How close were the Nazis to winning?

Now, when I say 'winning' I don't mean conquering the world, that's a farce of the most extreme Nazi fantasies. I'm simply about the Nazis maintaining control over Europe.

What fascinates me is all of their technological advances that they had just too late. Near the end of the war, they had invented the jet engine, stealth bombers, and were nearing completion of a nuclear bomb (not necessarily close to the manhattan project, but besides being the Americans being by far the closest and, speaking on a matter of contingency, the American efforts were near dependent on refugee German scientists). What if there defensive efforts were more effective and they had held the Allies off for a time longer?

A decisive victory was certainly within their grasp at the Battle of the Bulge, that could have forced an allied withdrawal in the west and given the Germans time. W/o a bomb, I don't think that the Germans could have outright won, but could they have held out long enough to weaken the Allied will to fight?

 

If they stopped before the Battle of Britain and didn't waste money on "super weapons" and just held what they had they would likely still be in power now over most of Europe, since they would have had the atomic bomb around when we did.

 

A decisive victory? Seriously no. The Battle of the Bulge- even if it had accomplished what Hitler had wanted it to- which as I recall was a drive to Amsterdam to split the Western Allied forces, would have only slowed down the American/British advance- and that would have given the Soviets time to conquer more of Germany. The Soviets had a steamroller going from the East- and every rational German feared them more than the West- basically everyone but Hitler.

As it was, the Battle of Bulge was another of the freaky Hitlerian decisions that only worked as well as it did because of the weather- once the weather improved enough for Allied planes to operate effectively it was all over. The Germans didn't have the fuel or the ammo to really fight all the way to Amsterdam.

 

Well the idea of it was to drive a spearhead through the western allies, and then encircle one end of the western allies. If it had worked - which there was an actual chance of it working - the German forces in the west would then have been enough to drive the western allies into the sea, but that wasn't the actual German plan. It would have taken the western allies over a year to recuperate their losses, and the German plan was to leave a holding forces in the west and then shift their forces east against the Soviets. The German defeats at the hands of the Soviets was a result of their failures in the west.

And again, as I had said, the entire plan was about buying time. The Germans had developed jet aircraft and, in short time, even with the earlier Luftwaffe defeats the superior aircraft the Germans were developing could have given them the edge that they needed. Like you said, the German supplies were depleted, but had they had a major victory at the Battle of the Bulge they would have recovered enough supplies to fight on for a time - but even then, that's specifically the Battle of the Bulge. It was a last-ditch attempt, that they didn't have good chances of success in, but just a couple years earlier they had a really good chance of winning the Battle of Britain and lost. Just talking contingency here.

 

They blew it in the Blitzkrieg. Hitler had intended the Wehrmacht to take Sedan and then stop and rebuild. When Guderian saw the Allies fleeing in disarray before him, he decided instead to press on.

Needless to say that Schickelgruber was a little riled that one of his generals would be so daring as to discard his original plan.. He ordered Guderian to stop just short of Dunkirk. It was a fit of childish pique from which the Wehrmacht never recovered. The orderly withdrawl and spirited defense of the beachhead and the determination of the British people in evacuating the trapped forces proved to be a morale boost for the British people which far outweighed the loss in men and materie. It also sent a message to the blithering idiot that the British people were not to be trifled with. This led to his next brain-dead move of invading the Soviet Union before he had neutralized the enormous enemy logistics resource on his flank. That would, in the end, bite him viciously in the butt. He was an idiot to invade the USSR without securing England.

There were, of course, other considerations in the outcome of Dunkirk and Guderian's defiance and Hitler's reaction.

Clausewitz wrote at some length of what he called "military virtue," the most important component of which, for this discussion, is the ability of field commanders, especially those spread along such an attenuated front, to assess their situation and to take appropriate actions toward achieving the military objectives of the operation.

Guderian had a lot of this "military virtue."

I am not sure whether Hitler ever had a clue what it was or what it was worth. More likely, he did not.

A few years later, after he had kicked some major asses back into line, and convinced his generals that HE was running this show, his disdain for this military virtue left Rommel and his panzer units sitting on the Pas de Calais twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the Real Invasion.

Gott sei Dank!

 

Uncle Ferd says, "Pretty close...

... had they been six months earlier on the V-2 rocket...

... an' we'd all be goose-steppin' and eatin' bratwurst.

 

It is possible, except that Hitler made 2 non-military blunders taht ultimately cost him the war.

1. He attacked the Soviet Union.
2. He declared war against the United States.

One of these might have been recoverable, but not both. With the nation with the largest potential land army in the world, and also the nation with the mightiest industrial capacity in the world both against him, Germany never stood a chance.

