Why Germany Lost World War Two

Why Germany Lost World War Two

In the summer of 1942, Nazi Germany controlled more of Europe than any power since Napoleon. Its armies stood on the Volga River in southern Russia, in the deserts of Egypt about 100 kilometres from Alexandria, and along the Atlantic coast from Norway to the Spanish border. Less than three years later, on 8 May 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally. Its cities were in ruins, its capital was occupied by the Red Army, and Adolf Hitler had been dead for a week.

Germany’s defeat cannot be put down to a single blunder or a single battle. It came from a combination of factors that reinforced one another: a war Germany was never equipped to win against the coalition it created, strategic choices made by Hitler himself, an ideology that turned potential allies into enemies, and opponents who learned faster and produced far more.

A War Against Opponents Far Larger Than Itself

The most basic explanation is a matter of numbers. Germany began the war with a strong army and an air force built for short, sharp campaigns. It did not have the economic base to fight a long war against the world’s largest empires and industrial powers at the same time.

By the end of 1941, Germany was at war with the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States together. The gap in resources between the two sides was enormous, and it grew every year. According to figures on wartime munitions spending, measured in 1944 dollars, the Allies spent about 70.5 billion dollars on munitions in 1944 alone, against about 23 billion dollars for all the Axis powers combined.

Total wartime production tells the same story:

• Aircraft: the United States built about 296,000, the British Empire about 177,000 and the Soviet Union about 136,000. Germany built about 133,000.

• Tanks and self-propelled guns: the Soviet Union built about 120,000 and the United States about 108,000. Germany built about 67,000.

Germany’s armaments chief from 1942, Albert Speer, did manage to raise output sharply, and German production peaked in 1944 even under heavy bombing. It made no difference to the outcome. Germany’s best year could not match what its enemies were producing in a normal month across three continents.

Germany also lacked key raw materials, above all oil. It relied on synthetic fuel made from coal, on imports from Romania and on captured stocks. This shortage shaped many of Hitler’s decisions, including his drive toward the oilfields of the Caucasus in 1942, and it became critical when Allied bombers began targeting fuel plants in 1944.

The Lightning Wars That Created a False Picture

Germany’s early victories were extraordinary. Poland fell in about five weeks in 1939. In spring 1940, Germany overran Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and then France in roughly six weeks. These campaigns combined fast-moving tanks, motorised infantry and close air support, and they shocked the world.

These quick victories gave Hitler and much of the German leadership a dangerous confidence. They came to believe that any enemy could be broken in a short campaign. The victories also concealed real weaknesses. Most of the German army still moved on foot and relied on horses for transport, and the economy had not been fully mobilised for a long war.

Even in 1940, there were signs of the limits of German power. More than 330,000 British and French soldiers escaped from the beaches during the Dunkirk evacuation. In the Battle of Britain that summer and autumn, the Luftwaffe failed to win control of the skies over southern England, and Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of Britain. Britain stayed in the war, and with it the possibility that the United States would one day join.

The Gamble in the East

On 22 June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, breaking the non-aggression pact the two countries had signed in 1939. More than 3.8 million Axis troops attacked along a front of about 2,900 kilometres. It remains the largest invasion in the history of warfare.

The plan rested on the belief that the Soviet state would collapse within months. Hitler is recorded as saying: “We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” On the day of the invasion, he predicted that Russia would collapse in less than three months.

At first, the campaign seemed to prove him right. Entire Soviet armies were surrounded and destroyed, and millions of prisoners were taken. The Red Army, however, did not collapse. It kept producing new divisions faster than the Germans could destroy them. In August 1941, the Chief of the German Army General Staff, Franz Halder, noted in his diary that the army had expected to face about 200 Soviet divisions and had already counted 360.

Distance, mud and winter did the rest. German supply lines stretched over hundreds of kilometres of poor roads, autumn rains turned them to mud, and German troops had not been equipped for a Russian winter because no one had planned for the campaign to last that long. The advance on Moscow stalled at the city’s outskirts, and on 5 December 1941, the Soviets launched a major counteroffensive in the Battle of Moscow that pushed the Germans back.

