Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...suppose Hitler, who often expressed admiration for the English, had not tried to conquer Britain? What if he had simply kept offering some kind of peace terms that would have preserved the independence of Britain and its empire while leaving Germany in control of Europe? It is hard to see how Britain could have gone on waging war indefinitely without any allies. And though Churchill had vowed to fight on the beaches, there were always others who might have been more "reasonable." One such figure was the self-exiled Duke of Windsor, who had taken refuge in Spain after...
...Hitler's greatest mistake of all, historians generally agree, was his decision to turn away from Britain and invade Soviet Russia. That ultimately disastrous error was based on a gross underestimation of the Soviet Union's strength and its people's willingness to fight stubbornly for their homeland. But here too Hitler came very close to winning. Once he had decided to invade, he made two major blunders. The first was to delay the attack by one crucial summer month for the unnecessary foray into Yugoslavia and Greece. The second was to postpone and weaken the drive on Moscow...
...even then, when the Soviets stopped the Wehrmacht just outside Moscow, Hitler still controlled vast territories in the western U.S.S.R. What if he had negotiated a settlement that let him keep his gains? He had predicted such a possibility in the fall: "The recognition that neither force is capable of annihilating the other will lead to a compromise peace." Stalin actually began sending out peace feelers as early as October 1941, and, according to Liddell Hart, Foreign Ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop finally met secretly in 1943 to seek a settlement. But the Germans wanted a new boundary on the Dnieper...
...question in any such speculation about a partial or complete Hitler victory is whether peace would have brought any kind of stability. Could Hitler have established a continental network of satellite states under German domination, like that in Vichy France? And could such a network of satellites have lasted as long as the one created by Stalin after the war? It was partly wartime hysteria that led to the savagery of Nazi rule in the occupied lands, not only against the Jews but also against the Slavs, some of whom had originally welcomed the Wehrmacht for liberating them from Stalin...
That suicidal impulse may have been what inspired his last major political error, declaring war on the U.S. after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. There was no treaty with the Japanese that required him to do so, and Hitler never saw a treaty he couldn't break. It is quite likely that the U.S. would have eventually joined the European war anyway, but it is also possible that if Hitler had professed neutrality, the U.S. war effort would have been turned against Japan. And if Hitler had succeeded in establishing some kind of peace with Britain and the Soviets...