# Was Hitler an idiot?



## LegoTugboat (May 8, 2016)

Given the issues that Germany had to face after their defeat in World War 1, and the resulting hyperinflation and chaos that resulted, it was somewhat inevitable that there would be a person that had to take charge.

But did that person go about the right way. He did overhaul Germany, made the autobahn, and ludicrous weapons, but he did also make many controversial decisions, like killing Jews, homosexuals and anybody that wanted to make a pre-internet tumblr.

Was Hitler right in taking control of Germany to revitalise them, or did he go about it the wrong way?


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## autisticdragonkin (May 8, 2016)

I think that Hitler made some good decisions but I think that he should have instead of trying to conquer the soviet union for himself had formed an alliance with all other european states in order to destroy the soviet union. He also possibly lead to the creation of SJWs by directly trying to kill their predecessors. There are also several groups that he killed for no good reason (meaning everyone who wasn't a proto tumblrina) and through doing so he only served to further harm his legacy. 

It is quite possible that none of the problems that I attributed to him actually have anything to do with him but I think that there is a possibility that if he formed a pan capitalist alliance against the USSR and only mocked leftists not killed them then we would live in a world in which Russia would be far more integrated with the rest of western society and there wouldn't be the societal harms of SJWs or cold war sponsored conflicts today


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## Mapache (May 8, 2016)

Hitler was an incompotent daydreamer.
Hitler could have won the war if he after conquering frace, norway, Poland and czechlovakia decided to declare peace with the allies instead of pushing forward into russia. He should have used that time to build up an army worthy to invade and decimate russia.
Or he could have bombed Russian farms and let the ussr turn inward. Either way he was only talk and none of the doing.


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## millais (May 8, 2016)

Hitler and the Nazi leadership in general were making it up as they went along; they had no long term planning or backup plans in case things didn't pan out as expected. From 1933 until 1941, luck and good fortune were on their side, making all of their half-assed and improvised decisions look pretty clever and deliberate when they were actually all crazy 50/50 chance gambles that only worked because of fortunate circumstances beyond their control.

From the annexation of the Sudetenland up until the fall of France, Hitler just kept gambling that every subsequent military conquest and demand made of the Anglo-French alliance would be won in a matter of weeks, even when common sense and informed opinion predicted the exact opposite, and to the surprise of everyone (the Nazis included), they kept winning and winning against the odds like a person who flips a coin ten times and manages to have it land on heads every time. They were winning so fast that they didn't have any solid plan in place for how to consolidate their gains and make best use of them in furthering the war effort. Then when they started stalemating in 1941 in Russia, English Channel, and North Africa, they got screwed over because all the Allied powers had been gearing up for total war the entire time while Germany's economy and industry was still operating at a peacetime tempo since Hitler had gambled that the war would have been won by then and thought it was important for civilian morale that consumer products still be sold and rationing not enforced. Even if Hitler had switched over to a wartime economy at that point with rationing and everything, the Allies already had a war-winning head-start that could not be matched. Nazi government and organizational infrastructure was never really improved and terribly inefficient to the end, with huge amounts of corruption, interservice rivalry, and lots of red tape that even Speer was never able to fully dispel.

But during the pre-war years, the rearmament and public works projects did contribute to revitalization of the economy, but I think the cessation of Versailles reparations payments and reoccupation of the Rhineland didn't do that much. Still, it was the same old crony capitalism that had existed in the time of the Kaiser (even with many of the same big industrialist corporations and dynasties), only this time it was more inefficient and corrupt due to the addition of the internally feuding Nazi "golden pheasant" officialdom to the upper crust. Man for man and hour for hour, pre-1918 German economy and manufacturing was more efficient and productive than any time under the Nazi rule.


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## AnOminous (May 9, 2016)

It doesn't really take a genius to see that breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was an absolutely insane blunder that essentially guaranteed the ultimate failure of Nazi Germany.  I prefer that as an example of Hitler error because while some errors are only obvious in retrospect, that was obvious even at the time to people who were actually there.

Subsequent failures like the catastrophic Battle of Stalingrad were nearly inevitable once Hitler made this error against better counsel.  This staggeringly costly failure left Germany and the Axis in general at a substantial material disadvantage in all subsequent encounters.  Also, historically, attacking Russia on its own territory is almost invariably a huge blunder.


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## GS 281 (May 9, 2016)

Idiots enjoy following idiots.


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## BT 075 (May 9, 2016)

Hitler was as lazy as he was intelligent: very. His story is a story of tremendous potential, used in all the wrong ways, and ultimately wasted. I do not believe being intelligent and being an idiot are always mutually exclusive, anyway.

