What If: Germany and co. won WW II?

[Coritani]

How could Nazi Germany win?

If it kept USSR friendly and invaded England.

Germany could not have possibly successfuly invaded England. With the RAF and the RN, this simply was not possible. The German troops would be lucky to set foot on British soil.

Operation Sealion was a joke.

No, I doubt it. Remember, the Soviets won handily against the Japanese in Mongolia in 1938 and 1939; the Red Army was not the Czar's army. I think they could have done it again even while occupied with Hitler in 1941. The Japanese were committed to about the limit of their strength in China/Manchuria and in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. As it was, just keeping their hold on China tied down a huge number of their troops. Simply put, they had got into a land war in Asia.

Also remember Operation August Storm. Japan didn't do too well here.

 

[Doc Daneeka]

I agree with the Don. The only scenario in which Germany wins is America staying out of the war.

I'd have to disagree. Germany could probably have held off the western allies had it not had to deal with the soviets. There's just no way that D-day would have been possible with the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe deployed mostly in the west.

 

[Pope130]

I just finished "If Britain had Fallen" by Norman Longmate. I can recommend it. Very well researched and refferenced. The author spends a good deal of time on the day-to-day details of living under occupation, which is quite interesting. He also gives a plausible scenario for the invasion.

Robert

 

[Ranillon]

I only just found this topic and wanted to add my own thoughts.

As to the question of whether Germany could have won WW2 I think that depends on what you mean by "won". Could Germany have conquered Britain, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East? I have great doubts about that. However, the notion of Germany going on to dominate Europe for an extended amount of time strikes me as far more plausable.

As I see it Germany did have a good chance to be ultimately "successful", but its odds weren't as good as it seemed at the time and required them to do most everything right. There were a lot of decisions made earlier in the war that pretty much doomed Germany later, but if other choices were made it could potentially done much better.

For example, if the force at Dunkirk had been destroyed or captured rather than escape that would have given the Germans greater diplomatic influence over Britain. Faced with no army and stinging from a terrible defeat the Brits might have gone with someone else rather than Churchill and sued for peace. This might have happened anyway if the Germans had stuck with destroying the RAF during the Battle of Britain. It wouldn't necessarily have meant German occupation, but it would have consigned Britain to being a virtual Nazi satellite. More to the point, it would remove any real threat of a two-front war once Hitler went after the Soviet Union.

Without Britain stirring up things there might easily have been no reason to delay Barbarossa with an invasion of the Balkans. Those extra five weeks could have allowed the Germans to take Moscow. I don't think that would have caused the Soviets to surrender (if they could keep going after the disasters of that Fall they could after losing the capital), but it certainly would have prolonged the war. Moscow was not just a symbol, but also a vital manufacturing center and railroad hub.

I agree that aid from the US and Britain wasn't the deciding factor in allowing the Soviet Union to survive, but you can make a much better argument that it did give the Soviets the extra resources they required to ultimately win. Take that away and you might have seen a prolonged stalemate in the East leading to an eventual ceasefire of some sort that would have preserved both governments. Keep in mind that by the end of the war even the Soviets were scrapping the bottom of their manpower barrel. Add in a few extra years of combat and I don't believe either side would have had the resources to defeat the other.

Things could have also been a lot different if Germany hadn't made a couple of basic mistakes. One already discussed was Hitler declaring war on the United States for no particular reason -- absent that Roosevelt would have had a hard time convincing the nation to independently declaring war on Germany rather than just concentrating on destroying Japan.

Another is Germany's failure to really capitalize on its great economic potential. By the end of 1941 that potential rivaled that of the US, yet Germany still produced less than either Britain over the Soviet Union, two economies only a fraction of the size. It wasn't until 1943 that the Germans began to really approach their economic potential, but by then it was too late. If they had started the process two or three years earlier the war would have likely been years longer -- perhaps enough for the Allies to prefer a negotiated peace rather than unconditional surrender.

So, with some important changes to history you might have ended up with a Nazi dominated Europe, although Britain and the Soviets likely would have survived. In that case I suspect that the Cold War would have been with them and that in the end the German empire would have collasped in the same manner as the Soviet one eventually did. However, I think it is clear more people would have died in the process. As terrible as Stalin was he was still preferable to Hitler, IMHO.

