The Story of the Fall of the Nazis and 4 Explanations for Their Defeat

The Second World War may be the most interesting and most impactful war in the history of the world. It was a brutal war like all others, but unlike any other war in history this was not simply a war for just territory and status, it was also an ideological war. A war where principles such as eugenics and racism were central to the Nazi war strategy and horrific crimes were committed as a result. It’s not surprising that this conflict is often called the ‘good war’, because it really seemed to be good versus evil. But it is important to emphasize that good triumphing over evil was never self-evident during the war. In fact, for most of the conflict it seemed to be the case that the Nazis had won. Obviously, they didn’t, and there were several reasons why they eventually lost. In the following post we’ll look at four of the main reasons why the Nazis lost the war, starting by giving an overview of the conflict to understand what happened in the Second World War and why.

 

Rise and Fall

Nazi Germany’s Rise

After the end of the First World War, Germany was devastated. The country was an economic disaster, mainly because of the very harsh demands imposed on Germany because of the Versailles Treaty, which stated that Germany owed France and other countries reparations for starting the First World War. The German public was upset about this. Combined with the fact that the Weimar Republic was not performing well, the people were longing for real change, and there was one man who promised he would provide it. After some slight setbacks and failed coups that made him end up in jail for a while, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party quickly rose to power. He did this mainly by promising economic recovery, the thing most Germans wanted most. Unemployment numbers in Germany were sky-high because of the economic issues, and Hitler promised to fix them and provide everyone with a job. Little did they know what kind of jobs he had in mind. In opposition to the Versailles Treaty, Hitler ordered the rebuilding of the German military. Other countries saw this and became concerned. They wanted him to stop, but he refused and because they did not want to risk another war so soon after the last one, they went for the appeasement approach, which meant that they told Hitler that what he was doing was okay as long as he didn’t go any further. Of course, Hitler continued to go further and further, until war finally broke out anyway.

The Second World War truly broke out when Hitler invaded Poland. He had already taken Austria and a part of the Sudetenland, and the British and the French simply let him do this in the hope he wouldn’t go further. The allies knew there was the possibility that Hitler would not stop, and decided to set Poland as a tripwire. If Hitler decided to invade Poland, England and France would declare war on Germany. It didn’t take long for Germany to overstep their agreements again and Hitler burst into Poland with his German blitzkrieg operation.

On the Eastern side, Stalin and his Soviet Army also invaded Poland, splitting the conquered land 50/50 with Germany. The Germans and Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact which stated that they would not fight each other. Although Hitler later broke this agreement when he initiated Operation Barbarossa, it did make Stalin help Hitler with the invasion of Poland.

When Poland was conquered, Hitler set his eyes on the other side of Germany’s border: France. In the First World War, Germany had also tried to invade France, but failed. Now Hitler wanted to make amends for this and successfully invade France this time, and he did. With their blitzkrieg operation, the Germans went right through the Ardennes, a terrain formerly believed to be impossible to be crossed by tanks and artillery. The Germans proved however that it was possible and caught the French and British by total surprise. France surrendered within 46 days following the example of Holland and Belgium. Now Hitler had the whole left flank of Europe under his control, and he could focus on bringing down his most dangerous adversary across the channel: Britain.

Because of the country being on an island, England has always been extremely difficult to invade, with the only successful example of an invasion of Britain being the Roman one in the year 43. With a channel and a strong navy to protect it, Germany could never invade Britain by sea, so they had to think of another plan to get the British Empire to its knees. They came up with the idea of bombing important British locations that were used for war production. When Britain would be weakened enough, they’d invade with their navy.

Eventually, Hitler found out that this would never work, so he started bombing British cities like London, to destroy British Morale. This didn’t have the effect he hoped it would, because these bombings would only strengthen Britain’s morale, and played a crucial role in their decision to start bombing Germany as retribution, which did negatively impact them.

After he realized that Britain wouldn’t budge, Hitler became impatient and made the worst mistake of the war: starting a two-front war. Russia and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, and Russia therefore thought that Germany was friendly towards Russia. Little did they know that Hitler had planned an invasion of Russia all along and believed the time finally to be ripe for that invasion to take place. Stalin was flabbergasted when he heard that the Germans had invaded his country (although he received numerous warnings from numerous different sources, some even including the exact date Hitler would invade).

At first, the invasion of Russia went spectacularly well for Germany. They acquired victory after victory, with the element of surprise working in their favor, and with the Russian army simply not prepared to defend itself. However, in one battle the whole tide suddenly shifted. Before it, the Germans were invincible, but after, the Russians held the upper hand for the rest of the war. That city was Stalingrad, a town where some of the most gruesome fighting in any war in history took place.