Lately I've been reading a biography of Albert Speer by Gitta Sereny. It's very insightful in showing how a brilliant and talented man, easily one of the finest architects of the last century, was hypnotized and fooled by Hitler's charisma. If Hitler was an idiot, he was a very charming and cunning idiot who was really good at hiding his idiocy, only showing it near the end when he already held all the cards.


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## millais (May 9, 2016)

AnOminous said:


> It doesn't really take a genius to see that breaking the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was an absolutely insane blunder that essentially guaranteed the ultimate failure of Nazi Germany.  I prefer that as an example of Hitler error because while some errors are only obvious in retrospect, that was obvious even at the time to people who were actually there.
> 
> Subsequent failures like the catastrophic Battle of Stalingrad were nearly inevitable once Hitler made this error against better counsel.  This staggeringly costly failure left Germany and the Axis in general at a substantial material disadvantage in all subsequent encounters.  Also, historically, attacking Russia on its own territory is almost invariably a huge blunder.



The breaking of the Soviet-German non aggression pact is made very complicated by the fact that Hitler was convinced Stalin wasn't dumb enough to actually honor the pact and that it was only a matter of time before one side backstabbed the other. The longer Hitler waited, the stronger the USSR became since the Soviets from 1939 to 41 were in the middle of a massive military buildup on the Polish frontier and Germany was constantly being drained by the ongoing fighting on the Channel Front and the Mediterranean. In such a high stakes game of Machiavellian brinkmanship, whoever broke the pact first would have been in a much better short-term position, so that is what Hitler did, sooner rather than later before the Soviets could bring their military preparations in the west up to full speed. But as it turned out, Stalin really WAS dumb enough to sincerely believe in the facade of German goodwill and had no intention of breaking the terms of the pact in spite of all the Soviet generals and ministers constantly urging him to do just that. He honestly thought that Hitler wanted to be best buddies with the Soviets, and said as much to all the Nazi diplomats who visited Moscow. Stalin sounded so genuine about his enthusiasm for the pact that Hitler thought it was too good to be true and became convinced that Stalin was playing him for a sucker, and that just added to Hitler's determination to make the first move. The Russians were and still are the masters of maskirovka, or political deception, which manifests in diplomacy namely in saying one thing while harboring the exact opposite intentions, but the one thing Stalin actually meant was taken by Hitler to be a lie. So he really overthought Stalin's intentions and miscalculated as a result, but just in terms of the arms buildup on the Polish frontier, the decision to go to war was a case of screwed today versus screwed even more tomorrow.

Looking at it from a contemporary military perspective, the Red Army's best (after being gutted by Stalin's purges) had been utterly trounced by a handful of Finns during the Winter War and the Germans still had a recent historical memory of the Imperial Russian Army's catastrophic implosion on the Eastern Front a mere two decades earlier, so from their perspective, it wasn't a totally hopeless longshot to try to make for Moscow.


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## AnOminous (May 9, 2016)

millais said:


> Looking at it from a contemporary military perspective, the Red Army's best (after being gutted by Stalin's purges) had been utterly trounced by a handful of Finns during the Winter War and the Germans still had a recent historical memory of the Imperial Russian Army's catastrophic implosion on the Eastern Front a mere two decades earlier, so from their perspective, it wasn't a totally hopeless longshot to try to make for Moscow.



History is full of such campaigns that start with such promise.

Then winter comes.


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## TowinKarz (May 9, 2016)

millais said:


> Hitler and the Nazi leadership in general were making it up as they went along; they had no long term planning or backup plans in case things didn't pan out as expected. From 1933 until 1941, luck and good fortune were on their side, making all of their half-assed and improvised decisions look pretty clever and deliberate when they were actually all crazy 50/50 chance gambles that only worked because of fortunate circumstances beyond their control..




They were also supremely impatient and would change tactics/priorities based on what made for good propaganda and newspaper  headlines declaring "victory!" coming, while losing sight of the larger strategic picture.  He'd never authorize retreats, even though any good General will tell you a fighting withdrawal IS your best option sometimes. especially when you're up against foes that have the industrial power to outproduce you, every tank saved by being moved to the rear is one you don't have to rebuild from scratch in a factory thousands of miles away.  Nope! Retreat? That's cowardice! And that would be bad for the look of the country, ignorant that it ultimately led to an even WORSE look for the country, T-34s in the streets of Berlin.

