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There’s a chance they could have won if he wasn’t such a unpredictable idiot who loved to be random and do military strategy based on how he was feeling that moment.
Maybe a chance if they didn’t invade the SU, but that was also like 75% of his political platform.
Literally every fascist empire is doomed to fail eventually because their core ideology and entire economy relies on violent expansion and exploitation of those they see as lesser. They always spread themselves too thin and weaken their armies by waging constant war with either neighboring nations or their own people. Even if they ran out of outsiders to fight and steal from, they would eventually turn on themselves as the final adversary. We’re seeing it happen right now in the West with the rich cannibalizing their own countries as much as possible, practically ripping the copper wiring out to maintain some form of dominance.
There is no situation in which Germany wins. Like even if one starts rolling back history with “well what if they weren’t sabotaging themselves with [insert literally any core Fascist ideological policy here]?” there is just no scenario where them being more competent and less self-destructive actually sees them through. A more competent Germany would have killed significantly more people before losing, but their loss was ultimately a material inevitability.
Actually wild how similar they were. Low in infrustructure, industry and manpower. Almost zero navy and under constant blockade. Won early battles before the oppositions full war machine was assembled, while in ground that favored them. But as soon as conditions changed they started losing. If it wasnt flat ground and it wasnt summer they were impotent.
But they had good officers and some of their soldiers had fancy rifles. Which means they tooooootaly should’ve won.
Not a chance. The Nazis straight up didn’t have the resources to wage the kind of war they fought. The only way to win would have been to somehow ally with the “Allies” (not out of the realm of possibility, to be fair) and get shipments of materiel and fuel that way. They simply did not have the oil to wage a war against anyone, and that meant no tanks, no trucks, and no navy.
They could not have won. Their army and their “reich” collapsed the moment they suffered a major defeat. The Soviet Union by comparison suffered horrific defeats and losses in the early stages of the eastern front and the nation rallied back and won the war. Why couldn’t the Germans do this? Because their “reich” was nothing more than plundering Europe, and it fell apart when it encountered its first test of resilience. The thousands of miles of captured territory was quickly lost despite plenty of opportunities to build and create contingencies in the event their offensives failed. They didn’t do it. They didn’t have a back up plan, or a way to transition their military into fighting a war of attrition.
The militant fascism required them to invade everything and everyone as quickly as possible. To try to fabricate a scenario where the Nazis made smart and long-term war winning decisions is to effectively make them not Nazis to begin with. You can argue that they may have had more success if Rommel was given command of everything but he never would have been able to create the political movement that gave him the tools in the first place. To speculate further is to create an alternate history scenario where everything went perfect for the Nazis and they had a dramatic regime and ideology change in the midst of their conquests.
Victory for the Nazis was total domination and nothing else. Conquering and holding Europe alone would never have been seen as “winning the war”, at least as far as they were concerned.
The argument can be made that any military force could have won if they just made no mistakes and got lucky everywhere they needed to. Despite having most of the cards in their favor early on, they lost. That isn’t a reflection of how close they were to victory, but how fragile their victories had been.
Nah, the Nazis had no real chance. Really, they only got as far as they did because the Soviet Union fumbled at the beginning. Once the deficiencies were dealt with, it was game over. The closest chance the Nazis could get would be if Fascist Japan completely threw away their chance of forming their own fascist empire by (re)invading the Soviet Union. You could have a not completely implausible scenario where the IJA/IJN put enough of a fight and the Soviet Union is forced to fight two fronts, a western front with Nazi Germany and an eastern front with Fascist Japan. This completely unrealistic scenario would also involve the US staying out of the war because Japan decided to commit suicide by invading Siberia via Manchuria instead of bombing Pearl Harbor.