 

Nazi Germany’s fall

Stalingrad was the biggest turning point in the Second World War. Up until this point, Germany seemed invincible, they hadn’t suffered any major defeat yet, and their enemies didn’t believe one would come soon either. So, the Russian victory at the battle of Stalingrad did more than push the German soldiers back; it showed the Russians, and all the other allies, that Germany wasn’t invincible, and that they could win if they fought hard enough.

Stalingrad, a city situated on the left side of the river Volga, was totally destroyed as a result of the fighting. People were killed in mass numbers and if you didn’t die from the fighting, you’d eventually die of the devastating cold. The deaths were so numerous and so swift that even Russian soldiers were considered Stalingrad veterans if they lasted more than three days. The average lifespan of a Russian soldier in the city was roughly one to two days.

Eventually, after many months of fighting, the Russians encircled and trapped the German troops in Operation Uranus. The Germans were in a desperate situation, and the only sensible way forward at this point would be to surrender and hope that the Russians treated their prisoners of war nicely (which they certainly didn’t). But Hitler wouldn’t have any of this. He ordered General Paulus, the German commander in Stalingrad, that he must fight on and surrender was not an option. If he had to, he had to fight till the last man. This order came also as the result of Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, telling Hitler that he could supply the entrapped soldiers at Stalingrad with his Airforce, which turned out not to be true at all. He could get some supplies into Stalingrad, but only a fraction of what the German soldiers would need to survive.

Not seeing the use in fighting anymore, Paulus surrendered, counter to the order of his Führer. The battle of Stalingrad was lost, and little did they know, that at this point, the war was also essentially lost for Germany.

After Stalingrad, the German story was mostly one of retreat. They lost more and more ground to the Red Army on the Eastern Front and they were driven out of the Caucasus, an area that Hitler desperately needed for the oil to fuel his war effort. Eventually, at the battle of Kursk, Germany launched Operation Citadel, which could have worked and could have pushed back the Russians. But, because of Hitler’s orders to wait on the production of more tanks and materials, the element of surprise was lost, and the Russians had plenty of time to strengthen their defenses of the city. Because of this, the battle of Kursk ended up being a catastrophe for Germany and was thereafter only followed by hopeless losses until the Russians marched into Berlin in 1945.

 

At the same time the Russians were fighting the Germans on the Eastern Front, the Allies were coming up on the ‘soft underbelly’ of Europe, as Churchill called it. After victories in North Africa at El Alamein and other battles, the Allies drove the Axis powers back into Italy.

The campaign in North Africa and eventually Italy, was mostly meant to weaken the German army and was later on continued to direct its forces south so that an invasion of France would be made possible. Many believed the attacks in Africa and Italy to be unnecessary, but if you look at how many forces Hitler had to send to Africa and Italy, and therefore away from the Western front, the battles in that soft underbelly turned out to be extremely helpful to the later invasion of the European mainland and victory over Nazi Germany. An invasion of Normandy was planned before the African campaign, but was simply not feasible yet. The Germans were too strong, and the Allies had too little experience and material to achieve a successful invasion. The African campaign also gave the American troops some much-needed war experience (because they didn’t have any before that), it distracted troops that could have been used on the western coast towards Italy, and it gave the British and Americans something to boost their people’s morale by not doing nothing.

Eventually, after invading Sicily, and some tough fighting taking place at other places in Italy such as Anzio, the Allies arrived at Rome, liberating it, just the day before D-Day.

The liberation of Rome however was more symbolic than strategic, because it didn’t have any military value, all the real value would come from the beaches of Normandy.

 

As Churchill already stated in 1940, they would fight them on the beaches, and on June 5th, 1944, the day to fight them there finally came: D-Day (the D standing for day as well, to emphasize the importance of the day). It was a risky operation, and the commanders were anxious that it would fail, and what the consequences of that would have been. They couldn’t fail, and luckily, they didn’t. The invasion was successful, in part due to a brilliant deception operation. The Allies built fake military bases along the coast that would have indicated an invasion at Calais, instead of Normandy. Even General George Patton, one of the generals who was most feared by the Germans, was stationed there (mainly because of some earlier incidents that made Eisenhower relieve Patton of his duties). The bases were complete with fake tanks (balloons), and other fake equipment. This deceptive operation was so successful, that Hitler kept most of his forces near Calais, even after the invasion of Normandy, because he still believed the real invasion would arrive at Calais.

