1. ADOLF HITLER
The worst to ever do it
Yes, let's cancel Hitler. Who better to start with?
Everyone knows who Hitler is, and what he did. Scholars have spent their entire lives detailing and retracing his life, all of his various crimes, including a phantasmagoric plethoric buffet of villainy. Think of everything ever made illegal. Thievery. Murder. Rape. He’s done it all, even mass murder, murder on an entirely new, industrial, mass scale. Tens of millions and millions dead by his whim, the whispers of madness compelling not just him but countless millions to endless slaughter. And that’s just the appetizer, the tawdry succulents. Every single village, town, and sty, from the straits of Gibraltar to the Urals and beyond is besotted in his torrential rot, seeping deep into the innocent Earth.
Adolf Hitler exists beyond critique, in that way. He is not human—oh, of flesh and blood he is, sure, but as a man so compelled by vile pursuits, he becomes alien to us enough to become unnatural. His deeds bind him in myth and legend, and that is his greatest threat to humanity in the present. He menaces now, even long dead, to become a god, a dark god indeed, but a god nevertheless. The simple solution in judging Hitler has been to irrationalize Hitler, to render his reasoning beyond causal understanding, thus beyond mortal critique.
Yet Hitler was not insane, not in the clinical sense. I’d argue instead he was differently sane. To consider a clinical diagnosis: how do you explain the millions of Germans that flung themselves to death at his command to the bitter end and beyond? They were in the end a society of true believers, and although Hitler sat at the head of that rot—its venereal possession ran deep, beyond any other explanation save societal.
If then Hitler—Germany—is mortal, sane, then we can judge both. We can uncover both meaning and purpose behind their vile actions. And what do we find, when we peel away the crust? That the Germany that both wrought and was made slave by Hitler was a culmination of an ugly stew, venial and corrupt. At the top, an elite military aristocracy ravished for glory. Old and new anti-Semitic animosities spread beyond class lines, bringing with them a desire to colonize new lands, married with a passion for revenge due to the loss of the previous war. An elite middle and capital-owning class contemptuous of democratic norms provided kindling, the restive urban poor providing fuel. The gears of the industrial revolution ever-churning gave sparks, and millions of jobless and penniless German veterans from the first World War gave nascent flames oxygen. The wider world bore witness to the birth of the Soviet Union, an alternative to the modus operandi status quo—a threat so foundational to the very existence of every living being, or so those in other societies thought—that radical, revolutionary resistance against it was needed. All the old privileges, all the old handguides threatened to be undone: a year zero loomed, and thus men sacrificed both security and freedom for the plaisant veneer of Nazi dominion.
But it is in Hitler's misguided passionate hatred of the Jewish people that sowed the seeds of his defeat. For this hatred is sina qua non—that which cannot be without that which is—to everything that happened after November, 1918.
The anti-Semitic shift happened all at once, and quickly. A shift in Hitler’s polarity of rationality, where rational explanations to material conditions became inverted, perverted, and transformed into baser rationales for action. This is plain: the means and goals of Naziism make no sense to a causal observer. They cannot. The precepts and the conclusions are not only self-defeating, but inherently contradictory. Yet perhaps here is Hitler’s greatest contribution to the combined theory of humanity: that we are imminently and inherently capable of propagating total, systemic failure, despite the fact that all those around us including ourselves, by applying just a touch of rational thought, could reasonably predict such an outcome that portends only doom.
Hitler thus sits bejeweled in a hall of many like-creatures. A common refrain heard in history is: ‘things would have turned out different, better, if only for X’. Hitler’s X was his hatred of the Jews, and thus, his downfall was confirmed as soon as he embraced that irrationality.
Hitler more than anyone deserves his number one spot on this publication’s list, for this critique makes clear his evil ought never to be repeated or embraced. Anti-Semitism and by extension Naziism remains a dead end to a rational application of power, antithetical to holding any power whatsoever.
Hatred of Jews
Adolf Hitler hated Jewish people.
He possesses near endless faults, but they pale compared to this central, hatred-filled root, foundational for all his later sins. Of course, he hated many others (I could attempt to transcribe them but I’m positive it wouldn’t even be a tenth of the actual total). Yet it was the Jewish people alone that earned his prime, first contempt. His words and tragic later deeds make plain and clear this contempt: by his murder of six million Jews and his tragic enslavement of several million more.
Anti-Semitism is a poison. It kills rationality, despite rationality being its tragic father. There is no rational reason to hate Jewish people. What reasons the anti-Semite can muster are the feverish fantasies of an overactive mind. Yet it spread, for lack of a compelling alternative to millions who then shared this belief. This is something that must be internalized. Whereas a man shouting on the street corner today shouting “I am an anti-Semite” would be viewed with derision, the example of Hitler remains at the forefront of all our minds: in Hitler's time he would've been applauded and lauded. Yet ignore not should we the threat of Hitler’s ilk and hatred thus; Hitler’s armies and ideas stir still, not a threat this generation but the next, and the next? We are precarious, indeed.