By the end of 1941, according to German army medical reports, more than 186,000 German soldiers had been killed and over 655,000 wounded on the Eastern Front. The quick victory had failed, and Germany was now trapped in exactly the kind of long war it was least able to win.

The Declaration That Brought America Into Europe

On 7 December 1941, Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor in the Attack on Pearl Harbor. Germany had no treaty obligation to join a Japanese war of aggression. Four days later, on 11 December 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States anyway, in the German declaration of war on the United States.

The decision is often listed among the greatest strategic errors of the war. The United States now fought Germany directly, and American leaders chose a “Germany first” strategy, treating the defeat of Germany as the top priority. The world’s largest industrial economy was now aimed at the Reich.

Hitler as Commander

In December 1941, after the defeat before Moscow, Hitler dismissed the army’s commander-in-chief and took over the post himself. From then on, he increasingly controlled military operations in detail, often against the advice of his generals.

His style of command had serious consequences. He repeatedly forbade retreats, even when withdrawal would have saved whole armies. He divided his forces between competing objectives. In the summer offensive of 1942, known as Case Blue, he sent one group of armies south toward the Caucasus oilfields and another toward the city of Stalingrad, leaving both too weak.

The result was the Battle of Stalingrad. On 19 November 1942, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive against the weak Romanian armies guarding the German flanks and encircled about 330,000 Axis soldiers. Hitler refused to allow the Sixth Army to break out. On 30 January 1943, he promoted its commander, Friedrich Paulus, to field marshal, a rank no German field marshal had ever surrendered. Paulus surrendered the next day. When the last troops gave up on 2 February, about 91,000 prisoners, including 22 generals, marched into Soviet captivity.

Stalingrad was the first time an entire German field army had been destroyed, and it is widely regarded as the turning point of the war in Europe.

The Soviet Union Learns to Win

The Red Army that defeated Germany in 1943 and 1944 was very different from the one that had been shattered in 1941. Soviet factories, moved east of the Ural Mountains during 1941, produced enormous numbers of tanks, guns and aircraft. Soviet commanders such as Georgy Zhukov learned to plan large, coordinated offensives and to deceive the Germans about where they would strike.

In July 1943, Germany launched its last major offensive in the east at the Battle of Kursk. The Soviets had prepared deep defences and absorbed the attack before striking back. After Kursk, the initiative in the east never returned to Germany.

The decisive blow came in the summer of 1944. On 22 June 1944, three years to the day after Barbarossa, the Soviets launched Operation Bagration in Belarus. Germany’s Army Group Centre was destroyed, and the Red Army advanced hundreds of kilometres toward Poland.

The Eastern Front was where the German army was broken. The large majority of German soldiers who died in the war died fighting the Soviet Union. The cost to the Soviet people was immense: around 30 million people died on the Eastern Front, soldiers and civilians together.

Help From Across the Ocean

The Soviet war effort did not rely only on its own resources. Under the American Lend-Lease programme, the United States shipped about 50 billion dollars in supplies to its allies. About 31 billion dollars went to Britain and about 11 billion dollars to the Soviet Union.

Soviet deliveries included more than 400,000 trucks and jeeps, nearly 2,000 locomotives, more than 11,000 aircraft and millions of tons of food. The trucks were especially important, because they gave the Red Army the mobility to keep up its great advances in 1944 and 1945. Nikita Khrushchev later recalled Stalin’s private view: “if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war.”

Losing the War at Sea and in the Air

Britain depended on supplies shipped across the Atlantic, and Germany’s U-boats came close to cutting that lifeline. The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest continuous campaign of the war.

By 1943, the Allies had turned it around. Long-range aircraft, escort carriers, better radar and code-breaking combined against the submarines. In May 1943, known to U-boat crews as “Black May”, Germany lost 41 U-boats in a single month, and the submarine commander Karl Dönitz withdrew his boats from the North Atlantic. American troops and supplies could now cross to Britain in safety.

In the air, the Combined Bomber Offensive by Britain and the United States struck German cities and industry. Bombing did not stop German production from rising until 1944, but it forced Germany to pull fighters, anti-aircraft guns and hundreds of thousands of men back home to defend the Reich. From May 1944, the oil campaign targeted Germany’s synthetic fuel plants. Aviation fuel output collapsed, leaving German aircraft and tanks short of fuel in the final year of the war.

