In the United States, and I suspect most of Europe, we’re led to believe that World War Two was a kind of existential battle between the Axis powers and the Allies, and the fate of the world was at stake. There are certainly people more knowledgable than me, but having read a few books on the subject, I find it hard to believe this. I’ve come to conclude that, from the beginning, there was absolutely no path to victory for the Third Reich — it could not have possibly beaten the UK, USSR, and US.
World War Two began because the Third Reich sought to utilize the resources of central and eastern Europe in its forthcoming struggle against Russia. With Russia (and Slavs) out of the way, Aryans would be able to colonize eastern Europe, and create a kind of supranational racial order. So in 1939, Germany invaded Poland. However, the UK and France intervened. In 1940, Germany invaded France, and caught the French off guard by making an unanticipated, but powerful push through the Ardennes Forest. In doing so, the Wehrmacht was able to break the French army into two, and it prevented the French from reforming their line. In about a month, the French surrendered. The Germans were proud of this accomplishment, but these tactics and circumstances could not be replicated against the UK or Russia; the former being an island, and the latter being too massive to knock out in one blow. The Germans had one quick, fortuitous victory but they couldn’t count on two more.
With France out of the way, the Wehrmacht focused on Britain. The British navy was vastly superior to anything the German could put in the North Sea, so in order to invade Britain, Germany would have to secure dominance in the air. The Battle of Britain lasted for a few months in 1940, but in the end, Germany was unable to make progress of any kind. The British could manufacture aircraft at a higher right than the Germans, and at a higher rate than the Germans could destroy British ones. At the end of 1940, Germany was no closer to invading Britain than it had been earlier that spring. It’s important to keep in mind that from the middle of 1940 to the middle of 1941, Britain was the sole adversary of Nazi Germany, so it isn’t as though the Germans were using their resources elsewhere.
Then we have the German invasion of Russia. Like its plans for France, the Wehrmacht hoped to knock Russia out of the war quickly. Operation Barbarossa involved launching an enormous assault on Russia that extended all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Germans hoped to reach the A-A line, and force the Red Army out of continental Europe. The Wehrmacht began with marked success — I think the Russians lost about two million dead and five million prisoners in the first six months of this conflict. But even this wasn’t enough to wipe out the inexhaustible Red Army, and it wasn’t even close. The Germans were able to make advances into Russia for six months, but once their offensive stalled, it never got going again. The Russians were able to move their armaments factories beyond the Urals and into the Caucuses, and once the Russian war machine got going, the Germans couldn’t come close to matching it. It would take a few years, but the Wermacht would eventually implode on the Eastern Front due to a lack of men and resources.
With all this in mind, I arrive at my question: Was the German war effort doomed from the beginning? I would say yes. Look at these figures (they’re all from Richard Evans’ The Third Reich at War): in 1943, the US produced 86,000 aircraft, the USSR produced 37,000, the UK produced 35,000, and Germany produced 26,000. In 1943, the combined Allied production of machine-guns came to 1,110,000, compared to 165,527 in Germany. There was absolutely no way for Germany to overcome the logistical disadvantages between it and the Allied powers. Keep in mind that the US barely lifted a finger in the European theater. The Allied invasion of Normandy occurred after the German retreat on the Eastern Front had begun. I think WWII can be described as Britain and the US waiting for the USSR to defeat Germany, and invading in the final months solely to have a stake in the post-war solution. By invading, the US prevented all of Europe from falling into the USSR’s hands, but it did not play a major role in defeating the Third Reich. Today, ordinary people, and even many history buffs, look back at the Second World War as an existential conflict in which the fate of the world was precarious for seven years, but I think it makes more sense to view it as a one-sided conflict initiated by an “irrational actor” that happened to take place on the largest scale humanity has ever seen. This is further evidenced by the delusional and literally suicidal leadership of the Nazi staff. What are your thoughts? Is there anything I’m missing?
in 1943, the US produced 86,000 aircraft, the USSR produced 37,000, the UK produced 35,000, and Germany produced 26,000. In 1943, the combined Allied production of machine-guns came to 1,110,000, compared to 165,527 in Germany.
Numbers do not lie. But they don't tell the whole truth either. I believe it to be an almost universal consensus that the German and Axis powers could not be successful in achieving their long or mid-term strategic goals once we consider the actual amount of manpower, materials, production forces committed by the Allied front to the conflict. And, indeed, it's dubious whether they could overcome the Soviet Union alone. But this interpretation of the conflict - which in military terms is probably an accurate one - does little to account for the fact that committing those resources, men and materials was not seen, until after the conflict broke out, as a necessary or inevitable development. And was, in turn, partly at least a consequence of a degree of mobilization which was only achieved because the war was interpreted as a colossal struggle of opposite ideologies.
Today, ordinary people, and even many history buffs, look back at the Second World War as an existential conflict between the forces of good and evil, but I think it makes more sense to view it as a one-sided conflict initiated by an “irrational actor” that happened to take place on the largest scale humanity has ever seen. This is further evidenced by the delusional and literally suicidal leadership of the Nazi staff.
I am not too fond of the "good vs. evil" narratives either. But, in this regard, I still feel that "evil" is a better characterization of the Nazi's political project than "irrational" or "delusional".
It ultimately failed - mercifully for us all - but still managed to impact an unprecedently large number of people across Europe, whose lives were not only affected but often ended, or erased completely from the world, society, families where they once belonged. This was an integral part of the Nazi project - not an accident, or a sidenote to military history.
