Hey, why DID the Germans lose WWII?

[DJ Yung Crunk]

It's not that I don't want to learn about history (though I absolutely don't) but I'm that sort of person, see? All the time I could spend on my MacBook pro researching this sort of stuff is time I could spend on my actual hobbies, like driving a Bugatti real fast through the Italian countryside while kissing a fine lady on the mouth (before leaving her at the altar the next day). I'm not wired to receive this unless they sit me down and force me.

And I know what you're thinking; "high school, right?" Well, to be perfectly fair, I might have retained history a bit more had the subject not been blessed with the best 9th grade teacher ever. See, Mr. Goldman was blessed with two things; a stigmatism like you wouldn't believe and too much pride to have it fixed. So slipping one past him was pathetically easy. So I decided to use the opportunity to get some forty winks. If I don't get some solid sack time I am a zombie. I take to internet message boards to argue about inane things like whether or not I would be caught dead playing a video game. Sleep deprivation makes fools of us all and, I figured, rather than get my regular eight hours like some straight laced, shirt wearing nerd I would just slip in 30 minutes here and there, peppered throughout the day. That's what Da Vinci did, you know.

So anyway, Mr. Goldman, blind as a bat as he was, was unsettlingly easy to pull one over on. I would tuck a broken broom handle down the back of my shirt to keep my neck upright and paint pupils and whites on my eyelids with mascara and foundation before class. And even though listening to an old man read aloud from a hilariously dated textbook about WWII would put most people to sleep, at the time I could only sleep to the new age guitar of Mike Oldfield.

But from what little I could hear over "Ommadawn" (inarguably Oldfield's finest work. "Tubular Bells" will always be more popular for its crossover appeal but "Ommadawn" has more moxxy and ambition. It's clearly the superior album. Even if that bit about horses at the end was only ever the vaguest bit creepy. There's "old timey equestrian" and then there's "that guy from equus". If I invited Mike Oldfield to my house I wouldn't let him into the barn, if you catch my drift) it seemed like the Germans had a good thing going for a while, there. So what happened?

[Douglas]

Sticking to strictly the military aspect of it because politics is against the Forum Rules, umm... it's complicated. Lots of military force production levels, strategy and tactics, spying, counterspying, technological innovations, etc. Drastically oversimplifying it, I've heard that a major factor was that Hitler was incompetent as a general and insisted on overruling his actual generals' better judgment a lot.

One interesting and amusing bit is that the UK literally ran the entire German spying operation in the UK after the first year or two - every single German agent in the UK defected or was caught. They used this to mislead Germany over where the real D-Day invasion landing would be, and did it so convincingly that when German commanders got word of the landings on Normandy beaches they intentionally held back their forces because they thought it was a feint.

[Flickerdart]

Well, a couple of things.

1: Remember the thing the Germans did at the beginning of the war? The Blitzkrieg? Well, it kind of relies on being fast. The Germans weren't making any territorial gains after they got bogged down in Russia (remember, Russia + winter = bad juju) and the Channel (the RAF is a nasty customer). This is important because...

2: The German economy needed conquest to be sustainable. It was still in shambles and confiscating property and businesses from your citizens only gets you so far. Germany isn't really well-set when it comes to natural resources either, so they needed to do things like get access to Baku's oil fields in order to power their war machine.

So the Germans basically went nova at the start of the war, ran out of steam, and got rolled by fresh Russian reinforcements arriving from Siberia (thanks to some A-level spying, the USSR was certain Japan would never attack them and could safely pull veteran regiments to reinforce the European front).

They also got too obsessed with Wunderwaffe to keep up in the tech game. Yes, the V rockets and their jet planes were super fancy, but they were actually pretty lousy as far as cost-benefit goes. Meanwhile, Russia just put better armour and guns on the T34 and refined its production to an art form (plus the IS-2 heavy tank but the war was pretty much already won by that point).

And then there was American involvement in the war - though they didn't do much of the important fighting, they provided a lot of material aid.

[Anarion]

Primarily it was being forced to fight a war on multiple fronts, neither of which could be easily won. Especially with supplies from America and the whole U-boat war in the Atlantic, the war went from a situation in which the initially superior German army could steamroll opposition to one in which resources were being stretched to the breaking point to supply millions of soldiers spread out across Europe fighting on both the English channel and the Russian front. Once military intervention from the U.S. happened, multiple fronts started opening up with the Germans being forced to commit military resources to North Africa as well as the French coast. That combined with being outnumbered in Russia, the classic Russian winter problem, and the Russian defense of Stalingrad at literally any cost pushed the German army past its limits and resulted in a major loss (on that note, stories say the Russians, short on guns but not on people, would simply send out their soldiers in teams. If one got shot, the other one would pick up the gun from a fallen comrade and continue firing.)