 

[Steveenfield]

When he realized that the West wouldn't let him do that, he had to attack the West first, because he wanted to avoid having to fight a two-front war. It wasn't until he felt adequately secure in the West that he turned to Russia.

Hitler didn't 'attack' the West, Britain and France declared war on Germany after Germany invaded Poland. Whether Hitler thought that he'd ever have to fight other European powers over Poland is a moot point.

A whopping 64% of all Allied military deaths were Russian

Considering their tactics, it's not surprising that Russian casualties were so high. In many battles, the Russian commanders bought in trainload after trainload of poorly armed troops from the Asian Soviets (I say 'poorly armed' but many were unarmed - some didn't even have boots!) and used them to clear minefields by charging their men over them. Once the minefields had been cleared, more waves of Asiatic would be sent against the German lines to soak up the German machine-gun and artillery ammunition. These troops had no chance against the Germans, and if they ran back to their own lines they'd be shot. Sometimes these massed infantry attacks would go on for days. Once the Russian commanders had decided that the German's ammunition supplies were sufficiently depleted, they would send forward their regular troops.

 

[Steveenfield]

Britain is irrelevant, if Germany had managed to somehow win against the Soviets; Britain would have been finished.

I think 'irrelevant' is a little unfair. If you look at a map of German troop distributions circa 1942/43, you'll find 70 German divisions in Russia and the other 70 spread out along the coast from Norway to Turkey. Half the German army was required to 'protect' mainland Europe from British attack.*

There were also many 'knock-on' effects from British resistance. For example, the RAF bombing of Germany infuriated Hitler so much that he poured virtually all aircraft manufacturing into the production of fighters for homeland defense. This meant that that plans for heavy four-engined bombers had to be scrapped, so when the Russians moved their factories east of the Urals the Germans had nothing to hit them with. Ironically, this move also slowed the development of Germany's jet engine technology.

*Many people think that the high concentration of German forces in Yugoslavia indicated a high level of resistance in that area. However, it seems that Hitler was obsessed with the idea that the Allies might launch a sea-borne assault on Yugoslavia and try to punch through to Romania. This would have cut-off the Germans from the Romanian oil-fields and allowed the Western Allies to join up with the Russians in the east. It would have been very risky, but the benefits would have been huge. In the end, the assault fell on the safer option of Italy.

 

[FarmallMTA]

Nah. Germany had itself screwed any way you look at it...

IMO, Germany could only have womd WWII if they hadn't taken on the U.S. and Russia. The counterfactual scenario I think least unlikely is as follows:

- Germany maintain their treaty with Russia, Poland is partitioned
- Germany consolidate their position in mainland Europe
- The British Empire, growing weary of war reach an accommodation with Germany
- Europe becomes (includng the UK) an anti-Jewish ghetto
- The UK becomes a republic, the empire is disbanded
- The cold war takes place between the United States of America and the Third Reich
- In the mid 1980s, democratic elections take place in Europe, though the head of state continues to be a dictator
- by 2000, the Third Reich claim to be "really sorry" about the extermination of the Jews - no-one believes them
- the USA and Third Reich compete for influence in the Middle East

Russian historians who have waded into the thickets of purged and sanitized Stalin-era archives are at a loss to explain how the USSR could have had its air fleet positioned so far forward if it was for defense. Why the USSR ground forces were logistically equipped for forward movement. Why defenses were so non-existent. In all probability and sensibility, Stalin was looking to invade Germany and hang Adolf for being such a dunghole. Takes one to know one, and all that.

In sum, Hitler had boxed himself into a loss no matter which way he went. Because of his vocal and aggressive hostility towards the USSR and communism, he was going to get knocked off by them eventually even if he didn't attack first. If he attacked first, he'd be sending his forces into an unwinnable cauldron unless the Russians revolted against Stalin (which Nazi behavior during the occupation of Russian soil helped prevent).

So forget it. Couldn't have happened in the long run, as long as America and Russia and Britain kept at it.