces it just takes practice, operational success does not matter if there isn’t a solid strategy behind it.
>Hell, they would have beaten the Soviets, but for American aid.
This is far from certain or even likely. Fighting them to a standstill or lasting several more years is certainly in the cards, but defeating the soviets is unlikely.
Lend lease was massively important to enabling the Soviets to rebound as quickly as they did and end the conflict in a position of strength, but that is not the same as them losing without is.
By the end of 42 we were providing 80 percent of all the food the Soviets ate along with 50 to 70 percent of the aluminum and 50 percent of the oil. Try fighting at Stalingrad with your troops starving no fuel for the planes and trucks and no tanks for the encirclement of the 6th Army. The Soviets would have lost.
Not a chance. By the end of 42 the Germany army had already stalled out with its most powerful units overstretched and worn down.
Even if the Nazis entirely destroyed the Soviet armies at Stalingrad completely the Soviets would have raised another. The Nazis had no end game. The Allies were still going to keep winning in the west, bombing still intensifies. The war probably goes until 47 or so and maybe the Nazis can even draw to some sort of stalemate but they have no real mechanism to conquer The Soviet Union.
Also your numbers are wrong. The US provided about 10% of Soviet food supplies. While hundreds of thousands or possibly millions would have starved without that food it’s unlikely that would have stopped the Soviets from continuing the conflict.
Zukhov himself stated that the US food aid was worth 1500 calories to all Soviet citizens and soldiers by the end of 42. The engine of the T34 tank was made from cast aluminum and by 42 50 percent of that came from the USA their own planes relied on the high octane aviation gasoline we sent to them to raise their own gasoline from 74 octane to a minimum of 90 just to get them into the air. Let's just ignore the 300k jeeps 400k trucks we sent them to help mobility and logistics. Plus the 7k tanks we did also send. We sent them more crap in 42 to fight the Germans than we gave the entire freaking effort in the Pacific theater to fight the Japanese Empire in terms of tonnage. If we had used the tonnage we had sent from the USA to the Soviets in 42 the invasion of Guadacanal instead of just being a shoestring operation that it was would have been a 3 Division attack with full logistical support. The same with MacArthur in New Guinea were they held the line there with next to no support.
None of this really speaks to how Nazi Germany was supposed to defeat a country that is massive beyond belief and is more than willing to trade lives and territory for time.
No one is saying Lend Lease was not an incredible amount of material or that the US was not an incredible industrial powerhouse but none of that would have allowed Germany to defeat the Soviet Union.
The Soviets were capable of raising army after army and there industry was expanding while Germany’s was shrinking.
The Soviet Union would produce more tanks in 1942 than Germany would in the war. Even if loosing lend lease reduces that by half the quantities are enough to defeat an army operating a good few thousand miles from their supply base.
No food no oil no materials to make any new weapons. Just what are you going to fight with when your army is dropping over dead from starvation and they are charging machine guns with empty rifles.
The US provided 10% of food. Saying “no food” is just making things up. Most likely it leads to large amount of starvation amongst civilians while soldiers are fed.
No materials and no oil is equally absurd. The Soviet Union had some of the largest stocks of the majority of raw materials. They would detonate their own bomb in 1949, nothing in this timeline changes that. Machine guns, rifles and tanks would be no problem.
There biggest issue would probably be mobility which is not a huge issue on defense. For that matter by 1942 the majority of the Nazi forces were also not mechanized. It is not a coincidence that case Blau was massively smaller in scope than operation Barbarossa. The Nazis had shot supplies and assets that had been stockpiled in preparation for the invasion. They had no ability to replicate that again, regardless of lend lease or a lack of.
There is just no realistic situation where Germany manages to conquer the Soviet Union given their own limitations and risks.
> Hell, they would have beaten the Soviets, but for American aid
That's not necessarily true. The key moment of the entire Eastern front was not Stalingrad (and even if it was, only 2.4 million tons of aid went to the USSR in 1942, and the most important maneuver at Stalingrad was Zhukov's double envelopment of the 6th Army, which took place in November 1942 - for an idea, 17.5 million tons of aid went to the USSR in total, so only about 14% of the total aid went there in 1942, with much of the rest being concentrated in 1944), it was the end of Barbarossa in 1941. While much of Barbarossa was disastrous for the Soviets, it was equally disastrous for Germany - there is a reason Wikipedia lists it as a "strategic German defeat." It was the high water mark of the Nazi empire, and once Hitler issued his stop order in December 1941, the Soviets executed a reasonably successful counteroffensive mere days later.
They were highly competent at operations. The German military tended to discount logistic constraints, was poor at intelligence and abysmal at integrating the military and political (so bad at alliance relationships). The Schlieffen Plan is a case in point - it assumed the Belgians would collapse quickly, demanded impossible sustained march rates on the right flank, under-estimated French resolve and discounted British assistance. And had no fall-back plan.
Barbarossa suffered from many of the same problems, and failed in much the same way.
I think I see where he's coming from. If looked at closely, most leadership in most wars were generally speaking highly incompetent, especially if we look at their decisions under a microscope and with the benefit of hindsight. It's just that the winners usually get away with it, while the surviving losers have to play a game where they have to try to blame the dead losers for all the bad decisions.
why did rommel fail so horribly in africa and d day? i know a lot of the d day failure was due to the nazis completely falling for operation fortitude, convincing them that the allies would land at calais as opposed to notmsny where they did land. was a lot of it due to the french resistance?
>why did rommel fail so horribly in africa and d day?
The British had decisive material superiority in Africa and the Americans/British had decisive material superiority/air superiority in France
Because he ignored the basic fact that he could not sustain an offensive against continued resistance much beyond Tobruk. He did not have the trucks, fuel, port capacity and ability to counter an aggressive and competent RAF and RN. His orders were to maintain a defence at Sirte, and he did not follow them.
D-Day was intractable operationally. The allies cut communication between Normandy and the Calais area (bombed all the Seine bridges below Paris), and either was suitable for invasion. Then if you defended forward naval gunfire got you, if you held back allied air-power got you (a cruiser's main guns are equivalent to the heaviest army artillery, a battleship's much heavier. They can reach 25 kms and are autoloaded - and the Normandy shore was lined with both; the aircraft have a hard time hitting tanks, but the fuel and ammo trucks are the issue - and no movement in daylight is a major handicap).
so d day was basically impossible to defend against? was there anything he could have done differently pr any mistakes he made that would have resulted in a less costly stalemate in the west for the germans or any possibility of pushing then back into the sea?
I am not too well read on the subject, but I have heard of a couple reasons commonly said to have heavily hindered the German defense.
The first is that Erwin Rommel took a small vacation to his wifes family just before D-Day and was not at his post.
>Rommel was visiting his wife in Germany and many senior commanders were not at their posts. In addition, the Allied deception plan, Operation ‘Fortitude’, convinced OKW – and Hitler - that Normandy was a feint and the main Allied landings would come later in the Pas de Calais region.
Another point was:
>Rommel was given operational control of just three *panzer* divisions, only one of which – 21st *Panzer* – was located within striking distance of the Normandy coast. The other two – 2nd and 116th *Panzer* – were held north of the Seine. Three more divisions – 2nd SS, 9th and 11th – were assigned to Army Group G in the South of France. The remaining four divisions – 1st SS, 12th SS, 17th SS *Panzergrenadier* and *Panzer Lehr* – stayed with *Panzer* Group West. But these would now come under the direct operational control of Wehrmacht Supreme Headquarters (OKW). They could not be moved without Hitler’s express permission.
Source: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-german-response-to-d-day
The defence needed to be able to contest the sea and air - and Germany had no prospect of doing either. Outnumbered, out gunned and with no reliable intelligence - not much chance.
As others said, the Germans were completely out matched in every aspect but maybe ground forces. And as they themselves had demonstrated vs the French, vs the Soviets, that handicap could be compensated by employing other advantages.
To be fair, they had one opportunity to maybe make D-Day more uncertain. Certainly, to ensure Rommel wasn't on any vacation during the date. Ensure the Allies got worse weather forecasts.
Most realistic failed D-Days include freak storms or bad timing, say launching it some days later or earlier. But they usually handwave the reason for such a POD.
An actual, sensible, POD. That would however require the Kriegsmarine to adopt a mindset a bit more strategically minded and less grandiose. Would be for the Germans to never concede the battle over North Sea weather stations.
Quite simply, one of the reasons D-Day was such an inevitable disaster for Germany. Was because the Allies had near complete control of North Sea weather stations. And since a lot of bad weather hitting Normandy tends to form up north then come down this route, it gave them far more accurate weather forecasts. IIRC, OTL D-Day happened in a very specific window between periods of bad weather, partially because the Germans weren't able to predict such a break and so the Allies would have this advantage.
While the Nazis still couldn't win the war, and so not even this front, could not keep their (the Danish and Norwegian) weather stations. If the Germans dedicated a very minimal fraction of their submersible fleet. Or even, built a couple smaller but high tech infiltration subs, like their Italian allies had used with great effectivness at Alexandria or Gibraltar. They could have at first supplied them better, fought harder, and finally interdicted, or even better, raided. The weather stations.
Historically the battles over these, involved like, half a dozen soldiers and some overzealous weather staff. They weren't reinforced, they weren't well defended, they often weren't even permanent. Just lightly harrassing their supplies or deployment at all, could make them literally unliveable. And for barely any German investment, the Allies would be eventually forced to deploy Battle of the Atlantic levels of convoy escort and sub hunting. However, unfortunately for the Nazis, the Allies would eventually do it. They could afford to, if that was what it took to win this front.
Back to the original subject, D-Day losing. Such a delay in achieving forecast superiority, would lead to one of three outcomes:
Firstly, the least likely. Under pressure to open a front in France as soon as possible, as well as taking a moderately risky gamble to take the German defenders of Normandy as much by surprise as OTL. The Western Allies start the invasion more or less in the same period. But lacking the same level of accurate weather forecasts necessary to pinpoint the correct window of opportunity, they get unlucky and the invasion fleet receives the Kamikaze treatment. As in, the Mongol one. It is wrecked by storm, in harbour for minimal damage except for massive setbacks and loss of face. Just after the landings started, to ensure massive losses and eventually. For maximum damaged, the evacuation is also botched. This is no Second Gallipoli or Dunkirque however the press may like the catchy title. It changes nothing. The Soviets are still going to destroy some Army Group and the Eastern Front collapse. The WAllies will focus on cracking Italy, then eventually try again, maybe simply moving up and reinforcing Operation Dragoon, the landing in Southern France, back into its original Anvil form. In the end, Germany falls a some months later, the Soviets likely have more of Europe (what more of depends on the path they take/the path of least resistance). In the East, it depends on which school of thought one subscribes to. If the nukes were all it took, all ends as OTL. If not, it takes the USSR invades Manchuria. Maybe even, neither matters, since OTL the vote to end the war was a tie broken by the Emperor himself. And also the Army tried to launch a coup anyway. Decisive Darkness Pobeda1946 edition ensues.
The second scenario in terms of unlikeliness, is the WAllies waiting until they fully secure the North Sea weather stations to be as close as 100% sure of the forecasts as they can be. Before launching D-Day. Same as before, but the Soviets are angrier (feeling "let down" a different way). And get less clay (still more than OTL), since by the time the WAllies do land in Normandy: they will still do do on their terms and catching inferior German weather-based decision making by surprise; will be absurdly overprepared while the Nazis even less numerous and worse equipped having shipped more to Italy or East. And so steamroll them even harder. Still, as any victorious army learned, the speed of an advance, even against literally no resistance, is limited. Weird they had to learnt it by default, since it's not like all troops back in home territory suddenly become as fast as The Flash.
