I do not know how much in 1943 (more than in 1942) Hitler was aware that the war was lost and how convinced he was of his inevitable destiny to lead Germany to greatness. Certainly the prospects for complete victory had faded, but they were still convinced of an honorable draw. There were basically four reasons why they led their country to continue the struggle:

1. Superiority: the fascist regimes were convinced that their system was inherently superior to enemy systems, that the national unity given by fascism and the superiority of their race would be sufficient to finally defeat enemies superior in men and means. Partly there was the belief that if they resisted long enough their enemies, who were more tired of war than they were, would grant them some kind of peace.

2. Destiny: Prussia's history is the story of downfalls and revenge. During the last of the war years Reich propaganda obsessively recalled the "miracle of the House of Brandenburg," when during the Seven Years' War in the eighteenth century Prussia had almost lost the war and its independence and the Russians were one step away from conquering Berlin. Suddenly, Tsarina Elizabeth, fiercely anti-Prussian, died and was succeeded by Tsar Peter III who, on the contrary, was a great admirer of the Prussian King Frederick and withdrew his troops allowing Prussia to reach an honorable peace with its enemies. Similarly, the Nazis were convinced that a miracle would come to save their Germany at the last second, either through the Wunderwaffen or through a war between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. It seemed to them to have come when Roosevelt, a great friend of the Soviets, died and was replaced by Truman who in contrast was a fierce anti-Communist. But in any case Truman hated the Nazis much more than the Soviets and carried the war through to the end.

3. Fear: The Nazi and collaborationist countries' leadership knew they had gone too far. Too many unprovoked wars, too much looting, too many gratuitous deaths caused by their choices to hope for leniency from the victors. Hitler and the other hierarchs, German or not, knew they would not end up like Kaiser Wilhelm II, who died peacefully in exile. Once they surrendered, they would all be killed, as indeed they were. In order to gain a few more months of life, they were ready to sacrifice millions of their countrymen.

4. Extermination: the main goal of Nazism, the one to which everything else could be sacrificed, was the extermination of the Jews. Nazism was a genocidal cult, and in fact the decision to proceed with the gas chambers came in 1942, by which time it was clear that the war was not going to be won any time soon and bizarre plans such as deporting them to Madagascar (where they would be left to starve, let us be clear) became impossible. Every day that Nazi Germany was still standing was one more day in which the Jews of Europe could be killed. If it was necessary to make the Germans extinct one day after killing the last Jew, the Nazis would have been ready to do so. Evidence of this genocidal obsession of the Nazis is plentiful: for example, the many times when trains loaded with soldiers and ammunition were left standing at stations, when the front needed them badly, in order to pass trains of deported Jews to the death camps. Or when Himmler in 1945 pretended to negotiate with Jewish-English agents the liberation of the surviving Jews in exchange for his personal salvation, when he knew full well that those same Jews were being exterminated in the so-called death marches (taken out of the camp and forced to march westward dressed in rags in the Polish winter) and thus destroying the only thing that could save his life.