With the invasion going just as they had hoped, the Allies began their march to Berlin, but although everybody believed at this point that winning the war was now only a matter of time, the Germans certainly didn’t go down without a fight. Fighting was still very tough, and the Allies suffered numerous setbacks. Most prominently at Antwerp and in the Ardennes at the battle of the Bulge they were held back for a while, but neither of these setbacks had much effect other than delaying the end of the war. With most of Western Europe liberated, it was time for the Allies to march into Germany. They wanted to get to Berlin, but they were not the only ones eager to get to the German capital.

On the Eastern front, the Russians kept on defeating the German army and kept getting closer and closer to Berlin. These victories were costly though, because the Russians suffered more casualties in nearly every battle than the Germans would, but the Russians didn’t really care much about the individual lives, they cared about winning, and also, they cared about revenge. The German army had mistreated, abused, and brutally murdered a lot of Russians during their invasion, and the Russians became aware of this. This made them even more motivated to fight and kill Germans as a way to avenge their people. This is most harshly exemplified in what the Russians did when they arrived in Berlin, which was to rape every woman they could find. Though this was of course horrible behavior, the Germans raped plenty of Russian women too, so they believed it to be payback, and either way, they didn’t consider Germans human anymore. They thought of them as beasts, and therefore they were treated as such.

The Nazis eventually came to a brutal end. With Germany being invaded from both sides, Hitler declared Totaler Krieg (total war), which meant that every single person was now obligated to fight to defend Germany from its invaders. Women, children, handicapped men, everyone was required to fight. Of course, many simply surrendered because they saw that the situation was hopeless, but especially in Berlin, a lot of Nazi fanatics still courageously fought on. Hitler’s idea of total war was simple. If the German people could not win over all of these other races that invaded them, then it wasn’t superior in the first place. His philosophy of the Aryan race being superior turned out to be false, and with his strong belief that the superior race would win, he believed that his Aryan race was inferior, and thus unworthy of existence.

With the Russians surrounding Berlin, and the rest of Germany in Allied hands, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, and the Nazis unconditionally surrendered to the Allies. The war was lost, Germany was destroyed, and Hitler was dead. So where did it all go wrong?

 

4 Reasons for Nazi Germany’s Downfall:

 

1: Hitler didn’t listen to the advice of his generals

Next to being Chancellor and eventually Führer of Germany, Hitler also made himself Supreme Commander of the Nazi war effort. Every decision had to be approved by him and could therefore also be overruled by him, giving him total control over how the war was fought. Making himself supreme commander was a combination of self-belief and arrogance. He believed himself to be a military genius because he actually did know a lot about war. He served in the First World War in the German army, though he didn’t see much fighting, and he was quite knowledgeable on many military affairs. And the issue was, that at the start of the war Hitler was proved right. He indeed proved himself to be a military genius because he constantly seemed to win. Though these victories were often a result of the ideas of his generals and not him, and certain terrible risks taken having paid off at first, he kept on winning, and this kept on fueling his ego. After winning battle after battle, he believed he could not be wrong, and this was the biggest mistake Hitler made. The delusions of his genius made him less and less likely to listen to his general’s advice, no matter how sound it was. One general said that when he was trying to convince Hitler of something, he seemed to listen at first, until Hitler himself started talking like the general didn’t say anything at all, coming to the same conclusion he had already made before the conversation began.

As a result of his inability to listen to his generals, he made some terrible errors that ended up costing him the war. In addition to this, he also created resentment among his generals, which even led to some of them plotting multiple (failed) assassination attempts on Hitler. Take Stalingrad for example, the turning point of the war. Hitler believed it to be cowardly to surrender, so he ordered his men to fight on. Even before the Germans were encircled and were certain to lose, he ignored the advice of his generals and ordered the soldiers in Stalingrad to fight to the death. Had he listened to his generals and ordered a retreat when it was still possible, the situation might have been very different, and the whole war might have turned out differently. But, as we’ll see later on, Hitler saw a retreat as cowardly, so if he was in charge, he wouldn’t let that happen. It was stand or die.

Another example is the Battle of Kursk, or Operation Citadelle. The Germans had the element of surprise, so if they had attacked Kursk in time, they could have overrun the Russian army and achieved a much-needed victory on the Eastern Front. Instead, Hitler ordered them to wait despite what his generals told him, so that more tanks and equipment could be produced and shipped over, and the element of surprise was lost, and with that the possibility of victory at the battle of Kursk.