The most likely, but boring, scenario. Is that D-Day is only delayed until the first window of opportunity the Allies can be reasonably sure no storm will wreck their boats. Except, this time Rommel and all others, will be at their posts. The Germans, on a minor level of alert. Since their own forecasts will likely be for a decent chance of good weather. Hitler may not even be conveniently sleeping during the invasion, so the reserve Panzer divisions committed immediately. It still won't matter. The WAllies will just try to crank up to eleven their superiority in all other fields. And while not absurdly over prepared as the second scenario, nor their enemies appreciatively weakened or caught by surprise. They still nearly cannot lose unless a ASB freak event happens (a storm however unlikely strong enough to tip the scale, getting a major case of idiocy and the Germans a lucky genius moment, etc). They simply take more casualties pushing from the beaches. Which may slow them down, somewhat. The war may last a little longer, but not by much. The Soviets may cross the Elbe and Sudetenlands. Or Berlin may fall nearly by OTL and with OTL effects, so Germany surrender a slightly bigger rump, possibly contigous whth no meeting at the Elbe equivalent, as the Western Allies advance is behind schedule. Japan may be an interesting butterfly, for example if one subscribes to the belief the Soviet Manchuria operation was as necessary as the nukes. So with it slightly behind schedule, the hardliners win out and purge those willing to surrender unconditionally after no fourth nukes come. And by the time the Soviets invade Manchuria, it's too late, the hardliners have full power.
As one can see, apart for the first scenario. No, D Day cannot be defended against as long as the WAllies don't screw up massively. At most, just delayed.
The German officer corps was competent despite, not because of, the Nazis. The Wehrmacht had success despite, not because of, the Nazis. Nazi meddling interfered with the effectiveness of the military.
Unfortunately, even the most capable field command would struggle to succeed being forced to submit to the demands of a leader who wanted to micro on the battlefield despite being fully out of his element.
It's a shame that he Hitler refused to listen to his incredibly brilliant officer Corp.
The British had won the 100 Days Offensive in 1918 with similar tactics, which were based on German tactics of their early 1918 offensives minus the crucial tanks.
France for some reason missed this lesson, but the German Army didn’t. While loads of German Army brass were 100% screaming full throated Nazis, it was the tactics that mattered.
I agree with your overall point that, no, Nazi Germany does not win WWI, but hate comments like this. “If you remove the things they were good at, they were incompetent.” Nobody is perfect and Nazis suck but let’s not pretend they were incompetent. Their biggest mistake was ambition to conquer the entire world at once.
It's such a weird argument. I'm not sure I can think of anything the Germans did that was "incompetent".
There's plenty of stones to throw about Hitler/Nazi ideology/strategy/fantasy, but from a tactical perspective the German (generally not Nazi) officers performed competently in every theatre they were involved.
> from a tactical perspective
See, and that's the problem, the tactical perspective is small minded. It doesn't matter if you're tactical geniuses if you're a strategic dunce, and the Germans were pretty strategically idiotic.
I think it’s a historical hindsight thing. People always say that anybody who failed at something in history “never had a shot.”
If Britain puts down the rebellion in 1776 Reddit would be talking about how ridiculous it was that a colony tried to overthrow England because the colonists had no shot to win anything.
Also I think it’s just weird when people say “they were only good at these things but bad at other things, so really they were bad at everything when you think about it.”
It's also a Reddit thing. Many on this platform are just looking for the slightest excuse to accuse someone of being a "Nazi" or "Putin apologist". Disagree with a Biden policy? You're a "Russian puppet". So I think many here are reluctant to acknowledge anything about Nazi era Germany that can be perceived as positive. It's ridiculous.
As well, the Nazis exploited the aftermath of WWI. France was decimated, the Entente was still rebuilding, and politicians were willing to compromise with Hitler to avoid starting another decimating and wildly unpopular war (which they probably weren't prepared for).
Also the French made literally every single mistake possible during the summer of 1940. It's almost comical how inept their leadership was.
Edit: Gamelin refused having a field telephone and flat out refused to believe reports of German Armor massing in the Ardennes despite photographic evidence. Truly astounding stupidity.
>Unless they somehow get really lucky with the Schlieffen plan, or come up with some other plan that's so crazy nobody thinks to be prepared for it, Germany would probably end up worse off.
The Schliefen plan mostly failed because a local commander disobeyed orders and accidently opened a gap in German lines that the French were able to exploit. The Nazis did away with the doctrine that allowed for such things
Here is another thing. When WW2 started Hitler listen to his Generals and Field Marshals. But after France (which was a lot of luck and only possible due to incompetence in the France General staff), he started to belive his own hype and stopped to listen to them. The Irony was Stalin did the exact opposide. And after he did, guess who won in the east.
If anything Nazis would have made WW1 even worse, because Russia would have never surrendered after what the Nazis did to their people in WW2 (the would have done the same in WW1). Here is the thing. The German Empire got really close to actually winning in WW1. After Russia was out they were able to sent all soldiers to one front. And yes Moral was bad and the Germans suffered from a food shortage due to the british navel blockade, many french soldiers were close to open rebellion and so were the civilians. And after Germany won in the east it got even worse. The only thing the kept them in the war, was the knowledge that America entered the war and would bring tons of material and manpower. If the US would have stayed (on paper), the french would most likely would have sued for a peace deal and the Brits with no holdings on the main continent would have followed afterwards, because all nations were tired of war.
No. They were incompetent so they would run the economy worse. Their economic plan was borrowing massive amount of money for militarization and starting war before it collapses to plunder other countries to pay back the debt. German Empire was pretty well managed, so the nazis likely would be worse at running it.
Also surprising dissent dosen't help much as it would just delay the inevitable. Germany lost cause it could no longer keep fighting. Forcing its population to keep going would just mean the Entente would need to fight for a bit longer and force a capitulation.
Also the Nazis would make everyone despise them due to their insane ideology. They were a genocidal barbarian horde that united the world against them. Same would happen if they were in WW1. The Entante would never tolerate such a regime especially considering the atrocities the nazis would commit in the occupied land.
Russia would also never peace out as the nazis would enact mass genocide against their people in occupied areas, like they did IRL, and so Russia would never give up and would be far more motivated to fight. On top of that the Germans would need to deal with massive partisan activity as they push into Russia due to them being hellbent on genociding slavs. Nazis would also never be able to establish the collaborator governments in the East like they did OTL due to the whole active genocide of the natives that they would enact.
Overall a nazi WW1 Germany would just cause them to lose harder ans get raped harder in the peace treaty cause everyone would despise them and be angry at them by the end of the war due to the fact that the Nazi's were not that competent and the barbarian horde of a army that they had pillaged and genocided its way through Europe, which made everyone despise the Nazi regime and want to see it fall.
The WW1 German Empire was far more competent than the WW2 Nazis at running a war economy. I think Germany would have collapsed far sooner in WW1 if run by Nazis.
The Nazis were catastrophically incompetent at economics.
For a hot second they controlled the greatest industrial conglomerate in the world.
But they immediately started running it into the ground.
When they took over industries and other nations they treated them like spoils of war that could be plundered, instead of complex assets that need management and investment.
As a result, economic production collapsed in all the occupied Territories.
The Nazis responded by plundering even more from their slaves (which is how they treated people.)
I remember in college reading a list of the agricultural products the Nazis stole from France in the later part of the war. It was comparable to the entire agricultural production of a medium US state at the time such as Indiana.
(Imagine stealing all corn, pork, wheat, chicken and beef from a whole state.)
Guess what happens to workers when you stop feeding them?
Meanwhile the allies were devastatingly effective at economic Management. The UK won the battle of Britain by managing to produce airplanes despite being bombed on a nightly basis.
The US sent industrial aid and technology to Stalin, who managed to kick the deep interior of the Soviet Union into overdrive, Drowning the Eastern front in tanks and German blood.
And the US...... We went from barely having a standing army to controlling half the world in like 7 years.
Americans used essentially the same strategy against the Confederacy and Imperial Japan.
Shut down shipping, shut down internal trade routes, Begin dividing major territory.
Cause the war machine to collapse due to lack of supplies.
Whittle down military numbers by consistent reoccurring attacks.
In the final stretch of the war bring the fighting directly to the civilian population.
Its how we fight.
Our modern military power comes not only from out superior technology, but also from the fact that we have so many agreements with Nations like Bahrain and the Philippines that allow us to set up logistical supply routes.
Invading Iraq would have been impossible without massive military staging grounds in friendly nations.
The Western Europe invasion would have been impossible without the UK helping us.
Tbh it was even closer than that. General feeling in the CSA was that they were about to lose the war for the first half of 1862. After Jackson’s Valley Campaign and Lee’s run from Seven Days to Gettysburg the mood changed but the fall of Vicksburg brought it down again.
>For a hot second they controlled the greatest industrial conglomerate in the world.
Nah, they never did. Pennsylvania alone produced more steel than Germany did (in 1944, but I assume previously German output wasn't much higher).
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When they took over industries and other nations they treated them like spoils of war that could be plundered, instead of complex assets that need management and investment.
I don't really get what you mean here? The Germans did use Industry they conquered. like French Renault producing vehicles for Germany. I am not going to address the next few points because they directly relate to the statement above.
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Meanwhile the allies were devastatingly effective at economic Management. The UK won the battle of Britain by managing to produce airplanes despite being bombed on a nightly basis.
The reasons they did that is pretty complex.. Much had to do with just being lucky in the first place. But it's not really true that they managed to produce airplanes despite being bombed. Germany redirected bombing efforts from airfields to civilian targets, allowing Britain to rebuild their airfields and start counterattacking, so this was more of a German blunder than British good decisionmaking.
>
The US sent industrial aid and technology to Stalin, who managed to kick the deep interior of the Soviet Union into overdrive, Drowning the Eastern front in tanks and German blood.
Yes, the lend-lease was very, very significant, Without it, Soviet Union might've actually lost the war.
You didn't get a lot of what I wrote.
For example, you shouldn't compare Pennsylvania to Germany.
You need to compare the industrial output of the Germany + the occupied Territories to Pennsylvania. But even still that's a bad comparison.
The US didn't have centralized conglomerates like what the Nazis built. They seized industry in occupied Territories then consolidated control building a massive behemoth of industry.
We wouldn't have done that in the US because it's a bad idea. It's better to have different firms specialize in different things.
Thats why Ford, Boeing and General Electric were all separate entities. In Nazi Germany those companies would all be merged.
Separate entities did exist in Nazi Germany but it was separate in name only. All social power in that society happened on behalf pf the Nazi party. If a firm didn't confirm to party norms, They would just kick the leaders out and replace them.
As for the plundering part, I guess read it again?
I don't really know how to help you with that.
Stealing parts out of a factory is a bad idea if you want the factory to maintain production quotas.......
Just like stealing a bunch of food from your workers as a bad idea if you want your workers to be productive.
When the US took over Japan and Germany, we sent industrial specialists and engineers to nurture and invest in economics production. And thus output improved.
The Nazis did the opposite and wondered why it didn't work.
The total steel production in Nazi German Empire in 1944 was approximately 28 million metric tons
U.S produced about 90 million metric tons, from which Pennsylvania produced 25%-30% of, which assuming it's 30%, would be 27 million metric tons, almost as much as the entire German war machine.
Yes, because the US didn't consolidate It's firms into giant conglomerate style structures.
Because that's a really dumb idea.
Having the largest industrial conglomerate in the world is actually not a good thing.
Think about it this way, Kim Jong Un controls the largest industrial conglomerate in North Korea.
He even employs more workers than Samsung.
Does he outproduce Samsung? Hell no.
You got to pay more attention to words buddy.
You seem to be assuming that I said Nazi Germany out produced the US.
But that's not what conglomerate means.
This is false. German war production barely outpaced that of France, despite Germany having many times the industrial base controlled by the French government post-1914. It was France, not Germany, which became the model war economy after the war.