 

I'm not so sure. Declaring war on the Soviet Union wasn't a blunder, insofar as I can see, the poor planning of the war with the Soviet Union was. The war with the United States was really out of their control. The US had already been funneling men and equipment to the allied powers for years. The Germans had intercepted a a US order, from FDR to US naval and air forces, to attack any German vessel or aircraft on sight, and then notified the US that they considered themselves already at a state of war due to US actions (which was basically correct).

The biggest error of the Nazis was to never push hard for a peace on any front. Had Hitler focused in one theater and then offered overly generous terms to a broken enemy, it might well have been a very different war.

The British patented one first, but the Germans developed a superior one independently and got theirs operational first. The German jet engine is to the British jet engine what the Wright brothers were to Leonardo Davinci.

As I had said, it's a matter of time.

There were many points prior where the Germans made critical mistakes, like in declaring war on the USSR (not as inherently bad as their overly-aggressive blunders in Russia), and their errors in the Battle of Britain, Goering's mismanagement of the Luftwaffe, lack of commitment to shipping (ultimately Rommel was defeated by a lack of oil).

But I maintain that the Battle of the Bulge could have been a success, although (as I already said) an unlikely one. I seriously doubt the most the Germans could have hoped for was 1 of the 23 US divisions in NW Europe, only 1 of well over 100 US divisions in the war. A significant German success was far from impossible, and if they did have the major success they were looking for, they would have been able to hold the western front with a fraction of the forces they had there, as the western allies would have had significant losses and been incredibly demoralized. The Germans didn't get as far as they did by being blundering idiots with zero understanding of stratagem. Had their plan at the Battle of the Bulge been even a moderate success, they could have pushed back the Soviets. It's only because it was a major loss that the Germans fell apart when they did.

 

Even though Germany was outnumbered and outgunned by almost a hundred to one by the allies, it was right on the brink of employing new weapons (fighter jet aircraft, rockets, missiles, radar systems and likely some nukes) just before the Soviet Union got to Berlin and saved the day just in the nick of time.

Had it not been for the USSR, Americans and others might be speaking German today. And increasingly, there are Americans who now believe that might be better than what they have today.

 

To win the war, Nazi Germany should have avoided attacking Soviet Russia in 1941, which forced Germany to fight a two-front war, and the US kept sending Lend-Lease aid to Russia to reinforce the Eastern Front. Keeping the Soviets out of the war was the only way for the Axis powers to dominate over the Allies and the Normandy invasion was possible because the Germans completely exhausted their resources by 1944. The Allies without the Soviet Union could have made peace with Nazi Germany and the Pacific War would not have been fought to the bitter end but Hitler's racialist views hampered him from making sound strategic decisions.

 

No. Not at all.

The Battle of the Bulge ultimately just meant that the Soviets conquered more of Germany than they would have had if Hitler had not chosen to make that grand gesture.

Already Allied strategic bombing forces had finally found a strategic objective that worked- rail centers- and there is no way that Germany could have moved its Western forces back to face the Soviets, even assuming some wierd paradox history where Brits and Americans just suddenly decided to give up after the Battle of the Bulge.

The only thing a more successful Battle of the Bulge would have done would have helped the Soviets do better.

The Soviets by the point of the Battle of the Bulge could have taken out what was left of Germany all by itself.

 

Germany was not on the brink of employing anything.

Heck, if you do not believe me, research some of their "superweapons" in development or produced towards the end of the war.

The Schwerer Gustav, an 800mm cannon.



After 48 rounds in combat the barrel was destroyed, the gun a total loss.

Then you had the planned successor, the Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster. A 1,500 ton tank that would fire the same gun.



The jets that had and were developing were largely ineffective. The swept wing had not been developed yet, and they were fuel hungry and to fast for actual combat. They could make a handful of passes then had to return to base, running on fumes the entire time.

Their rockets and missiles were never more then annoyance terror weapons. It did not matter how big they got, they had almost no accuracy. Therefore they were of no real threat other then to civilians in and around their target (as long as their target was something big, like "London").

And they were nowhere near achieving an atomic bomb. Not even close, they were not even working on a Fission device. Germany had decided that fission would not be useful in the war, and ordered all research into nuclear power, with a smaller group to research nuclear fusion. But they were not researching Nuclear Fission, that research had been banned.

And yea, they had the FuG 240 "Berlin" RADAR set. Increased performance and actually small enough to put in a heavy fighter. But not a game changer, it had no significant impact, and only 25 saw service in the last months of the war. Germany had been putting RADAR in aircraft since 1942 and it did little good, because as fast as they developed a new RADAR, the English figured out how to jam it.

But most German "Dream Projects" were unworkable, or would have taken years if not decades to complete. And Germany did not have that time.