[Donnadogsoth]

Two things, really.

One, Russian casualties. The Germans couldn't make enough bullets to kill them all.

Two, American economy. The Americans propped up the Russian war effort, and it was a matter of time before the Americans would crush Japan and then Germany in turn. They could just out-produce them in everything. Plus, they had the Bomb.

[veti]

The Germans, and Hitler specifically, consistently underestimated the level of resistance they'd meet on every front:

Hitler thought that the European countries he'd conquered would recognise the innate superiority of their Aryan masters, and just lie down passively.
He thought the Germanic peoples of some countries in Central and Northern Europe would rally enthusiastically behind his cause.
He thought he could force the UK to make peace.
He thought he could blitz through Russia all the way to the Urals before winter set in.
Perhaps worst of all: he thought that his own people would be unanimously willing, nay, eager, to die for their cause. This led him to think that when he ordered them "fight to the last man", they'd do it. (Plus he was sufficiently naive, as a military thinker, to imagine that would achieve something if they did follow it.)


Five spectacularly bad calls there. And he thought he was a military genius who could successfully micromanage his generals.

To look at it more abstractly: you could say that Germany's war aims were either incoherent, or just unrealistic, from the get-go. The Nazis wanted:
1. To expand Germany's borders
2. To "purify the German race"
3. To make Germany strong enough to withstand the efforts of others to interfere with (1) and (2).

Now, "expanding your borders", in a densely populated land, means taking more people into your country; but "purifying the race" implies the opposite. To resolve that contradiction, the Nazis discriminated - harshly - against foreigners within the Reich. This didn't exactly endear them to those foreigners, and meant they were never going to get anything more than very marginal productivity out of them.

Then there's the problem that every empire faces as it expands: more discontented people within it (exacerbated by (2), as described above), and longer borders to be defended. So the Nazis had a recipe for a classic Malthusian breakdown: expenses increasing geometrically as they expanded, but their own resources/production only increasing arithmetically, if that.

[Flickerdart]

(on that note, stories say the Russians, short on guns but not on people, would simply send out their soldiers in teams. If one got shot, the other one would pick up the gun from a fallen comrade and continue firing.)
If by stories, you mean the movie Enemy at the Gates. There's nothing cheaper to make than a Mosin-Nagant rifle.

[factotum]

One interesting and amusing bit is that the UK literally ran the entire German spying operation in the UK after the first year or two - every single German agent in the UK defected or was caught.

Story about that: the Germans were getting their agents to tell them where the V-1s they were sending over were landing, because they were an experimental technology and they wanted to be able to aim more precisely. Since they were double agents, the British intelligence got them to only report on the V-1s landing in the north-west of London, to give the impression the things were generally going too far and encourage the Germans to shorten the range and thus avoid the most heavily populated parts of the city. The Germans were so convinced of the intelligence their agents were returning that they assumed the information being returned by radio rangefinders in the bombs themselves was incorrect!

[Killer Angel]

Long story short: when the enemy is superior in men, resources, logistic and industrial production, and the war becomes a war of attrition, there's only one possible outcome.

[Aedilred]

Essentially, there were a couple of really bad strategic calls, which resulted in Germany and its allies becoming desperately outgunned. Early success in western Europe and the conquest of France bogged down in Britain at a time when the British military was on its knees because the Luftwaffe prioritised civilian over military targets, which allowed the RAF to hold them off long enough for Hitler to get bored and start looking elsewhere before that job was done. That "elsewhere" turned out to be Russia, the invasion of which from the west is never a good idea. A few months later, there were the attacks on Pearl Harbour which pushed the US from sympathetic neutrality and food shipments to the UK into a full participant, which allowed for massive reinforcement in Europe over the following years, the invasion of Italy and ultimately D-Day.

There is of course more to it than that - the Allies had superior intelligence for most of the war, Germany overestimated the appeal and pervasiveness of its cultural doctrine, etc. But a lot of it was simply a divide between tactics and strategy, and Hitler's impatience ruining the latter. The Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht tended towards tactical superiority, certainly early in the war, but they weren't given the freedom to follow through on enough of their advantages, and too often they were thrown away in endeavours that were strategically pointless, counterproductive or just really badly timed.