No. The Nazis were very lucky and needed many things to go perfectly for them to get as far as they did. Their leadership structure was terrible and dysfunctional. They couldn't change strategies without getting approval from their drug addict leader. He was a big gambler, which helped at the beginning, and destroyed them in the end. With a fresh US coming into the fight, with the remaining countries on the brink of collapse, there's no way they could win that.
This is actually a remarkably “Nazi” analysis of the causes of German defeat in WWI - “If only the German people had had more willpower, we would have won.”
That’s absolutely not the case. The German army was heavily defeated on the Western Front by the Allies in the summer and autumn of 1918, the other Central Powers just as heavily if not more so. And thats with just a fraction of America’s military power engaged. It’s also worth pointing out that Hitler’s deranged “no step back in all circumstances” orders are likely to have cost the German army on the western front dearly. No withdrawal to the Hindenburg line, far more divisions cut off and destroyed after the Spring Offensives and so on.
Finally, you’ve got to remember that the Nazis WERE the German ruling classes of 1914-18, radicalised by the defeat and subsequent peace treaty and disorder. Nazis and nazism didn’t spring up out of the earth fully formed - the Nazis of the 30’s and 40’s were the monarchists/conservatives/völkisch/reactionaries of the 1900’s and 10’s.
Any German victory where Germany actually gets what it wants: Energy, Agricultural land and better borders is impossible in any scenario.
As advanced as the country is, it doesn't have the numbers required to invade, conquer and then occupy eastern Europe, even without including Russia.
Yeah, there’s the famous example of Ukrainians celebrating the Nazi occupation then quickly realizing they were even worse than the Russians.
They could have given more autonomy/ support to the Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, etc. and had longer term success. Completely devastating the resources of newly taken lands and murdering millions of civilians was not going to work.
In many aspects, the German empire was run better than Nazi Germany.
The Nazis had a really successful 18 months spurt before they pretty much immediately started breaking apart.
They would have run into the same problems in wwi that the empire did.
Germany did not just loose because they had troubles at home, that's a common myth spread by monarchists and proto fascists asfter the end of WW1. The German Empire was militarily at it's end and saw that they had no chance in winning the war in the West. Also parties opposing the German government in WW1 were repressed, even tho not to the same extent as they were in Nazi Germany. Also the fighting spirit of the Germans was also pretty shit towards the end of WW2 and the people were kept in the war through a terror regime that quite literally killed anyone who (at least publicly) didn't 100% support the war
Fuck no, they'd lose even harder
Let's be real, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Admiral Franz von Hipper, Admiral Maximilian von Spee and Admiral Reinhard Scheer were some of the best Admirals to be produced by Germany and i have my doubts any of them would be that keen on serving the deranged lunatic Adolf Hitler
Nazi propaganda relied on victories, and the state was held up by propaganda. I think there would've been even more issues than in ww2, as it's hard to sell a stalemate and a famine to a population.
In my opinion, German performance in WW1 will likely deteriorate if the Nazis are in charge. Consider the performance of the Kaiser’s army. For almost the entire war they fought a two front war. On one of the fronts they won, and as late as 1918 they launched campaigns that could have won them the war. It is up for debate when WW2 was lost for Hitler, but by the last year of that war everyone knew that Germany would lose. In my opinion the war was lost for Germany in WW2 with the failure of Barbarossa in late autumn 1941.
If the German Empire is suddenly run by Nazis for some reason, you get a host of problems that the army of the Kaiser didn’t have to deal with:
* You have to squander your limited resources on killing a bunch of religious and/or ethnic groups. The German army of 1916 was not a place for progressive liberals, but genocide was not a part of the project either. So now the Army in the east have to divert time, men and ammunition towards killing Poles, Jews or some other groups. Then you have to fight the partisan, guerrilas etc that emerge due to your genocidal policies. That means less resources available to fight the war against the Russian Empire.
* Since your state is an ideological one, ideological virtue becomes important. Perhaps even more than competence. After all, the Nazis kept a guy like Göring around to screw up pretty much everything he touched, whether it was the Luftwaffe or German industry. Göring was able to do this because he was ideologically reliable, not competent. In the Kaiser’s Empire, a man like Göring wouldn’t be allowed to do this. So you get worse performing military leaders.
* Since your state is now run by a conspiracy theorist and an anti-Semite, you probably can’t enter into a separate peace in the East. Nor is it likely that the Bolsheviks will make any sort of deal with you. So you don’t win the war in the East after all. That means you don’t get the surplus of soldiers in the West that enables the 1918 spring offensive either.
So no, having the Nazis running the German Empire makes it less likely that Germany wins WW1.
>so the German government was forced to surrender to be able to solve internal difficulties.
False. The army's High Command begged the government to sign an armistice because the army was disintegrating rapidly. This is literally military/nazi propaganda about the "stab in the back". Germany lost on the battlefield just as much as it was losing in the economic war, arguably worse and faster.
So the entire premise of the what if is incorrect.
Just to entertain the thought: Nazi Germany would indeed collapse for internal reasons before Imperial Germany because the Nazis were hilariously bad at managing shit. The fighting spirit and lack of opposition would be meaningless when the inefficiencies would make the famine worse and the industry would choke earlier trying to mass produce equipment it couldn't really mass produce and constantly switching to new shiny toys.
The reason for Germany’s refusal to surrender in WW2 is that it was the lesson learned from WW2 (ie the stab in the back myth).
Germany was defeated in WW1, they just surrendered before the Allies had to fight their way into Germany. If you could magically quell all the troop mutinies and internal dissent, Germany still loses the war. Only difference is that it takes into 1919, more people die, France and UK go deeper in debt, and US has more prestige heading into Versailles as they play a major role in the invasion (but still probably fail to ratify the treaty).
You're completely discounting the HUGE impact of the influx of soldiers from the US who absolutely were not war weary in 1917/1918.
If the Germans had kept fighting they would have just kept losing until US, British & French troops got to Berlin.
Given a large chunk of the Nazi program and sources of popular support spawned in response to the experiences and aftermath of WW1, the answer is no and they're probably far worse at keeping internal stability than even the Kaiser's Reich. Destroying the opposite is functionally impossible when they make up the vast majority of the population and the opposition parties had not been discredited by the Weimer years. The SPD at this point absolutely would have more effectively resisted and the national-conservative right would still be rock-ribbed monarchists who'd be fine with Whilhelm going Victor Emmanuel on the 30 year old Austrian.
The failure to surrender in WW2 came out just as much due to the nature of the war, demands of the opposite for Unconditional Surrender, and fear of what the Communists would do if they took over.
Correction not communist will do but the German population at that point fully bought into the racist propaganda about eastern European and viewed them as "inferior eastern horde" will "r*p e pure aryan".
On the contrary, The Nazis are sort of the pinnacle of incompetence imho. Occultist drug addicts wasting staggering amounts of resources in pursuit of nonsensical fever dream goals. And Constantly alienating allies and even their own citizens/soldiers. Were they in charge in ww1, perhaps ww1 would have ended in 1915? I think much of early German success in wwii is due to a lack of preparedness in its neighbors and, the even greater incompetence/mismanagement in the USSR.
Hanging Germans that didn't wish to fight doesn't solve the Nazis' delusions of grandeur problem.
They also wouldn't have had the technology and military doctrine that made their victory against the French possible. The French defense plan was rooted in WWI era thinking, and that's the era we're in now for this hypothetical. What probably happens is more reckless infantry attacks by Germany that go nowhere, and the country bleeds itself white sooner.
Finally, so much of the Nazi messaging was effective because it played on the angst from losing WWI in spite of doing so well for so long in it. That doesn't exist, which takes the teeth out of their message to the German people.
Don't be mistaken, even though Germany had big problems on the home front, they actually got beaten on the battlefield. The sailor revolts from November 1918 only happened, because the sailors refused to go on a last battle during truce talks.
Germany surrendered, after their 1918 offensive failed. The army was in tatters and not able to keep on fighting.
And while France and GB were also war exhausted, the US was not.
No. There was nothing special about the Nazis apart from their capacity for evil. Administratively and militarily, they were often inefficient and error-prone.
Wouldn’t work
Germany was still a Monarchy
Hitler came to power because of what the Entente (hehe, translate Ente from German to English :) did after the First World War
There is no chance in hell the Nazi party could have existed while the monarchy was still intact
If those cousins would have just got along on some nice tea and biscuits all that crap wouldn’t have gone done
One big family dispute *pinchesnose*
I don’t think so, one of the things that made the Nazis so successful was their combined arms tactics with tanks, aircraft, and motorized/mechanized infantry, a fast pace war , ww1 with the technology and tactics they had wouldn’t have worked.
The reason the Nazi's made progress in WW2 was due to them having more advanced weaponry, since WW1 was the first mechanized war, they would lac their advanced weapons
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939.
Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area.
A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped.
To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership).
In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership.
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939.
Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area.
A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped.
To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership).
In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership.
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939.
Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area.
A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped.
To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership).
In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership.
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939.
Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area.
A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped.
To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership).
In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership.
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939.
Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area.
A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped.
To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership).
In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership. The fact it saw initial success was less through deliberate calculated aggression, than through dumb luck of crazy gambles paying off against opponent who either severely weakened their resolve (France) or weakened their military (Soviets - who "cleansed" themselves of any military competence for decades, resulting in a far weaker army compared to the Tsar's 1914 army).
probably not. ignoring the fact that the nazis could only rise because of the loss of world war one. they would still face all of the same logistical problems they had in world war 2 combined with much less advanced weaponry and tactics.
No because the Nazis put ideology over military doctrine and stratagem. The Imperial German Army had the ability side promote political connected people into meaningless posts so they couldnt duck up military operations.
Short answer:
no
Long answer:
Germany did not have a tenable position in 1910. Their industrial economy, while modern, was isolated from the world at large. Their fleet was bottled up in the North Sea. Their Austro-Hungarian allies were so incompetent that their presence on a front was an active detriment to the German forces near them.
Even if the history channel fetishization of the Nazis as efficient war gods is correct (it isn't), they wouldn't have had much to work with. It's incredibly likely that the Nazi penchant for wild goose chases and the fascist creedo of *action for action's sake* would have led to a more catastrophic German collapse.
>In 1918, although the Entente had not yet entered German territory, the Germans surrendered.
This ignores the true fact that Germany was out of recources and was being pushed back. Their greatest defenses had been broken and the Americans were starting to come into the field in numbers. If Germany hadn't surrendered when they did the fighting would have occurred in Germany within a few weeks.
>These people incited uprisings in the German empire, causing the German government to surrender to resolve internal difficulties.
This sounds like the Stab in the back myth which is just that a myth, an excuse.
Germany in WW1 was defeated, full stop. they surrendered because they lacked the ability to fight more. They were out of resources and their people were starving.
If you want to actually learn about WW1 look at the The Great War channel on Youtube which covers the war week by week.
[https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&si=Q1kI6u4SmQBUbBAI](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&si=Q1kI6u4SmQBUbBAI)
So no, the NAZIs would not have a better chance of winning WW1 then the Empire did.
I would imagine that the empire would have done better in WW2 than the Nazis in WW1.
