None of this is meant in any way to denigrate the contributions of the Western allies, which were vital to victory. Lend-Lease aid was of pivotal importance to the Soviet Union, not so much in 1941–1942 as in 1943–1944. Without aid from the Western allies, the Soviet economy would have been even more heavily burdened, while the mobility that allowed the Red Army to fight and win large-scale offensives in 1944 would not have existed. Most probably, without Lend-Lease vehicles, the crushing Soviet drives of that year would have stalled at an early stage, having quickly outrun their logistic tail, thus allowing the Germans time to withdraw, avoid encirclements, and prepare new defensive positions. Allied military actions also came at key points and drew off scarce German resources, while the air war over Germany not only contributed to the Soviet ability to achieve air superiority over the Ostfront but also had an enormous impact on restricting and then crippling the German war economy. The Soviets also enjoyed the advantage of essentially fighting on only one front. Without Western aid, Stalin might well have had to fight another year in order to achieve victory, if his system had survived in the first place, or he conceivably would have sought a negotiated way out of the war. Still, the Red Army (and the Soviet civilian population in general) suffered enormous losses. Although the generally accepted post-Communist figure for total Soviet military deaths has hovered around 11.5 million (or 39 percent of those mobilized during the war), with a total of 29 million military casualties, other estimates of total Soviet armed forces dead have ranged as high as 26 million. At the highest end of the estimates, then, ten Ivans were killed for every Landser lost on the Ostfront. There have been equal discrepancies with regard to civilian deaths (which were not all caused by direct German action), with the estimates ranging from 16.9 to 24 million, with a total demographic loss in the Soviet Union during World War II at anywhere from 35 to 43 million. In addition, the Soviet Union was left physically in ruins, with an extraordinary catalog of destruction: seventy thousand villages, seventeen hundred towns, thirty-two thousand factories, forty thousand miles of railroad track, and over a third of Soviet wealth destroyed. While American GDP had grown anywhere from 50 to 72 percent and German between 14 and 23 percent, Soviet GDP between 1940 and 1942 fell by 34 percent, with a total decline between 1940 and 1945 of 18 percent. By any reckoning, the devastation wrought by the Germans in the Soviet Union had been appalling.49
If Soviet forces fought on a few days after the official end of the war in order finally to destroy the Nazi beast, the question remains as to why the Germans fought on in such hopeless circumstances. Hitler, of course, had vowed no repetition of November 1918 and had held to his conviction with extraordinary determination, long after prospects for a military victory had vanished. But that begs the question of why he was able to continue fighting, of why his system did not collapse. In part, he profited from the caution of his enemies. The broad front strategy that both pursued in 1944 was militarily and politically cautious. In this fear of taking any risks, both the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans betrayed great respect for the Wehrmacht, which, although battered, was still capable of springing nasty surprises. Terror and the willingness of the Nazi regime to inflict it on its own citizens also played an important role. Average Germans, in contrast to the Soviet population under Stalin’s arbitrary and violent rule, had hardly been exposed to systematic terror during the course of the Third Reich, but now, at the end of a lost war, they experienced a noticeable increase in violence and coercion. Despite signs of apathy, war-weariness, and resignation, they nonetheless responded not by revolting (as in 1918) but by continuing the struggle. Certainly, in the east, Soviet atrocities and Goebbels’s lurid propaganda played a role in stiffening the backs of people who might otherwise have given it up. The very brutalization of war seemed to play a role as well, as many Landsers, their feelings stunted by the hardships they had suffered, lacked empathy for German civilians as they retreated. Not only did they seem indifferent to the destruction around them, but it was also hard for them to visualize an alternative. Although some acted to defend their homes or allow their compatriots to get to the west and others, especially officers and younger Landsers, resisted from ideological conviction or Nazi indoctrination, most simply sought to escape war with their own lives. Beyond Hitler, the key responsibility for the senseless continuation of war, however, lies with the weak and irresponsible military leadership that failed to act to oppose his obviously destructive plans and orders. In this, they were abetted by people such as Albert Speer and other technocratic and industrial figures who at all costs kept the armaments economy producing the weapons necessary to maintain the fight. Ultimately, then, the Third Reich expired, not with the “magnificent mystery of the dying hero,” or as a result of “heroic idealism,” but as a sordid act of Hitlerian willed self-destruction in which far too many people who knew better participated.50
Conclusion
Its impressive blitzkrieg triumphs over Poland and France obscured the reality that, when the war began in September 1939, Germany had no clear economic, military, or technical superiority over its Western adversaries. The furious rearmament effort of the 1930s had simply allowed the Germans to make up the vast gulf produced by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Further, the war that did result was, from the perspective expressed in Mein Kampf, the wrong war. Hitler had originally intended an Anglo-German alliance to confront the Judeo-Bolshevik threat but in 1939 reversed himself and allied with the Soviet Union in an effort to forestall an Anglo-French declaration of war. After the quick destruction of Poland, then, the war that followed was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and against the wrong enemy. This conjunction of circumstances has led many historians to conclude one of two things: either rapid rearmament generated an overheated economy that threatened a domestic crisis and, thus, pushed Hitler toward war, or he simply gambled that, having failed to oppose earlier territorial grabs and with little leverage now that Germany’s pact with the Soviet Union made it blockade-proof, the Western democracies would once again stand aside in the face of aggression. Both interpretations contain a kernel of truth, for Hitler did make a rational assessment of economic and strategic factors before plunging ahead, but both are incomplete. What they lack, as Adam Tooze has suggested, is the racial-ideological dimension.