The decision to target the RAF early in the Battle of Britain, only to switch targets to urban centers that had vastly diminished military value because they weren't getting their promised-in-two-weeks air superiority as fast as they liked? Allowing the RAF to regroup and replenish their losses? Another example.  Their early victories convinced them that if the enemy didn't fold in about a couple months at most, you were doing it wrong.....

How about the repeated times during the invasion of Russia? Ordering the   changing of objectives  when one particular town or pocket of resistance proved too tough to just roll over? Ultimately wasting time, fuel, supplies and blunting the spearheads of the armies advances until they were stretched so thin they couldn't reach anything?  Or his decision to try and take or hold onto cities for propaganda value when they were already rendered useless since the Soviets moved the industry out ahead of the Germans, or it had already been bombed into the ground?  The Sixth Army froze and starved to death at Stalingrad because to Hitler, REAL Germans don't give up ground, even if it's nothing but shell craters and rubble.  I think you can blame his WWI sensibilities for that, he was convinced they could have won WWI if they'd just hung on to France harder, and was determined that he wouldn't commit the "Shame" of losing ground again, no matter what.

Arguably, Japan was just as reckless and bit off more than they could chew in the Pacific, interpreting the massive gains from initial surprise attacks as the kind of resistance they'd always face, only to find that when their enemies knew they were coming, they could leverage resources and manpower Japan couldn't hope to match against them.  By the time that dawned on them, it was too late to ask for a do over, and the best they could do was try to delay the inevitable as they were pushed back.  Also, like the Nazis , they were drawing strength from an internal ideology (Bushido, vs Nazism) that held they were the TRUE heroes of the fight and their superior will and spirit would somehow make up for the fact that US industry could produce 10 aircraft carriers in the same time frame that they could build one.  Some of the more level-headed Japanese officers even had a name for this tendency to take wild gambles that flew in the face of military logic, hoping for some million to one win.... because glorious Nippon! : "Victory Sickness".

I see a little bit of this attitude every time some hillbilly with a plug of chaw in his mouth leans against his pickup and says he knows EXACTLY how to beat Isis......  if only them dumb pansy-ass liberals would let him.....     Hitler and the Junta running Japan should prove pretty stark examples of why the armchair general is just that....


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## Chaosbandit (May 10, 2016)

I once heard a historian on some program I was watching say that if he had died on August 31, 1939, Hitler would have gone down in German history as their greatest (albeit extremely racist) Chancellor ever.




Wish I could remember the name of the documentary...


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## pinhpanther123 (Dec 5, 2019)

I mean... How an idiot can become the chancellor and after that become fuhrer


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## ProgKing of the North (Dec 6, 2019)

pinhpanther123 said:


> I mean... How an idiot can become the chancellor and after that become fuhrer


Yes, no idiot could ever possibly become leader of a country...


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## Distant Stare (Dec 6, 2019)

From what I know Germany could not have won a vernal European war. They did not have the resources or population. The Russians and Americans absolutely clobbered them. To win the Second World War Gemany would have needed either nuclear nuclear weapons.


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## Кот Бегемот (Dec 6, 2019)

millais said:


> The breaking of the Soviet-German non aggression pact is made very complicated by the fact that Hitler was convinced Stalin wasn't dumb enough to actually honor the pact and that it was only a matter of time before one side backstabbed the other.



There is a very popular theory that's well backed by public facts that Stalin was planning on invading the West, and massed troops on the border, which explains why some rediculous percentage of tanks and ammo were captured right in the first month of war, while absolutely no defensive positions were made despite bases everywhere. There was massive mobilization too, few years prior that brought army strength to something like 9 million. USSR had more tanks, better tanks, more artillery and aircraft and men on 22nd of July, it's hard to believe, but it's true.

Both Nazi Germany and USSR acknowledged the need for "lebenstraum". Stalin and commies called it "world proletariat revolution", not the word "world." But basically, tyranical regimes need ever bigger place and loftier goals.


As to Hitler specifically, Nazi party and nationalist policies were extremely popular and drew record crowds not seen since, anywhere else. Germany needed Hitler or anyone else but that name. Keep in mind that Hitler had plenty of competition who wanted to outdo him and thinned the ranks of his competitors by assassinating them. They were not ideologically different either.

Also, elsewhere in the world, the context was ripe for the war and slaughter. The Holocaust was a small blip compared to calamities prior or to come.


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## Oskar Dirlewanger (Dec 6, 2019)

As the leading Hitler expert on this forum I can give you a conclusive answer:

Hitler was both an idiot and a genius at the same time. The proportions were like 90% genius 10% idiot, but the problem was the idiot part related to very crucial areas (like his own health or general foreign policy sympathies), so it was prominent enough to make him lose the war.