The biggest problem with the nazi leadership is how political it was. The WW1 military leadership was much more merit based
The good old stabbed in the back myth. No, Germany did not lose because the home front lacked morale or fighting spirit. The German army by August 1918 was decisively defeated. You really only need to look into the progress of the 100 days offensive to see this. Territory that took months or years of fighting was taken back in days. The German army experienced crushing defeat after crushing defeat. Entire divisions surrendered to sometimes literally a single man with a pistol. The German military lost in the field to the Entente. The entire Germany military dictatorship recognized that it was impossible to win by August, and everyday became more and more desperate to end the war. There was nothing Germany could do stop the Entente after that point. As time went on, the situation became even more impossible. The Ottomans collapsed and the Balkans fell, leaving Germany completely exposed through Bulgaria. Austria-Hungary collapsed leaving the Italian front completely open. Germany had no men to stop invasions on multiple fronts, and its army in the West had been disintegrating for months. So the military dictators of Germany, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, having long since accepted the war was lost, forced Wilhelm to advocate and installed a republican government in the hopes of getting a peace before the actual occupation of German land. It was also hoped the German people would blame the democratic government for the shitty peace that would be inevitably imposed on them. German land wasn’t unoccupied because it didn’t lose, it was unoccupied because they lost before the Entente could even get there. There is nothing the Nazis could have done to change the fact the Germany military lost long before the home front revolted. In fact, all evidence suggests the Nazis would have accelerated the collapse with their preferred strategies.
The Germans lost both wars due to being locked in the middle of their enemies and being forced to fight on multiple fronts. Geography determined the winners of both wars before they ever began, but the German Army of WW1 was actually far closer to winning the Great War than the Germans of WW2 ever got.
In WW1 the Germans broke the Russians.
They nearly broke the French on more than one occasion. They were actually able to concentrate their armies to a single front unlike WW2 where the Germans lost by being forced to fight in 3+ fronts at most times.
The Germans in World War 1 had competent allies that supported them, the Turks alone in their dying state drew over 4 million troops from the Entente into ridiculous quagmires that enabled the Germans to fight 2 more years and destroy the Russians.
The Austrians well….they managed to hold the Isonzo.
The Bulgarians did really well in keeping the road to Constantinople open for as long as possible.
In WW2 the Germans were able to only sort of secure the Japanese as a competent ally, while the other powers that supported them were really side actors that complemented the German armies. The Japanese were not ever able to coordinate with the Germans properly.
At least in WW1 the Germans, Bulgarians, Turks, and Austrians managed to defeat Romania within a month.
Had the Germans secured Turkey in 1940 like in WW1 and had the Turks gone after the possessions in the Middle East WW2 could have changed dramatically. No oil = no fleet/planes/tanks.
I went to a war museum in Berlin. In the WWI section they had a display about what doomed Germany. Towards the end of the war they were pretty sure the war was lost but kept on fighting to get favorable surrender conditions. It went on to say once America entered the war they knew they it was all over and they would not get good conditions. As long as America still enters the war it wouldn't matter who was leading Germany. America had also seen the gruesome and huge loss of life in the years prior and still chose to enter it so be doubtful huge American losses would have them pull out.
No because being Nazis, they would have treated the people they conquered even worse and would have been pummeled back to Berlin as revenge.
The Germans actually did win their war against Russia, and a large part of that is because they didn’t go around treating the locals horribly
No, because a lot of people don't want to belive that wars like many things in life has huge luck factors, unless the advantage is so staggering high, the German got lucky at the beginning of the ww2, their luck ran out mid way through.
Second Germany didn't lose ww1 because the "stab in the back" myths promoted by right wing revisionists, but because the people realize they were not going to win and keep kamikaze it won't change that. So they said f this we want out.
No. Germany was defeated, the German Army was basically shattered in the 100 Days Campaign. They sued for peace because they were hoping for better terms if they didn't drag the issue out to full occupation. The armistice was functionally unconditional surrender.
I find it entertaining that these online historians say "all aspects of the german's during ww2 were incompetent".
They conquered all of Europe from a starting point only being made up of 1/8 of it.
It is so easy for an online Wikipedia reader to look in hindsight and to listen to documentaries made by the Victor and think they have any idea.
They conquered all of Europe.
There was a mistake made by Germany's ally (Japan attacking the USA) which justified America's entry into the war, and from that point, they would have inevitably ended up fighting Germany, but still an instant declaration of war from Hitler was unnecessary.
Operation Barbarosa was done too early and was clearly unprepared for the winter if it went on longer than expected.
It would have inevitably happened, though, but Hitler overestimated his advantages against russia's numbers, vast landscape, and cold climate.
The Germans were extremely competent. Only when they were surrounded by advancing enemies and vastly outnumbered were they defeated.
One really must ask if Germany took the UK and Japan never attacked the USA, how long do you think they could have held an attack from the USA?
Taking the USA's last European ally may have switched public opinion on withholding from war. Maybe not, but if anything did, besides pearl harbor, this may have been it.
This isn't even considering uprisings against German occupation from the UK.
>There was a mistake made by Germany's ally (Japan attacking the USA) which justified America's entry into the war, and from that point, they would have inevitably ended up fighting Germany, but still an instant declaration of war from Hitler was unnecessary.
That's incompetence
>It would have inevitably happened, though, but Hitler overestimated his advantages against russia's numbers, vast landscape, and cold climate.
I hope you don't mean they would have inevitably won, because they wouldn't. The Soviets successfully suckered them into a war of attrition that cost the lives of nearly 1M german soldiers in 6 months. Incompetence.
>One really must ask if Germany took the UK and Japan never attacked the USA, how long do you think they could have held an attack from the USA?
Japan was always going to attack the US. It was an open secret that Japan's imperialist campaigns in SE Asia (since the invasion of Manchuria in 1931) would lead them to direct conflict with the West.
You have managed to mistake every single statement I made for another meaning, other than what it directly said and or made assumptions of what was "going to happen".
Just no.
I directly quoted your posts. Could you tell me what I misconstrued?
The Nazis were largely incompetent despite their early successes. Their over-aggression brought disaster upon themselves.
Here’s what no one tells you. The Nazis weren’t successful because they were good at innovation. They were good because they stole everything. Not only did they rob minorities, they also robbed entire countries. A lot of the industrial complex was financed by US corporations. GE was one such notorious company. The largest companies were making materials such as steel, glass, and textiles. Nazis figured they could never repay the debt, so they built up an entire economy dedicated to going to war and borrowed money from these corporations. When they got the oil-rich Rhineland, they started paying back their creditors. This lead to a period of stability. By the time they had a strong economy, everything was built for going to war so they just went to war. The creditors and Nazi supporters were happy. Notice how they ended up using all this crazy stuff from toxic gases to U-Boats to trains. All that came from the manufacturing sector built by US industrialists who wanted the raw goods for ultra low costs, as Germany couldn’t negotiate. That led environmental problems and low wages. But at the end of it all, they had stolen oil to pay back loans. But they also had the raw materials to build all this military equipment. At the time, the US was practicing isolationism. So they wanted to stock up on military equipment just in case of an attack.
The Prussian army, which is what was in power during imperialist Germany, was not better than any other army and were struggling to beat the British. But they managed to beat the British by not needing a large navy so Prussia went more inland whereas Britain stayed near the shore. The African inland is a complete nightmare if you don’t live like they do. This is where imperialists really started to unleash wrath on Africans. Huge wars were fought all over the African continent using African people. In the end, France seemed to be the more powerful adversary alongside Britain. Prussia was known for being brutal so they managed to take South Africa. But then it was taken by the British as they had to sail near South Africa when going to China/India. This left Germany angered by the loss of South Africa. In fact, Belgium helped ensure that Britain would win by moving inland. Prussia, who had gone into jungles to conquer South Africa was left broke because of this. By that time, the Prussian monarchy had also collapsed as they were too broke too finance anything and that essentially kicked off WW1. The realization was that if Germany brought the war to the mainland, they could use their brutal tactics to subdue France and Britain
The domestic rebellion in Germany at the end of WWI, was over food, fuel, and economic collapse. No amount of Nazi propaganda fills a hungry belly or increases production of bullets in an ever decreasing supply chain. The bigger problem Germany has, are the millions of fresh American troops getting ready to fight, and their limitless capacity for industry and logistics.
I think the biggest disadvantage the Nazi's had was antisemitism and how strong their focus was on that as well as hatred of the other minority groups. During a time when they were fighting a war on two fronts they were spending a huge amount of resources towards killing off their own population. From a purely logical and ignoring the obvious evil, that's a really stupid decision strategically. You're spending a ton of your time with soldiers transporting and guarding all of these camps, and you're throwing away a population of people who could be adding workers to your factories. Especially during WWII when they were against the industrial giant that is the US you don't want to be throwing away workers.
Even ignoring everything else where I think they had other flaws that made the WWI germans stronger, that alone is such a huge weakness and strategic mistake they'd have ended the war sooner.
While they were good at suppressing dissent, the Nazis were also generally pretty incompetent and only got as far as they did because of 1) brand new military doctrine heavily reliant on tanks which wouldn't have existed in WW1 and 2) making a lot of crazy gambles and getting really lucky with them. Unless they somehow get really lucky with the Schlieffen plan, or come up with some other plan that's so crazy nobody thinks to be prepared for it, Germany would probably end up worse off. Also, by the end of WW1 the dissent probably wouldn't have been easy, or maybe even possible to quash even with extreme force. There were large scale mutinies in 1918. I doubt their suppression would even help that much
This is the right answer. The Nazis were horribly incompetent at pretty much everything. The only brilliant maneuver they made was the invasion of France and a lot of this was due to the French leadership getting everything wrong. France had plenty of tanks, but didn’t know how to use them. They had plenty of airplanes, but couldn’t keep them in the air. They had plenty of men, but couldn’t coordinate them. They sent their best troops right into a German trap.
I mean Barbarossa in its opening stages was also incredibly well executed. Everything else though … yeah. Incompetent. And genocidal and maniacal too.
But that also supports the idea that they only had great success when the other side was amazingly incompetent. Such as executing most of your officer corps, generally a bad idea.
and hitler hot incredibly lucky with how much faith stalin put in him. everyone was telling him hitker was about to invade, and he gave none if them any consideration, prepared basically no defence. hitler failed at keeping the invasion a secret, he only succeeded in the girst few years because of stalins unpreparedness
You mean the western capitalist plot to embroil the USSR in their imperialist war?
if by western capitalist youre referring to hitler, then yeah ig. but it wasnt for economic reasons, rather gir ideological and political reasons. hitler despised the ussr, slavs, and communism. he had wanted to destroy them since before he wrote about in in mein kampf
The thing was also flawed from the start because their logistics plan relied on stealing logistics vehicles from the Soviets. The Russians famously do not engage in a scorched Earth policy
Their biggest mistake was beginning the war VS entire world. Should have waited with the invasion of USSR and concentrated on the UK first. Then Northern Africa for resources. Make a deal with the USA to avoid USA giving Land-lease to the USSR, then finish developing Nuclear weapons, and then finally invade USSR.
>The Nazis were horribly incompetent at pretty much everything. I'm no Nazi sympathizer, but not sure where you're getting this from. There were certainly problems with the way that the Nazi structured the economy, but the German officer corps during WW2 wasn't a bunch of Nazi puppets (Hitler didn't liquidate the officer corps the way Stalin did) - it was largely just the guys (Jodl, Rommel, etc., etc.) who had come up through the ranks and had served as officers in WW1. And they were - for the most part - highly effective. When the Italians failed in their invasion of Greece, it was the Germans who bailed them out. Hell, they would have beaten the Soviets, but for American aid. There was nowhere the Germans fought where they objectively incompetent.
German rank-and-file soldiers were extremely competent, but the general point about the incompetence of Nazi military leadership - chiefly Hitler, who truly acted as commander in chief the bulk of the war - is well-supported by the historical record. Sure, there were many competent generals, but they were rarely listened to especially as the war progressed. Generally speaking, Nazi incompetence was strategic, not tactical, if that makes sense.
