Nazi Victory in World War II



Introduction:

World War II was a conflict involving all the major global powers of the time and lasted from 1st September 1939 to 12th October 1953. The war was broken up into two major theatres of action. A pan euroasian war and a conflict around the Pacific rim. The war in Europe officially ended on 8th December 1949, however further fighting between the German Wehrmacht and pro Soviet Russian rebels continued until the early 1950s. The war in the Pacific ended with one of the most bloody battles in history as American expeditionary forces invaded mainland Japan. The decisive contest that brought the contest to a close was the encirclement and wholesale destruction of Tokyo from December 1952 until October 1953. The war is estimated to have cost the lives of 100 million combatants (mainly Soviet and Japanese) and a further 100 million Jewish and Slav civilians as a result of attrocities by the German state on a level never seen before or since in history. The conflict caused a dramatic redrawing of the world's political and economic landscape as the Soviet Union and the Japanese empire both ceased to exist entirely and the once all powerful British Empire was reduced to the status of a client state of Nazi Germany. By the war's end the two remaining super powers were The United States of America and The Greater Germanic Reich. Relations between the two nations remained tense and hostile for almost 5 decades until more the Nazi Party gradually liberalised Germany and sought to improve relations with it's great rival across the Atlantic.

Origins of the Conflict:

Germany's defeat in World War I saw them punished harshly by a victorious France and Britain. Germany lost a great deal of territory and forced to pay crippling war reparations as a result of the treaty of Versailles. They were forced to cede most of Prussia to a newly reconstitued Poland, The Sutenland to Czechoslovakia and the Alsace-Lorraine region to France. A combination of these punative mesures and the US Stock Market crash of 1929 saw the successor state of the Kaiser's regime, The Weimar Republic fall into economic freefall. Hyperinflation was rampant and destroyed any chance of economic recovery. A commonly held view at the time amongst the German population was the powerful Jewish members of the financial and manufacturing sectors had been responsible for Germany's defeat by refusing to supply additional finance to the state to allow the war machine to continue. Antisemitism was extremley common all across Europe at the time to one degree or another, however the harsh reality of everyday life in the Weimar Republic caused this prejudice to be taken to a new extreme by some of the more politically active members of society, such as the nascent National Socialist Workers Party (The Nazi Party for short). This party was led by the charasmatic and passionate Adolf Hitler. The Nazi Party attempted to sieze power in 1924 during the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. This coup was unsuccessful and was repulsed by armed German troops leading to the death or injury of several members of the party at the time and the imprisonment of it's leader.

Germany moves towards Nazi control:

After Adolf Hitler was released from prison four years after his sentance was passed and resumed his position as the active leader of the Nazi Party. Initially the party remained on the fringes of the German domestic political scene until the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. The increasingly despairate situation with the economy and mass unemployment allowed the Hitler and his party to begin their rapid rise to power. As successive temporary coalition governments collapsed the Nazi Party were able to steadily increase the number of seats they had in the Reichstag until the German Emperor Wilhem II was left with no alternative other than to appoint Adolf Hitler as the Prime Minister. Upon the Emperor's death Hitler and the Nazis consolidated their power base still further. Firstly Hitler was appointed as the President of Germany and then laws were passed after the staged Reichstag fire incident, giving the Nazi Party total control over Germany.

The road towards war:

Germany began to make increasinly strident moves towards restoring itself as a European power. Using massive overseas borrowing the Nazi Party rebuilt the German military (forbidden under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles) and started making territorial claims on lands it had lost after the World War I. These moves made Hitler a national hero and initially one of the most respected statesmen in Europe. A policy of appeasement by France and Britain permitted Germany to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine and the Sutenland and to formally begin rebuilding it's armed forces, however when Germany invaded Poland to recapture the former territories of Prussia the two allies declared war on the Nazi state on 1st September 1939.

World War II in Europe begins:

After an initial 6 month period where very little military activity was seen from any of the protagonists, the European war began in ernest with the German invasion of France. Using previously unseen tactics in modern warfare of lightning quick strikes deep into enemy territory using a highly mobile tank force and well prepared troops, the Werhmact were able to quickly destroy French resistance and captured Paris in March 1940 after the surrender of the government. Hitler forced the French leadership to sign the terms of surrender in the same railway carraige that the Germans had been forced to surrender in at the end of World War I.

The British were stunned with the speed at which France had fallen and watched on in horror as the German army rapidly overran the low countries, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. In July 1940 British Expeditionary forces landed at Dunkirk on the northern coast of France. In a decisive battle that dramatically weakened the British as a credible foe, Germany completed a rapid rout of UK forces and drove them into a retreat. 'The Massacre of Dunkirk' as it would later be known saw nearly one million men killed or captured as they attempted to return to Britain by sea. With virtually all of it's combat ready troops and equipment captured or destroyed Hitler was certain that Britain's leader Winston Churchill would sue for peace. Churchill refused, saying that Britain would 'fight to the last man and the last bullet'.

At this stage of the war, Germany had neither the planes, nor the fuel to gain air superiority over British skies or the troop transports to launch a full invasion. On this basis the German high command opted for a policy of containment of Britain, rather than attempting outright to destroy it. As long as Britain maintained control of the Suez canal and the oilfields of Iraq in the middle east they could not be knocked out of the war via any other means than an invasion and were no longer capable of launching a further assault for the time being, so German attention switched elsewhere.

Operation Barbarossa and the war in Eastern Europe:

With Western Europe siezed rapdily and with minimal losses during late 1940 and early 1941 Hitler and his military planners began making preparations for an assault on the Soviet Union to the east. German high command realised that invading such a large and numerically superior neighbour was a high risk strategy, but one that was possible to win if Moscow could be taken quickly and with minimal losses. In early 1941 Germany did not have enough troops, fuel or weaponary to fully defeat the British by taking the Suez canal as well as taking Moscow, the arable land of the Ukraine and the oilfields of Baku. Germany's only source of crude oil was from it's ally Romania and it's manufacturing base and economy was not yet able to produce the equipment for long range, extended warfare.

With the British using what little of their ground forces they had left to hold suez and Iraq, Hitler dispatched his now legendary General Rommel to North Africa with minimal mechnised support and supplies. There he was under instruction to simpy hold the British Commonwealth and North Africa regiments at bay and from preventing them from assisting the Greeks and Yugoslavians in their resistance against Germany's facist ally, Italy. With General Ionescu building a strong defensive line along it's border to the south Hitler felt confident that even if Italy was defeated, Romania and it's oil was safe from invasion.

All during the spring of 1941 a massive military build up (under the guise of an exercise) began along the border of Russian Poland. An invasion was initially planned for 5th April 1945, however due to an extended wet season in European Russia that year turning the unpaved roads to bogs the invasion was delayed until the 1st of May. Despite repeated warnings from British intelligence that an invasion was imminent, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin refused to believe the Nazis would attack so soon. As a result the Soviet military, severely weakened by the great purges was taken totally by surpise and rapidly pushed back in retreat.

Due to the rate at which Germany made territorial advances into the Russian interior, its army had no time to prepare adequate fortification and defenses. Attempts were made to begin evacuating factories and equipment behind the Ural Mountains, however due to the severe time constraints this was only partly completed. The Wehrmacht had achieved total air superiority very early in the conflict and was in a position to provide air support when German ground troops began encircling Moscow in August 1941.