It's something that's difficult to look at in retrospect, to an extent. Germany lost in large part because the war became a World War, rather than a localised European one (or a series of European ones). Germany could probably have knocked over Britain and held its gains in the west almost indefinitely if it had stayed on track. With time to rebuild and refocus after that, it might even have been able to invade Russia and force a peace with the Soviets like at Brest-Litovsk. But trying to fight Britain and the USSR and the USA simultaneously was just never going to work.

[Knaight]

It's something that's difficult to look at in retrospect, to an extent. Germany lost in large part because the war became a World War, rather than a localised European one (or a series of European ones). Germany could probably have knocked over Britain and held its gains in the west almost indefinitely if it had stayed on track. With time to rebuild and refocus after that, it might even have been able to invade Russia and force a peace with the Soviets like at Brest-Litovsk. But trying to fight Britain and the USSR and the USA simultaneously was just never going to work.
It was likely doomed even before that point. The war being a world war also brought in allies that Germany otherwise wouldn't have had, notably Japan. Even with the war being a localized European one, Germany was in trouble - the eastern front against Russia represented the majority of fighting for Germany, and even if it was only other European states involved there's still a western front, there's still heavy fighting in Africa, there's still resistance movements in conquered states, etc. The logistics from Europe alone were terrible for Germany, and it's not like there was brilliant leadership compensating for that.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Everything's been pretty well covered aside from the politics that can't be covered, but to sum up: simply based on the production, manpower, and resources of Germany and its allies vs. its enemies (particularly the USSR's manpower, the USA's industry, and the UK's enormous empire and five-star navy and air force), the only way the Axis powers were going to win in Europe was if everything went perfectly at a strategic level, and after their initial speedrun victories in Poland and France...they didn't.

[Gwynfrid]

A number of good points have been made on this thread. The following, however, is mistaken, in my opinion:



Perhaps worst of all: he thought that his own people would be unanimously willing, nay, eager, to die for their cause. This led him to think that when he ordered them "fight to the last man", they'd do it. (Plus he was sufficiently naive, as a military thinker, to imagine that would achieve something if they did follow it.)

The fact is that Hitler managed to get his people to fight to the very end, long after they realized all hope of victory had been lost. Germany's surrender only became possible after he was dead. The reasons for that incredible stubbornness, as well as the terrifying consequences for Germany and the German people, are explored in this book (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11197125-the-end) by historian Ian Kershaw - highly recommended reading for non-experts who are interested in history.

[Grytorm]

Two things, really.

One, Russian casualties. The Germans couldn't make enough bullets to kill them all.

Two, American economy. The Americans propped up the Russian war effort, and it was a matter of time before the Americans would crush Japan and then Germany in turn. They could just out-produce them in everything. Plus, they had the Bomb.

This strike me as inaccurate. I don't know about one. But Germany was forced to surrender before Japan and Nuclear Weapons weren't used until near the planned invasion of Japan.

[factotum]

This strike me as inaccurate. I don't know about one. But Germany was forced to surrender before Japan and Nuclear Weapons weren't used until near the planned invasion of Japan.

In point of fact, the first ever atomic explosion (the Trinity bomb test) took place in July 1945, some two months *after* the German surrender.

[Frog Dragon]

For Germany to have won even in the short term would've required at least these two things.

1. America doesn't enter the war against Germany.
2. Someone other than Hitler is at the helm.

While most casualties were caused by the Soviets, American equipment strengthened Soviet logistics immensely (though the Soviet war industry was better than is usually depicted. They were not lacking in tanks or guns). They were running on American fuel supplied by American trucks. While German war production was comparable to Soviet production, American entry tipped the scales so far against the Germans it's not even funny. American entry made already dubious odds impossible because you simply cannot fight a long war against an enemy with multiple times both your manpower and your industry. It simply does not work.

However, even if you remove America from the equation, a war of attrition against the USSR is also a very dubious proposition that a prospective Fuhrer would want to avoid. Moves like the battle of Stalingrad quite frankly served nothing except Hitler's ego. In blitzkrieg, it makes no sense to engage enemy strongpoints when you can instead cut supply lines to them, leave them behind your lines and continue advancing. Against the disorganized Red Army at the start of Operation Barbarossa, something like this was possible... if the commander had a grasp of strategy and understood which actions served it and which actions simply stalled them out and played directly into Soviet hands. Hitler did not.

Note that this is merely about short-term war success. Even with military victory, the third reich was an unrealistic basket case.

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: Real world politics is an inappropriate topic for this forum. Please give it a wide berth.