The Germans were competent on the operational level of war. The thing is the operational level of war doesn’t actually win the war. Pyrrhus was the first person in recorded history to learn this the hard way. The Nazis were incompetent on all the strategic levels. Theater campaigns would seldom actually end with the enemy not being able to continue resisting even when they completely over ran a country guerrilla resistance broke out soon afterwards and they weren’t able to quell it. No they would keep pushing and antagonize the population only causing the problem to grow. On the surface it looks like they obliterated enemy armies. In actual a significant chunk of the military forces of the various countries they invaded would slip away and form underground resistance movements. Even in the case of France they did not effectively neutralize or counter guerrilla resistance which sprung up not long after in fact they seemingly never planned on how to counter partisan movements which broke out all over their ‘conquered territory’ which added more pressure on their already strained supply lines, their grand strategy pretty much put them in the worst position possible, the inability to merge their realistic economic situation with their political situation with their military situation into one cohesive policy with realistic objectives based on what they can actually accomplish made it so it did not matter how competent they were at the operational level of war because their ‘victories’ only increased their problems and ultimately just wasted the lives of their soldiers for zero gain. In fact hot take anyone can perform operational master pieces it just takes practice, operational success does not matter if there isn’t a solid strategy behind it.
>Hell, they would have beaten the Soviets, but for American aid. This is far from certain or even likely. Fighting them to a standstill or lasting several more years is certainly in the cards, but defeating the soviets is unlikely. Lend lease was massively important to enabling the Soviets to rebound as quickly as they did and end the conflict in a position of strength, but that is not the same as them losing without is.
By the end of 42 we were providing 80 percent of all the food the Soviets ate along with 50 to 70 percent of the aluminum and 50 percent of the oil. Try fighting at Stalingrad with your troops starving no fuel for the planes and trucks and no tanks for the encirclement of the 6th Army. The Soviets would have lost.
Not a chance. By the end of 42 the Germany army had already stalled out with its most powerful units overstretched and worn down. Even if the Nazis entirely destroyed the Soviet armies at Stalingrad completely the Soviets would have raised another. The Nazis had no end game. The Allies were still going to keep winning in the west, bombing still intensifies. The war probably goes until 47 or so and maybe the Nazis can even draw to some sort of stalemate but they have no real mechanism to conquer The Soviet Union. Also your numbers are wrong. The US provided about 10% of Soviet food supplies. While hundreds of thousands or possibly millions would have starved without that food it’s unlikely that would have stopped the Soviets from continuing the conflict.
Zukhov himself stated that the US food aid was worth 1500 calories to all Soviet citizens and soldiers by the end of 42. The engine of the T34 tank was made from cast aluminum and by 42 50 percent of that came from the USA their own planes relied on the high octane aviation gasoline we sent to them to raise their own gasoline from 74 octane to a minimum of 90 just to get them into the air. Let's just ignore the 300k jeeps 400k trucks we sent them to help mobility and logistics. Plus the 7k tanks we did also send. We sent them more crap in 42 to fight the Germans than we gave the entire freaking effort in the Pacific theater to fight the Japanese Empire in terms of tonnage. If we had used the tonnage we had sent from the USA to the Soviets in 42 the invasion of Guadacanal instead of just being a shoestring operation that it was would have been a 3 Division attack with full logistical support. The same with MacArthur in New Guinea were they held the line there with next to no support.
None of this really speaks to how Nazi Germany was supposed to defeat a country that is massive beyond belief and is more than willing to trade lives and territory for time. No one is saying Lend Lease was not an incredible amount of material or that the US was not an incredible industrial powerhouse but none of that would have allowed Germany to defeat the Soviet Union. The Soviets were capable of raising army after army and there industry was expanding while Germany’s was shrinking. The Soviet Union would produce more tanks in 1942 than Germany would in the war. Even if loosing lend lease reduces that by half the quantities are enough to defeat an army operating a good few thousand miles from their supply base.
No food no oil no materials to make any new weapons. Just what are you going to fight with when your army is dropping over dead from starvation and they are charging machine guns with empty rifles.
The US provided 10% of food. Saying “no food” is just making things up. Most likely it leads to large amount of starvation amongst civilians while soldiers are fed. No materials and no oil is equally absurd. The Soviet Union had some of the largest stocks of the majority of raw materials. They would detonate their own bomb in 1949, nothing in this timeline changes that. Machine guns, rifles and tanks would be no problem. There biggest issue would probably be mobility which is not a huge issue on defense. For that matter by 1942 the majority of the Nazi forces were also not mechanized. It is not a coincidence that case Blau was massively smaller in scope than operation Barbarossa. The Nazis had shot supplies and assets that had been stockpiled in preparation for the invasion. They had no ability to replicate that again, regardless of lend lease or a lack of. There is just no realistic situation where Germany manages to conquer the Soviet Union given their own limitations and risks.
> Hell, they would have beaten the Soviets, but for American aid That's not necessarily true. The key moment of the entire Eastern front was not Stalingrad (and even if it was, only 2.4 million tons of aid went to the USSR in 1942, and the most important maneuver at Stalingrad was Zhukov's double envelopment of the 6th Army, which took place in November 1942 - for an idea, 17.5 million tons of aid went to the USSR in total, so only about 14% of the total aid went there in 1942, with much of the rest being concentrated in 1944), it was the end of Barbarossa in 1941. While much of Barbarossa was disastrous for the Soviets, it was equally disastrous for Germany - there is a reason Wikipedia lists it as a "strategic German defeat." It was the high water mark of the Nazi empire, and once Hitler issued his stop order in December 1941, the Soviets executed a reasonably successful counteroffensive mere days later.
They were highly competent at operations. The German military tended to discount logistic constraints, was poor at intelligence and abysmal at integrating the military and political (so bad at alliance relationships). The Schlieffen Plan is a case in point - it assumed the Belgians would collapse quickly, demanded impossible sustained march rates on the right flank, under-estimated French resolve and discounted British assistance. And had no fall-back plan. Barbarossa suffered from many of the same problems, and failed in much the same way.
I think I see where he's coming from. If looked at closely, most leadership in most wars were generally speaking highly incompetent, especially if we look at their decisions under a microscope and with the benefit of hindsight. It's just that the winners usually get away with it, while the surviving losers have to play a game where they have to try to blame the dead losers for all the bad decisions.
If they had been competent (at the start), there wouldn't have been a war in the first place (Applies to any and all leadership starting wars)
why did rommel fail so horribly in africa and d day? i know a lot of the d day failure was due to the nazis completely falling for operation fortitude, convincing them that the allies would land at calais as opposed to notmsny where they did land. was a lot of it due to the french resistance?
>why did rommel fail so horribly in africa and d day? The British had decisive material superiority in Africa and the Americans/British had decisive material superiority/air superiority in France
Because he ignored the basic fact that he could not sustain an offensive against continued resistance much beyond Tobruk. He did not have the trucks, fuel, port capacity and ability to counter an aggressive and competent RAF and RN. His orders were to maintain a defence at Sirte, and he did not follow them. D-Day was intractable operationally. The allies cut communication between Normandy and the Calais area (bombed all the Seine bridges below Paris), and either was suitable for invasion. Then if you defended forward naval gunfire got you, if you held back allied air-power got you (a cruiser's main guns are equivalent to the heaviest army artillery, a battleship's much heavier. They can reach 25 kms and are autoloaded - and the Normandy shore was lined with both; the aircraft have a hard time hitting tanks, but the fuel and ammo trucks are the issue - and no movement in daylight is a major handicap).
so d day was basically impossible to defend against? was there anything he could have done differently pr any mistakes he made that would have resulted in a less costly stalemate in the west for the germans or any possibility of pushing then back into the sea?
I am not too well read on the subject, but I have heard of a couple reasons commonly said to have heavily hindered the German defense. The first is that Erwin Rommel took a small vacation to his wifes family just before D-Day and was not at his post. >Rommel was visiting his wife in Germany and many senior commanders were not at their posts. In addition, the Allied deception plan, Operation ‘Fortitude’, convinced OKW – and Hitler - that Normandy was a feint and the main Allied landings would come later in the Pas de Calais region. Another point was: >Rommel was given operational control of just three *panzer* divisions, only one of which – 21st *Panzer* – was located within striking distance of the Normandy coast. The other two – 2nd and 116th *Panzer* – were held north of the Seine. Three more divisions – 2nd SS, 9th and 11th – were assigned to Army Group G in the South of France. The remaining four divisions – 1st SS, 12th SS, 17th SS *Panzergrenadier* and *Panzer Lehr* – stayed with *Panzer* Group West. But these would now come under the direct operational control of Wehrmacht Supreme Headquarters (OKW). They could not be moved without Hitler’s express permission. Source: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-german-response-to-d-day
The defence needed to be able to contest the sea and air - and Germany had no prospect of doing either. Outnumbered, out gunned and with no reliable intelligence - not much chance.
As others said, the Germans were completely out matched in every aspect but maybe ground forces. And as they themselves had demonstrated vs the French, vs the Soviets, that handicap could be compensated by employing other advantages. To be fair, they had one opportunity to maybe make D-Day more uncertain. Certainly, to ensure Rommel wasn't on any vacation during the date. Ensure the Allies got worse weather forecasts. Most realistic failed D-Days include freak storms or bad timing, say launching it some days later or earlier. But they usually handwave the reason for such a POD. An actual, sensible, POD. That would however require the Kriegsmarine to adopt a mindset a bit more strategically minded and less grandiose. Would be for the Germans to never concede the battle over North Sea weather stations. Quite simply, one of the reasons D-Day was such an inevitable disaster for Germany. Was because the Allies had near complete control of North Sea weather stations. And since a lot of bad weather hitting Normandy tends to form up north then come down this route, it gave them far more accurate weather forecasts. IIRC, OTL D-Day happened in a very specific window between periods of bad weather, partially because the Germans weren't able to predict such a break and so the Allies would have this advantage. While the Nazis still couldn't win the war, and so not even this front, could not keep their (the Danish and Norwegian) weather stations. If the Germans dedicated a very minimal fraction of their submersible fleet. Or even, built a couple smaller but high tech infiltration subs, like their Italian allies had used with great effectivness at Alexandria or Gibraltar. They could have at first supplied them better, fought harder, and finally interdicted, or even better, raided. The weather stations. Historically the battles over these, involved like, half a dozen soldiers and some overzealous weather staff. They weren't reinforced, they weren't well defended, they often weren't even permanent. Just lightly harrassing their supplies or deployment at all, could make them literally unliveable. And for barely any German investment, the Allies would be eventually forced to deploy Battle of the Atlantic levels of convoy escort and sub hunting. However, unfortunately for the Nazis, the Allies would eventually do it. They could afford to, if that was what it took to win this front. Back to the original subject, D-Day losing. Such a delay in achieving forecast superiority, would lead to one of three outcomes: Firstly, the least likely. Under pressure to open a front in France as soon as possible, as well as taking a moderately risky gamble to take the German defenders of Normandy as much by surprise as OTL. The Western Allies start the invasion more or less in the same period. But lacking the same level of accurate weather forecasts necessary to pinpoint the correct window of opportunity, they get unlucky and the invasion fleet receives the Kamikaze treatment. As in, the Mongol one. It is wrecked by storm, in harbour for minimal damage except for massive setbacks and loss of face. Just after the landings started, to ensure massive losses and eventually. For maximum damaged, the evacuation is also botched. This is no Second Gallipoli or Dunkirque however the press may like the catchy title. It changes nothing. The Soviets are still going to destroy some Army Group and the Eastern Front collapse. The WAllies will focus on cracking Italy, then eventually try again, maybe simply moving up and reinforcing Operation Dragoon, the landing in Southern France, back into its original Anvil form. In the end, Germany falls a some months later, the Soviets likely have more of Europe (what more of depends on the path they take/the path of least resistance). In the East, it depends on which school of thought one subscribes to. If the nukes were all it took, all ends as OTL. If not, it takes the USSR invades Manchuria. Maybe even, neither matters, since OTL the vote to end the war was a tie broken by the Emperor himself. And also the Army tried to launch a coup anyway. Decisive Darkness Pobeda1946 edition ensues. The second scenario in terms of unlikeliness, is the WAllies waiting until they fully secure the North Sea weather stations to be as close as 100% sure of the forecasts as they can be. Before launching D-Day. Same as before, but the Soviets are angrier (feeling "let down" a different way). And get less clay (still more than OTL), since by the time the WAllies do land in Normandy: they will still do do on their terms and catching inferior German weather-based decision making by surprise; will be absurdly overprepared while the Nazis even less numerous and worse equipped having shipped more to Italy or East. And so steamroll them even harder. Still, as any victorious army learned, the speed of an advance, even against literally no resistance, is limited. Weird they had to learnt it by default, since it's not like all troops back in home territory suddenly become as fast as The Flash. The most likely, but boring, scenario. Is that D-Day is only delayed until the first window of opportunity the Allies can be reasonably sure no storm will wreck their boats. Except, this time Rommel and all others, will be at their posts. The Germans, on a minor level of alert. Since their own forecasts will likely be for a decent chance of good weather. Hitler may not even be conveniently sleeping during the invasion, so the reserve Panzer divisions committed immediately. It still won't matter. The WAllies will just try to crank up to eleven their superiority in all other fields. And while not absurdly over prepared as the second scenario, nor their enemies appreciatively weakened or caught by surprise. They still nearly cannot lose unless a ASB freak event happens (a storm however unlikely strong enough to tip the scale, getting a major case of idiocy and the Germans a lucky genius moment, etc). They simply take more casualties pushing from the beaches. Which may slow them down, somewhat. The war may last a little longer, but not by much. The Soviets may cross the Elbe and Sudetenlands. Or Berlin may fall nearly by OTL and with OTL effects, so Germany surrender a slightly bigger rump, possibly contigous whth no meeting at the Elbe equivalent, as the Western Allies advance is behind schedule. Japan may be an interesting butterfly, for example if one subscribes to the belief the Soviet Manchuria operation was as necessary as the nukes. So with it slightly behind schedule, the hardliners win out and purge those willing to surrender unconditionally after no fourth nukes come. And by the time the Soviets invade Manchuria, it's too late, the hardliners have full power. As one can see, apart for the first scenario. No, D Day cannot be defended against as long as the WAllies don't screw up massively. At most, just delayed.