May I also point you toward my thread about Good Books About Hitler


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## Кот Бегемот (Dec 6, 2019)

millais said:


> Looking at it from a contemporary military perspective, the Red Army's best (after being gutted by Stalin's purges) had been utterly trounced by a handful of Finns during the Winter War and the Germans still had a recent historical memory of the Imperial Russian Army's catastrophic implosion on the Eastern Front a mere two decades earlier, so from their perspective, it wasn't a totally hopeless longshot to try to make for Moscow.



this shit keeps coming up, so while unrelated, the human cost wasn't a concern to Stalin. Finns crawled to Cremlin to sign a peace treaty ceding 10% of their country, and they were on the verge of total collapse. Entire population of Finland is less than Moscow. Stalin could easily absorb human losses many times that. On positive side, they fixed a lot of equipment, like dumping multi-turret tanks as stupid, proving that KV1 was great, borrowing the concept of Suomi for PPSh design. It was def net plus for Stalin, predictable loss for Finns who wasted a significant percentage of their population just to accept Stalin's original demand. No Finns won nothing.


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## millais (Dec 6, 2019)

Кот Бегемот said:


> this shit keeps coming up, so while unrelated, the human cost wasn't a concern to Stalin. Finns crawled to Cremlin to sign a peace treaty ceding 10% of their country, and they were on the verge of total collapse. Entire population of Finland is less than Moscow. Stalin could easily absorb human losses many times that. On positive side, they fixed a lot of equipment, like dumping multi-turret tanks as stupid, proving that KV1 was great, borrowing the concept of Suomi for PPSh design. It was def net plus for Stalin, predictable loss for Finns who wasted a significant percentage of their population just to accept Stalin's original demand. No Finns won nothing.


Yes, I agree that the losses suffered in the Soviet invasion of Finland was not unbearable for Stalin and he did achieve what he wanted in the war. I was just making the point that from the Western and German point of view, they saw the Red Army's poor performance in Finland as evidence of the Red Army's qualitative inferiority when compared to the Western European military forces. That misjudgment contributed to Hitler and his general staff's belief that they could defeat the Red Army, take Moscow, etc in six weeks


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## murgatroid (Dec 6, 2019)

Gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet.


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## Cheerlead-in-Chief (Dec 6, 2019)

He did attempt to invade Russia, following after Napoleon. 
However, in the books I read about him, he was a master manipulator and managed to get many people to fund for him. So, maybe.


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## byuu (Dec 6, 2019)

murgatroid said:


> Gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet.


And then you get the omelette burned and have to kill yourself.


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## DocHoliday1977 (Dec 6, 2019)

Yes.


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## Manah (Dec 6, 2019)

How do people keep finding these years old threads and reviving them?


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## ProgKing of the North (Dec 6, 2019)

Manah said:


> How do people keep finding these years old threads and reviving them?


It was bumped by a newfag with a pepe avatar*, seems likely he just did a search for "Hitler" and bumped the first one that struck his fancy 

*Kiss my ass


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## mindlessobserver (Dec 7, 2019)

Mapache said:


> Hitler was an incompotent daydreamer.
> Hitler could have won the war if he after conquering frace, norway, Poland and czechlovakia decided to declare peace with the allies instead of pushing forward into russia. He should have used that time to build up an army worthy to invade and decimate russia.
> Or he could have bombed Russian farms and let the ussr turn inward. Either way he was only talk and none of the doing.



He did actually try and make peace with the Allies, or more broadly, the UK, after the surrender of France. Part of the reason the Battle of Britain and the plans for the invasion of England came across as an incoherent mess was because they were. Germany had no plans to invade the UK because they assumed they had already won. But Britain point blank refused to peace out and continued with the blockade of Germany, and even went so far as to start sinking French Navy ships in the off chance that they might be handed over to the Germans. The Royal Navy also continued to use the Italian Navy for target practice at Taranto and the Siege of Malta. 

As for Germany/Soviet relations, both Stalin and Hitler fully expected they would go to war with each other. All things considered, the decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 was a sound one. There was no immediate danger from the UK in the West. Germany's only major threat was Russia. A Russia with its Army in total disarray thanks to Comrade Stalin purging the entire officer corps. Its important to remember that in the first year of the War the Soviet Army was absolutely creamed. The issue Hitler ran into was that the supply lines became too long, and of course, the winter became unusually fierce, even for Russia. Even then it was a very near thing. He might have even pulled it off had he ordered his Army to move straight for Baku and the Oil Fields rather then focusing on Stalingrad so hard. 

