The Nazis Could Never Have Won, They Knew It, And Thus Exacted Vengeance Right From The Start

Confronted, in 2023, with what may turn out to be the greatest war ever, it is moral and most significant to study strategy as it occurred in the past.

Holocausts do not just happen out of greed. They may happen out of vengeance for anticipated defeat. (And the same happens for smaller scale violence!)

The Nazis could never have won… Their economy was too small, pathetic, debt ridden, ruined by military spending… and too much of an extension of US plutocracy. Moreover, the Nazis had ravaged their own society, innovation and academia (by instituting a climate of terror, anti-intellectualism, and expelling the Jews). Once they met determined opposition from the twin democracies France and Britain, and their gigantic empires, the Nazis didn’t have a chance. So the Nazis knew, right from the start, that they had lost. However, they hoped for a miracle, and they got an entire cavalcade of them… In the beginning.  

Through an impressive parade of weird miracles, some of these stupendous miracles courtesy of the French High Command, plus a number of spectacular treasons, Hitler and his gang were able to cut from behind the French army in a few days of May 1940… before the French and the Brits understood that tanks should have radio, aircraft reconnaissance was crucial, and that giving amphetamines to soldiers enabled armor to advance for many days and nights without stopping.

An important aspect of the battle of France of May 10 to June 23, 1940, though, is that Nazi tanks advanced quickly on excellent French roads, thanks to… Soviet oil. Yes the Kremlin enabled the Nazis to invade France, it provided all the oil (Germany would use oil from coal, thanks to the Standard Oil process, and oil from Romania later in the war).

The Nazi Luftwaffe suffered enormous losses in May-June 1940, over 6 weeks of heavy fighting against France. Moreover 50,000 elite fanatical Nazi soldiers died (Nazi engineers charged fortifications with explosive backpacks, etc.). (In the recording below, Hitler himself recognizes that Germany needed a year to recover after its enormous losses in France.)

Finally the Royal Navy ruled the sea, and Britain had enough planes to establish air supremacy above England. So Britain couldn’t be defeated. More alarmingly for the Nazis, the entire British empire, with its enormous resources, and allies, was at war against the Third Reich.

In 1941, Hitler deduced, and explained to his thousands of general officers, that they had to attack the Soviet Union, their ally, because, ultimately, there would be a war on two fronts, as Kamerad Stalin would find the situation too tempting. Stalin had even grabbed the Polish oil fields, the original proximal reason for the Nazis to attack Poland…

But attacking the USSR meant no more oil, and no more crucial elements to make, among other things, high temperature alloys (so, once cut off from the USSR, jet engines burned up in a few hours, instead of 100 hours previously; this slowed down the development of fighter jets by years).

All of this was highly predictable, but the Nazis were complete idiots who thought they could scare away France and Britain, because they were democracies. After that didn’t work, Hitler made his alliance with Stalin official. But still, France and Britain were not scared, and Hitler was stuck: he had to attack Poland, lest he lost face.

In most war games repeating the Battle of France of 1940, Nazi Germany loses quickly. Actually, the Nazis guessed as much. Paradoxically, knowing they were sure to lose, the Nazis tried a completely crazy attack by stuffing 7 of their 10 armored divisions on three small roads in the Ardennes mountains. The leaves hid the tanks. The jam extended over 100 miles. Allied pilots saw it: they were not believed, because it was too crazy. Yet, the second in command of the French army had guessed this could happen: Gamelin, his stupid superior, overruled him, and sent the French armored reserve, all the way north, to the Netherlands (was he working for the Nazis? He nearly admitted this in his memoirs…)

The short of it was that the Nazis could have never won, and they knew it, and that may explain why they engaged in holocausts right away, first against the Poles, then the Jews, Ukrainians, etc. Since the Nazis knew they had lost as soon as the war had started, they may as well kill a maximum of people.

This psychological “solution” to the cornered rat syndrome, going down but killing as many as possible, must be kept in mind when dealing with the soon to be desperate Kremlin… Thus we may want to inform the Russians that the holocausts of WWII happened, not because the Nazis were sure to win, but, precisely, because they were sure to lose… A situation, the perception of certain defeat, which may soon affect the largest land empire that the world has ever seen to last centuries.

By learning why the Nazis behaved the way they did, we may be able to avoid a repetition…. In particular one may guess that the atrociies committed by the Russian army in general and the Kremlin in particular (such as the mass deportation of Ukrainians, especially children, from temporarily occupied territories) has to do with the rage and anxiety the perpetrators feel at the ineluctability of their well-deserved defeat.

Patrice Ayme

They came out of the forest with their tiny tanks: Nazi Panzer I and II below come out of the Belgian forest they hid inside. The Nazis had only 1,000 German tanks, and very few of them were medium sized Panzer IV. The Nazis also had 1,000 captured Czech tanks. France had 4,000 tanks, hundreds of them superior to any German tanks (except those few P IV…) However, the Nazis avoided most of the French tanks…

P/S: Some have claimed that Hitler came close to victory when talks were conducted in 1940 to make the USSR an official Axis partner…. with Germany, Italy and Japan… However, that’s an illusion.

The Nazi-Kremlin Pact was entered in a desperate attempt by the Nazis to scare France and Britain.

By November 1940, the Nazis told the Soviets Britain was defeated. That was a complete lie and the Soviets knew it.

Molotov, standing in an air raid shelter in Berlin as the Nazi capital shook under British bombs, pointed out to his hosts that Britain didn’t look very defeated to him. Stalin was crafty and deeply indebted to, and embedded in, the US plutocratic sphere. He was not going to risk a war with the US: some viewed US plutocrat Harriman as the real chief of the USSR. Harriman had developed offshore Baku oil fields.

The Nazis were completely blind to the enormous war preparations of Stalin, and the URSS-US connection. The Nazis attacked France with 1,000 (small) German made tanks. Three years later, Hitler would discover that Stalin had 35,000 tanks in 1941… He added that nobody could have imagined… Actually Hitler explains much of what happened, under the illusion that he could have defeated France in 1939, and thus mitigated the Soviet military preparations…