Smarter Hitler vs smarter Stalin

So lets say that Stalin and Hitler both act significantly smarter than in OTL. Hitler does not do the Holocaust until after WWII is over, keeping the Jews in the ghettos, and lets the Wehrmacht have control over the war in full. He also acts more decisively at Dunkirk and won the Battle of Britain, forcing a UK surrender. Stalin has been less intense with the purges, notably sparing Tukhachevsky. He has also let the Red Army have control over the war. So in this scenario, how does Barbarossa go? Who wins?
 

Ryan

Donor
smarter Stalin means that the red army isn't caught with it's pants down, so German forces end up suffering a slow painful slog relatively close to the border and eventually get overwhelmed and conquered by the soviets.
 
I think that even with a smarter Hitler, the Battle of Britain is still a lost cause. I don't see any plausible way that the Nazis could have won with a POD after ~1933.

Smarter Stalin/USSR is the real winner here if Stalin doesn't get couped out of power. The purges did untold damage to the Red Army, far greater than Hitler's micromanaging IMO and deep battle would be a decent counterweight to blitzkrieg.

All in all, the Germans do far worse than OTL and bleed out in Belarus and Western Ukraine before being overrun.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
This scenario = No War.

A smarter Hitler is not going to try to invade a country the size of the USSR on his own. A smarter Stalin would have the Red Army cocked and locked, but would not want to start a ruinous war.

BTW: I would suggest you replace "smarter" with "saner"
 

Cryostorm

Monthly Donor
This scenario = No War.

A smarter Hitler is not going to try to invade a country the size of the USSR on his own. A smarter Stalin would have the Red Army cocked and locked, but would not want to start a ruinous war.

BTW: I would suggest you replace "smarter" with "saner"

This is correct, a smarter Hitler would not have wasted valuable war materials committing the Holocaust and would have waited for Britain to bow out of the war and have Western Europe integrated into the Greater German Reich before he even thought about taking on the Soviet Union.
 
A smarter Hitler would do similar things to what he does in 'An extremely reluctant fuhrer'.
 
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It's not only a matter of smartness but of mental stability and of education, and of the quality of advisors surrounding each dictator. I don't think you can meaningfully posit smartness-in-itself as a POD.
 
It's not only a matter of smartness but of mental stability and of education, and of the quality of advisors surrounding each dictator. I don't think you can meaningfully posit smartness-in-itself as a POD.

Yeah, this. Both Stalin and Hitler were indeed very intelligent men. Their educational backgrounds, lifetime experience, psychology, and the people they worked with shaped how they used that intelligence.
 
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