Which was his major flaw. Hitler was a great ORGANIZER. He knew how to set up institutions and put plans in motion at a genius level. He was a terrible tactical commander however, and all his great blunders came from attempting to micromanage his generals at the unit level rather then trusting them to implement his vision. He also wasted stupendous human and financial resources in his ethnic purges. Just imagine how many divisions he could have raised and armed from the 10 million "undesirables" he purged instead.


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## Feline Supremacist (Dec 7, 2019)

He's an idiot because he lost. If he had won he'd be a genius.


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## ZeCommissar (Dec 7, 2019)

mindlessobserver said:


> . He also wasted stupendous human and financial resources in his ethnic purges. Just imagine how many divisions he could have raised and armed from the 10 million "undesirables" he purged instead.



"If the Nazis weren't Nazis they would have won"

The Ukrainians were for the most part willing and ready to collaborate with the Nazis since they hated the Soviets for the Holodomor and wanted their own state. However as we all know Nazis weren't very....kind in occupied Soviet lands to the point that when the Red Army returned they instead were greeted as liberators and had over 4.5 million people join the Red Army. This is nothing to say of other ethnic groups that could have been conscripted/convinced to fight against the Soviets that were purged.

People that say "he should have just ignored Russia" don't realize that in doing so we aren't talking about Nazis anymore. Hitlers plan was getting Lebensraum at all costs. The German method in Winter '41 of just "attack, attack, attack" when they were right outside of Moscow in a cold ass winter with tired troops instead of just digging in and waiting for the inevitable Soviet counterattack also shows how naive OberKommando could be. They could have bled the Soviets dry from said counterattack and try to resume operations next year after taking the oilfields...which they also failed at.

Hell even if they took Moscow the war wouldn't have just ended there. Sure they might have been in a more favorable position, but they would have had to push the Soviets all the way into the urals before they could even dare claim victory. Stalin would have been just as stubborn as Hitler, and at best the Germans could have hoped to just make a wall of troops infront of the Urals and hold until the Soviets had literally nothing left to counterattack with. They Germans had the very real possibility of losing before that point even if they took Moscow.

The Nazis could have probably won the Blitz in Britain if they crippled the RAFs ablity to fly instead of going into an autistic fit because they got bombed in a war, which is what made them switch to civilian targets. "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them"

The Nazis were idiots because they rarely looked at things in the pragmatic view when it came to winning a war.


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## Pixy (Dec 9, 2019)

pinhpanther123 said:


> I mean... How an idiot can become the chancellor and after that become fuhrer


You need to understand that he was *never elected* for such a position. The Nazi party, although the largest party in the Reichstag, *never had a majority, even when they had their largest electoral victory*. They had to forge a coalition with the Conservatives most of the time.

Since Hitler had repeatedly thrown a fit in past governments over never being appointed Chancellor, after the November 1932 election, the Conservatives convinced President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler Chancellor because they thought they could control him.

edit: In regards to him becoming Fuhrer, that was because Hindenburg died in August 1933, and Hitler "legally" usurped the powers of the President. By then, the Nazis had already achieved political dominance and were enacting Gleichschaltung via the _Reichstag Fire Decree _and the _Enabling Act. _As they formed the government (and had banned every other political party/forced them to dissolve), the _Enabling Act_ allowed them to pass legislation without involvement of the Reichstag, which had become a rubber stamp thanks to their efforts to undermine German democracy.


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## Кот Бегемот (Dec 9, 2019)

ZeCommissar said:


> The Ukrainians were for the most part willing and ready to collaborate with the Nazis since they hated the Soviets for the Holodomor and wanted their own state. However as well all know Nazis weren't very....kind in occupied Soviet lands to the point that when the Red Army returned they instead were greeted as liberators and had over 4.5 million people join the Red Army. This is nothing to say of other ethnic groups that could have been conscripted/convinced to fight against the Soviets that were purged.



Ukrainians weren't the only ones, there were Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonias, Beloruss, Crimean Tatars, Don kossaks, Georgians, Armenians .... they didn't call it "red terror" for nothing. Bolsheviks up to 1939 went on bloody rampage and pissed off every neighbor, never mind their own people.

One telling figure was that over 3x x-Soviets fought against the Soviet Union compared to the civil war 20 years prior. That tells you how sick people were of executions, Gulags and collectivization.

