Why Hitler Lost the War: German Strategic Mistakes in WWII

ladies and gentlemen it is a great honor to be invited to address you this afternoon and thank you very much indeed uh col tce for those kind comments uh it is perfectly true uh that my book reached number two on the bestseller list, second only to a book While Michael Jackson was writing The Storm of War and its predecessor Masters and Commanders, it became very clear to me that the main reason the Germans

lost

World War II, a war they could have won, is that Adolf Hitler was always the better. The interests of the Nazi party were differentiated from those of the Verar He always took the first route He always prioritized his fascism His Nazism above the best interests of the German Reich He also saw the Second World War entirely in ideological terms rather than in the grand

strategic

terms that a previous German leader like Bismar or a previous Chief of Staff like Helmet Von Muler would have done and this happens so often that it is so pervasive in the key decision-making moments of World War II that it is a pattern of their fighting in The war and an explanation for its defeat just at the beginning of the war At the time of Operation Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of Britain in 1940, Hitler had only 43 operational OTS compared to 46 63 at the time of the final of the second world war on May 19, at least in the war in Europe in May 1945, if it had had 463 OTS at the beginning of the war, if it had started developing its ubot capability from the moment it came to power in January 1933, he would have done so.

He could have strangled Britain from the beginning of the war, but he never thought it was necessary, he never thought it would be necessary for an Anglo-Saxon nation to fight another Anglo-Saxon nation, although, of course, he had done it himself. He fought in the Great War across no man's land from the British regiments. This was a classic example of his way of placing his Nazism in his belief in the importance of the vital center of the race compared to any of the other important ones. necessary uh considerations he um didn't even work out what would happen if he had to invade Britain the various plans for the invasion of Britain operation San were still being refined at the time of the Battle of Britain and then um when At that time, after defeat in the Battle of Britain, Hitler had no realistic chance of invading this, it got to the point where when the SS drew up a list of 2,820 Britons who were to be arrested and shot on the spot, the list was so casual and last minute listing that included Sigman Freud, who had died two years earlier, had Aldus Huxley, who had come to live in the United States in 1936 and when the full list was published in um, uh, after the end of the war, once.

She was captured. Dame Rebecca West telegraphed the NL coward. They both appeared on the list saying, dear, the people we should have been seen dead with on August 25, 1940, a lone Hanle 111 bomber who had in fact missed out on the rest. of his squad dropped some bombs on the East End of London. Winston Churchill took this opportunity to respond the following night with an all-out attack on Berlin. This was at the height of the Battle of Britain at a time when the Royal Air Force was absolutely on its last legs, the command and control systems had been destroyed, the holes in the runways, uh and uh, and the RAF squadrons' ability to take off were deeply damaged, the RAF was absolutely, um, within days of being operationally incapable of continuing to defend Britain and yet instead of fulfilling this luffer plan of destroying the airways, airfields, Hitler again was entirely due to ideological ideology or the fact that he had promised the German people that no bomber would ever succeed in bombing Berlin, this went totally against his concept, the Nazi concept of the fura principle that the fura was infallible and he had been shown to be fallible by Churchill's immediate response to this lone bomber 1111, so on September 7 he converts the airfield luffer attack to the bombing of London to the civilian bombing of the bombing of the East End trying to destroy the British docks and this, ladies and gentlemen, gave the RA F the absolutely crucial time it needed to fill the holes in the runway to repair the command and control systems and put us in a position to win the Battle of Britain before September 15th again ideology you see in the three central reasons for Hitler's invasion of Russia on June 22nd Ideology of 1941 Trump General uh and Grand Strategy every time the first was to build space habitable of the kingdom of Laban in the East uh for the German um Uber mench the uh the uh Superman and this was intended to take over hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory in Eastern Europe and I use it for the German writing and to serve for the work to be done by the subhuman slaves that Hitler believed he would be able to quickly destroy again racial ideology as the primary Motivating Factor, but the other two factors also had very little to do with, in fact nothing to do with. grand strategy, the politician, of course, was out of his desire to win what he called the final fight against the Bolsheviks.

