How close were the Nazis to winning?

Then let me put it different. What you say is wrong. The Germans used poison gas in first world war and it made no difference, it would have made no difference in WW2. You describe politics as something irrational, driven by emotions. From my point of view politics is driven by interests. That's why I "ignore" what you wrote since from my point of view it is simply irrelevant. The USA dropped atomic bombs on civilians, they would not have given a damn how many civilians or soldiers Hitler killed with poison gas and it were the USA who decided what happened with Germany.

The USA (and Germany) delivered Saddam Hussein the poison gas to kill Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians. As long as they didn't want to attack the Iraq this was no problem. If they would have wanted to attack the Iraq then they would have taken this as an excuse. If the USA after 1945 would have wanted to destroy Germany, then they had plenty of reasons. But they did NOT want to destroy Germany, so poison gas used by Hitler would have been absolutely irrelevant for what happened to Germany back then.

 

No, it would not have been the same. During WWI there were no nerve agents. There were also no reliable delivery systems that could take them to population centers, so they remained battlefield weapons.

There was also no Geneva Protocol banning the use of chemical weapons in WWI, there was such a ban in place by World War II.

And sorry, but Germany was destroyed. It was broken up into 4 separate occupation zones. The only reason that West Germany was allowed to exist again was because it could be used as a buffer against the Soviets and East Germany. With a less hostile East Germany, I doubt that France, the US and UK would have combined their occupation zones into a single zone.

But use chemical weapons again, I doubt reunification would have ever happened again. Germany started the use of deadly chemical weapons in World War I, and if they had done so a second time none of the Allied Powers would have let them survive. Not even the Soviets, who likely would have received the worst of such an attack. After being invaded by Germany twice in less then 50 years, do you think they would have wanted to keep part of it for potential use, or see it totally destroyed so it would never be a threat ever again?

I vote for destroying that threat. You seem to have forgotten the complete and total anger that the Soviets had for Germany by the end of the war. It was only realpolitik that kept it from remaining in it's 4 separate pieces after 1949.

And yes, unlike you I do remember that Germany was broken into 4 pieces for 4 years, from 1945 until 1949.



If not for the Berlin Airlift and increasing tensions between The Eastern and Western Powers, no doubt it would have remained that way. So what you are missing is that they did "destroy Germany", then chose to put part of it back together again.

 

Invading the Soviet Union was highly desirable; it had massive grain resources, oil resources, mineral resources, strategic advantages on the Black Sea and north of the Arab states and more oil, and a large population that would have been used for slave labor for the Reich. Stalin would have eventually posed a serious threat to Germany, by sheer numbers and manufacturing capabilities, not to mention the Communist countries were virulently imperialist. Western Europe was a relatively easy conquest for the most part; declaring war on the U.S. was one of his biggest mistakes.

At one point, the U.S. was fighting a three front war with material to spare. The depth of American mid-level operational talent was amazing. You can have all the brilliant generals in history on your side, but if they don't have the depth of skills and talent at the operations level they might as well be paperweights.

 

Napoleone Bonaparte did the same mistake, he tried to conquer Russia by leading a massive army but got repelled and decimated thanks to sheer cold and russian's burn and run tactics. Even an excellent military mind like him couldn't deal with russia and it's strange nazis did the same error but that's exactly what they did. That was an error from the start. To win the war, they should have first conquered all western europe and then plan carefully their next move. Remember that nazis got the upper hand in military technology and had the best weapons, while soviet army was big in number but poorly armed and not well organized, so even if Russia made it's move against Germany they would have had a terrible time clashing against germany's armoured divisions and aircraft.

 

Hitler came close to succeeding, unlike Napoleon. A few adjustments and he would have brought Stalin to terms and ended up with a massive territory gain.

 

I am not sure that attacking the USSR was a bad idea, leaving a natural enemy on your flank is always problematic. Hitler started too soon, should have waited on Poland, it was a done deal anyway. Had Germany waited a few years ands developed some of their technology I suspect things might have gone differently. Hitler's animosity toward France was a failing, USSR first, wait, clean up Europe after. All that being said, America was undefeatable-a sleeping giant as Yamamoto predicted. The Battle of the Bulge was lost before it started and Hitler's generals probably knew it. They did as good as could be expected. The actually did better at Kursk, a much bigger and more decisive battle.

 

Poison gas was banned by the Haager Landkriegsordnung from 1907(I guess).

It wasn't East Germany which was hostile, it was Stalin's Sovjetunion which was hostile.

Yes. I think so. For Stalin and his followers lives were no category which had influence on their decisions. He didn't kill as many Russians as Hitler but he would have done it, if he thought it would be necessary and he would have used poison gas if necessary. As I said, I see politics as mostly driven by interests. Realpolitik, indeed.

 

Then show it to me please. The Second Havue Convention (1907) was almost exclusively involving Naval Warfare.

Sorry, but the Hague Convention that dealt with chemical weapons was not until 1928, almost a decade after the war ended. It does help if you know one from the other.

Irrelevant, the East German Government did it, whoever pushed them to do it does not matter.

This does not matter for the point I was making. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, meaningless for the discussion.

To Europe, the fact was that in their eyes, Germany had triggered a World War 2 times in less then half a century. Therefore they did not want them to have that capability ever again. Even over 40 years after the war ended, it was still a hard sell to get the rest of Europe to agree to reunification.

Whoever the players behind the aggression were, that is meaningless. Most of Europe was still paranoid to one degree or another about Germany.

 

Yes, and this was the primary reason Roosevelt insisted on unconditional surrenders from both Japan and Germany in WW II, to make sure there wasn't going to be a third time. He was also going to see to it that the old empires were dismantled and replaced with independent self-ruling states, which made him unpopular with both Britain and France and the other minor colonial powers. At least Britain made a real effort to leave their former colonies in good shape; the French left many of theirs in a mess for the most part.