Another issue that Soviets had, was complete apathy of people to join the guerilla warfare on Nazi occupied lands. Very little interest. Germans were grooming the occupied lands as their slave/resource base, while commies didn't care. Villages starved, so what? Soviets had special forces that parachuted behind enemy lines to terrorize locals and to force them into joining Nazi resistance at gun point.

Ukraian Galician Waffen SS was formed to fight communists only, not allies. When they surrendered to allies, they were interned, cleared of war crimes and let resettle far away from the commies. 

If you want to draw lines, USSR entered the WWII in September of 1939 on the side of Axis, annexed half a Poland working hand in hand with Nazi troops, invaded Finland, was kicked out of League of Nations ...  if you want to pin shit on Hitler as the only "evil doer" that's not even half of it.


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## ZeCommissar (Dec 9, 2019)

Кот Бегемот said:


> Ukrainians weren't the only ones, there were Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonias, Beloruss, Crimean Tatars, Don kossaks, Georgians, Armenians .... they didn't call it "red terror" for nothing. Bolsheviks up to 1939 went on bloody rampage and pissed off every neighbor, never mind their own people.
> 
> One telling figure was that over 3x x-Soviets fought against the Soviet Union compared to the civil war 20 years prior. That tells you how sick people were of executions, Gulags and collectivization.
> 
> ...



Which makes it even more retarded in the way the Nazis dropped the ball when it came to occupying "soviet" lands that the soviets had just annexed not too long prior. The way the Nazis acted literally defies logic. 

Honestly I feel bad for Eastern Europeans during WW2 (and most of history for that matter) in the sense that they always seem to be caught in between and exploited by the giants around them. Soviets came in raped, executed, and starved until the Nazis came in and raped, executed, and starved; just for the Soviets to come right back and rape, execute, and starve. Then they set up communist puppet states that were "nations" in name only and were really just used as a buffer against NATO.


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## Кот Бегемот (Dec 9, 2019)

ZeCommissar said:


> Which makes it even more exceptional in the way the Nazis dropped the ball when it came to occupying "soviet" lands that the soviets had just annexed not too long prior. The way the Nazis acted literally defies logic.



so yes, there were several periods. In the beginning of the campaign, Nazis didn't terrorize locals unless they were jews or gipsies. A lot of locals welcomed them as liberators and in fact Nazi's did know and used that sentiment against communists. Nazis knew about Holodomor and presented it as predominantly jewish orchestrated event. There are propaganada posters to back this. They pressed jews-communists angle well.

In the beginning of Barbarosa, Nazis were completely surprised how many Red Army units surrendered, so much that they had absolutely no logistics to support it. From some memoirs, the numbers were so great that front units simply disarmed surrendering troops and let them walk West with their hands up. There were no provisions how to house and feed thousands of prisoners.

Later in the war, some on occupied lands became disenchanted with occupation seeing that they are basically a slave resource, not a country with the Reich and with war not going well, Nazi's milked them as much as they could. The life on occupied lands was rough, but at least predictable.

In the end, there was scorched earth. Nazis also did take seriously guerilla warfare and dished out punishment galore for any community that wanted to help resistance.





ZeCommissar said:


> Honestly I feel bad for Eastern Europeans during WW2 (and most of history for that matter) in the sense that they always seem to be caught in between and exploited by the giants around them. Soviets came in raped, executed, and starved until the Nazis came in and raped, executed, and starved; just for the Soviets to come right back and rape, execute, and starve. Then they set up communist puppet states that were "nations" in name only and were really just used as a buffer against NATO.



From my family recollections,  SS did most of the jew killing but regular Wehrmacht was ok. Most soldiers were the same poor bastards that got conscripted into the Red Army, i.e. at the gun point. A lot of soldiers shared their chocolate rations with kids and missed their home a lot.

A lot of Germans who got conscripted were also from country side, i.e. as far from politics as you can get. Basically working on the farm, minding your business and raising livestock. Then one day they send you Gott knows where to die.

Soviets did massive scorched earth. In fact when retreating, all political and other prisoners in jails were executed wholesale. By the end of the war Nazi's did the same scorched earth.

Between Nazis and Soviets Poland/Ukraine lost over 40% of the population.


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## Chive Turkey (Dec 10, 2019)

> But did that person go about the right way. He did overhaul Germany


Through extensive military keynesianism that was predicated on winning major wars of conquest in the near future to keep the ball rolling. Germany would've collapsed under its own new, militaristic weight hadn't there been a war, and the war they pursued would've ended in quagmire or disaster like what happened historically. 