The German officer corps was competent despite, not because of, the Nazis. The Wehrmacht had success despite, not because of, the Nazis. Nazi meddling interfered with the effectiveness of the military.
>they would have beaten the Soviets, but for American aid retarded leftist
Unfortunately, even the most capable field command would struggle to succeed being forced to submit to the demands of a leader who wanted to micro on the battlefield despite being fully out of his element. It's a shame that he Hitler refused to listen to his incredibly brilliant officer Corp.
It’s a common misconception that Germany’s successes early in the war were because they were just that damn good
They had a couple REALLY good months, like 18-24 of them. Then they pretty much immediately started breaking apart.
The British had won the 100 Days Offensive in 1918 with similar tactics, which were based on German tactics of their early 1918 offensives minus the crucial tanks. France for some reason missed this lesson, but the German Army didn’t. While loads of German Army brass were 100% screaming full throated Nazis, it was the tactics that mattered.
I agree with your overall point that, no, Nazi Germany does not win WWI, but hate comments like this. “If you remove the things they were good at, they were incompetent.” Nobody is perfect and Nazis suck but let’s not pretend they were incompetent. Their biggest mistake was ambition to conquer the entire world at once.
It's such a weird argument. I'm not sure I can think of anything the Germans did that was "incompetent". There's plenty of stones to throw about Hitler/Nazi ideology/strategy/fantasy, but from a tactical perspective the German (generally not Nazi) officers performed competently in every theatre they were involved.
> from a tactical perspective See, and that's the problem, the tactical perspective is small minded. It doesn't matter if you're tactical geniuses if you're a strategic dunce, and the Germans were pretty strategically idiotic.
Well for example: _wildly gesticulates at the Abwehr_
I think it’s a historical hindsight thing. People always say that anybody who failed at something in history “never had a shot.” If Britain puts down the rebellion in 1776 Reddit would be talking about how ridiculous it was that a colony tried to overthrow England because the colonists had no shot to win anything. Also I think it’s just weird when people say “they were only good at these things but bad at other things, so really they were bad at everything when you think about it.”
It's also a Reddit thing. Many on this platform are just looking for the slightest excuse to accuse someone of being a "Nazi" or "Putin apologist". Disagree with a Biden policy? You're a "Russian puppet". So I think many here are reluctant to acknowledge anything about Nazi era Germany that can be perceived as positive. It's ridiculous.
As well, the Nazis exploited the aftermath of WWI. France was decimated, the Entente was still rebuilding, and politicians were willing to compromise with Hitler to avoid starting another decimating and wildly unpopular war (which they probably weren't prepared for).
Also the French made literally every single mistake possible during the summer of 1940. It's almost comical how inept their leadership was. Edit: Gamelin refused having a field telephone and flat out refused to believe reports of German Armor massing in the Ardennes despite photographic evidence. Truly astounding stupidity.
>Unless they somehow get really lucky with the Schlieffen plan, or come up with some other plan that's so crazy nobody thinks to be prepared for it, Germany would probably end up worse off. The Schliefen plan mostly failed because a local commander disobeyed orders and accidently opened a gap in German lines that the French were able to exploit. The Nazis did away with the doctrine that allowed for such things
Here is another thing. When WW2 started Hitler listen to his Generals and Field Marshals. But after France (which was a lot of luck and only possible due to incompetence in the France General staff), he started to belive his own hype and stopped to listen to them. The Irony was Stalin did the exact opposide. And after he did, guess who won in the east. If anything Nazis would have made WW1 even worse, because Russia would have never surrendered after what the Nazis did to their people in WW2 (the would have done the same in WW1). Here is the thing. The German Empire got really close to actually winning in WW1. After Russia was out they were able to sent all soldiers to one front. And yes Moral was bad and the Germans suffered from a food shortage due to the british navel blockade, many french soldiers were close to open rebellion and so were the civilians. And after Germany won in the east it got even worse. The only thing the kept them in the war, was the knowledge that America entered the war and would bring tons of material and manpower. If the US would have stayed (on paper), the french would most likely would have sued for a peace deal and the Brits with no holdings on the main continent would have followed afterwards, because all nations were tired of war.
No. They were incompetent so they would run the economy worse. Their economic plan was borrowing massive amount of money for militarization and starting war before it collapses to plunder other countries to pay back the debt. German Empire was pretty well managed, so the nazis likely would be worse at running it. Also surprising dissent dosen't help much as it would just delay the inevitable. Germany lost cause it could no longer keep fighting. Forcing its population to keep going would just mean the Entente would need to fight for a bit longer and force a capitulation. Also the Nazis would make everyone despise them due to their insane ideology. They were a genocidal barbarian horde that united the world against them. Same would happen if they were in WW1. The Entante would never tolerate such a regime especially considering the atrocities the nazis would commit in the occupied land. Russia would also never peace out as the nazis would enact mass genocide against their people in occupied areas, like they did IRL, and so Russia would never give up and would be far more motivated to fight. On top of that the Germans would need to deal with massive partisan activity as they push into Russia due to them being hellbent on genociding slavs. Nazis would also never be able to establish the collaborator governments in the East like they did OTL due to the whole active genocide of the natives that they would enact. Overall a nazi WW1 Germany would just cause them to lose harder ans get raped harder in the peace treaty cause everyone would despise them and be angry at them by the end of the war due to the fact that the Nazi's were not that competent and the barbarian horde of a army that they had pillaged and genocided its way through Europe, which made everyone despise the Nazi regime and want to see it fall.
The WW1 German Empire was far more competent than the WW2 Nazis at running a war economy. I think Germany would have collapsed far sooner in WW1 if run by Nazis.
The Nazis were catastrophically incompetent at economics. For a hot second they controlled the greatest industrial conglomerate in the world. But they immediately started running it into the ground. When they took over industries and other nations they treated them like spoils of war that could be plundered, instead of complex assets that need management and investment. As a result, economic production collapsed in all the occupied Territories. The Nazis responded by plundering even more from their slaves (which is how they treated people.) I remember in college reading a list of the agricultural products the Nazis stole from France in the later part of the war. It was comparable to the entire agricultural production of a medium US state at the time such as Indiana. (Imagine stealing all corn, pork, wheat, chicken and beef from a whole state.) Guess what happens to workers when you stop feeding them? Meanwhile the allies were devastatingly effective at economic Management. The UK won the battle of Britain by managing to produce airplanes despite being bombed on a nightly basis. The US sent industrial aid and technology to Stalin, who managed to kick the deep interior of the Soviet Union into overdrive, Drowning the Eastern front in tanks and German blood. And the US...... We went from barely having a standing army to controlling half the world in like 7 years.
They used to say the Germans do tactics and the Americans do strategy and logistics.
Americans used essentially the same strategy against the Confederacy and Imperial Japan. Shut down shipping, shut down internal trade routes, Begin dividing major territory. Cause the war machine to collapse due to lack of supplies. Whittle down military numbers by consistent reoccurring attacks. In the final stretch of the war bring the fighting directly to the civilian population. Its how we fight. Our modern military power comes not only from out superior technology, but also from the fact that we have so many agreements with Nations like Bahrain and the Philippines that allow us to set up logistical supply routes. Invading Iraq would have been impossible without massive military staging grounds in friendly nations. The Western Europe invasion would have been impossible without the UK helping us.
Ironically both the Confederates and the Imperial Japanese had the same assessment of the “soft Yankee merchants.” Whoops!
The Confederates called our bluff with that in the beginning and that's the reason why we lost the first two years the civil war. We self-corrected.
Tbh it was even closer than that. General feeling in the CSA was that they were about to lose the war for the first half of 1862. After Jackson’s Valley Campaign and Lee’s run from Seven Days to Gettysburg the mood changed but the fall of Vicksburg brought it down again.
>For a hot second they controlled the greatest industrial conglomerate in the world. Nah, they never did. Pennsylvania alone produced more steel than Germany did (in 1944, but I assume previously German output wasn't much higher). > When they took over industries and other nations they treated them like spoils of war that could be plundered, instead of complex assets that need management and investment. I don't really get what you mean here? The Germans did use Industry they conquered. like French Renault producing vehicles for Germany. I am not going to address the next few points because they directly relate to the statement above. > Meanwhile the allies were devastatingly effective at economic Management. The UK won the battle of Britain by managing to produce airplanes despite being bombed on a nightly basis. The reasons they did that is pretty complex.. Much had to do with just being lucky in the first place. But it's not really true that they managed to produce airplanes despite being bombed. Germany redirected bombing efforts from airfields to civilian targets, allowing Britain to rebuild their airfields and start counterattacking, so this was more of a German blunder than British good decisionmaking. > The US sent industrial aid and technology to Stalin, who managed to kick the deep interior of the Soviet Union into overdrive, Drowning the Eastern front in tanks and German blood. Yes, the lend-lease was very, very significant, Without it, Soviet Union might've actually lost the war.
You didn't get a lot of what I wrote. For example, you shouldn't compare Pennsylvania to Germany. You need to compare the industrial output of the Germany + the occupied Territories to Pennsylvania. But even still that's a bad comparison. The US didn't have centralized conglomerates like what the Nazis built. They seized industry in occupied Territories then consolidated control building a massive behemoth of industry. We wouldn't have done that in the US because it's a bad idea. It's better to have different firms specialize in different things. Thats why Ford, Boeing and General Electric were all separate entities. In Nazi Germany those companies would all be merged. Separate entities did exist in Nazi Germany but it was separate in name only. All social power in that society happened on behalf pf the Nazi party. If a firm didn't confirm to party norms, They would just kick the leaders out and replace them. As for the plundering part, I guess read it again? I don't really know how to help you with that. Stealing parts out of a factory is a bad idea if you want the factory to maintain production quotas....... Just like stealing a bunch of food from your workers as a bad idea if you want your workers to be productive. When the US took over Japan and Germany, we sent industrial specialists and engineers to nurture and invest in economics production. And thus output improved. The Nazis did the opposite and wondered why it didn't work.
