Barbarossa is well planned & executed, much like the sickle cut was.

1) This is very obvious : to blame Hitler for the defeat and to claim that without Hitler they could have won the war .

2) As you say that it is well documented, I am waiting for several exemples . Reality is that he was open for discussions,but less at the end of the war,reality is that in a lot of cases he was rightly overriding the decisions of the generals . And ,mostly, the generals agreed with Hitler, something they wisely were hidding after the war .

3 )The question is not if Hitler was incompetent,but the question is that you have to prove that he was incompetent ,and, there are no proofs for this .One can question several of his decisions,but the point is that there were no better alternatives .

It seems that a lot of people still are arguing that because Hitler was a criminal, he was also incompetent .World history gives a lot of exemples of competent criminals .

 

Part of the problem is that while many of Hitler's orders were questionable changing the questionable ones alone is insufficient to change the course of the war. Many of the issues sighted by a number of German generals were real and serious issues but where they enough to change the course of the war? It's also worth noting that many of the memoirs of said generals (and Speer for that matter) neglect the errors they made.

The question as to whether or not Hitler was incompetent is an interesting one by the way. Early in the war he made a number of decisions that resulted in spectacular victories. My personal opinion is that the problem was he was a rather compulsive gambler. The early successful gambles (which relied a lot on surprise) encouraged him to keep making such gambles but as he lost the edge of surprise the chances of them turning out in his favor continued to diminish. There does also appear to have been some significant mental deterioration on his part throughout the course of the war.

 

Are there any books that can provide a reasonable explanation for why Hitler's generals all blamed him? I can't see all of Hitler's generals blaming him. Not saying they were good down to earth honest people(in the case of Speer) or doubting they would all lie, but wouldn't there be conflict from both sides fighting over whether Hitler was responsible or was it his generals? I would like for you to explain where was you researched and found information for all of Hitler's generals to blame him.

 

-It doesn't seem obvious to me. Not saying in a bad way, but would you mind explaining why is it obvious that all of the German High Command would lie about Hitler being responsible for every blunder?

-Ian Kershaw, Bevin Alexander, and Andrew Roberts have all spoke of Hitler being responsible for the military blunders. Also he did refuse the retreat of the German 6th Army and a plot by the British to assassinate him was abandoned as it was believed that killing Hitler would have prolonged the war. If you have any counter texts to why their points are invalid or know any historians that talk of Hitler's high command being in agreement with him, I'll be glad to check it out.

-Well I am aware that Hitler was competent, he certainly bet against his generals and won a surprising amount of times, but that was toward the West(excluding Britain), it really started to suffer when turned against the Soviet Union. He was a erratic drug user along with Herman Goering.

I never said being a criminal makes someone incompetent.

 

Bevin Alexander is the last to be used, as he is not reliable (and this is an euphemism)

Why would Hitler's refusal to let 6 Army retreat be a blunder : most sources argue that such a retreat was impossible .

The plot to kill Hitler is fiction and also the belief that killing him would prolong the war

I like to see where Kershaw is arguing that Hitler was responsible for military blunders .

Hitler was not an erratic drug user : he took a lot of medication ,but medication and drugs are not the same, besides there is no proof that the taking of these medication resulted in military blunders .

After the war,the German generals started a disinformation campaign (destined to the German public and the other countries) to make Hitler the only responsible for Auschwitz and the defeats;this was directed by the former chief of staff Halder .

 

Not All. Many were dead before the end of the war. Also very few things in life are completely black or white. Of course there were dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. But you to remember that after the war there were the Nuremberg trials, and many people were trying to exonerate themselves from having anything to with atrocities. Collective amnesia became a national sport. In this kind of situation, a group will try to collectively blame either the most disliked individual of the group, or the individual not present.

Already immediately after the war, Liddel B Hart interviewed many surviving Nazi Leaders (Blumentritt, Rundstedt, Thoma, Kleist, Heinrici, Manteuffel, Student). The interviews are useful because they were done so close to the war, before politics, biased memories and self-justification really kicks in by these surviving German commanders who would write their own memoirs years later. Liddell Hart particulalry develops a view contrary to the stereotype of Hitler as an incompetent meddler in military affairs.

 

About the disinformation campaign : a good source is : operational history(German section ) and also : Erschriebene Siege (rough translation = written victories) .

Manstein continued the work of Halder with his : Lost Victories,where he argued that Hitler was responsible for the defeat because he did not listen to the generals .

 

You should forget what you already "know" and start looking for relevant, serious sources. Speer was the one who was actually behind execution of Holocaust - a boss of the death camps. His "factories" were death camps with slave working force which was first incarcerated, worked to death and then incinerated. An "honest" Nazi? That doesn't exist.

 

These memoirs were a blueprint for the most of popular documentaries which helped to spread myths about Hitlers "knights" written by Guderian and Manstein. What they wrote is a pile of half truths and lies. A good source that debunks Manstein is "Field Marshal Von Manstein, a Portrait: The Janushead" by a serious historian Marcel Stein.

BTW, thanks for the info about Operational History.

