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To: FredZarguna; Reaganez
What you are saying FZ misses a couple of points. Most important is that if the Nazis weren't facing too fronts they may very well won. That is something most historians agree on, together with the point that Hitler started aggression too early. Had he not attacked Stalin, as had been agreed, all of Europe would have fallen. Additionally, major war would have started a couple of years later, when many of the superlative weapons the Nazis had invented would have come online with sufficient numbers to make a difference. Sufficient tanks better than anything anyone else had, sufficient cruise missiles and IRBMs, jet fighters (that no one else had) in sufficient numbers, they were even working on their own nuclear program.

The Soviets were monsters, however so were the Nazis. The difference is that the Soviets had a self defeating ideology ...communism has embedded self-destruct failsafes. Nazism, like any form of fascism/nationalism (eg the Chinese 'communism' which is anything but) has a far longer shelf life.

Anyways, had the Soviets fallen when Hitler expected them to, Europe would have fallen. Germany would have only had one front to deal with rather than three (the Western Allies, the Soviets, and the Russian winter), and Germany would have won. A Germany with superior weapons in superior numbers, with an ally in Japan, and with nuclear weapons.

14 posted on 07/07/2013 1:04:08 AM PDT by spetznaz (Nuclear-tipped Ballistic Missiles: The Ultimate Phallic Symbol)
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To: spetznaz
Too fronts = two fronts.

Apologies for this and other spelling errors. Word fill on phone.

16 posted on 07/07/2013 1:05:43 AM PDT by spetznaz (Nuclear-tipped Ballistic Missiles: The Ultimate Phallic Symbol)
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To: spetznaz

The Germans had no chance of building a nuclear bomb before we did. None whatsoever.


17 posted on 07/07/2013 1:06:46 AM PDT by FredZarguna (Separated by a common language.)
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To: spetznaz
That is something most historians agree on, together with the point that Hitler started aggression too early.

First, I can't quite speak to this, because I don't know which aggression you're talking about. Hitler's threats and bluster were a form of diplomatic aggression, and they were, sadly, quite successful.

If you mean aggression against Western Europe, it's hard to argue with success. If you're talking about aggression against Russia, there are plenty who claim he had no choice. In The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich even the very pro-Soviet William L. Shirer concedes that the Russians were already expanding their sphere of influence beyond what they agreed to in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, and that if anything Hitler struck too late because of a vendetta against Yugoslavia that pushed his offensive too late into the year. There was also some evidence the Soviets were preparing to strike first.

If you mean in general terms, I can't really agree. One of the reasons Hitler had a technological advantage at the start of the War was that he had mobilized a decade before the Allies. The advantage -- contrary to what some people on this thread have posted -- was rapidly disappearing, and by the end of the war was virtually gone. The one weapon he had that the Allies did not was the ME-262; a truly formidable weapon which fortunately he did not have the foresight to exploit. [If you believe Speer -- and there's probably no reason you should, since his bio is largely self-serving crap and he was Nazi scum -- Hitler diverted research and war production into increasingly less effective weapons systems.] Heisenberg, again in a self serving account, claims he deliberately foot-dragged the development of the German nuclear bomb. The truth was that Heisenberg could not mount a first-rate research staff because the Nazi's had already exiled, driven-off, or murdered most of the people who might have developed nukes. Heisenberg himself appears to have actually been working on a hydrogen bomb -- but he had no engineers who could have told him that while the physics for thermonuclear weapons was mostly understood, the technology for such a weapon did not yet exist, and would not for 15 years.

I don't take my history from throw-away lines from Patton or other Hollywood vehicles, and I certainly don't believe Nazi propaganda fed to the German people about miracle weapons that would be "coming to the front any day real soon now" in order to keep them fighting. The V1 and V2 were terrorist weapons and not effective weapons of war. A lot of the other technology was years from fruition.

As for what "most historians" believe, I'm afraid I must demur. I'll be glad to discuss individual historians, but when you remember that "most historians" believe that Joe McCarthy was a witch hunter, Richard Nixon was a more dangerous enemy of liberty than Barack 0bama, or that Bill Clinton should not have been impeached, just to name three bits of conventional wisdom (read: lunacy) I can think of off the top of my head, I'm afraid I can't say I'm very impressed with what "most historians" believe.

37 posted on 07/07/2013 11:31:17 AM PDT by FredZarguna (Separated by a common language.)
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