> made the autobahn


Not really. Steps to build autobahns had been taken in the 20s, but they were frustrated by lack of manpower and funds. Ironically, one of the reasons for that was the Nazi's, who voted against new funds along with other 'workers parties', because they thought cars were decadent. While you can credit Hitler with throwing enough money and material at the Autobahn to make it happen, it wasn't the act of a visionary as much as a shrewd politician, considering he blatantly stole the idea and put his own name on it. 


> and ludicrous weapons


Problem being that the projects cheerleader by him were the silliest ones, like the super-duper heavy tanks. The German military rocketry project had started long before he came to power, and continued unchanged afterwards, except they received some more cash (because you'd be an idiot not to when you're planning wars). Hitler really didn't have any personal involvement with their work, beyond praising the inventions they presented him with. If anything, Nazi meddling in the work of the rocket scientists would only mess things up, like when Werner von Braun was arrested by the SS 1944 for really trivial shit and Hitler had to be convinced to let him go. 


> but he did also make many controversial decisions, like killing Jews, homosexuals and anybody that wanted to make a pre-internet tumblr.


 it wasn't just 'controversial', it was often impractical and downright counterproductive. The Nazis' race autism and casual brutality alienated and antagonized alot of occupied peoples that could've been helpful allies had the Germans been more pragmatic. Operation Barbarossa might've went differently if they courted anti-Soviet sentiment better, rather than treating most of the people as subhuman animals and revealing themselves as a worse alternative to Stalin. To quote Talleyrand: 'It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake'.

I think the biggest problem with partitioning out praise or condemnation to Hitler for specific things is that, while he was a dictator, he didn't micromanage his party, let alone the entire country, nor could he have. There was quite a bit of factionalism making use of his whims to advance their own agendas, and for a lot of projects and decisions he wasn't really the arch-mastermind as the rubber stamp for what people under him had planned out.


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## Tecumseh (Dec 17, 2019)

He was a definite drug addict by the end.


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## Still Anonymous For This (Dec 17, 2019)

millais said:


> Yes, I agree that the losses suffered in the Soviet invasion of Finland was not unbearable for Stalin and he did achieve what he wanted in the war. I was just making the point that from the Western and German point of view, they saw the Red Army's poor performance in Finland as evidence of the Red Army's qualitative inferiority when compared to the Western European military forces. That misjudgment contributed to Hitler and his general staff's belief that they could defeat the Red Army, take Moscow, etc in six weeks



This point really can't be driven hard enough.  In the 1930s, very few people believed the Soviet Union was going to become the preeminent power in Europe in the next decade or two.  Not only had the Soviets suffered horrid losses during the Winter War, but two decades prior they had essentially lost their first war against an emerging Polish Republic during the Polish-Soviet war - where they had to cede territory and influence to Poland: a nation that hadn't existed in over a hundred years.  Everybody thought the Soviet Union was a house of straw waiting for a good fire and Germany was apt to be that fire. 

Was Hitler an idiot?  In some ways, yes.  Outside of the truly horrific things he did, I can't really judge him for the actions he took: we're looking at his expansion in the early war years through the advantage of history.  We know now that Germany had lost the war in 1939: no matter what they did, they were _royally fucked_.  They just didn't know it yet; their early victories gave them false hopes.  Every leader, no matter how large or small, makes critical errors.

Case in point: one of my favorite historical leaders was Józef Piłsudski. He was a good statesman (and took a mean portrait) and saw the writing on the wall during the 1930s with the rise of Germany and the USSR. He's one of the primary reasons why the Polish Army was able to hold off for as long as it did, and even after losing, still provide the fourth largest contingent of troops for the Allies during the war: providing more men than France. He pursued the idea of _Międzymorze_, the Polish idea of an Eastern European confederation comprising of Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, etc.  A confederation that could combine resources and troops to stop any future German or Russian meddling. 

Unfortunately Piłsudski was a Pole first and a nice guy second. He routinely fucked over the Ukrainians and other possible partners any time it suited Polish interests to do so. Even though he had a strong idea and a reasonable chance of pulling his plan off, he traded long-term gains for short-term gains. He was more interested in furthering Polish interests than those of his partners. If he _had  _been a better leader, I imagine Hitler would have been told to go fuck himself and find his own Sudetenland in 1938.  Which could have led to an early victory over Germany: which leads to a stunted USSR, lacking the resources and manpower of Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  

One can dream I guess.


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## Non-Expert! (Dec 18, 2019)

No.