Anti-Semitism is of course not new. The European commoner and elite have always had a superstition about Jews. As it relates to the modern era, we can see it most clearly from the Reformation, when long centuries of ignorance and jealousy built up against the Jews to create true distaste. Then nationalism, then imperialism, with all its paranoid delusions. All the while, science overtook God as the way to describe the physical world. Biological and Cultural Sciences followed the path of rationality, but when met with nationalism, they birthed an evil child, one beyond the realm of either science or religion but which instead came from true madness from beyond a void of rationality. This great monster, this beast from the deep of our minds, became the epochal and terrible Race Science. In the 19th century, this leviathan spread its tentacle deep and throughout all realms of the world.
Race Science is not a science. It is a misnomer, an insanity. A trick of the mind, imagined phantasms leaping as if on a cave wall behind you. Except you’re not with Plato, you’re you in society as it actually exists, perceiving these phantasms as actually real. This isn’t a psychological event of delusion, but rather, the synapses of impotent rage snapping shut rational inquiry so as to bathe in innate ignorance. The so-called scientific aspect belies an attempt to categorize, and thus rank from best to worst, the human species, based on perceived physical, cultural, and geographic attributes. It is a science bereft of the scientific method and thus not a science at all.
For what is racial superiority? How or indeed even can it be measured? And if it can be measured, and if it can be defined, which races are superior? What is a race? Has there ever been one race in history dominant above all others—and if there has, where are they today? For if they are superior one day then surely their superiority must therefore exist for all time. If looking at history there has never been one ethnic group or classification in dominion above all others in any measurable method in cultural, economic, or political outputs, and if looking at the underlying biology there is no innate or defined meaningful difference at the genetic and biological levels between different races, then how can any one single race be superior to any other? And again, moreover: even if this mystical Race X could be found, where is it? Where are its cities, its temples, its rulers? Where is it literally right now, on a map? Is there a place I could go to? Some actual real physical place that exists in time? For if Race Science is real, it posits a real place. And yet.
There’s nothing there.
Not a wisp, not a whisper. All evidence eludes Race Science. Oh sure, the vacant minds of so-called theorists bandy about phrases like ‘Rome’ or ‘the United Kingdom’ or in general just ‘white people’, but there’s no actual evidence of any one peoples displaying any sort of long-term superiority on racial grounds. Of course: there is superiority in our world. Some states are better at killing people than others, some outproduce their competitors. This is never because of some racial attribute of course; what made tiny England so powerful had nothing to do with its people but the fact it was an island, situated strategically near a captive continental economy hungry for its export of wool, then coal, then steel, and finally: financial sophistication.
Decades, centuries have passed since the initial hypothesis of Race Science and not one iota of evidence has been uncovered. Yet to men like Hitler, this so-called ‘science’ was Gospel Truth.
To understand why Hitler’s project failed, we must understand what made Hitler this way. Let's crack beneath the surface layer a bit. You know what anti-Semitism is, surely, but how does it arise in nature? And you can’t use your own experience or definition for this: one must place Hitler in his proper time and place to truly understand him. After all, he did not exist in a vacuum but was indeed a reflection of society at the time, just as we are each part-reflections of our own society. Thus we must know how and what Central Europeans, specifically what the German states, thought of the Jews, for that will inform our own understanding of how Hitler perceived them.
Germanic Anti-Semitism
A full recounting of Jewish history as it relates to European Christian history can be found in countless other works—suffice it to say that with the coming of Christianity to Europe, the rulers of the various lands and the Catholic Church sought to legally, spiritually, and politically segregate Jewish people from the majority Christian communities. The reason for this varied greatly, and was indeed a confluence of political, economic, cultural and crucially: religious differences.
This separation from the main body politic led to the Jewish diaspora suffering for hundreds of years in Europe. Many Kings invited the Jewish families to come and live on their lands, only for a future king to seize their wealth and kick them out. Massacres, pogroms, and genocides abounded. Of course, not all was bad—treatment depended on time and place. By the Reformation, Jews had come to be held in high regard in some courts of central Europe—becoming hofjude or Court Jews. This gave a few Jewish families immense power, prestige, and wealth. Not that all Jews benefited—most Jews, like most humans at the time, were poor peasant laborers. Yet that did not matter: a perceived minority, receiving positions of wealth and power? The self-conscious, proto-nationalist mentalities stirred the first roots of paranoiac hatred in the non-Jewish German society.
By the 19th century, the religious justification for keeping the Jews separate and apart from the gentile communities had collapsed. The old rationales of “they killed Jesus” made little sense to a world that had killed God. The old orders of Church and Emperor thus withered away. In some areas of the world, the birth of rationalism was like a great blessing: truly the best outcome of rationality is the acceptance that no person or religious belief is superior to any other and all must be treated equally and equitably. Thus the Jews of those types of societies assimilated, keeping their beliefs and traditions but otherwise participating in society, politics, and economies just as practitioners of other faiths would.
