Had the Italians not been his allies he would have won.
The Italians invaded Greece without telling Hitler and they were getting their @$$es kicked by the Greeks, so Hitler had to detach a division and send it down to help the Italians subdue the Greeks. That division would have turned the tide at the battle of Stalingrad, and Hitler would have had his fuel. He would have taken Russia.
No one really knows for sure about that, especially once the U.S. entered the war after Pearl Harbor. The battle of Stalingrad ended in February of '43, so it's anybody's guess what would have happened. That division he sent to Greece may have been decimated by the Russians just as easily. And even if he had managed to take parts of Russia, he would have never been able to conquer the whole territory quickly. There were no guarantees for Hitler when it came to Russia.
Taking Russia was just never in the cards. All it would have happened had he made it past Stalingrad is the lines of battle would have been moved back a couple of hundred miles. Taking Moscow wouldn’t have made any difference. It was taken before, and resulted in nothing more than them falling back.
He was doomed to failure for his mass-murdering ways. His only chance what’s the act like a liberator when he went into Ukraine in Eastern Europe. He may have had people join with him. Instead, he acted like a cop shooting a a rapist in the act. And right when the victim feels they are saved, he starts unbuckling his belt.
No matter what minor successes he would have achieved in the East, he was always doomed to complete failure and would have never conquered all of Russia. Lost Cause thinking always imagine scenarios were Hitler was going to win and conquer the world, but it just simply was not in the cards on the day the War began.
Well, the invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, and the surrender at Stalingrad was in January (or February) 1943, so I don’t think that the diversion of German formations to Greece and Yugoslavia in April, 1941, had a direct impact on Stalingrad.
The diversion has been cited as delaying the initial invasion (Operation Barbarossa) although I have read that the Spring of 1941 was so wet that the invasion couldn’t have kicked off any sooner. I don’t know whether this argument is correct.
“Hitler had to detach a division and send it down to help the Italians subdue the Greeks.”
Hitler detached more than one division.
The invasion of Greece used 24 divisions of which 6 were armored. Most of these forces had been assigned to the invasion of the Soviet Union. At the end of the 5 week campaign, three divisions were left in Greece and the remainder returned to support Soviet operation. But these divisions had see five weeks of intense operations and were not completely ready for Barbarossa on June 22.