DBWI: Hitler Survives March

As everyone knows, Hitler died on the 13th or March 1943 when the plane he was flying in was shot down by Soviet fighters near Minsk (although some conspiracy theorists claim the destruction was due to a bomb inside the aircraft) while flying from his HQ near Vinnitsa, Ukraine, to Smolensk, but I was wondering, what would have happened if he'd reached Smolensk, and eventually returned to Germany, what effect would his continued leadership have had on the German war effort?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Wasn't Hitler insisting on a major offensive against the Soviets at Kursk at this time? I suppose it would have gone forward. Would that have been good or bad for the Germans?
 
I think an offensive would only accelerate Germany's total defeat. They suffered such heavy losses on the defensive at Orel and Kharkov in May that an offensive would be even bloodier. The Red Army will still take Berlin in May.
 
I think an offensive would only accelerate Germany's total defeat. They suffered such heavy losses on the defensive at Orel and Kharkov in May that an offensive would be even bloodier. The Red Army will still take Berlin in May.

Maybe May '45 instead of '46 though.
 
Maybe May '45 instead of '46 though.

And maybe Dresden, Potsdam and Koln aren't nuked.

OTOH, the Nazi ideologues don't have things like 'strategic mobility' or 'the army is trying to win the goddamn war' to interfere with their program of industrial murder. A million or so civilians butchered was nightmarish enough, but if the plan got fully implemented before the Russians could overrun most of the site or liberate the areas that were going to be most affected? Even if they go down a year sooner, the Nazis could have killed ten times as many... Not that the German Army was guiltless, as they did turn a blind eye (in return for a free hand in fighting the war) to evil. Also more than a few senior and mid-level officers subscribed to that ideology (as was revealed at Nuremberg post-war), though to a man they merely thought that such things could wait until after they'd fought and won the war.
 
OOC: No Kursk wouldn't have delayed Soviet victory for a year...I could write several paragraphs explaining why.

OOC: Agreed, it was more for effect than anything else, although with the catastrophe of Kursk replaced by a stalemate in 1943 and a somewhat smarter German strategy I could see them holding out for at least a few more months.
 
I dunno, I don't think you can get an early finish without the A-bomb gutting the heart out of Germany. The bomb wouldn't be ready by May of 1945.

The effect of The Bomb has been exaggerated, it was Soviet boots on German soil that really forced their surrender.
 
I dunno, I don't think you can get an early finish without the A-bomb gutting the heart out of Germany. The bomb wouldn't be ready by May of 1945.

Well, the initial test, Trinity, was conducted on the 14th of July. If it has worked, then the yanks have the bomb ready to deliver by August. As it was, they still had a few bugs that they had to fix, and the successful test wasn't conducted until the 3rd of November. And then the yanks wanted to be sure they had enough for both Japan and Germany, so the first one wasn't used until the 6th of April 1946. And though the Armistice came two weeks later, it wasn't until the first week of May that Allied forces entered Berlin.

So had Trinity gone off as planned, the war could have been over by the end of September. But that is a POD in it's own right, and not a common one.
 
Hitler was apparently very much influenced by the Allied deception operations. The role of the Abwehr chief Adm Canaris is obscure in this, as is several of the other nazi chiefs who lost power in 1943. One can postulate that the British deception operations would have remained at the higher level of sucess as in 1942-43. The Allies certainly had a easier time of it in 1943 when the German senior commanders fell for anything the Double Cross system & the Deception Committie fed them. Compare the ease of Operation Husky in 1943 with the Axis armies scattered allover the Mediterranean coasts vs the German armies concentrated in NW France to oppose op. Overlord in 1944.
 
OOC: Agreed, it was more for effect than anything else, although with the catastrophe of Kursk replaced by a stalemate in 1943 and a somewhat smarter German strategy I could see them holding out for at least a few more months.

OOC: My argument has always been that Germany's defeat was due to the Red Army's size and sophistication from 1943 onwards. No matter what strategy it adopted survival for even 1-2 months more was essentially impossible, much less several months. The Red Army could have actually advanced on Berlin and Germany far earlier than it did IOTL, as early as November 1944, but was delayed because Hitler directed large reserves into Hungary and Romania against the advice of his generals. As Stalin wanted to secure the Balkans before the war ended, he delayed the Vistula-Oder Offensive until January 1945, when it became clear that Budapest wouldn't be taken before the winter campaign season ended, and delayed Berlin until Vienna was taken.

The Nazi Germany lasted until May 1945 due to Stalin's desire for a Balkan empire, and Hitler's fixation on Hungary and Romania
 
The effect of The Bomb has been exaggerated, it was Soviet boots on German soil that really forced their surrender.

Soviet boots, the A bomb, then there is the third school which argues the German leadership had disintegrated anyway. There is some truth to the old joke the Germans were shooting each other as much as the Allies were in those last weeks. What were there, five coups and counter coups? & no less that three German army commanders tried to flip to the western Allies. They were just following their Landser. Over one million individual German soldiers surrendered in the last two months in the west as the Allied armies closed up to the Rhine River.
 