But this was not the case in Germany and for much of Eastern Europe. Rationality there birthed ethno-Nationalism, which spoke mainly of homogenized peoples, speaking the same language, worshiping the same god, having the same understanding of historical grievances, living in a tightly-knit national community: the Nation. Anyone outside this grouping of homogenized peoples were suspect, and if they resided in the community of the homogenized peoples, the Nation, they were to be driven out, out of fear of alien elements perverting the Nation.
Here Race Science came, and spoke of an ability to actually classify and determine races and their various attributes.
For other peoples—in this case, Jews—to set up their own autonomous communities inside the racially homogenous national territory—this was anathema to existence for the nationalist. Thus fear, thus hatred, thus death.
The Jewish people of Europe had spent the many centuries of hardship and separation not idly—they reformed their languages, made separate laws, and established themselves truly distinct and apart communities. What else could they do, in the face of sheer abandonment by the continent’s monarchies? Thus when the German rationalists took stock of the nation, they noticed the Jewish people, and noticed they were not German and thus, suspect.
The rise of Race Science proved the fatal catalyst, for it gave more than the peasants but the elite and middle classes a new religion of hatred. It said: “if Jews are not Germans, then surely they are inferior.” When challenged to produce proof, they couldn’t. Rather than change their hypothesis, they changed the conclusions, the evidence—the everything, with sole exception being the foundational thesis. Anti-Semitism became a cult-like belief in anti-rationality, a willful and purposeful embracing of the absurd and illogical. There’s little merit in expounding more on the interaction of Race Science and anti-Semitism, for the interaction is entirely nonsensical, a pure fictional invention made all too real through the power of delusional belief.
And of course, if there is an antagonist, there must be a protagonist, hence the mighty Aryan and the German nation and people which represented them. The rationalist race scientists concluded that the faults of one became the virtue of the other: weak into strong, dumb into smart. Thus could a ‘natural order’ be found: if homo sapiens were the apex predator of the animal kingdom, surely Aryans were the apex predator of homo sapiens, and the Jews the prey of this superior being. Delusions compounded, dangers abounded.
Ravages of War
By the time Adolf Hitler was born, the sparks for the coming wildfire were already set. As stated above, he was born in a time and place where to say one hated Jews was an acceptable saying in polite society. Thus to him and millions others, anti-Semitism and racial superiority was not some crackpot idea in firm belief at the fringes, but one truly widespread and firm at every level of society: the artisan, the merchant, the peasant, the shoe-cobbler, the coal-raker, the soldier, the seaman, the seamstress, the journalist, the wealthy Junker, the lawyer, the judge, the bailiff, the housewife, the chemist, the biologist, the diplomat, the bureaucrat, and so on: all held it as part of who they were. Of these, the elite hold most of the blame, for it is through their wealth and power that the annals of history turn, and in this case, they turned very poorly.
Hitler’s service in the first World War need not be remarked upon in depth. He fought in the most pointless yet significant conflict in over a century, and made it out, like millions of others, in relatively good health by sheer luck. In a sense, he was lucky and humanity unlucky. A stray artillery shell, or bullet, or minor particle of pandemic flu or epidemic typhus prevalent at the time would’ve spared us his future. Some die, many live: and you spend eternity wondering an alternative schema: such is our material reality.
Although Hitler’s body was spared the ravages of war, his mind did not survive. He himself claims the defeat of Germany in the first World War made him an anti-Semite. In this, we should take him at his word. Even if he lied, we must remind ourselves that he held this hatred without shame or hesitation; it would merit him little to lie. Whomever Adolf Hitler was prior to 1914 died on the shell-pocked fields of Northern Europe. What remained was a shattered mind, broken by Germany’s defeat. Of note, but do take this as hyperbole, when he was convalescencing in the hospital from temporary blindness due to a chemical gas blinding at the end of the war, he said he went blind again when he heard of Germany signing the instrument of surrender. Though I doubt his ability to see had been actually impaired, that his mind had been irrevocably broken is undeniable. And he wasn’t alone.
The aggressive albeit relatively dormant anti-Semitism awoke in Germans generally after 1918. Germany’s defeat asked a question, one which nationalism, race science, and anti-Semitism stood prepared to profit the most. How could they lose the war? How could pure Germany, righteous Germany, fail and falter so miserably? Those in uniform like Hitler demanded satisfaction. If the German Empire had been the fulfillment of an agenda of unifying all German peoples into a homogenous ethno-nationalist state, thus making the Aryan the apex predator not just of Europe but of the world, then how had the prey bested them? Their illogic bred fallacies endless unto infinity.
They first tried denial. Germany had not actually lost the war, not truly. Their logic: the homeland remained unmolested. The East, Russia, had been subdued. Sure, the armies in the West had been beaten back, but the people, the holy people, the highest and best and most strongest in the world, would fight to the last, and the last once again, from the Rhine to the Elbe and back, eternally and forever, throwing back all enemies into the sea from whence they came. This was part of their founding myth after all, going back to the Teutons and Frederick the Great.
All this denial did was culminate in 1945, in Hitler's desire to turn his Empire into a carcass of cinders. If Germany could not fight and win against the Jews, it did not deserve to exist, a sort of suicidal logic applied to an entire nation. Suicide or genocide: that was the choice. It is the type of choice you foist upon a people only if you are totally enraptured with a belief in your own people's inherent superiority.
