Was Hitler an idiot?

[LegoTugboat]

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?

 

[autisticdragonkin]

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

 

[Mapache]

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.

 

[millais]

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.

 

[AnOminous]

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.

 

[GS 281]

Idiots enjoy following idiots.

 

[BT 075]

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.

 

[millais]

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.

 

[AnOminous]

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.

 

[TowinKarz]

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....

 

[Chaosbandit]

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...

 

[pinhpanther123]

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

 

[ProgKing of the North]

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...

 

[Distant Stare]

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.

 

[Кот Бегемот]

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.

 

[Oskar Dirlewanger]

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

 

[Кот Бегемот]

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.

 

[millais]

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

 

[murgatroid]

Gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

 

[Cheerlead-in-Chief]

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.