Anyone want to raise the old argument of how the Allies would have gained from the momentary chaos in the German leadership had they stuck to Marshals concept and been prepared to invade France in the summer of 1943? ;) End the war in 1945 as Dunn & Grigg claim was possible? :p
 
OOC: My argument has always been that Germany's defeat was due to the Red Army's size and sophistication from 1943 onwards. No matter what strategy it adopted survival for even 1-2 months more was essentially impossible, much less several months. The Red Army could have actually advanced on Berlin and Germany far earlier than it did IOTL, as early as November 1944, but was delayed because Hitler directed large reserves into Hungary and Romania against the advice of his generals. As Stalin wanted to secure the Balkans before the war ended, he delayed the Vistula-Oder Offensive until January 1945, when it became clear that Budapest wouldn't be taken before the winter campaign season ended, and delayed Berlin until Vienna was taken.

The Nazi Germany lasted until May 1945 due to Stalin's desire for a Balkan empire, and Hitler's fixation on Hungary and Romania

OOC: I think you're dismissing how devastating Kursk was for the Germans, without it the Germans might have retained the ability to launch major offensives, would have saved significant amounts of men and material and with no Hitler they might even have managed to have a saner defensive strategy in the east. Yes, the amount of blame Hitler gets is completely exaggerated but he did poke his nose in far too much, not that having a Himmler or Goering replacing him guarantees things will improve though, both were equally inept. But for the sake of the scenario I think the Germans holding out for a year longer isn't too ASB.
 
OOC: I think you're dismissing how devastating Kursk was for the Germans, without it the Germans might have retained the ability to launch major offensives, would have saved significant amounts of men and material and with no Hitler they might even have managed to have a saner defensive strategy in the east. Yes, the amount of blame Hitler gets is completely exaggerated but he did poke his nose in far too much, not that having a Himmler or Goering replacing him guarantees things will improve though, both were equally inept. But for the sake of the scenario I think the Germans holding out for a year longer isn't too ASB.

OOC: Nazi Germany lost many times more men trying to defend Orel and Kharkov during the Soviet counteroffensive than it did during the offensive. Indeed, the Kursk attack as a whole essentially destroyed three Soviet tank armies, crippled many rifle armies, and forced the Red Army to hurriedly rebuild it's forces for the counteroffensive. The Red Army was very badly damaged, yet still inflicted incredibly heavy losses on the Germans at Orel and Kharkov; either of those battles was more deadly for the Germans than both of the German attacks on Kursk combined!

Further, what strategic options were available for Nazi Germany? The "backhand blow" proposed by Manstein failed IOTL, because the Soviets outmatched the Germans in deception and reconnaissance. He threw his armored reserves into smashing the Soviet diversions on the Mius and Donets, drawing them away from the decisive Soviet offensive at Kharkov. The Germans in 1943 lacked the infantry strength for a static defense. Just look at the Soviet Smolensk offensive; between July and September the Red Army, with minimal mechanized and cavalry support, smashed multiple German defensive belts (Some of the strongest, backed up by armored reserves), captured Smolensk, advanced to the borders of Belorussia, and still had the offensive strength to launch new offensive in October and November. Army Group Center, meanwhile, was decisively defeated and suffered irreplaceable losses.

No matter what Nazi Germany does, it loses.
 
Further, what strategic options were available for Nazi Germany? The "backhand blow" proposed by Manstein failed IOTL, because the Soviets outmatched the Germans in deception and reconnaissance. He threw his armored reserves into smashing the Soviet diversions on the Mius and Donets, drawing them away from the decisive Soviet offensive at Kharkov. The Germans in 1943 lacked the infantry strength for a static defense. Just look at the Soviet Smolensk offensive; between July and August the Red Army, with minimal mechanized and cavalry support, smashed multiple German defensive belts (Some of the strongest, backed up by armored reserves), captured Smolensk, advanced to the borders of Belorussia, and still had the offensive strength to launch new offensive in October and November. Army Group Center, meanwhile, was decisively defeated and suffered irreplaceable losses.

OOC: They could have adopted Guederians "final roll of the dice" strategy and went for an all or nothing armoured battle with a final attempt at the backhand blow in 1944. Not that there was any likelihood that this wouldn't have in fact shortened the war, but I get your point.

IC: Not to derail the thread but does anyone reckon if the Allies had just dropped one of the bombs on the Berlin Festung it might have surrendered around the same time as the rest of the country? Would Stalin even have allowed it?
 
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IC: Not to derail the thread but does anyone reckon if the Allies had just dropped one of the bombs on the Berlin Festung it might have surrendered around the same time as the rest of the country? Would Stalin even have allowed it?

Berlin was the communications hub for the German defense in the east that spring. Disrupting that, and the German central command knode is liable to cause the eastern defense to dissolve far faster and more completely than OTL.

I cant say if Stalin might have desired this.
 
Well, Potsdam is a suburb of Berlin, and it was there that the USAAF dropped their second nuclear bomb. That, and the destruction of Koln (Cologne) later on the night of April 10 1946 did convince the German Army and the saner Nazis that jig was up. In the end the German Army got out of the way and let the Russians have at the stubborn lunatics who'd seized control in Berlin. And then the Americans started dropping nuclear bombs on Japan...
 
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