Yet Germany had been defeated in November 1918, totally and completely. The Entente should have occupied the entire country as the Allies did after WW2, but it still doesn't erase that basic fact. You'd have to excuse quite a bit to argue the opposite, that Germany could still resist. Just nevermind the fact that the entire Western front had collapsed into an unorganized rout, that millions of soldiers not only went unpaid but unfed, unclothed, unequipped. Nevermind the fact that Italy and the Entente had totally smashed through the Southern flank, that Italian and British soldiers would be storming undefended cities in the German south in weeks if not days. Nevermind the fact that their conquest of the East had turned into a house of cards, with supposedly conquered regions on a map in open, flagrant rebellion. Nevermind the fact that Germany was not only bankrupt but about to enter a period of acute famine in the coming winter. Nevermind the fact that the naval leadership had ordered the fleet to sally forth to sink ships and thus make a case for a higher naval budget after the war and that in response, the Navy ships mutined en masse, with crippling industrial strikes joining in the struggle. Nevermind the fact that all-told, the Entente could outproduce Germany at all points especially now at their lowest, in such ratios that rendered collapse, all-told, inevitable.
Whose Fault? Our Fault
The first World War had been the German Army’s war. They were the main drivers, and it was they, specifically Army Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, that oversaw the final defeat. Both of course were just merely princes on top of a rotten structure. It had been a rather logical system that made sense to a civilian leadership brought up by Clausewitz and the genius of generals like him: let the high command run the war and therefore the state. They were after all, the most competent men trained in the art of war; they alone could achieve victory.
But no training or blue blood could overcome Germany’s deficit in key resources across various sectors. Germany lacked the shells, lacked the ships, lacked the steel, lacked the coal, lacked the chemical inputs to make industrial war upon all of Europe a reality. It moreover lacked the manpower: every soldier given a rifle was one farm less productive—and if millions of soldiers were not only fighting but dying, less food overall was produced, and with no ability to import it, famine became an inevitability. Further, every factory worker robs a gun available for the frontline, yet every frontline soldier robs a factory of its worker. And so on: other states like the United Kingdom and especially the United States had an abundant surplus of excess manpower. But Germany, encompassing not much land and still mostly composed of unmechanized peasant labor as its primary class, was not conducive to having an excess surplus of many people. Thus they lost.
But perhaps its greatest deficit lay in its friends. Diplomacy enables what military might alone decree impossible. Such is the folly of nationalism: you so believe in your own people’s supremacy you neglect the strengths of others, wishing to render them only as your proxy-slaves, always begging for your limited pleasure. In the first World War, Germany had the Austrians and the Ottomans, against the combined might of the rest of Europe including Russia, Japan, India, Africa, the greater Middle East and eventually America. It’s the equivalent of a single wasp invading a honey bee hive: its doom is assured.
Of course, Hitler and Germany could not blame the Army, the purebred Germanic Army, of course not. They needed a scapegoat, and the Army happily gave them one, the spark that lit the storm. They said firmly: the Jews did it. This became known as the Stab-In-The-Back, not a true theory, just another phantasm. The basis for this lie is that the civilian leadership were the ones that signed the final surrender, and since the civilian leadership included Jews and those who were friendly to Jews—it was they, the Jews, who pulled the strings behind the backs of the Army to produce their preferred result, a German defeat. The civilian parliamentarians who were left holding the blame, the Social Democrats and Conservatives that inked the final signatures on Versailles—they fell right into the Army’s trap. Civilian politics, democracy, Judaism: that is what had defeated Germany in WW1. And thus that lie, that myth, spread.
At the exact same time, the Soviet Union came into being from the fires of Revolution and Civil War, themselves a defeated power of the first World War. The Germans already despised the Slavic races of the East, and with Communism, their hatred became their northern Star, for Communism to them was a Jewish invention. By having a Communist state near their border, a state of Jewish invention and perhaps malice, the state policy of Hitler became clear: to defeat the Jews is to defeat the Soviet Union.
The Soviets, to be clear, represented the harmonious synthesis of rationalism and humanism, a polity based on true human equality, that did not seek to segregate nationalities but rather unite them towards a singular, socialistic goal while preserving the national cultures of the various peoples in the Union. All peoples of all backgrounds could participate in the governance of the Union, including Jews, and they did. Why not? The logic of Lenin’s system is plain: all who can contribute to the socialist vision should, regardless of heritage or background.
But the existence of the Soviet Union confirmed the worst fears that Hitler and many like him had. And then: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published—a known forgery at the time, but that fact was ignored, like so many other facts are ignored by the anti-Semite. The forgery purported that not only had the Jewish cabal been real, but they had left detailed minutes describing in full their plans to subjugate the non-Jew gentiles as their peasant-slaves across the entire world. Another brick was laid into the structure of a state that could not only hate the Jews, but actively seek their murder.