Since the 1920s he had been a street fighter against Bolshevism, he wanted what he called what he told Geral would be the final reckoning against the Bolsheviks when we break down the door, he says, the whole rotten edifice will collapse and, again , this was not like that. driven by a strategy, this was driven by a political hatred and also, of course, in 1941, more than half of the Jews of Europe lived in the USSR and he wanted a chance to have a final solution, a chance to destroy them, and thus these three major driving forces behind what was and presumably always will be the largest invasion in world history.

More than three million men crossed the Russian border in June 1941. A total of 186 divisions were put into operation. Barbarosa and uh, it was not properly thought out in the

strategic

sense, the initial victories were truly amazing on the first day of Barbarosa, on June 22, no less than 40% of the red bomber force, the USSR bomber force was destroyed on the ground did not even have a chance to take off, its commander, the leftist general Ivan Copet, shot himself that afternoon, which in Stalin's Russia was a sensible professional move, what happened next was a serious refusal by part of the rage to take advice from generals who were much more strategically um impressive uh much better strategic thinkers than uh than him um people who of course had gone to Staff College who had learned about strategy who had fought as officers rather than uh non-commissioned officers. in the Great War uh men like win roml and Hines Garian and Eric gon manstein and gerd runed he listened to these people we know uh we know how long he listened to them sometimes up to an hour he listened to these uh these generals We know because since December 1942 until the end of the war and his death in April 1945, we have verbatim accounts of the Fur conferences that took place in most of Vul Shansa in the east.

Prussia, it's still there, you can go visit it in what is present-day Poland of the fabulously fascinating Sinister Place, including the remains of the cabin where they tried to kill him on July 20, 1944 and he spent more than half the war in vul shansa and we know every word that was said in the meetings and so we know that yes, he would listen to garan, rumel and others, but then at the end of the meeting decide to do precisely what he intended to do right at the beginning of the meeting he was a um uh he admired his generals until of course in July 44 they tried to blow him up um but he uh constantly be moving them from different theaters um myddle had to take command in the calendar year 1944 myddle had that taking command of Army Group North Army Group Center and Army Group South um at different stages would move uh moved, ran dead back and forth by dismissing him three times in the course of the second world war, gadarian too He was effectively fired at one point and Roml was, of course, forced to commit suicide.

These men were never sure that they would stay on the job for long because he could never keep the general himself in his position, it went against his nature the idea that Adolf Hitler had as his propagandists, such as Dr. Joseph Geral , their Minister of Culture and Public Enlightenment told the Germans. Hitler constantly changed his mind on some very important aspects, such as the jet plane, which went from a fighter to a bomber and back to a fighter. He actually created industrial bottlenecks through his changes of heart that turned out to be disastrous. He also became again because of his ideology.

Completely incapable when the turn of the war came in the fall of 1942. Completely incapable. Not seeing strategic retreats in any sense other than political, he assumed that because this great campaign for Europe had been so successful between 1930 and 1941, the German people, if they saw any strategic retreats, would consider them. that was the equivalent of uh of defeat and yet the Germans were excellent at strategic retreats when they were allowed to do so, the only drawback was that it constantly denied the generals the right to always taught us as historians now, at least to me I was taught. in college never use the word inevitable because nothing is inevitable in history um and that's true uh except the German counterattack uh German counterattack when one looks at Kazarin's pass when one looks at K when one looks at Anzio when one looks at Solero When one looks at the Battle of the Bulge, the classic example of this, a 39-division attack that came out of Arden, forests and mountains, carried out in the dead of night through three feet of snow with search lights bounced off the clouds to turn night into day with messages only delivered by motorcyclists and never by radio it was surprising uh The counterattack almost reached the river m um that is the capacity of the germs for counterattack and uh and yet um Hitler constantly limped the uh Stop command in his attempts to undertake them, he would also do so as the war progressed and especially, of course, after the bomb plot, he would appoint generals on the basis of their political loyalty to him personally and his Nazism rather than their ability like generals, you see this with Sherer with Rendel with Krebs, several German generals who, frankly, were not first class soldiers, but fanatical Nazis and he would name them before the less political, but better soldiers, another example like as I say of that ideology prevails over the best interests of the verar, you also see it in Operation Barbarosa with the way it treated the Baltics and Ukraine.