 

Hitler was dead, so he gets the blame. Every one likes to blame Hitler for the turn south, yet it was the original army plan that foresaw the need for the clearing the flanks of AGC. It would have been impossible for the German to reach Moscow before the mud season and to try to fight in the winter for a city of the size of Moscow would have left AGC very weakened and with extremely vulnerable flanks. While the western front was incompetently led, the SW front was quite skillful in dealing with AGS which is why there was a threat, I believe that Hitler went south because he realized before his generals did that the gamble had failed and that the resources of the Ukraine would be essential for Germany to stay in the war. Hitler halted AGN because he had decided to go south and thus he needed what troops could be spared, especially the tanks for that effort.

 

This is an interesting line of reasoning, but it was easy to lead competently the 1939 Wehrmacht and it was so difficult to extract anything fruitful from the 1945 Wehrmacht. Hitler - a competent man or even genius as some claim? Hitler has listened carefully to his generals and adopted their ideas as his own - Aufmarschanweisung N°4, Fall Gelb of 1940, for example. During the Zitadelle, Hitler did not interfere at all except for the correct decision to cancel the operation entirely when it has failed. All in all, the generals screwed Germany. It isn't a crime do be dumb but it isn't decent to doom own country and deny to admit own fault and to apology to their countrymen. That is their the greatest failure. They have failed on the personal level - they weren't decent men. Hitler was just one of them.

 

Hitler gambled but the circumstances forced him to gamble :every day the German strategic situation was becoming worse, thus Germany had to take risks before it was defeated by general time .

 

Hitler's gambles were based on his intuition and not any sound reasoning. The battle of France is an example, the reason the Ardennes attack was a success is because the French could not adapt to a situation they had not planned for. IF Gamelin had not taken his 7th army out of reserve and had it available he would have had troops to deal with the attack. Barbarossa had the early success simply because the Soviets were in a major transformation and were not ready for war. As in France it was not so much the superiority of Germany as it was breakdown of command and control. Hitler had been right, but he then became convinced that only he could be right and that he could not guess wrong. As he guesses proved more and more wrong he blamed it more and more on his generals

 

The reason the attack in the Ardennes was a success was that the French had not enough forces to stop the attack and that those who were committed were committed to slowly .

About the 7th Army, there were very valid reasons to commit it how and where it was committed .And,given its weakness and its slowness,it is very doubtful that it could have been committed successfully to stop the German advance south of the Meuse .

 

What is wrong with Bevin Alexander? Can you name any issues he has with his analysis of military history?

Can you give me a few of these sources which argue that a retreat would be impossible?

Fiction? Have you ever heard of Operation Foxley? Roger Moorhouse wrote a book on the considered plot called Killing Hitler. Oh I guess that if he had died before the war ended no German would see him as a martyr and think they could have won if he didn't die.

Kershaw argues for Hitler being responsible at the disaster at Stalingrad, and how Germany was a mono-polycracy with many of the politicians trying to get on Hitler's good side.

Can I have sources on the other side of people's memoirs of what people spread about Hitler after the war? I know history is written by the victors but there are stories written by the losers however they never reach the mainstream and fall into virtual obscurity. I am looking forward to your sources.

 

About Alexander, some extracts of his "How Hitler could have won WWII " PP 49/52 (available on the internet )

The Axis could move at will in the ME for the British had no substantial forces there : wrong : Britain had a numerical superiority in the ME .

German Panzers could seize Iraq and Iran at will : wrong

The capture of the oil of Iraq and Iran would provide ample amount of Germany's most-needed strategic material : nonsense

German forces could easily occupy French North Africa : nonsense

Germany could threaten the Soviet oilfields through the Caucasus: wrong

The loss of this oil would immobilize Stalin : facts prove that this is wrong

From Iran Germany could invade India : Alexander was probably jiking .

 

There was NO Allied attempt to kill Hitler, thus the whole story is fiction .

 

About a break- out from Stalingrad by 6thArmy, Alan Clark wrote the following in "Barbarossa :the Russian German conflict " :a break-out could only start at earliest 5 days after the encirclment (28 november ) and the result would have been total annihilation ."

A lot of units would have to march 100 miles which would take a week .

If Wintergewetter (the relief operation by Manstein ) could not succeed,why should a retreat be possible ?

About Kershaw : it is correct that Germany was a mono-polycracy, but this was irrelevant for the outcome of the war ,and Kershaw is wrong : not Hitler was responsible for the catastrophe of Stalingrad, but the Soviets .

 

Operation Foxley was at the same level as the propositions of the CIA to kill Castro by poisening his cigars or something like that .

 

We have gone over this multiple times. Finland was a German ally during WWII and was not neutral. Conflict and between Finland and the SU reignited ONLY AFTER Finlad broke the treaty signed between the states.

Finland broke the treaty by occupying the demilitarized Åland Islands and arresting the Soviet Unions commanding officer Sergei Ivanovich Kobanov.

Prior to June 25th German planes attacked Leningrad from Finland. This did not help Finland. War had begun.

GB declared war on Finland shortly afterwards.