Over the course of many years, Hitler never faltered. If he forgave some old comrade for being Jewish, it could be explained away as the decaying neurons of humanity still somewhat firing within him. For after 1918, Hitler was set in who he was: outwardly and plainly an anti-Semite.
It seeped in, poisoned every thought he had after or before. When an ur-explanation exists to whisk away all contradictions, and you believe in it, and cause others to believe in it, you render tactful, reasonable thought impossible. Not that he wasn't a smart man—he was. At the national and interpersonal levels, he could easily dominate. His conquest of Germany into his personal fief gives plausible credence to some base ability. And yet Germany was so enraptured with anti-Semitism, that they could've picked any similar person to lead them in the 30s. That it was Hitler and not, say, Schleicher or Rohm, was a matter of how the chips fell when and where they did. German society was poised to elect Nazis or their fellow riders; they always would have picked Hitler or someone like him—German society by 1933 was extremely sick. The domestic political game was thus rigged to make him succeed, in other words. His achievement in conquering Germany, perhaps the singular achievement of his that could be judged mostly amorally—for the capture of power is no great sin, only its usage—even that deserves not even neutered praise. He was at the right place and right time. It is thus pathetic to have any admiration for his seizure of power.
Not that all Germans shared his exact fervor. Some even resisted, but against the combined forces of the true levers of power: the wealthy and the army, the disorganized resistance stood no chance. For the rest, they went along despite their reservations: they thought they could live it, that he would just rejuvenate the nation. But never trust an anti-Semite with their stated objectives. Hitler had his one vision for the future. He didn't become Fuhrer to make Germany great again, to build German industry, to make the German people prosperous, or any other developmentalist delusion. He came to power for one reason, and one reason only: to defeat the Jews, and thus cause a second Great War.
When I was young, I watched a TV show called Pinky and the Brain. It's about these two animated mice who go on insane, whacky adventures—fun for the whole family, in other words. The central recurring joke for Brain's character is that he is always trying to take over the world. Regardless of the circumstances, or other events, his answer to Pinky's question “what shall we do tonight” is almost invariably “try to take over the world”. For Hitler, his answer to every problem he confronted, to every question he was ever posed, would be to think and do whatever it took to help him defeat the Jews. If Himmler had asked “what are we doing tonight mein fuhrer?”, Hitler would respond with: “defeating the Jews”.
Everything Hitler ever did can be understood through his racial, anti-Semitic bias. He got into politics to further his personal and shared antagonism against the Jews (and various other peoples). Every act he did was in furtherance of this final goal. From the beginning to the very end, he never, not once, lost sight of his racial animosities. Consider his record, all his deeds prior to 1933: a singular, unforgiving pursuit for power and why? To defeat the Jews. And then, after his seizure of power: every further act he did was to make ready the campaigns of war against the Western and Eastern powers. Some are obvious: rearmament, the Rhineland militarized, the Sudeten Incident. Some less so: the Volkswagen, the diplomacy (both the Soviets and the West routinely signed beneficial agreements with the Germans), the Alpine retreat. Even deeds that to an ignorant person seemed harmless, like the autobahn carried with it grim overtones: they were very plainly part of a logistics network for the war he was planning. War and bloody conquest would be his sole policy and achievement.
Some have posited that Hitler went East for Lebensraum, to give German people new places to settle. While this indeed was part of the truth, such was not a new innovation from Hitler; German High Command had eyed the plains of Ukraine greedily since the late 19th century. No, for Hitler and the millions of Germans who gave him his awesome power, this new land was merely a means to an end, to procure more resources so as to wage an apocalyptic final struggle against the Jews of the world. It is through this perspective that Hitler's decision to declare war on America after Pearl Harbor can be understood; an unnecessary, even foolish act, yet one demanded of him in order to accomplish his designs. To achieve his preferred Endsieg, German troops would have had to land in New York, conquer London, and seek Jews out wherever they dwelled across all the seas. That necessitated the resources of the Soviet Union before Germany could even begin to dream of doing so.
Conquering the Soviet Union was easier said than done. But Hitler believed in Germans to the same level of delusion as he viewed the Jews and the communists. After all, when he thought of Jews, they were not Jews as a rational person might observe them, but rather the phantasmic Jew found in the Protocols and deep in the recesses of his own prejudiced mind. Thus the delusion led to an inverse belief in German racial superiority: that Germany could overcome any challenge because the German race was stronger, more moral, more just, than any other race. If Germany encountered a problem or a downturn: German ingenuity would conquer it.
This racial vision included the aforementioned disdain for the so-called Slavic races of the East. Absent any evidence, the entirety of the German High Command beginning with Hitler on down believed so much in Aryan superiority that the mere act of invasion would cause the Soviet Union to collapse like a house of cards. After all, German military officers had been bred from high nobility for centuries—warfare was in their blood. Meanwhile, from their perspective, the Soviets had shot all (most) of the Tsarist officer class and made untrained peasants field marshals. All the while, the leadership of the Soviets included prominent Jews. Thus did the Soviet Union, in Nazi reckoning, become a crypto-Jewish-Bolshevik state, dominated at the ground-level by poor feckless peasants and at the elite level by the damnable Jewish cabal; not truly a state in Westphalian terms but rather a demonic abomination in all definition of the word. This explains a sort of rational question one might ask: why didn’t the invading Germans in 1941 try to co-opt the local populations against Communist rule? Because simply: these people to the Germans were not people. They were problems to be bulldozed over, a backwards colonial people in need of total pacification and subjugation. That the Nazis drew inspiration from the European conquest of the Americas should be little surprise.