If the ongoing radicalization of the exploitation, elimination and extermination process after the military fortunes of the Axis campaigns had taken a turn to the worse tell us something, is not only the fact that those policies represented a goal in themselves and an integral part of the Nazi war effort; but also that, for the men who enacted them, they provided a real and concrete way of bringing as much of their "ideal", of their imagined new Europe, into existence.
For men like Giovanni Preziosi - calling for the "removal" of every Jewish men, woman, or children, of every "mongrel" and "half-Jew" in early 1944 - military victory was not the main purpose of the Axis campaign. The extermination of the Jews was more than enough to justify the war in the face of military defeat; given that it was the necessary precondition for a true "rebirth" of Italian society.
Under the lense of the Nazi worldview, their initiatives are bound to appear less irrational and more integral part of a somewhat coherent project which was, more or less implicitly, accepted by significant portions of the European society of the time. That of a "world without others". Given that Nazi policies in Europe are not my main subject of interest, I'll limit my recommendation to one work of A. Kallis - Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe - which provides an effective introduction to the development and social and cultural background of what he has called the "eliminationist drive".
I believe it's important not to overlook - in the face of their ultimate abject military defeat - that the Axis did achieve a dreadfully large portion of its strategic goals when it comes to the extermination of Jews, Roma, and to the systematic elimination of political opponents, and other persecuted minorities.
Equally important, I think, is to remember that the degree of resistance ultimately encountered along their planned trajectory was not at all obvious when their motion towards the "new" Europe begun. The first, great "clash" of ideologies had been the takeover of Germany against Weimar and the communists - and had been victorious. The international forces had failed to match the German and Italian ones in Spain. The Anschluss had gone through with no opposition of sorts. The Munich crisis had proven the weakness of the democratic powers, as well as the "cravenness" (to quote from Mussolini) of the East European peoples.
It was at least conceivable that the Axis powers could continue to move forward more or less unopposed - or facing only a formal resistance (as with the international sanctions over the Italian invasion of Ethiopia) - even if it's certainly true that the threat of a large scale conflict loomed nearer at every new step. Even then, what else would they do? Irrational as their plan may appear to us, it was the very reason for their existence. Whether "removal" of the others, revision of the international asset, satisfaction of production and exportation needs, establishment of a new "ideal" order expression of the "true" community; that was the essence of the "fascist" project, which extended far beyond mere military gains. It looks "delusional" to us, largely because it failed. But I don't think its failure was as obviously inevitable in 1939 as it appears now.
The nature of "ideological" struggle between "fascism" and... well, the others, is also one not to be disregarded. It was, it goes almost without saying, paramount for many of the actors of the conflict, as well as directly relevant to the lives of millions. But various authors since then, have attempted to interpret the whole portion of European history between the two world wars as a moment of conflict between two alternative and possibly irreducible views of society, politics, nation, etc. The works of E. Traverso (Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914–1945) and E. Nolte (Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945) come to mind, but many others have taken, to varying degrees, a similar approach. And while both works have their limitations (with Nolte's interpretation being extremely questionable), it bears keeping in mind nonetheless that a comparison of military strength and strategic resources tells us only a fairly modest part of the trajectory of fascism in Europe, of its legacy and of the degree to which it may have appeared a "rational" endeavor.
The essence of my view in response to this kind of question can be summed up by a quotation from Henry Stimson, US Secretary of War, who told President Roosevelt when the invasion of the USSR began that the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed "Germany will be thoroughly occupied with beating Russia for a minimum of a month and a possible maximum of three months." We all know how that turned out.
You posit that history buffs can incorrectly tend to view the war as a life-or-death struggle when it was more or less a sure thing, but in my experience, history buffs and historians too - people who are aware of the massive economic and industrial gap between the Allies and Nazi Germany, essentially - can fall into determinism. It's easy to do and it's understandable; the difference in output between the belligerent powers was indeed vast, and it's difficult to imagine the Hitler regime managing its problems intelligently rather than being shortsighted and self-sabotaging; if it didn't tend towards the latter, it wouldn't have been the Hitler regime. But it was not at all obvious to the experts at the time how things were going to turn out, and it was not inevitable. The Nazis certainly thought they would win, the Soviets thought they might lose, and the US thought the contest was so one-sided that the USSR couldn't last more than three months.
In general, in history, it's considered improper to assume that what happened was always going to happen. This is a good example, partly because it really is tempting to argue that Nazi Germany couldn't possibly have won and partly because it's such a prominent area of history. But it's no less important to avoid assuming inevitability here than anywhere else in history.
Numbers are never everything, and while the structural issues of the Third Reich's economy and it's lack of essential raw materials existed from the start, simply looking back with hindsight and saying well it was doomed from the beginning is flawed. How resources are used (or even how resources are able to be used) matters just as much as how plentiful they are - a key example would be the issues with supply that the Western Allies ran into during later 1944 because they did not control enough large ports and their supply lines had to run back to the Normandy coast and down to the Mediterranean. How much stuff you can make doesn't matter if you can't move it to where it is needed, and use it effectively.
I'm not sure your characterisation of the Western Allies efforts in the European Theater are remotely fair. The United States not only had to split its war effort between Europe and the Pacific, but also support its allies through its war production as well meaning its manpower had to be divided between all of these tasks. The United States also committed itself to a 'Europe First' strategy and took a larger proportion of its casualties in Europe than in the Pacific. Downplaying the sheer scale of the task that was Operation Overlord to "waiting for the USSR to defeat Germany" ignores the significant logistical feat that it was to actually engage in a significant amphibious invasion of Europe.
Check out Did Nazi Germany benefit or suffer economically from acquiring France and Poland? feat /u/commiespaceinader /u/estherke and /u/kieslowski_fan
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