Ukraine is a classic example of a part of the Soviet Union that understandably detested the Bolsheviks in Moscow, since something like 2 million Ukrainians had been deliberately starved to death in the artificial Great Famine of the late 1920s and early 1930s by the Bolsheviks and yet I couldn't stand it. constitutionally could not allow genuine Slavic autonomy when the um verar arrived in the Ukrainian villages the elders came out with their traditional welcome of bread and salt um if he had turned Ukraine against um against the Moscow government then almost anything could have It had been possible in Operation Barbarosa, but he couldn't really do that, he couldn't give genuine autonomy to the uh, to the Slavic non-man, she had to see it in terms of um ideology and so you get to the um horrible moment, of course, in the winter of 194 uh2 I am very sorry in 1941, as the Russian winter approaches and the assumption that had been made again for ideological reasons that the Soviet Union would collapse uh after the door was kicked in, after only five months of campaigning .

Russia would be expelled from Moscow and Leningrad would fall, it was put to the test and because of this, during this Assumption of Victory, instead of the long War, we had the situation where the German soldiers were not adequately supplied when they came to clothing. winter and the results I mention in my book always show the product. There was an Italian journalist called Kio malap who in his autobiographical book called Kaput refers to the moment when he was waiting at the um en. The Eura cafe in Warsaw is still there, in fact it's right across the street from the train station and he started seeing wounded Germans coming off the trains and before he read to them what that was. like here is a quote from

hitler

on august 12, 1942 he was having dinner with the head of the SSH kimla in the berus garden that day and they were talking about how cold the russian winters could get and he said that having to always wear long pants It was a misery to me, he boasted about how good he was in the and how Hardy he was in the cold, also arguing that his army could be so Hardy having to change.

Wearing long pants was always a misery for me even in a temperature of 10 below zeroI used to walk around with hoses the feeling of freedom they give you is wonderful uh giving up my shorts was one of the biggest sacrifices I had to invent something. at 5 degrees below zero I didn't even realize that many young people today already wear shorts all year round it's just a matter of habit in the future I will have an SS Highland Brigade in Lerosen of course I do. It wasn't minus 5 or 10, including the wind chill factor, the weather dropped to -30 degrees and the result was that Kio malap partti saw this while he was sitting in the cafe watching the troops get off the train, suddenly he was I was horrified and I realized they didn't have eyelids.

I had already seen soldiers with lidless eyes on the Minsk station platform a few days before, when I was leaving Smolin. The terrible cold of that winter had the strangest consequences for thousands and thousands of soldiers. had

lost

their limbs thousands and thousands had their ears, noses, fingers and sexual organs torn off by the ice many had lost their hair many had lost their eyelids singed by the cold the eyelid falls off like a piece of dead skin and their future It was only crazy when it comes to explaining Hitler's other big classic mistake: his decision to go to war against you on December 11, 1941 to declare war on an impregnable country.

You can also see the influence of ideology on any type of um. In a grand strategic sense, his assumption, of course, was that after having been attacked 4 days earlier at Pearl Harbor, the full power of the United States military was going to be concentrated against the Japanese, first. I had no idea what to me represents the most far-sighted strategic decision of the 20th century, which was that of General Marshall and the Roosevelt administration and, of course, Dwight Eisenhower, to put Germany first, Germany's policy First of all, it was the same. which was the fundamental framework for the American victory over the fascist powers in the second world war, in my opinion, what he based his assumptions on was the idea that, because he believed that the United States was ruled by blacks and Jews, Therefore they could not successfully fight in World War II, apart from the fact that they obviously had not studied the personnel of the Roosevelt administration.