Even when Germans could conceive of a possible future where invading the USSR would turn out poorly, they figured their racial superiority would see them victorious, thus they plowed on ahead, regardless. The German tanks were the best, after all. The German planes without peers alongside pilots that flew them, each greater than the Red Baron. The German U-Boat was a masterpiece of engineering, and the People’s Car, the Volkswagen, the proper symbol of a nation rising to great imperial heights. Soon they would build Germania, the capital of all Europa, and all would bow before German supremacy! And if all else failed, then German elan, the immortal spirit and morale of the good German people, would conquer any foe no matter how great!
All delusions, of course. Germany was not the best at war. It had a good land army, a first rate air fleet, and an irrelevant navy. It, more importantly to its ambitions, lacked the logistics and the manpower to wage anything approaching continental war without collapsing in on itself. Against a single power like France or Austria or Poland, it could achieve limited successes. But against a European coalition? Or worse: a global coalition? Germany was doomed, just as it had been in 1914. Despite this, their belief in their own racial and thus physical and intellectual supremacy rendered them blind to these and any other real deficiencies. Germany would always win because Germany must always win. Even though Germany had already lost once before—it did not matter. Now they would win because they must—simple as.
The Doomed Regime
The Third Reich rose and fell in a little over 12 years. It never stood a chance.
When we consider why, we must always presume that Germany would invade the Soviet Union by no later than 1942. Why? Because it is to engage in fantasy to consider a world where Germany did not invade the Soviet Union, for just as it is impossible consider seriously a world where Hitler or someone like him did not rule Germany at that time. The existence of the Third Reich presumes the existence of Hitler. A Germany without Hitler is not our Third Reich. And to posit other types of Germany is just as ludicrous as pondering other types of Hitler. Hitler was Hitler. Germany was the Third Reich. All other considerations are flights of fancy, best left for fiction than serious historical inquiry.
Thus Hitler, thus the war. As explained above, Hitler’s entire purpose of being was the defeat of the Jews and to achieve that goal, he needed Germany to produce enough men and resources to compete on a global scale, at first with the local powers, then against the Soviets, and lastly the rest: America and et cetera. So at minimum, a war of bloody conquest from Gibraltar to the Urals. Thus would Germany and the Aryan race achieve its thousand year Reich, or at least the foundations of one. Even he was not so blind as to think such a daunting task could be accomplished through sheer willpower alone and all at once. He planned and schemed and stabbed his way through for 6 tedious yet tragically bloody years to build the German Armed Forces to the best potential he could muster before unleashing his war, achieving certain mass tactical successes at first.
We all know what happened next: he lost the war, and lost badly. What people really demand to know from that is: could it have been different, they ask in either terror or elation—could Germany have won the war? No, never. Not our Germany, not our Hitler, not our timeline. Why? Well, ask another, more interesting question. Such as: when did Germany lose the war, and then why then? Here there has been true academic debate of interest.
Many dates have historians bandied about. The diehard wehraboos and fact-obsessed geeks will say with surety May 1945, for that is when Germany delivered its official surrender. An American or British fanboy might whimper June 6, 1944. A tank-obsessed freak, on the other hand: August 1943 after Kursk. Or Stalingrad in February 1943 if you are a pure objectivist. Or the failure of Case Blue in Summer 1942, if you believe in immediate a priori causal relations. And there’s some brave lads who think Autumn 1940 when the Luftwaffe failed to knock Britain out of the war. And who can forget honorable mentions: September 1939 and January 1933. I’ll stake however the most radical position here: November 1918—but if we really wish to be honest with ourselves: July 1914.
Numerically ordering the World Wars as One and Two makes more than face-value sense, but actual, factual sense in that the events are literally quite sequential, each a layer of dominoes setting the next up to fall. The failures of the Entente to defeat Germany in full allowed the rise of Hitler. The rise of Hitler led to the invasion of the Soviet Union. The German High Command decision for war in July 1914 caused their own inevitable defeat and thus: the Entente failures, the 1920s, the rise of Naziism, of Hitler, and then: the war. It’s all tied neatly together, that if for a change in time and place and other elements it would’ve resulted in a different outcome. Say the Western Entente marched all the way to Konigsberg and laid down a different peace. Or that the German generals in 1914 opted not for war but to grumble under British naval supremacy forever. Or that the German proletariat had succeeded in their own proletariat revolution in 1918-1919. And so on. But we don’t live in a time of different outcomes. We live in a time of our certain truths.
