By "winning", I mean acquiring some manner of European hegemony and/or "empire" equivalent to that territory she had taken at her "high-water mark" - say, the end of 1941...
My contention is that it was impossible for Nazi Germany to have won, regardless of the fact that it seems no other political entity working in Germany at the time could have so much as propelled Germany to a condition wherein she would have been capable of conquering anything...
The reason being the Nazi system itself...
Any ideology which places loyalty to itself - such as the Hitlerian cult of personality - above innovative or "counter-ideological" thinking is bound to fail in the end.
Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer told of his difficulty in altering the Nazi-dominated system to the degree necessary to fight a war of ever-increasing scope and demand on German industry... Of running into resistance from "dyed-in-the-wool" National Socialists who believed that prior loyalty to Hitler and Nazism justified their positions of power, and the perception that he, an "outsider" - and in their perception mere would-be usurper of their portion of that power - was "meddling" in areas he had no business in.
Granted, one must take Speer's scribblings with the appropriate grain of salt, (He is nowhere near as bad as, say Gobbels, though, whose surviving diary fragments tell a bizarre tale of his ever-increasing area of responsibility within the Third Reich, apparently justified by his appropriately "Nazi-esque" view of the world, and loyalty to uncle Adolf....) but Speer is certainly not the sole source of data incriminating the Nazi system as one which, in the end, threw away its advantages and squandered its strengths the better to serve the unrealistic expectations of itsall-too inflexible leadership...
Perhaps its just as well.
Thoughts?
My contention is that it was impossible for Nazi Germany to have won, regardless of the fact that it seems no other political entity working in Germany at the time could have so much as propelled Germany to a condition wherein she would have been capable of conquering anything...
The reason being the Nazi system itself...
Any ideology which places loyalty to itself - such as the Hitlerian cult of personality - above innovative or "counter-ideological" thinking is bound to fail in the end.
Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer told of his difficulty in altering the Nazi-dominated system to the degree necessary to fight a war of ever-increasing scope and demand on German industry... Of running into resistance from "dyed-in-the-wool" National Socialists who believed that prior loyalty to Hitler and Nazism justified their positions of power, and the perception that he, an "outsider" - and in their perception mere would-be usurper of their portion of that power - was "meddling" in areas he had no business in.
Granted, one must take Speer's scribblings with the appropriate grain of salt, (He is nowhere near as bad as, say Gobbels, though, whose surviving diary fragments tell a bizarre tale of his ever-increasing area of responsibility within the Third Reich, apparently justified by his appropriately "Nazi-esque" view of the world, and loyalty to uncle Adolf....) but Speer is certainly not the sole source of data incriminating the Nazi system as one which, in the end, threw away its advantages and squandered its strengths the better to serve the unrealistic expectations of itsall-too inflexible leadership...
Perhaps its just as well.
Thoughts?
Comment