One of the best examples of Hitler’s unwillingness to listen to his generals in the earlier stages of the war is the evacuation at Dunkirk. When the Germans had trapped the over 30000 English troops at Dunkirk, they could have wiped them out completely. The evacuation was still long away, and the British had nowhere to go. But instead of following the advice of many of his generals to simply finish the job and march straight to Dunkirk, Hitler ordered a halt. He believed that the Germans should resupply their fuel and arms before marching off to Dunkirk, and Göring told him that the Luftwaffe could entirely wipe out the British army anyway (which it couldn’t). This decision gave Britain the crucial time they needed to make their miraculous evacuation work. Without this decision of Hitler, most of the British army would have been captured or killed, and the war would have probably gone quite differently.

Hitler’s arrogance and unwillingness to listen to the advice of his experts in war led mostly to the downfall of the Nazis. Had he listened to these generals, who often had very good ideas that could have worked, the war could have gone quite differently. Lucky for us his arrogance blinded him from making the right decisions.

 

2: Hitler’s Impatience (fighting a two-front war)

The reason often cited for Germany losing the First World War, is that they decided to fight a two-front war. The Germans fought in France and Russia at the same time, something which made them unable to go all out on either one, and resulted in them not being able to win from either one.

It is often stated that the most important lesson people can learn from history, is that no one seems to learn the lessons of history, and Hitler was no exception to this statement. With examples of Germany losing WWI because of fighting a two-front war, and with other examples such as Napoleon fighting in Russia and Spain, Hitler could have known that fighting a two-front war would not end well for the aggressor. But, of course, Hitler and his Germany were better than all those who came before him, so that could never happen to them. So, when he was still at war with Britain, trying and failing to invade the island, he decided to go to war with Russia, despite having signed a nonaggression pact with them a couple of years before. At first, Hitler was proved right. He was better than those who came before him, and he was successful at fighting a two-front war, but not for long. When the tide turned at Stalingrad, it became clear that the two-front war was actually much more difficult than expected. The biggest downside to fighting this type of war is that you can’t concentrate all of your efforts on one front, which means your front will be weaker than it could be and therefore giving the enemy, who is fighting a one-front war, a huge advantage. This is exactly what happened in Russia. The Russians could allocate all their forces to fighting the Germans, while the Germans had to allocate a big portion of their troops to places like Africa, and a large number of aircraft to attack London and to defend themselves against the British and American bombardments.

The war he declared on Russia was not out of some strategic idea. Many of his generals found this idea to be terrible and believed it to be the reason they would lose the war (which it turned out to be). Barbarossa was driven almost fully by his ideological hate for the communists, which he felt needed to be exterminated. The thing was, Hitler didn’t need to invade the Soviet Union that soon. The Russians didn’t even prepare themselves at all in case war would break out, mainly because they trusted the Nazi-Soviet pact. That means that he could have waited a couple of years even, in which he could have strengthened his military enormously, while the Russians would’ve probably not done much to strengthen theirs, which would have made a successful invasion of Russia much more likely. But, because he was impatient, he decided to attack, in the middle of his invasion of Britain.

His impatience probably stems from the feeling he had that he would die young (which he would, but by his own hand), mainly because of the early deaths of his parents. This meant that he believed that he needed to get this war over with as quickly as possible, fulfill his mission, and leave this world as a hero. His impatience also resulted in declaring war on the United States after they declared war on Japan while having no obligation to do so, and most importantly, it made him start the war much earlier than planned. The plan was actually to start the war around four years later, which would have given Germany much more time to build up its military. Instead, the war started four years too early, and because of this impatience, he lost.

 

3: Stand or Die (sunk cost fallacy)

When the end of the war was near, Hitler gave essentially the same order every time the Germans were losing: Stand or Die. This order meant that the soldiers were not allowed to retreat or give up, they would fight, and they would win, or they’d die. Of course, more often than not the soldiers just died. A retreat in many cases would have at least saved some lives, but those were not Hitler’s orders.

His idea of never retreating, even in the most disastrous circumstances, came mostly from seeing a military retreat as the same as a political retreat. He felt that retreating was a sign of weakness and incompetence, he felt like it was giving up, and although you can say a lot of things about Hitler, he was not a quitter, and he didn’t want to see himself as such. But he didn’t realize that there are important differences between a military and a political retreat, and that retreats can even be strategically valuable to an army at times. When you retreat, you can save a lot of men, which you can then use to prepare another attack from a different position, which may work.

