"Best-case" scenario for the Germans:
1942
- Soviet positions south of Stalingrad and west of the Volga are cleared as a follow-up, making any future 'pincer' impossible
- Luftwaffe brings it's A-Game and flattens the Baku refineries
- Axis units are reshuffled, with Italian mountain infantry actually sent to mountains and German mechanized units back north into the Don steppe
- Allies also land in Tunisia, North Africa abandoned early
- Soviets bungle their winter offensive, preferably with the spearheads cut off and destroyed
1943
- renewed push in the north sees Leningrad cut off
- 1943 summer campaign sees disastrous Soviet counteroffensive against Leningrad (desperate to relieve it) and premature D-Day instead of Sicily (launched due to fear of Soviet collapse); both fail spectacularly
- Leningrad starves to death late '43
- Winter of '43 ends up as an inconclusive meat grinder, as Germany still has a strategic armor reserve to throw at the Soviets
1944
- Allies decide to revisit the Mediterranean theater, and begin slowly pushing through Sicily and southern Italy, easily contained by German forces
- Soviet forces launch massive operation in Don region, break through; Caucasus, Stalingrad abandoned
- Red Army launches renewed offensive in the south, everything east of the Dnieper overrun, German forces withdraw in good order, mount a couple of succesful local counterattacks against exposed spearheads
- Crimea lost
- New offensive against occupied Leningrad, heavy street fighting
1945
- Soviets being experiencing severe manpower issues early
- Army Group Center pushed out of eastern Belarus
- D-Day Mark II launched in France, German armour stalls Allied advance in the bocage countryside for a couple of months
- German industrial output begins to collapse due to shattering of transport network by Allied air offensive
- Soviet forces cross the Dnieper along the entire front, German forces avoid encirclement
- Allies break through, Germans withdraw to the Seine river, then to eastern French border
- Soviet forces halted on the Dniester in Ukraine; Minsk falls
- lack of captured uranium slightly delays A-Bomb production
- first A-Bomb dropped over Nuremberg in late September
- second A-Bomb attack launched in October, but random Me-262 gets lucky and shoots down the bomber
- Army Group North withdraws from most of the Baltic states
- third A-Bomb attack launched mid-October, bomber crashes due to mechanical issues, blowing up random German village
- Antwerp harbor finally cleared by Allies
- Po Valley in Italy liberated
- atomic bombs churned out at the rate of 3-4/month in 1945: 3 in November, 4 in December, 3 in January, etc. etc. Anyone's guess when the Germans throw in the towel