There was absolutely no point in constantly underestimating the Americans' fighting capabilities. especially since he himself, as a corporal in the trenches of the 16th Bavarian regiment of the Bavarian list in the Great War, had been in no man's land against the American divisions, so he was putting his ideology before the real experience of his own um from his own life an amazing concept none of the uh none of the top Nazis knew America the only one of them who had ever come here was yoakim Von Ribbon Trop who in the 1920s had tried unsuccessfully to sell champagne in New York uh that was the full extent of the Nazis' personal knowledge of America and that's why when um Ribbon Shop talked about America, he listened, they listened to him, um, even Hitler and this is what he told a delegation of Italians in 1942, he said.

I know this about the United States, I know your country, a country without culture, without music, above all, a country without soldiers, a people that will never be able to decide war from the air, when a jefi nation like that has ever become in a race of Fighters and Flying Aces and Hitler himself told Molotov in 1940 that the earliest the Americans could deploy any significant number of troops in the Western theater would be the year 1970, as it goes without saying. , ladies and gentlemen. I don't have to tell any of you that by November 1942, under Operation Torch, a quarter of a million men had landed in the North African theater of operations and then, of course, we will continue in July 1943 to Sicily. then across the Straits in September 1943 to Italy and then the day after taking Rome you were to cross the Channel with massive preponderant forces.

The other central statistic for me from World War II is that in calendar year 1944 this is something the Nazis could never understand because they never really appreciated the enormous productive power of the United States in calendar year 1944, when Britain produced 28,000 warplanes and Germany and Russia produced 40,000 warplanes each; The United States produced no less than 98,000. fighter planes as much as the rest of the world were effectively armed and this was something that they were um that the Nazis were, for ideological reasons, incapable of understanding non-Nazis perfectly understood uh, you had the um uh you had serious figures and substantial contributions to German war production.

Ministries, including Albert Spar, who understood that if the United States, like Roosevelt, did what he did in the January 1942 State of the Union address, it would convert all peacetime productive capacity to peacetime. of the United States in a wartime military capacity, then anything was possible, in fact, a person in one of the German ministries shot himself as soon as he heard that the United States had entered the war because he knew that indeed the game was in the great attack on Russia, the Barbarosa attack, which took place in June 1941, which of course came entirely from the West, if Hitler had managed to coordinate with Japan and if Japan had managed to attack from the East, it was in a position from Manchuria if they had moved to Siberia at that time, then it would have been impossible for the Russians to have defended Moscow on October 18, 1941.

Stalin prepared his personal train to take him back beyond the Urals. um a uh a And cinberg and uh if it had not been for the 16 Siberian divisions that were taken from Beyond the Urals to defend Moscow at that key moment in mid 19 to mid October 1941 um then the demoralization of the Union Soviet Union would have been incalculable if they had learned that Stalin had abandoned Moscow when one thinks that in the north the Nazis, the Germans subjected Leningrad to a grueling 850-day siege, 850 days that cost a total of 1.1 million of soldiers and civilians, but they still resisted and then fell. in Stalingrad, in the south, um, which is a place where I highly recommend that you go to the modern and vulgar immensely moving place where some of the buildings that have for the old tractor factories that were fought in Stalingrad, where There is literally a bullet in every brick of these buildings, and that, of course, was taken by the Germans, but then it was recovered at the time of these great sieges, if Moscow had fallen, then anything could have happened. happened, but the fact is that the Germans and the Japanese effectively fought two completely separate wars, they just happened at the same time, they didn't help each other, they didn't coordinate, they didn't.

