In pursuing the goal of eastward expansion and continental hegemony Hitler and his war planners overestimated German capabilities, although this was certainly not apparent at the start of the war. The Germans lost the war because they underestimated the willingness and ability of Britain, Russia, and the United States to resist German military expansion. Perhaps Hitler’s most fundamental misjudgement was to assume that Britain would eventually give Germany a free hand on the continent once the British became convinced that they had no chance to gain military victory at an acceptable cost. Hitler would have preferred to have come to some arrangement with Britain short of war, but he would not let British opposition deter him from his long-range goal. Years of British appeasement led him to assume that Britain would be unwilling to fight a long war that might put its world-wide empire at risk. This fundamental misjudgement meant that after launching the invasion of Poland Hitler would never again have full control of events. As Winston Churchill (1874–1965) acidly remarked at the time, Hitler had been free to start the war at a time of his choosing, but he was not free to choose the time for its end, except by surrender.

British refusal to come to terms after the German conquest of Poland in 1939 and after the fall of France in 1940 forced Hitler to revise his original plan of attacking the Soviet Union only after peace with Britain. His miscalculation of the Russians’ willingness and capacity to fight for their country was Hitler’s second egregious mistake. The unexpected failure of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, in the autumn of 1941 in effect forced Hitler to play the “Japanese card” against the United States in the hope that Japan would prevent the US from tipping the balance against Germany in the European theater. Hitler’s third and fatal misjudgement was to have underestimated the determination and resources that the United States would bring to the war. In late 1941 Germany sought to persuade its treaty partner Japan to enter the war by promising to declare war on the US in support of a Japanese attack. Three days after Pearl Harbor Hitler made good on this promise.

From the start of the war in 1939 to the end of the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943 the German Wehrmacht was the strongest and technologically most advanced fighting force in the world. One of the reasons Hitler was determined to go to war in 1939 was to take advantage of Germany’s relative lead in state-of-the-art weaponry and aircraft, as well as to exploit its perceived superiority in resolute leadership and the will to fight. As a relatively small country with limited natural resources, however, German plans were predicated on fighting short wars, isolating their opponents, and rapidly defeating them one at a time. This Blitzkrieg strategy worked to perfection against Poland, which found itself having to fight a two-front war when Soviet forces invaded from the east in accordance with the secret protocol of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Poland was forced to surrender in early October 1939. In the West the Phony War that resulted from the reluctance of France or Great Britain to launch any offensive action in the hope that full-scale war might yet be avoided came to an end in May 1940 when the German armies overran Holland, Belgium, Luxemburg, and France within six weeks. The British managed to extricate their forces at Dunkirk in early June 1940, but were now reduced to preparing a desperate defense of their home island against a threatened invasion. Germany appeared to have won the war.

But Britain, now under the defiant leadership of Winston Churchill, a long-term foe of appeasement, refused to accept the German conquest of Poland or to accede to German domination of the continent. German failure to gain air supremacy in the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 forced the postponement and eventual cancellation of Operation Sea Lion, the plan to invade Britain across the English Channel. Instead, Hitler gave his long-range foreign policy goal, conquest of Lebensraum in the east, top priority. The time seemed right for the invasion of the Soviet Union, as Britain was in no position to contest a German campaign in the east, and the US, despite the unconcealed antipathy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) to Hitler’s regime, was badly divided on the wisdom of active American intervention in the war. Here was the window of opportunity to achieve what Hitler had always considered his primary mission: the destruction of the Soviet regime and the seizure of its territory for German colonization. Mutually reinforcing racial and ideological assumptions about the evil of “Jewish Bolshevism” lay behind the Nazis’ contempt for the Soviet Union and their decision to violate their pledge of non-aggression a full eight years before it was scheduled to run out. Vast stretches of rich and fertile lands sparsely populated by what the Nazis defined as Untermenschen (subhumans) seemed ripe for Germany’s taking. Defeat of the Soviet Union would also end the potential danger of a Soviet–British alliance and greatly strengthen Germany’s position in the coming showdown for global primacy with the Anglo-American powers. A campaign against Communist Russia would enjoy the full support of Germany’s allies and co-belligerents, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Vichy France, and Franco’s Spain, who had always regarded the Nazi–Soviet Pact as a breach of fascist principles.

At the heart of the German decision to attack the Soviet Union lay the assumption of Soviet weakness. Stalinist purges in the late 1930s had not only sown fear and dissension in the Soviet population but had also decimated the ranks of the officer corps of the Red Army and the Soviet navy. The Red Army’s poor performance in the 1939–1940 Winter War against Finland seemed to confirm its lack of fighting strength. Imperial Germany had soundly defeated the Russian forces in the First World War. The Nazis could not believe that the communists, the “peaceniks” of the First World War, could effectively rally the Russian population behind an egalitarian ideology that championed the interests of the “inferior” proletarian masses and restricted the enterprise of “superior” individuals. Soviet military technology and economic production lagged well behind German levels. German military leaders confidently expected Russian resistance to collapse within a matter of weeks. Although the Balkan Campaign to pacify Yugoslavia and Greece delayed the invasion of Russia until 22 June 1941, there was no reason to believe that Moscow would not be captured by the end of the year. And even if German forces were to take longer to conquer the USSR than expected, the possibility that they could be defeated by so backward and “primitive” an enemy seemed out of the question.