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## Lamaze-P Stan (Dec 18, 2019)

Smart during his beginning stages and literally did more of the war work than his generals. It all went downwards after Operation Barbarossa and Invasion of the USSR


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## Puck (Dec 19, 2019)

Yes

Both the war in Russia and in britain were winnable in their early stages.  The mark of a good head of state  is the ability to take a step back and admit what u dont know and let people who do take point.


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## Unyielding Stupidity (Dec 19, 2019)

He was simultaneously pretty damn smart, and an absolute retard. He managed to become leader of a major power (something that isn't exactly easy), and was very good at encouraging people to support him. However, he also made several major errors, from firing Hjalmar Schacht because Schacht thought Germany's rearmament would fuck up the economy (Spoiler - it did, and Germany's dire economic situation was part of the reason as to why they were fully pushed into invading Poland as soon as they did), to the myriad of issues they made invading the Soviets, to literally being on drugs for a notable portion of the war.

Germany most likely couldn't have won WWII anyway. They should've just waited for Stalin to go attack some neutral third party and end up getting in a war with the US/UK/France, and then attacked the Soviets.


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## Basil II (Dec 19, 2019)

Approx. 59 Robins said:


> He was simultaneously pretty damn smart, and an absolute exceptional individual. He managed to become leader of a major power (something that isn't exactly easy), and was very good at encouraging people to support him. However, he also made several major errors, from firing Hjalmar Schacht because Schacht thought Germany's rearmament would fuck up the economy (Spoiler - it did, and Germany's dire economic situation was part of the reason as to why they were fully pushed into invading Poland as soon as they did), to the myriad of issues they made invading the Soviets, to literally being on drugs for a notable portion of the war.
> 
> Germany most likely couldn't have won WWII anyway. They should've just waited for Stalin to go attack some neutral third party and end up getting in a war with the US/UK/France, and then attacked the Soviets.


Stalin already invaded Poland and Finland while Western Europe did nothing.


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## qu_rahn (Dec 20, 2019)

Hitler was a faggot


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## Terrorist (Dec 20, 2019)

He was right about the problems and even some of the solutions (say what you will about the tenets of national socialism...but they’re actually pretty good). His problem was bad strategic/tactical decision making to achieve his goals.

 Could’ve done great things for Germany if he hadn’t invaded Europe. Of course, I’m Polish so I might be a little biased against that.


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## ProgKing of the North (Dec 20, 2019)

Terrorist said:


> (say what you will about the tenets of national socialism...but they’re actually pretty good).


Genuine question...how do the tenets of national socialism make my life better? 

Like, I'm not a fan of getting kicked off Twitter for misgendering trannies, but it's a hell of a lot better than getting sent to a concentration camp because I criticized the government


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## Terrorist (Dec 21, 2019)

ProgKing of the North said:


> Genuine question...how do the tenets of national socialism make my life better?
> 
> Like, I'm not a fan of getting kicked off Twitter for misgendering trannies, but it's a hell of a lot better than getting sent to a concentration camp because I criticized the government



You act like that's the only thing to it. Look at how NS aimed to help Germans instead of smite its enemies and get back to me.


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## KimCoppolaAficionado (Dec 21, 2019)

Terrorist said:


> You act like that's the only thing to it. Look at how NS aimed to help Germans instead of smite its enemies and get back to me.


No, you can't just say "but ignore how it killed all of its political enemies and large swathes of the population".  Purging "undesirables" (political dissidents, Jews, homosexuals, cripples, the mentally ill or disabled, and "surplus population" in areas targeted for lebensraum) is hard-baked into National Socialist ideology.  If you want to say "National Socialism was great and did great things", you need to construct a defense for the systemic purges and concentration/death camps.


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## Mimekiller (Dec 21, 2019)

A fucking syphilitic retard who let Jewish banker paranoia open up the eastern front and ground his troops into a fine powder.


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## Cpl. Long Dong Silver (Dec 21, 2019)

Hitler was an idiot because he just talked about exterminating the jews but never did it


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## snailslime (Dec 21, 2019)

he may have been intelligent but he goofed with the wrong people, and pissed too many countries off


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## ProgKing of the North (Dec 21, 2019)

Cpl. Long Dong Silver said:


> Hitler was an idiot because he just talked about exterminating the jews but never did it


He did his best, dammit!


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## B. F. Bugleberry (Dec 21, 2019)

Hitler was doin a'right being some sort of avatar for the far right zeitgeist, just observing and becoming a focal point for all the rage and chaos that followed the first world war. He could get people on board for his wacky adventures because he was giving them what their subconscious was always craving.

But then he stopped surfing the tidal wave of far right fun times, and climbed on the white horse of amphetamines. A rookie mistake.


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