The Secret War

Germany believed its Enigma cipher machine could not be broken. At Bletchley Park in England, Allied code-breakers proved otherwise. The intelligence they produced, known as Ultra, gave Allied commanders insight into German plans, troop movements and U-boat positions. It played an important part in the Battle of the Atlantic and in North Africa, and it helped the Allies judge how far the Germans had been fooled by deception plans before D-Day.

North Africa and the Opening of New Fronts

In North Africa, Erwin Rommel won fame for his daring desert campaigns, but his forces were always short of fuel and supplies shipped across the Mediterranean. At the Second Battle of El Alamein in October and November 1942, British Commonwealth forces broke his army. American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria the same month. When the Tunisian campaign ended in May 1943, about a quarter of a million German and Italian troops surrendered.

The Allies then invaded Sicily and mainland Italy in 1943. Italy surrendered in September, and German forces were tied down defending the Italian peninsula for the rest of the war.

On 6 June 1944, the Normandy landings opened the long-awaited second front in western Europe. Germany now faced major land fronts in the east, west and south at the same time. Its last major offensive in the west, the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, used up much of its remaining armour and fuel and gained nothing.

An Ideology That Undermined Its Own War

Nazi ideology was not a side issue in Germany’s war. It shaped its aims and its methods, and it damaged its chances of winning.

In the occupied Soviet territories, some people, particularly in the Baltic states and western Ukraine, first saw the Germans as liberators from Stalin’s rule. Nazi policy quickly destroyed that possibility. Plans such as the Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost called for the starvation, expulsion and enslavement of tens of millions of Slavic people to make room for German settlers. Soviet prisoners of war were held in such conditions that millions died. Brutal occupation drove many people into the partisan movements that attacked German supply lines.

The Nazi regime also devoted railways, guards and resources to the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews, even when the army was desperate for transport. The regime’s antisemitism had already driven many talented scientists out of Germany before the war, several of whom later worked for the Allies.

Allies That Could Not Help

Germany’s partners were weaker than its enemies’ partners. Italy entered the war in June 1940 poorly prepared, and its defeats in Greece and North Africa forced Germany to send troops to rescue it. Japan fought its own war in Asia and the Pacific and never coordinated strategy with Germany in a meaningful way. It did not attack the Soviet Union, which allowed Stalin to move divisions from Siberia to defend Moscow in 1941. Romania, Hungary and Finland provided troops for the east, but their armies were less well equipped, and in late 1944 several of them changed sides.

The Allied coalition had deep tensions of its own, but Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union shared one clear aim: the complete defeat of Germany. They met at the highest level, agreed on priorities and, despite their mistrust, held together until the end.

The End in Berlin

By early 1945, Germany was being squeezed from both sides. Soviet forces crossed into eastern Germany, and the Western Allies crossed the Rhine in March. The Red Army surrounded Berlin in late April. Hitler killed himself in his bunker on 30 April 1945. Germany signed the German Instrument of Surrender at Reims on 7 May, and a final ceremony followed in Berlin on 8 May, the day now marked in Europe as Victory in Europe Day.

Weighing the Causes

Historians continue to debate which factors mattered most.

Some emphasise economics. In this view, once Germany was at war with the British Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States together, defeat was close to certain because its enemies could simply outproduce it.

Others emphasise decisions. They point to Hitler’s choice to invade the Soviet Union before defeating Britain, his declaration of war on the United States, his refusal to allow retreats and his direct interference in military operations. Different choices might not have brought victory, but they might have made defeat slower or the war shorter.

A third group stresses the role of the Soviet Union. The Red Army destroyed the bulk of German military power, at a cost in lives far greater than that of any other Allied nation.

A fourth view highlights ideology. Germany’s war in the east was a war of annihilation from the beginning. It ruled out compromise, turned potential allies into enemies and pushed opponents to fight to the end.

These explanations are not alternatives so much as parts of a single picture. Germany began a war it could only win quickly. When quick victory failed in the winter of 1941, the advantages of its enemies in manpower, industry, resources and intelligence came into play, and Hitler’s decisions and the nature of his regime made them count even more. The defeat that came in May 1945 had been taking shape since the moment the German advance stopped outside Moscow.

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