Fleeting, perhaps, as it was, Hitler in 1942 had one last chance to achieve some sort of triumph that might have allowed a stalemated war, at least until the United States developed the atomic bomb. Militarily and economically, then, 1942 was the key year of the war. Hitler, however, in late July squandered whatever slim chances he had for achieving victory militarily in Russia by splitting his already inadequate forces in the vain hope of achieving simultaneously goals that could have been attained only sequentially, if at all. Economically, too, Germany wasted its apparent advantage, finding itself not only being outproduced by the Anglo-Americans, which was perhaps to be expected, but also being overtaken by a truly stupendous effort on the part of the Soviet Union. The Russians ultimately could not sustain this superhuman effort, and, by 1944, the German war economy had pulled even with Soviet production, but by then it was too late, for American output alone swamped the Germans. Unfortunately, 1942 proved decisive in the other war as welclass="underline" the success of the Ostheer through much of the year provided the opportunity to complete the Final Solution as the Nazis made a concerted effort to kill the Jews in their sphere of influence. The systematic murders of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union, the often ad hoc killings at the local level in many areas of occupied Europe, and the efforts of Nazi bureaucrats at the RSHA and the Foreign Office to get allies and satellite nations to hand over their Jews merged to produce a crash program of mass murder undertaken under the cover of German military success. By the autumn of 1943, even as the war had turned decisively against the Reich, Himmler could boast that the Jewish problem had largely been solved in the areas under German control and that what remained was primarily a mopping-up operation.13
That same year, 1943, witnessed an increasing interaction of the various fronts—eastern, Mediterranean, Atlantic, the skies over Germany—that pressured even further the already strained German resources. With Hitler unable or unwilling to mobilize the German people as ruthlessly as Stalin had in the Soviet Union, the German economy became increasingly dependent on forced labor from the east and slave workers from the concentration camps. By 1944, Hitler’s last remaining hope was to defeat the anticipated Anglo-American invasion in the west and then, in a repeat of the scenario of 1940–1941, turn once more to the east. This meant a reversal in the priority of the fronts, with disastrous results. Because of constant, enormous Soviet pressure in the winter of 1943–1944, the Wehrmacht could never transfer sufficiently large forces to the west to ensure the defeat of the Allied invasion, while the Ostheer found itself with insufficient resources to stabilize the front in the east. Like a rubber band stretched too far, German defenses had to break, and they did so spectacularly in the summer of 1944. Even as Anglo-American forces struggled to escape the narrow confines of Normandy, the Soviets launched one of the most successful blitzkrieg operations of the war in Belorussia, a triumph that effectively ended any lingering hopes Hitler might have retained about stalemating the war. Despite the brave talk of miracle weapons and a split in the enemy coalition, the last nine months of the war were more about Hitler’s fanatic determination to prevent another November 1918 than any realistic chance to extricate Germany from its fate. The result, however, was not only a radicalization of the Volksgemeinschaft, as Nazi violence and terror now turned inward, but also the large-scale destruction of German cities and infrastructure as well as the death of millions of people. True to his ideology, Hitler refused to abandon the Darwinistic struggle that he held to be the key to history, nor did he waver racially, insisting in his last testament that the Nazi race laws be upheld, and urging the German people to continue the struggle against the Jewish conspiracy.
From the outset, the German invasion of the Soviet Union had been an enormous gamble that depended for success primarily on the Soviets reacting to the shock of initial defeat as the French had, by ceasing resistance. Unlike the blitzkrieg campaign against France, however, Barbarossa had no clear Schwerpunkt, nor was it likely that the bulk of the Red Army could be trapped and destroyed in the first weeks of the conflict. Hitler also grossly underestimated the political and economic strength and resilience of the Stalinist system as well as the resources that would be necessary to win in the Soviet Union. Although Richard Overy has made a very cogent argument that Allied success in World War II depended on the cumulative impact of narrow triumphs in a number of key areas, the fact remains that the Germans always had only a very slight chance of triumphing in any of these sectors. Their early success owed as much to their enemies’ weaknesses as to their own strengths, a fact that has tended to obscure the hard reality facing them. In terms of population, available military manpower, and access to key raw materials, Nazi Germany had no clear advantage over Britain and France, let alone when facing a possible coalition of enemies including the United States and the Soviet Union. Hitler was, in fact, a leader with great ambitions to overturn and remake the European political, economic, and social system but whose vehicle of choice was a medium-size European power with few allies of any consequence. This fundamental weakness was revealed as early as 1940. The best chance for Germany to have won the war, if such a possibility existed, was likely a pursuit of the Mediterranean strategy urged on him by naval leaders and some at the OKW. This, however, would have forced Hitler into dependence on weak and unreliable allies (as he well knew), dispersed German strength, and contradicted his own ideology, which stressed the importance of Lebensraum in the east.
The “right” war, for Hitler, was always the one against the Soviet Union, while all the other conflicts were secondary in importance. He meant finally to solve the “German question,” the inability or unwillingness of the British and French to accommodate the Reich in the European balance of power, by establishing German hegemony over Europe, then using a German-dominated Europe to meet the rising threat from the United States. Further, resolving the German question raised the possibility of settling the Jewish question. Nazism had always been fueled by a complex mixture of resentment, fear, and idealism: resentment at those who had supposedly undermined Germany in World War I; fear of the alleged Jewish-Bolshevik threat to destroy the German people; and a utopian vision of a harmonious racial community that would redeem past injustices and suffering. For Hitler, the purpose of a state was to promote and guarantee the existence of the Volksgemeinschaft. To do so required war to conquer the resources necessary to sustain the struggle for national life. Acquiring this Lebensraum, however, opened the possibility of ensuring Germany’s future, not only economically but also racially.