I did not even exchange information on anti-tank weaponry, and this again can largely be attributed to the fact that although in 1937, when the Japanese entered the anti-compact pact, German scientists were sent to measure to obtain Japanese skulls from German museums and measure them with calibers and deduce from this that in reality the Japanese were an Aryan people. However, it was not something anyone in the Nazi hierarchy believed and, fortunately, certainly not for the British. In the Indian Ocean there was no effective interaction between the two most powerful Axis powers. One thinks, of course, also of the moment in the middle part of World War II, of Hitler's surprising decision to um and indeed, in many ways, the classic decision of him putting his fanatical narcissism before the best interests of the Reich um of his decision to undertake the Holocaust at that time he did not do it in the way that he did while between 1939 and 1945 the number of um people working in the German war production factories fell, you could say, collapsed from 39 million to 29 million, 26% now, at that exact moment, Hitler decided to kill 6 million of his smartest, hardest working, best educated people, uh, it made absolutely no sense. in military terms in strategic terms in uh in terms of war production but it meant everything to him because ultimately that was what war was about for him I um and and and in the course of that, of course, uh he ured in the course of his anti-Semitic actions, um uh, which of course had taken place before he became a fura, but certainly after he became a fura in January 1933, um one of the classic and most important aspects of that was that he lost all the scientists, not just the Jewish scientists, but liberal-minded men who, UL, were going to come here to Los Anamos, uh, um and uh, and create the nuclear bomb that, after all, ended the second war global, um, and when, when you think about when it falls.

In the list of names of people Robert Oppenheimer gathered in New Mexico, one sees again and again these brilliant men, many, many of them, most of them, in fact, refugees from Europe between 1901 and 1932. The number of people who received Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry in Germany was 16 and in the United States there were only five. Between 1950 and 2000, the people who won those Nobel Prizes were seven in Germany and 67 in the United States, that's the size. of the massive brain drain that took place as a result of Nazi ideology. I once interviewed him while writing my first book about 20 years ago.

I once interviewed General Serrian Jacob, who was Winston Churchill's military secretary, and I'm sorry. Winston Church's military undersecretary Churchill and I said to him at the end of lunch, so why, ultimately, do you think we won the war instead of the Germans? Because he explained quite a bit how the Germans could. And he said, "You know," for me it always comes back to the fact that our German scientists were smarter than your German scientists to conclude. I would like to take you back to the takeoff where, on February 4, 1942. Adolf Hitler was entertaining hinr kimla um again the conversation rather strangely turned to Shakespeare, it was probably Hamlet and King Lea that the fury was referring to when He said it was a disgrace that none of our great writers took their subject from German imperial history.

Our Shiller found nothing better to do than glorify a Swiss crossbowman. The English, for their part, had a Shakespeare, but the history of their country had provided Shakespeare, as far as heroes were concerned, with only imbeciles and madmen, the assumption that Hitler was an imile. or a madman is wrong Hitler had a fairly high IQ um it is believed that he did uh he was he was more like I don't know if you have the same expression in the United States more like a train spotter uh in that it would be he was a great expert on the gauges of railways, on the speed of tanks, on the displacement of ships and on the fuel capacity of airplanes, etc., when it comes to the essential details of numbers and and details like that um Hitler was a mine of information um nor was he if he wasn't an asshole and he wasn't angry to the uh Point towards the end of the war, let's say in March or February historians won't agree when he was certainly going to lose and he was certainly going to die, so of course, um, the rant turned into uh, turned into um, well, we've all seen that magnificent Bruno Gant movie, the fall, which captures it as well as any historian can, uh , and all.

Hitler historians, when that movie came out, said this was the closest we're going to get to an accurate representation of the man, so when you look at this creature, he doesn't. I guess he was an idiot or crazy. No, what it was was something different and it was the reason he lost the war. He was an incapable and non-regenerative Nazi. Thank you very much really.