Why the German defeat was inevitable was the same reason in 1914 as it was in 1933. Literally nothing at that fundamental level had changed, despite the new technologies, military theories, and so on. The balance of the central equation remained unchanged. On one side of the equation was people, the literal number of the population. And on the other: everything that those people ever did. The numbers never added up in Germany’s favor. The Germans never had enough food, enough industry, enough raw materials, to wage any sort of long continental campaign. At best, they could do quick campaigns, the sort seen against Poland and France. Men could quickly be shuffled off the front to the factories and back and forth again and again. That way, industrial labor would suffer a bit but not cripple Germany. But facing a struggle against Britain and America overseas and a larger, far more important and imminent one in the East against either Russians or Soviets, this idea of shuffling men around became yet another delusion.
In the second World War, it was only in 1943 that Germany well and truly realized, 2 years after the Eastern Campaign had failed, that Germany needed more resources to survive and it was only then they considered the previously unthinkable: arming ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, and more against the Soviets, and moreover conscripting a mass slave labor force made up of the unthinkables they had been so recently murdering en masse, the gays, the trans, the Roma, the Slavs, and most steadfastly of all: the Jews. Conscript slave labor, as in most modern societies including our own, had always been present in Germany. But it was only the ugly necessity of war that scaled this monster up to the industrial level—thus the killing factories of the early Holocaust merged with the slave labor camps to churn both bodies and war material out in disproportionate measure in the later Holocaust.
It was too late, and never enough. Germany never outproduced the Allies or the Soviets alone. To use a key metric, take raw numbers of aircraft produced. In 1941, Germany produced around 11,000 airplanes. In that same year: the US alone made 26,000. The Soviets: 15,000. The peak of war mobilization for Germany came in 1944, and it only got up to 39,000 planes. That year, the US had made 96,000 and the Soviets 40,000. Similar discrepancies echo themselves across every measurable metric you can name: trucks, train engines, tanks, guns made; miles of rail track laid, tons of steel refined, shells produced, and so on. Germany was outgunned in every single way, in a way that only got worse year after year.
Nor could the wunderwaffe be relied upon. The jet and the rocket were the only feasible technologies that Germany could produce that could tip the balance yet again: Germany possessed neither the engineers or the raw resources, or the pilots, or the chemical plants to make enough ammunition. By the time these technologies became somewhat reliable in 1945, Berlin had already fallen. Nor if you magically transposed those technologies to 1933 would it have made a difference: all technology eventually spreads, and by the time Germany fired the first shot, every world power would have not only the same tech, but better and in higher quantity. Thus Germany was doomed, again and again and again.
The war against the Soviets deserves special condemnation, for here we can observe the critical lack of manpower in all its ugliness. It didn’t take until the end, until Bagration, until Kursk, until Stalingrad or the Russian winter of 1941 for Germany to realize it had failed. It took a week, in hindsight, from the start of open hostilities.
The first week of Operation Barbarossa had been a stunning success. The frontier armies of the Soviet Union had been smashed, routed, totally destroyed into nothing. Minsk fell. The vast Russian plains stretched out before the Teutonic hordes, undefended keeps and citadels ripe for the taking. For those that know anything of military timetables and how impossible it is most of the time to stick to those schedules, the invasion was in fact right on schedule, right where they needed to be at the end of that first week. All of the High Command was ecstatic, best encapsulated by the Chief of the High Command himself, Franz Halder, who recorded his giddy thoughts like a schoolgirl before the spring prom. This was prophecy: the Fuhrer said that the whole rotten structure of the Soviet Union needed but a swift kick, and it would all tumble down. The peasant Soviets would revert to their bandit ways and thus be easy pickings, the Jewish Commissars would revert to their baser forms by stealing the country’s remaining wealth and fleeing to the United States, but all over: there would be no organized resistance after the first week.
All according to plan—then on the 8th day a new Soviet Army appeared on the maps, in the reports, on the field, in new tanks—larger tanks, bigger than the German tank commanders had ever reckoned with. Then another Army appeared. And then another. The Germans reorganized their forces quickly—not fast enough though to maintain momentum. The supply lines were already at their outer limits. By expending fuel and ammunition they couldn't waste, the Germans managed to survive the first onslaught. Yet the timetable was missed, lost. Thus the war. For every second lost made defeat sting more true. The endless combat wore thin a very fragile logistics and maintenance network. Even small things, like the endless dust of the steppe became as deadly to a Panzer tank as an enemy shell. Men got sick. It was hot that summer, unbearably so for some, who had little experience with scorching heat. And the gas: there was never enough gas.
The plan had worked before, to be fair to the Germans. In 1918 during the final offensive in the East: it became known as a train war, for it was just as easy as a squad of soldiers to seize the railways and then use the trains to go, logistics hub to hub, conquering without stop. Of course, March 1918 was not June 1941. Even though it was in effect the same combatants, the Soviets on one side and the Germans on the other—you cannot compare the Soviet Army of 1918 to the one in 1941. The fact that the Germans and especially Hitler thought so is extremely damning for them, and reveals just how contemptuous they were of their foe.
For they never planned to contend with a slow drive across thousands of kilometers of active resistance. As soon as a Soviet Army was met and defeated in the field, another three rose to take their place. And these weren't unarmed men in the style of Enemy at the Gates. They were poorly trained, sure, but they had all the best and most modern equipment the Soviet Union had on hand, which was considerable.
