Posted on 05/14/2015 4:52:09 AM PDT by Kaslin
Shirer, who was there for the catastrophe, saw it differently. He was certain from close and continuous observation of the Nazi regime, that the ultimate goal was to the East. According to his sources at the time, the plan was to stall off Russia, secure the Reich's Western front as the rear, neutralize Britain in the Med and Africa, then turn full fury on the Russian land mass.
The plan was a good one, and could have worked, but Hitler was so obsessed with conquering Russia that he pulled several million crack troops out of the Southern Theatre before achieving solid objectives.
Britain was just about ready to pull out of the war when Hitler launched on Russia, using the armies he could have left in the Med for long enough to win.
Had Hitler secured his southern flank as he had his western flank, he could have reached the three objectives of Barbarossa before the Red Army could begin to mount a stout defense.
I have never before heard Hanson's interpretation that Hitler's goals went westward.
I once spent hours talking with a man who served in Iran during WW II as a construction engineer. During the war we built a whole railroad and highway system from Tehran north into Turkmenistan and supplied the USSR with trainloads of trucks, tractors, all manner of vehicles and shipments of war materiel. For all the bravado of the Red Army, they got their supplies in convoys of American trucks and ate SPAM to survive.
The forced famine of the Ukraine 1932-33 killed anywhere from 7 to 10 million innocent civilians. For starters.
Read Stalin's Genocides by Norman Naimark for the rest of the story of the Soviet death regime.
Sorry, but you didn’t address the demographic argument I actually made.
It has been proposed that upwards of 60M died due to the crimes of Stalinism. Which need to be added to the numbers killed in the wars. Yet the population increased over this period at about the same rate as the USA.
Keeping in mind that most of the murders resulted in the absence not only of the persons killed from the later numbers, but also their potential children and grandchildren, how is that even possible?
I think you are entirely right. The Nazis really wanted to make a deal with UK.
Germany would take Europe and perhaps North Africa and the Middle East.
UK would dominate the non-Aryans in the rest of the world.
They fully expected that UK would agree to this deal after being kicked off the Continent. It would have been, after all, the logical thing to do.
Hitler was doomed when Stalin re located his factories in and behind the Ural Mountains. In a war of attrition with Russia Germany would lose. Germany did not have the natural resources or manpower to win a war of attrition. When Hitler declared war upon the United States, his fate was sealed. It was just a matter of time. And time was not on Germany’s side.
Hey, wait a minute...
I always thought that if Japan did not attack PEarl Harbor dragging us into the war, I think the U.S. would have gotten involved anyway at some point. If I had to pick when I would say most likely by mid 1942, my guess the Germans would have provoked something be it accidental or by intent.
I’m in China, now. When I was here last November, I ran into a Russian girl, a student, who aggressively asked me if I thought that the US won World War II.
I replied, “No. It was a team effort. But Russia helped start it.”
Tyrants always think they are smarter than anyone else. If Hitler had listened to his Generals, there are a lot of things that could have come out differently. He followed in the footsteps of other tyrants such as Napoleon.
The overriding thing was his health. He had given a time frame of starting in 1946 to the Navy. They were building up aimed at that date, and were really upset that he started earlier than they were ready.
Parkinson's made it mandatory that it start while he had time to accomplish what he had in mind. He figured he could just by force of his will, speed it up.
We see the same divorced from reality in Obummer now.
Hitler was doomed when he declared war on the United States
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