 

not even going to bother. the whole concept of contingency is lost on your in every respect.

 

Germany was no where near making an atomic bomb.
Sure, the theories all originated in Germany, but during a key experiment the position of the multiplier switch was recorded wrong, and the recorded result was off by a factor of ten. Thus when the germans made the calculation of how much fissile material would be needed for a single bomb they were off by a factor of ten, and they determined a bomb would require ten times as much U-235 as the American design, making the projected bomb design about ten times as heavy as the American design, a bomb that could only be delivered by rail car, and would require an effort three times as large as the Manhattan Project to produce the material for one bomb.
So the German effort was largely theoretical, barely funded and housed in one building.

By the same token, liquid fuel rockets were invented in Worcester, Massachusetts, but it was the Germans that developed the V-2.

 

And that goes back to Government Sponsorship and the Versailles Treaty.

While aircraft were controlled by the treaty, rockets were not. So Germany was able to dump a lot of money and resources into their development. At the same time Dr. Goddard had a few individuals like Charles Lindberg who donated money to help fun his research, but he was mostly on his own.

Even Dr. Von Braun admitted that most of their designs came from Dr. Goddard, and until 1938 they were still behind Dr. Goddard. Imagine what would have happened if the US had started to fund his research in 1936?

As for rockets, it was never as much about ability as it was about funding.

http://www.space.com/20122-wernher-von-braun.html

 

During WWI, Dr. Goddard sent the War Department plans for a shoulder held, tube launched rocket.
The plans were returned to him with a note that said that rockets had no foreseeable use in warfare.

 

There was a scenario that Roosevelt feared.
That was Hitler and Stalin kissing and making up.
Some deal between Hitler and Stalin, dividing Europe.
This would free the eastern forces and with those forces reinforcing the west, the Anglo-American forces would have been in deep doo-doo.

 

And that is exactly my point. It was nothing about the intelligence of the scientists, simply the funding they got.

Now imagine Dr. Goddard with 1/10 the budget of the Manhattan Project ($200 million - $2.6 billion in today's money), and what he could have designed with it.

 

agreed...going to war with England was never part of hitlers original plan but when England entered the war he erred by not defeating England before attacking the USSR, likely would've defeated USSR if not for England entering the war.

agree 100% the english operational jets flew not long after germany's, englands first jet was flown in 1941...the english patent for a jet engine came in 1930 and germany's patent 1936...

yeah and there is no evidence that the Nazi's were working on an atomic weapon...

yup defeat was inevitable at this point, with or without the western allies the soviets were by then unstoppable...

 

Actually there was, and I wish I could find the reference for it.

A few years ago I found a curious article about an abandoned Nazi research facility. Among some of the things discovered was barrels of deuterium ("Heavy Water"), and curiously imploded metal spheres. All data from the site had been destroyed, and the allies did not think much of it when they passed through the area. But years later some amateur urban spelunkers ran across the site and released pictures of some of the imploded and partially imploded spheres that had laid in the forest for the last 60 years.

And myself and others realized it does match descriptions of some reports that they were trying to use conventional implosions in an attempt to kick off a fusion reaction. However, no conventional explosives can create anywhere near enough heat and pressure to kickstart a fusion reaction, so all they ended up doing was splattering a lot of deuterium around the trees.

I do wish I could find those sources again, but I found them by accident the first time, and have not found them again since.

 

I've looked it as well and all the historical sources I found conclude there was no evidence to back up the claims...if historical records can't confirm it then it's all just speculation...the nazi's were methodical record keepers and not to find definitive evidence of research into nuclear bomb making is very unusual...that even you can't find it now should tell you that it's more unsubstantiated myth than fact...the Nazi's heavy water source was Norway which had no nuclear research program for bombs in the early 1930's...norway produced heavy water for export for physics, chemistry, and biomedical research...that it can be used for nuclear bombs does not mean that was what the nazi's wanted it for, it's circumstantial evidence...

 

There is a lot of very good historical information already presented in this thread, but I just wanted to reiterate one thing...

The OP seems to be vastly underestimating just how massive the Soviet forces were. The second they entered the war, Germany had already lost - they just didn't know it yet.

 

I think Hitler was a gifted Politician, but he sucked at Military Strategy.

He had a gifted Military Strategist in Rommel.

If he had backed off on the micro-managing and let Rommel run the Military they would have had a much better chance IMO.

But if a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass so much.

 

No (*)(*)(*)(*).

That was a disastrous case of over reach.

A lot like what the Tea Party is doing with this shutdown.

 

That's pretty spot on. Rommel was a true f***king genius, and Hitler got in his way (actually made him commit suicide).