[citation needed]

Hitler started a war he couldn't possibly win in my view. For a long time I had a notion that Hitler made strategic blunders in waging his war that if not made would have brought him victory. At some point though I changed my view. Hitler being a complete bat **** crazy man is part of it. His loyal henchmen of the same ilk as Hitler is another part if it. The crazy, insane ideology (evil goes without saying) is another part of it. Trying to match the industrial might of the Allies is another part if it. Trying to match the Allies in manpower is another part of it.

Similar discussions to the one in this thread have been carried out many times over the years. They're interesting to a point but I think a lot of them are based on a premise that somehow strategic mistakes cost Hitler victory. I reject that premise.

moving east was a bad play imo.

According to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, Stalin trusted Hitler and refused to believe that he would betray him, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Based on this, I would have to say that attacking Russia in the first place was his primary mistake.

Afterward Stalin was uber-paranoid... who knows how history would have turned out if they had stayed on good terms. Probably not nearly as good for the US.

Stalin was paranoid his whole life. I have a hard time believing this.

awesome thread guys, good to see there's at least one forum on 2p2 with interesting and informed discussion. Hope the rest of the history forum is this good, just stumbled across it

Dunkirk

Spreading army thin by simultaneously attacking Leningrad, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus Mountains

Forcing Rommel to hold his ground in Alexandria and Tobruk.

Overextending into Moscow during winter.

Forcing vo Manstein to hold his ground on the Eastern front.

These mistakes cost him victory. Lucky for all of us that he sucked at war.

his biggest mistake was being the biggest douchebag of history i geuss

Sounds about right, would add they Germany lost a lot of soldiers etc as well. If things had somehow been different these people would have fought on the German side like they did in WW1.

Great thread btw.

Tnx for the great thread guys.

I would like to use the opportunity to ask for some book titles that any of you would recommend regarding the WW2 in general.

In the computer game "The Sims 2: University", characters have the opportunity to take a first semester course titled "The World: A survey of everything that ever happened". For some reason, your request for a book dealing with WW2 - by far the largest war the word has ever experienced, whether measured in terms of troops mobilized, deaths, nations involved or economic inputs - "in general", reminded me of the comic notion of that course.

I have seen a number of books or multi-volume sets that attempt to take a survey approach to covering WW2. The sheer scale of the war means that inevitably such books omit important aspects. Most, IMO, also have an overly narrow national perspective. There are none I am prepared to recommend.

I'm sorry. That wasn't a very helpful response. I made it to illustrate the practical impossibility of producing a truly useful book of the sort you requested, and therefore the difficulty of anwering your question. Perhaps a more helpful response is that classic response to questions about poker strategy: "It depends". In this case, it depends on what you want to learn or experience.

For instance, if I were to guess that you are not very familiar with the participating nations nor the battles and campaigns, and you just wanted to get a general overview of these things, I might recommend "The Collins Atlas of World War II" or the apparently larger and more detailed "The Times Atlas of the Second World War". These would at least partially answer the questions "What?", "Where?" and "When?", but wouldn't really address the "Who?" of leading individuals or personal impacts/experiences, nor the "How" of miltary strategy and technology, nor the "Why?" of causes, origins and influence.

If you can tell us more about what sort of things you want to read about, perhaps someone can make some more recommendations.

Sure my question was very vague.

I'm interested in the bigger picture of what was happening and I want to understand is how something like WWII could happen (It feel sometimes that the world was in some kind of collective psychosis at the time). From reading Wikipedia I already find out about so many stories that were running in the background and a lot about how so many countries that aren't mentioned so much in the history texts which I read (they were also probably very biased towards things happening in europe). In this thread for example I discovered that UK and Russia invaded Iran, which I never heard of before and I think it has many implication and repercussions even in our own time.

Since I have no academic needs I'd also like to read books that are a good read per se and not to heavy.

Basically the response I was hoping for for something along the lines of : You should really read that, or that one was amazing for me.

Thank you for your suggestions I will check the two books.

It has to be wasting so much of his manpower and resources running the concentration camps.

I know people have already said it was blaming the Jews. I don't know if he could have risen to power without the Jew hatred, but if he could have he might have had Leo Szilard, Ernico Fermi, Stansilaw Ulam, Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, Hans Bethe, Emilio Serge, John Von Neumann, and James Frack working for him or at least not working against him.

By far the biggest reason for the defeat of Germany was the Enigma-code-machine, but I doubt that this was Hitler's decision to keep using it.

The biggest mistake by Hitler himself was overestimating his chances to start peace talks with England. He made too many concessions trying to archieve this goal.

The other stuff was probably just tough luck. Pervitin - the german wonder drug - had unexpected side effects. The british Swordfish torpedo hit the Bismarck exactly at the weakest spot. The italan army turned out to be totally useless. The british managed to trace german submarines. Heisenberg miscalulated the critical mass for the atomic bomb, told Nils Bohr about the project, who escaped with the information to the US. The japanese screwed up Pearl Habour, most likely because their code got cracked also. I mean that's pretty much as FUBAR as it gets. I don't think that Hitler had a chance.

At the same time, Hitler's drug abuse got out of hand. He took two injections from Morell with meth each day and he showed the exact symptomes of meth addiction - from bad teeth to outbursts of anger. You can't win a war if your chief decision maker is a drug addict who doesn't know what he is doing.

All,

Just read tt. Ty for all your efforts. It was amazing reading this being so green.

Head explodes

I watched a documentary about a jet plane the Germans had but after the allies bombed and destroyed most of the manufacturing sites Hitler decided to build the factories in a mountain. They only built like 26 planes to little too late. If they would have built the planes decentralized under plywood roofs, it might have allowed them to control the air.

ME 262
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVNYUY6Nack

Supposely Britian and US had jets too. And supposedly it was a maintenance hog. In summary, Hitler thankfully did not know what he was doing.

+1