But Hitler and his paladins had miscalculated the strength of Soviet resistance. Informed by their intelligence sources that Japan, with whom the Soviets had signed a non-aggression treaty in April 1941, would not join the German attack on the USSR, the Soviets were able to mass some three million soldiers for the Battle of Moscow in December 1941. The overstretched German front, hampered by severe winter weather, was forced to retreat. The Germans now had to prepare for a much longer war than expected. The news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, however, lifted German morale. The Japanese entry into the war seemed to mark the successful culmination of Hitler’s global strategy. On 11 December 1941 Hitler honored his commitment to Japan under the Tripartite Pact by declaring war on the US.

In retrospect this declaration of war appears to have been Hitler’s greatest mistake. At the time, however, it represented the climactic realization of Hitler’s plan of using Japan to tie down American and British forces in the Pacific. A Japanese–American settlement that would enable the US fully to engage its forces in Europe was the one eventuality that the Nazis sought to prevent at all costs. True, a Japanese attack on the US would have the effect of bringing the potentially formidable American foe fully into the war sooner than Hitler might have wished. But from the German perspective a formal declaration of war was a small price to pay for Japanese entry into the war, which promised to relieve the military threat to Germany from the US. The US was after all already fully engaged in the war in the Atlantic against the German navy, to whom the thankless task of preventing American supplies from reaching Britain and the USSR was assigned. German naval leaders pressured the Nazi government for a formal declaration of war against the US to give the navy the same legitimate claim to supplies and resources as the army that was fighting in Russia. A formal declaration of war against the US would also presumably give Japan a boost in morale and enable Germany to share in the credit for the expected Japanese victories.

The year 1942 was indeed one of Axis ascendancy as German Panzer units conquered the Ukraine and rolled through the southern Russian steppes on their way to the Volga River and the beckoning oilfields of the Caucasus. In the Pacific theater Japan conquered the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaya, including the British fortress at Singapore, before losing its naval supremacy at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. The turn of the year 1942/1943 brought the turning of the tide in Europe. In the battle of El Alamein in November 1942 British forces turned back the German–Italian campaign under General Erwin Rommel to capture Egypt and the British possessions in the Middle East. That same month Anglo- American troops landed in the French colonies of Algeria and Morocco in an operation codenamed Torch. The most significant German defeat occurred at Stalingrad on the Volga River in the winter of 1942/1943. After some of the most savage fighting in the history of warfare, an entire German army was forced to surrender to the Soviets on 1 February 1943. The crushing of the last major German offensive in the east in the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 spelled the end of the German military initiative on the eastern front.

From 1943 on Germany fought a defensive war as its armies began the long drawn- out, more than 1,200-mile retreat from its forward positions in Russia that ended in the battle for Berlin in April 1945. The remnants of the German Africa Corps and the Italian troops in North Africa surrendered to the Allies at Tunis in May 1943. In July 1943, after the Allied capture of Sicily and the landing of Allied forces on the Italian mainland, Mussolini was deposed by the Fascist Grand Council. Italy formally joined the Allied side in October of that year. Allied naval supremacy forced German submarines on the defensive in the Atlantic as well. Increasing Allied superiority in aircraft and weaponry brought the air war home to the Reich, culminating in the devastating bombing of Dresden in February 1945 with the loss of thousands of civilian lives.

The long-anticipated D-Day landing of Allied forces in Normandy on 6 June 1944 (Operation Overlord) doomed the Nazi regime, which now had to fight for its very survival in Russia, Italy, and France. On each of these fronts the Allies mounted major offensives in the summer of 1944. The Allied forward thrust on the Western front was slowed but not stopped by an unexpected counterattack in the Ardennes in December 1944, known as the Battle of the Bulge. The hope that “wonder weapons” developed by German engineers might yet turn the tide in Germany’s favor came to an end when Allied troops overran the launching sites of the V1 flying bombs and V2 long-range missiles aimed at London and Antwerp. Jet-powered aircraft, operational by early 1945, could not be used for lack of fuel.

With Soviet troops only a few city blocks away, Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945 in his fortified bunker under the ruined Reich Chancellery, constructed and dedicated with much fanfare in 1939. The European phase of the war officially ended on 8 May 1945 after the German government under Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s successor, surrendered to the Allied and Soviet commands. In his last testament Hitler refused to recant Nazi principles and expressed no remorse for the untold suffering that Nazi aggression had brought upon the world.

The Nazis’ supremacist ideology had led to German defeat by blinding Nazi leaders to the realities of power in the world and to the readiness of peoples threatened by German domination to defend their liberty and sovereignty. In retrospect, Germany was doomed by a hubris that could not help but lead to tactical and strategic misjudgements. Germany’s defeat was not the result of any single mistake in military tactics, though undoubtedly there were a number of these. One such unsound tactical decision was Hitler’s refusal to permit the German Sixth Army to break out of its encirclement at Stalingrad in late 1942. He could not bring himself to authorize a tactic that would contradict his oft proclaimed conceit that German soldiers never retreat. By the end of the war German forces had retreated some 2,000 miles from their positions on the Volga.

In what remains a classic example of historical justice, Nazi Germany fell victim to its own odious Social Darwinist conviction that military might was the only principle that counted in international relations. “I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, whether it is plausible or not,” Hitler had told his military commanders in Berchtesgaden to overcome their skepticism on the eve of the war in August 1939. “The victor will not be asked afterwards whether he told the truth or not. When starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.” Nazi militarism was based on the fascist conviction that stronger peoples have the right to rule over the weak. Their belief that their supposed cultural superiority was sufficient grounds for a war of colonial conquest left the Nazis with no moral or material resources for the defense of their own country against the Allies’ superior strength at the end of the war. Nazism equated the power, the interests, and the welfare of the German nation and racial community with the highest moral good. It was a system of belief that allowed its adherents to commit the most horrible atrocities with good conscience.