Re: Nazis without Hitler

David Thornley wrote:

In article <4799FCEB.5ACAA8D5@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Dave Smith <adavid.smith@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hindsight canbe a good thing if applied ahead of time. Never the less,
Germany was winning at the time.

Germany looked to be winning at the time. There were several things
that could easily have gone wrong.

Indeed they looked to be winning at that point it time. They had been
successful in every step of their aggression to date.



Had Hitler not turned on the Soviet
Union the next year,

Not going to war with the Soviet Union would have meant forfeiting
much of Hitler's war aims, which were to conquer large parts of the
Soviet Union as part of the expansion of the Aryan race. Delaying
going to war with the Soviet Union would have been dangerous, as
the Soviets were increasing their military capabilities fairly
fast.

It is my understanding that Hitler believed that the British would come to
accept that they would be better off joinging forces with Germany and
turning on a mutual threat, the Soviet Union. Even if the Soviets did have
time to prepare for war, Hitler could have seen advantages to delaying that
conflict until he made peace with Britain, in which case he would have had
British support plus the support of the occupied countries of western
Europe. he would have had a huge and well equipped army and one that would
benefit from the vast resources of the west. However, it seems that was
not to be. The British were not prepared to make peace at that time.

A more rational person would have realized the folly of attacking Russia
when he was still at war with Britian and its allies. When Operation
Barbarossa was launched, the gains made by the Germans must have reinforced
their belief that they would have an easy victory because they made such a
rapid advance. Then they hit a brickwall, and it was all down hill for Nazi
Germany from there.
..


and then declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor,

The US was already in a shooting war with Germany, and had been
since September 1941. Roosevelt could manipulate this into a
full-scale war pretty much on his own schedule.

In a very small way compared to what was going on between the germans and
the British.




he most likely would have been victorious over all of Europe. As it
turned out, he bit off more than he could chew, but that all happened
after 1940.

No, he bit off more than he could chew when he didn't back down
from the British ultimatum. Britain didn't look like a danger
at the time, but Britain was a long-term danger.

I won't dispute that he underestimated Britain's resolve to stop German
expansion. Apparently Hitler was surprised when Britian stuck to its guns
and declared war after the invasion of Poland. Given that the Germans were
able to sweep across so much of northwestern Europe and push the British
army off the beaches at Dunkirk, it would appear that he had, to that
point, been able to chew as much as he had bit off. Hitler must have been
fairly confident at the time that he could keep Britain at bay before he
turned his sights on Russia...... or he was completely irrational, and
there is plent of evidence of that.


If Hitler had avoided fighting the British as much as possible,
he might have been in much better shape. In the invasion of
the Soviet Union, the Luftwaffe was considerably weaker than it
could have been, due to fighting the British. It was the
Battle of the Atlantic that was most important in moving the
US into the war, not Pearl Harbor.

US involvement in the Atlantic certainly gave Hitler justification to
declare war on the US. Perhaps he would have been well advised to let them
get away with firing on the odd raider rather than declaring war and facing
them on European soil and in the sky over Europe.



Finally, there is the
possibility that Britain might have won the air technology
race decisively, and produced nuclear bombs.

Ironically, much of the research and the work on American bombs being done
by Jewish scientists who had been forced to flee Germany.

Hitler had no way to force the British to peace, any more than
Napoleon had. He needed to find a way to live with British
hostility, and never really succeeded.

He certainly underestimated them. It was unfortunate for Hitler that the
British leadership was firm in its opposition to Germany and its refusal to
make peace, because there was definitely an element in the government that
was prepared to make peace.

.

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