Konrad Zuse, a German engineer and world's first computer nerd, invented an amazing set of electromechanical relay computers in compete isolation in his mom's basement starting in 1936. Possibly because he had no friends it didn't really catch on. His Z3 computer in 1941 was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine. Using 2,300 relays, the Z3 used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. Because no one in the U.S. knew about it, it didn't have any influence on computer development here.
Possibly Hitler should go down in history as the Xerox of dictators. He had Einstein, the first computers, all the world's rocket scientists. He misplayed many of the cards he was dealt big time.