The thing is that the entire “Nazis would have conquered the world” isn’t true.
Nazi Germany was never going to win the second world war. the only way Nazi Germany wins is if
1. Hitler is not in power and Germany is not “Nazi” Germany
2. The war starts at a different time and place
People misunderstand the situation of Nazi Germany in WW2. From the outside, they look like a rather unstoppable military that only the combined efforts of the allied powers could bring down.
1. Next to no oil was produced in Germany. Their only method of making in came from turning coal into oil and they were even short on coal after their industrialization in the 19th century. They only had the Romanian oil fields to rely on and this was nowhere near enough.
2. Their naval surface fleet was very small and underpowered. It could not stand up to even the French Navy forget about the British Navy.
3. They did not have enough manpower. In a war the size of WW2 you need every man to be involved. Not only do you need to staff a military that is 10 million strong but you must also have men in factories making equipping and men in the farms growing food.
In contrast, Russia had a lot more men. Even the UK had more men - really? Yes. The British had a 2 million strong VOLUNTEER British India army.
4. Germany produced equipment too slowly. Every allied power had Germany beat in terms of production. Not only did German decide on complex tank and gun models but they frequently changed them during production. This meant production had to stop, retool, and resume constantly.
The Germans went for highly complex machinery that were customized and difficult to build quickly. In contrast look at the liberty ships - built in a couple of weeks. The American and Russian tanks were cruder but quicker to build and easier to maintain.
There was no way Germany was going to win in the long run
Even if the Germans won in Russia, they were ultimately going to have to make peace with Britain, there was no way they could have taken on the whole British Empire, even Hitler knew that.
Hitler’s order to kill Russians instead of taking them prisoner created a “fight to the death” situation. The mass surrenders stopped and the Germans found themselves fighting a stronger Russian army.
Vacillating between Leningrad and Moscow didn’t help either. He got neither.
Do not forget the oil fields in Hungary...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spring_Awakening
"The operation, initially planned for March 5, began after German units were moved in great secrecy around Lake Balaton (German: Plattensee) to secure the last significant oil reserves still available to the Axis powers and prevent the Red Army from advancing towards Vienna."
I agree. Hitler successfully played off Europe’s aversion to war (resulting from WWI) to take much of what he wanted. But once it became a fight to the death with Britain, the USSR and the USA, he wasn’t going to win. If a mobster comes into your business and says “pay me $100 a week protection,” you might do it. But if he says I’m coming back tonight to kill you and your whole family, you are likely to have a different response, especially if you are armed.
Hitler made a number of mistakes during Barbarossa (delaying the invasion until June 22, delaying the push to Moscow while jerking around in the Ukraine, becoming obsessed by Stalingrad, making clear that ordinary Russians had no choice to fight to the death when many of them would have welcomed liberation from Stalin, “no retreat” orders, etc.), but would any of it have mattered? Given the scope of the Soviet counteroffensive that began Dec. 6, which truly shocked the Germans, I don’t think even taking Moscow would have made much of a difference.
The fact is that Hitler grossly underestimated the Red Army based on Stalin’s purge of the officer corps and its unimpressive performance against Finland. And he likely felt invincible after the collapse of France. Historians like to rattle off the numbers of planes, tanks and heavy guns involved in Barbarossa as though the Germans were the most unstoppable juggernaut ever seen, but for a country the size of the USSR, Barbarossa was underpowered. Compared to the numbers that the Soviets brought to Germany’s border in 1944-45, it was night and day.
Up to 1939, Hitler succeeded beyond any normal person’s wildest dreams - Germany united, with a rebuilt economy and military, large chunks of territory secured without a shot fired, the Versailles treaty dead, the democracies cowering. But once Hitler started to try to enact HIS wildest dreams — world domination and extermination of entire peoples based on his insane ideology, making the war a matter of national survival for all the other major powers — he bit off more than Germany could chew.