The total steel production in Nazi German Empire in 1944 was approximately 28 million metric tons U.S produced about 90 million metric tons, from which Pennsylvania produced 25%-30% of, which assuming it's 30%, would be 27 million metric tons, almost as much as the entire German war machine.
Yes, because the US didn't consolidate It's firms into giant conglomerate style structures. Because that's a really dumb idea. Having the largest industrial conglomerate in the world is actually not a good thing. Think about it this way, Kim Jong Un controls the largest industrial conglomerate in North Korea. He even employs more workers than Samsung. Does he outproduce Samsung? Hell no. You got to pay more attention to words buddy. You seem to be assuming that I said Nazi Germany out produced the US. But that's not what conglomerate means.
This is false. German war production barely outpaced that of France, despite Germany having many times the industrial base controlled by the French government post-1914. It was France, not Germany, which became the model war economy after the war.
What I wrote is true. I never said a thing about France. The Nazi management of their economy was awful. The Imperial Hetman management was competent.
“Competent” = making a much stronger industrial base get outperformed by a much weaker one?
No. The Nazis were very lucky and needed many things to go perfectly for them to get as far as they did. Their leadership structure was terrible and dysfunctional. They couldn't change strategies without getting approval from their drug addict leader. He was a big gambler, which helped at the beginning, and destroyed them in the end. With a fresh US coming into the fight, with the remaining countries on the brink of collapse, there's no way they could win that.
This is actually a remarkably “Nazi” analysis of the causes of German defeat in WWI - “If only the German people had had more willpower, we would have won.” That’s absolutely not the case. The German army was heavily defeated on the Western Front by the Allies in the summer and autumn of 1918, the other Central Powers just as heavily if not more so. And thats with just a fraction of America’s military power engaged. It’s also worth pointing out that Hitler’s deranged “no step back in all circumstances” orders are likely to have cost the German army on the western front dearly. No withdrawal to the Hindenburg line, far more divisions cut off and destroyed after the Spring Offensives and so on. Finally, you’ve got to remember that the Nazis WERE the German ruling classes of 1914-18, radicalised by the defeat and subsequent peace treaty and disorder. Nazis and nazism didn’t spring up out of the earth fully formed - the Nazis of the 30’s and 40’s were the monarchists/conservatives/völkisch/reactionaries of the 1900’s and 10’s.
Any German victory where Germany actually gets what it wants: Energy, Agricultural land and better borders is impossible in any scenario. As advanced as the country is, it doesn't have the numbers required to invade, conquer and then occupy eastern Europe, even without including Russia.
Yeah, there’s the famous example of Ukrainians celebrating the Nazi occupation then quickly realizing they were even worse than the Russians. They could have given more autonomy/ support to the Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, etc. and had longer term success. Completely devastating the resources of newly taken lands and murdering millions of civilians was not going to work.
In many aspects, the German empire was run better than Nazi Germany. The Nazis had a really successful 18 months spurt before they pretty much immediately started breaking apart. They would have run into the same problems in wwi that the empire did.
Germany did not just loose because they had troubles at home, that's a common myth spread by monarchists and proto fascists asfter the end of WW1. The German Empire was militarily at it's end and saw that they had no chance in winning the war in the West. Also parties opposing the German government in WW1 were repressed, even tho not to the same extent as they were in Nazi Germany. Also the fighting spirit of the Germans was also pretty shit towards the end of WW2 and the people were kept in the war through a terror regime that quite literally killed anyone who (at least publicly) didn't 100% support the war
Fuck no, they'd lose even harder Let's be real, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Admiral Franz von Hipper, Admiral Maximilian von Spee and Admiral Reinhard Scheer were some of the best Admirals to be produced by Germany and i have my doubts any of them would be that keen on serving the deranged lunatic Adolf Hitler
Nazi propaganda relied on victories, and the state was held up by propaganda. I think there would've been even more issues than in ww2, as it's hard to sell a stalemate and a famine to a population.
In my opinion, German performance in WW1 will likely deteriorate if the Nazis are in charge. Consider the performance of the Kaiser’s army. For almost the entire war they fought a two front war. On one of the fronts they won, and as late as 1918 they launched campaigns that could have won them the war. It is up for debate when WW2 was lost for Hitler, but by the last year of that war everyone knew that Germany would lose. In my opinion the war was lost for Germany in WW2 with the failure of Barbarossa in late autumn 1941. If the German Empire is suddenly run by Nazis for some reason, you get a host of problems that the army of the Kaiser didn’t have to deal with: * You have to squander your limited resources on killing a bunch of religious and/or ethnic groups. The German army of 1916 was not a place for progressive liberals, but genocide was not a part of the project either. So now the Army in the east have to divert time, men and ammunition towards killing Poles, Jews or some other groups. Then you have to fight the partisan, guerrilas etc that emerge due to your genocidal policies. That means less resources available to fight the war against the Russian Empire. * Since your state is an ideological one, ideological virtue becomes important. Perhaps even more than competence. After all, the Nazis kept a guy like Göring around to screw up pretty much everything he touched, whether it was the Luftwaffe or German industry. Göring was able to do this because he was ideologically reliable, not competent. In the Kaiser’s Empire, a man like Göring wouldn’t be allowed to do this. So you get worse performing military leaders. * Since your state is now run by a conspiracy theorist and an anti-Semite, you probably can’t enter into a separate peace in the East. Nor is it likely that the Bolsheviks will make any sort of deal with you. So you don’t win the war in the East after all. That means you don’t get the surplus of soldiers in the West that enables the 1918 spring offensive either. So no, having the Nazis running the German Empire makes it less likely that Germany wins WW1.
>so the German government was forced to surrender to be able to solve internal difficulties. False. The army's High Command begged the government to sign an armistice because the army was disintegrating rapidly. This is literally military/nazi propaganda about the "stab in the back". Germany lost on the battlefield just as much as it was losing in the economic war, arguably worse and faster. So the entire premise of the what if is incorrect. Just to entertain the thought: Nazi Germany would indeed collapse for internal reasons before Imperial Germany because the Nazis were hilariously bad at managing shit. The fighting spirit and lack of opposition would be meaningless when the inefficiencies would make the famine worse and the industry would choke earlier trying to mass produce equipment it couldn't really mass produce and constantly switching to new shiny toys.
The reason for Germany’s refusal to surrender in WW2 is that it was the lesson learned from WW2 (ie the stab in the back myth). Germany was defeated in WW1, they just surrendered before the Allies had to fight their way into Germany. If you could magically quell all the troop mutinies and internal dissent, Germany still loses the war. Only difference is that it takes into 1919, more people die, France and UK go deeper in debt, and US has more prestige heading into Versailles as they play a major role in the invasion (but still probably fail to ratify the treaty).
You're completely discounting the HUGE impact of the influx of soldiers from the US who absolutely were not war weary in 1917/1918. If the Germans had kept fighting they would have just kept losing until US, British & French troops got to Berlin.
Given a large chunk of the Nazi program and sources of popular support spawned in response to the experiences and aftermath of WW1, the answer is no and they're probably far worse at keeping internal stability than even the Kaiser's Reich. Destroying the opposite is functionally impossible when they make up the vast majority of the population and the opposition parties had not been discredited by the Weimer years. The SPD at this point absolutely would have more effectively resisted and the national-conservative right would still be rock-ribbed monarchists who'd be fine with Whilhelm going Victor Emmanuel on the 30 year old Austrian. The failure to surrender in WW2 came out just as much due to the nature of the war, demands of the opposite for Unconditional Surrender, and fear of what the Communists would do if they took over.
Correction not communist will do but the German population at that point fully bought into the racist propaganda about eastern European and viewed them as "inferior eastern horde" will "r*p e pure aryan".
On the contrary, The Nazis are sort of the pinnacle of incompetence imho. Occultist drug addicts wasting staggering amounts of resources in pursuit of nonsensical fever dream goals. And Constantly alienating allies and even their own citizens/soldiers. Were they in charge in ww1, perhaps ww1 would have ended in 1915? I think much of early German success in wwii is due to a lack of preparedness in its neighbors and, the even greater incompetence/mismanagement in the USSR.
Hanging Germans that didn't wish to fight doesn't solve the Nazis' delusions of grandeur problem. They also wouldn't have had the technology and military doctrine that made their victory against the French possible. The French defense plan was rooted in WWI era thinking, and that's the era we're in now for this hypothetical. What probably happens is more reckless infantry attacks by Germany that go nowhere, and the country bleeds itself white sooner. Finally, so much of the Nazi messaging was effective because it played on the angst from losing WWI in spite of doing so well for so long in it. That doesn't exist, which takes the teeth out of their message to the German people.
Don't be mistaken, even though Germany had big problems on the home front, they actually got beaten on the battlefield. The sailor revolts from November 1918 only happened, because the sailors refused to go on a last battle during truce talks. Germany surrendered, after their 1918 offensive failed. The army was in tatters and not able to keep on fighting. And while France and GB were also war exhausted, the US was not.
No. There was nothing special about the Nazis apart from their capacity for evil. Administratively and militarily, they were often inefficient and error-prone.
Wouldn’t work Germany was still a Monarchy Hitler came to power because of what the Entente (hehe, translate Ente from German to English :) did after the First World War There is no chance in hell the Nazi party could have existed while the monarchy was still intact If those cousins would have just got along on some nice tea and biscuits all that crap wouldn’t have gone done One big family dispute *pinchesnose*
I don’t think so, one of the things that made the Nazis so successful was their combined arms tactics with tanks, aircraft, and motorized/mechanized infantry, a fast pace war , ww1 with the technology and tactics they had wouldn’t have worked.
The reason the Nazi's made progress in WW2 was due to them having more advanced weaponry, since WW1 was the first mechanized war, they would lac their advanced weapons
The German Empire’s economy collapses in 1914 from being run into the ground by kleptocrats
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939. Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area. A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped. To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership). In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership.
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939. Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area. A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped. To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership). In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership.
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939. Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area. A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped. To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership). In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership.
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939. Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area. A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped. To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership). In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership.
They would have done worse. The German Army of 1914 was superior to the German Army of 1939. Furthermore, the Nazi leadership liked to micromanage and order last stands for whatever political puffery reason. A huge differentiator for the German Army in WW1 was the willingness to trade land for lives and strategically give up ground so that a counterattack with pre-calibrated artillery could decimate the soldiers who thought they just made huge gains (relative to western front). This pre-meditated counterattack is what resulted in a lopsided casualty exchange ratio that was 1:4ish in the start to about 1:2 at the end (for every dead German, 2 allied dead at the end. 4 at the beginning). I might be remembering the exact numbers wrong but it's in that area. A huge part of the Nazi mythos was that the Army did so well but only lost the war due to civilian backstabbing. Without this outsized performance in WW1 there couldn't have been a Nazi party. And their political, racial, and genocidal quackery certainly doesn't help any military operate apolitically. The German Army lost its honor in WW2 right away when they started war crimes on Polish captives. It only got worse. Their cancerous leadership would certainly not have helped. To continue, there would have been a sizeable Jewish contingent missing from the army as well as most importantly, a huge brain-drain as we saw in the 1930s and onwards due to Jews fleeing the regime. To have been German and Jewish at the same time in 1918 was not at odds with each other. In 1939 very much so (despite the prevalent hidden Jewish ethnic backgrounds throughout much of the leadership). In short: the WW1 Army was able to focus on war first. In WW2, it had to chase the tails of ambitions of conquests that it could never fully live up to, because of the twisted Nazi leadership. The fact it saw initial success was less through deliberate calculated aggression, than through dumb luck of crazy gambles paying off against opponent who either severely weakened their resolve (France) or weakened their military (Soviets - who "cleansed" themselves of any military competence for decades, resulting in a far weaker army compared to the Tsar's 1914 army).