Thus deadlines were missed and then: mud set in early autumn and Barbarossa had failed for good, with Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow still standing. The war was of course supposed to be over by then: German troops were to be wintering in safe quarters in the Urals, and scattered across the former Soviet Union’s various cities as permanent garrisons. The factories back home desparately needed labor for both the war effort and for consumer goods, and began to grow hungry for it, an appetite that was never sated. Worse still for Germany, they could never even hope to compete with the Soviets in terms of active duty manpower. In this, they again massively underestimated their supposed racial inferiors. Consider Barbarossa and Bagration; both are considered massive German failures due to a lack of reserves for Germany in both cases. It is, in fact, the principal story of both world wars. As seen with the Soviet defense of 1941, merely having men with guns who can stand in front of an army is enough to make that army slow down and then halt altogether. To wit: Germany could mobilize 800,000 men in June 1941. The Soviet Union could, and did, mobilize 30 million.
It really is that simple. Numerical superiority, and that the Soviet Union was able to trade space and men for time to regenerate proper new armies, enabled their ultimate success. The war was long and bloody but its ultimate outcome was never in doubt. The best Germany could do was struggle pitifully to the end, which it did, finally accomplishing what Hitler had wished the German Empire to have done in 1918—to devastate the German homeland, and to punish itself for its final failure.
Hitler could not perceive anything outside his racial prejudices. He never conceived of a world that would fight back, and that when it did fight back, that it wouldn’t be as ferocious as it actually was, nor could he imagine that Germany would be bested across every field scientific and mathematical. The limit of his intelligence was bound by a shared radical delusion in a Jewish conspiracy, one shared equally by millions of Germans that gave him the power to pursue his wicked objectives. But this delusion made it impossible to consider the world rationally and thus doomed him, his project, and his entire rotten regime.
I don’t like Hitler
I really don’t. The reason I put him at the front of the list, before any other world historical failure, is that he industrially slaughtered tens of millions of people needlessly and pointlessly, and set the world up we’re living in today, with all its modern problems and issues. Other tyrants may one day dwarf Hitler numerically but at least to our modern imaginations, he will remain first and foremost in all of our minds.
And to this day, people still adore Hitler—his regime, his party, his state, his war, his empire, and so forth. And to those I say: you are fools. Hitler made his own defeat possible by falling to anti-Semitism, which itself, as has been shown decisively, is a dead end to power—it is in effect, state and national suicide to adopt it as a policy—if you want to understand why Hitler failed, look no further and first as his anti-Semitic nature.
I wish Hitler had died in birth or before, or that he had been struck down every moment from life unto death. Especially after 1918, he had become a husk of a man. Totally worthless and beyond approach as a normal human being. That we failed to stop him before the monstrous mechanics of politics and power crowned him Fuhrer must remain our original sin for our current society. We didn’t stop Hitler before the war, and because of that, 60 million people died. It's his fault but also: our fault too.
I’m glad he’s dead. Every April 20th, I think about his birthday, his final one, as he pissed his pants a few dozen meters beneath the ground in Berlin. Soviet artillery 12 kilometers away opened up a furious barrage, a trumpet of his coming doom. It was aimed at the city center. Panic gripped the streets as the war came to the capital. Aides came and went and informed the fuhrer of the carnage. Two million soldiers of the Red Army began to encircle his pathetic capital. Only 90,000 Germans stood in the way. About 45,000 were not soldiers. They were civilians with guns: many sick, many weak, many young. Another 45,000 or so were actual fighters. But they had little bullets, little food, and little time.
Ten days shook Berlin with fire and brimstone. The Soviets drank deep from the chalice of revenge, for the fallen millions Germans had killed with callous cruelty. On the tenth day, Adolf Hitler put a loaded gun to his head—and perhaps bit on a cyanide capsule—and pulled the trigger. His brain annihilated, his body soon joined it in gasoline fueled fire. The Soviets found his blackened, shrunken corpse days later, beneath the corpses of his wife, the Goebbels, and the Goebbels children. Thus ended Hitler. The vultures then descended, picking him, his party, and his Germany, apart into the ashes of oblivion.
For all time, for all who follow in this path: may they receive similar returns. They deserve nothing else.
Addendum: Sources
Much of this article has been derived from the masterful works of Glantz, Kershaw, Ullrich, and Tooze, whose works on Germany formed much of the basis of this article. I also recommend Rise and Fall of the 3rd Reich as a contemporary primary source document. Beevor I rank slightly lower as a historian but his work does provide some basic insight, so I will begrudgingly include him.
Beyond the literary, special shout-out goes to the Radio War Nerd podcast and their various insightful episodes on WW2.
I should mention, if only for completion, that Mein Kampf was also used, mainly in confirming Hitler’s deranged mentality. You do not need to read it to understand Hitler. Its only use is backing up the theories about Hitler present in the academic works of Glantz et al. I derived no special insight from it that I did not already possess, and I doubt anyone else will.