His loathing of retreats may, besides from a political view, come from a psychological bias that every human has. The Sunk Cost Fallacy is a human bias that everyone struggles with. It means that when you have something, you are afraid of losing it, and even when you are losing it and everything seems lost, you still desperately try to hold onto that last bit that you had. This is because you can’t stand the feeling of making all that effort for nothing. This is something that normal people often experience with projects that they know won’t work, but since they’ve come so far and put so much time and effort into it, they are not willing to give them up. The exact same phenomenon occured when it came to Hitler’s project of war. He had gained all this land in Russia, and he was not willing to give it up, no matter how wise it would have been to retreat, and no matter if they could’ve got it back later. Giving up land and retreating would feel like a loss of something he won, and that would in his mind not only hurt the war effort, but also his pride.

These Stand or Die orders made sure that Hitler would certainly lose the ground, because the enemy was often simply much stronger, and often much more willing to suffer. When such an order was given, it essentially meant certain death and defeat. He could’ve strategically retreated, which would have increased his chances of success, but because he couldn’t stand losing any of his progress, retreat was not seen as an option. It was winning and living or losing and perishing.

 

4: Ideology Came Before Strategy

The Nazi party was mostly a party based on an ideology of hate. This is not how they came to power to be clear, they mostly came to power because of their appeal to the working class and giving them jobs, not because of their antisemitism or anti-bolshevism. But, as it turned out, their ideology was the main driving force behind the Nazi regime and its war effort. This ideology was even more important to the Nazis than strategy was, and often overruled strategically sound concepts for ideas that were better ideologically.

Of course, we have the most famous and horrible example of ‘The Jewish Question’ and the Nazis ‘Final Solution’ to this question. Their hate for the Jews and the idea they had that the world would be better off without them, led them to initiate what is now known as the holocaust, sending Jews off to concentration camps and gassing them in mass numbers. This, however, was strategically a stupid move to make within the war effort. The Jews that Hitler wanted to gas, could have made brilliant soldiers who could have died fighting for the German Reich instead of in a gas chamber. They also could have provided the Nazis with a couple million extra factory workers which they could have used to produce more arms for their war effort. They could have done all of this, and only really implemented their final solution after they had won the war. As horrible as it sounds, this could have worked, and they could have had a better chance at winning the war if their antisemitism didn’t come before strategy.

The same concept applies to Hitler’s decision to invade Russia, and its ideological driving force. The Nazis believed that the Slavic people were ‘untermenschen’ (lesser people), who needed to be exterminated to make ‘room’ for the German people (lebensraum). Another thing the Nazis hated about Russia, was communism, which made them even more motivated to start exterminating people in the Soviet Union. This meant that when Germany invaded Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slavic countries, they immediately started mass murdering its people. When the Germans entered Russia, often orders were given to murder as many Russian people as possible, not just soldiers, but citizens as well. Many Slavic people were killed, shot in the head, or transported to camps and gassed. What happened to these people was truly horrifying, and strategically retarded.

What resulted from this attempted extermination of the Russian people, was a feeling of anger and a longing for revenge that came into effect once the Russians decided to fight back. Now they were not simply motivated by glory or defending their motherland, but they were also fighting for their lives and their family’s lives, and they were fighting to not face a brutal death at the hands of the Nazis. This fighting spirit is what made the Russians fight so hard in such dire circumstances, and what made them accept the huge numbers of casualties during the war (it is estimated that the Russians lost more than 11 million men).

If strategy would have been more important to the Nazis than ideology, the invasion of Russia could’ve gone quite differently. What Hitler could have done, is make friends with anti-bolshevist people in Slavic countries, of which there were plenty, and make them fight for the Nazis to destroy the Bolshevist regime in Russia. They could have done this, taken over Russia, and then killed them all afterward, and that could have worked. But instead, they went on terrible rampages against any town that wasn’t German, and this made sure that they wouldn’t get any support whatsoever from any Slavic people, which made their invasion of Russia that much harder. It would also probably have meant that if they didn’t start murdering every Slavic person right away, the Russian army wouldn’t have fought as hard or would have been willing to suffer as many casualties, which could have probably made the invasion of Russia successful as well.

But of course, strategy wasn’t on top of the Nazi list. It always came after their ideological ideas. The Jews had to be exterminated first, no matter what happens to the war effort, the same with the communists and with all the other people deemed inferior by the Nazis. If the Nazis hadn’t fought an ideological war or would have left their ideological plans for after the war, they would have had a larger chance of winning it. The Nazi war machine was the most powerful in the whole world at that time, and if they had combined this with sound strategy, it could have been unstoppable. Lucky for us, this is not what happened, and the Nazis put their ideology above everything, resulting in their defeat. As Andrew Roberts concluded at the end of his book ‘The Storm of War’: “The real reason why Hitler lost the Second World War was exactly the same one that caused him to unleash it in the first place: he was a nazi.”