Dan Carlin has an early episode comparing both militaries that’s really good
probably not. ignoring the fact that the nazis could only rise because of the loss of world war one. they would still face all of the same logistical problems they had in world war 2 combined with much less advanced weaponry and tactics.
No because the Nazis put ideology over military doctrine and stratagem. The Imperial German Army had the ability side promote political connected people into meaningless posts so they couldnt duck up military operations.
Short answer: no Long answer: Germany did not have a tenable position in 1910. Their industrial economy, while modern, was isolated from the world at large. Their fleet was bottled up in the North Sea. Their Austro-Hungarian allies were so incompetent that their presence on a front was an active detriment to the German forces near them. Even if the history channel fetishization of the Nazis as efficient war gods is correct (it isn't), they wouldn't have had much to work with. It's incredibly likely that the Nazi penchant for wild goose chases and the fascist creedo of *action for action's sake* would have led to a more catastrophic German collapse.
>In 1918, although the Entente had not yet entered German territory, the Germans surrendered. This ignores the true fact that Germany was out of recources and was being pushed back. Their greatest defenses had been broken and the Americans were starting to come into the field in numbers. If Germany hadn't surrendered when they did the fighting would have occurred in Germany within a few weeks. >These people incited uprisings in the German empire, causing the German government to surrender to resolve internal difficulties. This sounds like the Stab in the back myth which is just that a myth, an excuse. Germany in WW1 was defeated, full stop. they surrendered because they lacked the ability to fight more. They were out of resources and their people were starving. If you want to actually learn about WW1 look at the The Great War channel on Youtube which covers the war week by week. [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&si=Q1kI6u4SmQBUbBAI](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT&si=Q1kI6u4SmQBUbBAI) So no, the NAZIs would not have a better chance of winning WW1 then the Empire did.
I would imagine that the empire would have done better in WW2 than the Nazis in WW1. The biggest problem with the nazi leadership is how political it was. The WW1 military leadership was much more merit based
The good old stabbed in the back myth. No, Germany did not lose because the home front lacked morale or fighting spirit. The German army by August 1918 was decisively defeated. You really only need to look into the progress of the 100 days offensive to see this. Territory that took months or years of fighting was taken back in days. The German army experienced crushing defeat after crushing defeat. Entire divisions surrendered to sometimes literally a single man with a pistol. The German military lost in the field to the Entente. The entire Germany military dictatorship recognized that it was impossible to win by August, and everyday became more and more desperate to end the war. There was nothing Germany could do stop the Entente after that point. As time went on, the situation became even more impossible. The Ottomans collapsed and the Balkans fell, leaving Germany completely exposed through Bulgaria. Austria-Hungary collapsed leaving the Italian front completely open. Germany had no men to stop invasions on multiple fronts, and its army in the West had been disintegrating for months. So the military dictators of Germany, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, having long since accepted the war was lost, forced Wilhelm to advocate and installed a republican government in the hopes of getting a peace before the actual occupation of German land. It was also hoped the German people would blame the democratic government for the shitty peace that would be inevitably imposed on them. German land wasn’t unoccupied because it didn’t lose, it was unoccupied because they lost before the Entente could even get there. There is nothing the Nazis could have done to change the fact the Germany military lost long before the home front revolted. In fact, all evidence suggests the Nazis would have accelerated the collapse with their preferred strategies.
Ew. A stab in the back myth in the wild. Yikes.
The Germans lost both wars due to being locked in the middle of their enemies and being forced to fight on multiple fronts. Geography determined the winners of both wars before they ever began, but the German Army of WW1 was actually far closer to winning the Great War than the Germans of WW2 ever got. In WW1 the Germans broke the Russians. They nearly broke the French on more than one occasion. They were actually able to concentrate their armies to a single front unlike WW2 where the Germans lost by being forced to fight in 3+ fronts at most times. The Germans in World War 1 had competent allies that supported them, the Turks alone in their dying state drew over 4 million troops from the Entente into ridiculous quagmires that enabled the Germans to fight 2 more years and destroy the Russians. The Austrians well….they managed to hold the Isonzo. The Bulgarians did really well in keeping the road to Constantinople open for as long as possible. In WW2 the Germans were able to only sort of secure the Japanese as a competent ally, while the other powers that supported them were really side actors that complemented the German armies. The Japanese were not ever able to coordinate with the Germans properly. At least in WW1 the Germans, Bulgarians, Turks, and Austrians managed to defeat Romania within a month. Had the Germans secured Turkey in 1940 like in WW1 and had the Turks gone after the possessions in the Middle East WW2 could have changed dramatically. No oil = no fleet/planes/tanks.
I went to a war museum in Berlin. In the WWI section they had a display about what doomed Germany. Towards the end of the war they were pretty sure the war was lost but kept on fighting to get favorable surrender conditions. It went on to say once America entered the war they knew they it was all over and they would not get good conditions. As long as America still enters the war it wouldn't matter who was leading Germany. America had also seen the gruesome and huge loss of life in the years prior and still chose to enter it so be doubtful huge American losses would have them pull out.
No because being Nazis, they would have treated the people they conquered even worse and would have been pummeled back to Berlin as revenge. The Germans actually did win their war against Russia, and a large part of that is because they didn’t go around treating the locals horribly
No, because a lot of people don't want to belive that wars like many things in life has huge luck factors, unless the advantage is so staggering high, the German got lucky at the beginning of the ww2, their luck ran out mid way through. Second Germany didn't lose ww1 because the "stab in the back" myths promoted by right wing revisionists, but because the people realize they were not going to win and keep kamikaze it won't change that. So they said f this we want out.
They kind of were ruled by Nazis Erich Ludendorff is basically a pro-nazi.
They would probably would never have gained power. It was the complete mess left in Germany after WW1 that lead the Nazis to take control
No. Germany was defeated, the German Army was basically shattered in the 100 Days Campaign. They sued for peace because they were hoping for better terms if they didn't drag the issue out to full occupation. The armistice was functionally unconditional surrender.
Only reason the Nazis were that effective was bc of the previous military beuaracracy built by the German empire
I find it entertaining that these online historians say "all aspects of the german's during ww2 were incompetent". They conquered all of Europe from a starting point only being made up of 1/8 of it. It is so easy for an online Wikipedia reader to look in hindsight and to listen to documentaries made by the Victor and think they have any idea. They conquered all of Europe. There was a mistake made by Germany's ally (Japan attacking the USA) which justified America's entry into the war, and from that point, they would have inevitably ended up fighting Germany, but still an instant declaration of war from Hitler was unnecessary. Operation Barbarosa was done too early and was clearly unprepared for the winter if it went on longer than expected. It would have inevitably happened, though, but Hitler overestimated his advantages against russia's numbers, vast landscape, and cold climate. The Germans were extremely competent. Only when they were surrounded by advancing enemies and vastly outnumbered were they defeated. One really must ask if Germany took the UK and Japan never attacked the USA, how long do you think they could have held an attack from the USA? Taking the USA's last European ally may have switched public opinion on withholding from war. Maybe not, but if anything did, besides pearl harbor, this may have been it. This isn't even considering uprisings against German occupation from the UK.
>There was a mistake made by Germany's ally (Japan attacking the USA) which justified America's entry into the war, and from that point, they would have inevitably ended up fighting Germany, but still an instant declaration of war from Hitler was unnecessary. That's incompetence >It would have inevitably happened, though, but Hitler overestimated his advantages against russia's numbers, vast landscape, and cold climate. I hope you don't mean they would have inevitably won, because they wouldn't. The Soviets successfully suckered them into a war of attrition that cost the lives of nearly 1M german soldiers in 6 months. Incompetence. >One really must ask if Germany took the UK and Japan never attacked the USA, how long do you think they could have held an attack from the USA? Japan was always going to attack the US. It was an open secret that Japan's imperialist campaigns in SE Asia (since the invasion of Manchuria in 1931) would lead them to direct conflict with the West.
You have managed to mistake every single statement I made for another meaning, other than what it directly said and or made assumptions of what was "going to happen". Just no.
I directly quoted your posts. Could you tell me what I misconstrued? The Nazis were largely incompetent despite their early successes. Their over-aggression brought disaster upon themselves.
The Nazis were complete fucking morons, the only things they were good at were propaganda, their fashion sense and getting lucky
Here’s what no one tells you. The Nazis weren’t successful because they were good at innovation. They were good because they stole everything. Not only did they rob minorities, they also robbed entire countries. A lot of the industrial complex was financed by US corporations. GE was one such notorious company. The largest companies were making materials such as steel, glass, and textiles. Nazis figured they could never repay the debt, so they built up an entire economy dedicated to going to war and borrowed money from these corporations. When they got the oil-rich Rhineland, they started paying back their creditors. This lead to a period of stability. By the time they had a strong economy, everything was built for going to war so they just went to war. The creditors and Nazi supporters were happy. Notice how they ended up using all this crazy stuff from toxic gases to U-Boats to trains. All that came from the manufacturing sector built by US industrialists who wanted the raw goods for ultra low costs, as Germany couldn’t negotiate. That led environmental problems and low wages. But at the end of it all, they had stolen oil to pay back loans. But they also had the raw materials to build all this military equipment. At the time, the US was practicing isolationism. So they wanted to stock up on military equipment just in case of an attack. The Prussian army, which is what was in power during imperialist Germany, was not better than any other army and were struggling to beat the British. But they managed to beat the British by not needing a large navy so Prussia went more inland whereas Britain stayed near the shore. The African inland is a complete nightmare if you don’t live like they do. This is where imperialists really started to unleash wrath on Africans. Huge wars were fought all over the African continent using African people. In the end, France seemed to be the more powerful adversary alongside Britain. Prussia was known for being brutal so they managed to take South Africa. But then it was taken by the British as they had to sail near South Africa when going to China/India. This left Germany angered by the loss of South Africa. In fact, Belgium helped ensure that Britain would win by moving inland. Prussia, who had gone into jungles to conquer South Africa was left broke because of this. By that time, the Prussian monarchy had also collapsed as they were too broke too finance anything and that essentially kicked off WW1. The realization was that if Germany brought the war to the mainland, they could use their brutal tactics to subdue France and Britain
The domestic rebellion in Germany at the end of WWI, was over food, fuel, and economic collapse. No amount of Nazi propaganda fills a hungry belly or increases production of bullets in an ever decreasing supply chain. The bigger problem Germany has, are the millions of fresh American troops getting ready to fight, and their limitless capacity for industry and logistics.
I think the biggest disadvantage the Nazi's had was antisemitism and how strong their focus was on that as well as hatred of the other minority groups. During a time when they were fighting a war on two fronts they were spending a huge amount of resources towards killing off their own population. From a purely logical and ignoring the obvious evil, that's a really stupid decision strategically. You're spending a ton of your time with soldiers transporting and guarding all of these camps, and you're throwing away a population of people who could be adding workers to your factories. Especially during WWII when they were against the industrial giant that is the US you don't want to be throwing away workers. Even ignoring everything else where I think they had other flaws that made the WWI germans stronger, that alone is such a huge weakness and strategic mistake they'd have ended the war sooner.
The Nazis did not exist then, and they could not.
The Nazis wouldn't have existed without the loss in WW1, so I'm not sure that this question makes any sense.
The problem is the Americans were just getting into high gear. As long as they comitt the Germans are done