WI: Hitler didn't micromanage the war as he did?

You always hear how badly Hitler misjudged the war due to his own ego and how his no retreat policy nearly destroyed the army and if he listened to his generals Nazi Germany would have taken even longer to defeat.

Now I'm no expert so that's why I'm asking here.

How much longer would the war have dragged on if Hitler didn't micromanage the whole thing.

So in this exercise say all the same battles take place yet Hitler is mostly hands off and lets the army do most of the thing.

Actually lets take one battle away if you would like..lets say there is no Kursk.

I know it may be easy but i'm hoping not all answers would be "Until August when Germany is nuked"
 
How much longer would the war have dragged on if Hitler didn't micromanage the whole thing.
I don't think the re-militarization of the Reinland would have occurred, as the Germany military professionals thought it would be a disaster. The same professionals thought that a deal with Stalin to bring Soviet soldiers closer to Germany via sharing Poland was a very bad idea. Without Hitler micromanaging these first few affairs I do not see the early successes happening per OTL. Until the winters of 1941 and 1942, Hitler's micromanagement would have seemed beneficial.
 
The thought that the german generals would have done better is a lot of hindsight and memoirs and it fit the post war narrative that the soviet war machine wasn't that scary it was Hitler that messed it all up.

Maybe the soviets were just good and were going to win about the same time regardless.

Its tricky in a totalitarian state to delegate like that too.

Certainly there were a number of decisions that didn't work out. But if your Hitler what good is losing in August 45 or may 45. You just have to hold these places and win.

But if you had to pick I say the decisions November 41 thru November 42 are the ones to look at. Maybe you could end up with German army that was just big enough to fight a defensive campaign in 43 and 44. If you can avoid the kiln bulge, demaynsk, Stalingrad, etc. The generals had their parts in those though.
 
Germany loses faster. There were many instances where Hitler overrode the German high command that he was right and they were wrong (going for Kiev before Moscow, for instance). Some of these instances were more luck then insight, but that does not change that it contributed much more to success then the generals own ideas. The one time he totally delegated the making of a war plan to his subordinates, the result was Kursk.

Part of the reason Germany got as far as it did was because of Hitler's "meddling", something the surviving German generals after the war pointedly ignored because they wanted to simultaneously disassociate themselves from him and wash the stink of defeat from themselves. So they wrote book after book blaming everything on dead men, who being dead were in no position to rebuke or contradict them, and in doing so deliberately obscured the very real contributions he actually did make to Germany's success.

They even blamed some things that were really their own fault on him. The halt order at Dunkirk is a classic case-in-point: the order was not actually Hitler's, it was Gerd von Rundstedt. Hitler merely just happened to be there to give his stamp of approval while consulting with Von Rundstedt on a number of matters, a fact that Rundstedt was able to use to pretend that he had no responsibility for the order he drafted and issued.

Hitler's core belief that war offered Germany her best (only) chance of becoming the dominant world power was madness but there's evidence he knew it was a huge gamble. He was just convinced of his ability to beat the odds and didn't care about all the death and destruction such an attempt would result in. Once that core position is accepted, Hitler's actions show he understood the dangerous game he was playing and the tight timelines he was under. In contrast, very few German generals seem to have fully appreciated the situation. the orthodox view of the German officer class was that Germany would have to regain her power and position through offensive war against her neighbours, they dissented greatly on the specifics - namely, the "when." OKW wanted to delay war until some time around 1945/46 when they felt they'd be fully prepared.

Hitler called them a bunch of old women with no strategic insight, and overrode them. And he was right. What OKH had failed to realize was that, while Germany had stolen a march on the Allies with early re-armament, France, Britain and the Soviet Union were catching up rapidly while Germany's stocks of strategic resources and her ability to sustain high rates of production was beginning to fall. By 1941 the military balance would have grossly favoured the Allies and that would only increase as the years went by. If it was to be war, Hitler had to strike fast while he still had the advantage.

The simple problem with "letting the generals run the war" is that the generals lacked Hitler's strategic insight. And the fact that Adolf Hitler was ultimately a better strategist then the German general staff is a pretty damning indictment of their strategic skill.
 
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In December 1941 the German Generals wanted to withdraw to hold a shorter line. Hitler said no step back. The Germans held their ground(mostly). Some say that had they begun withdrawing it could had ended up like Napoleon.

Hitler was actually right to abandon the 6th army, the Russians had to keep troops to surround the army and the rest of the army group in Caucacus could escape.
 
Adolf Hitler was ultimately a better strategist then the German general staff is a pretty damning indictment of their strategic skill.

That is the greatest irony of this website, where everyone portrays him as a bumbling idiot who lost the war singlehandedly. I'd like to see a TL where the Nazis without Hitler come to power and proceed to completely screw up.
 
That is the greatest irony of this website, where everyone portrays him as a bumbling idiot who lost the war singlehandedly.

Well, to be fair to the German general staff, there were a few who realized what the odds were and what would happen to Germany in a general European war. Ludwig von Beck is the most prominent example that comes to mind. They were all forced into retirement or resignation by the time Munich happened.

A similar phenomenon happened to the Japanese in the early-30s, although in their case it went a lot faster and involved the odd assassination.
 
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I doubt the generals would have declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbour. I'm not sure what their plan would have been for fighting the Battle of the Atlantic though - they can't just sit there and let US-flagged ships steam serenely over to the UK.

I presume that they'd have simply attacked US shipping anyway, although not in the organised sense that led to the Second Happy Time. Meanwhile, the USN would step up its own undeclared war. After a month or two, Congress would probably formalise the whole mess.
 
That is the greatest irony of this website, where everyone portrays him as a bumbling idiot who lost the war singlehandedly. I'd like to see a TL where the Nazis without Hitler come to power and proceed to completely screw up.

But then, without Hitler they'd just be a bunch of loud mouthed German nationalists either too close to the old stodgy conservatives, or too close to the communists depending on who you asked (even though really neither was true, much to the disappointment of many ultraleft idiots in the KPD who thought they could use them as a stepping stone to power). Without Hitler the Nazis would simply be their component parts, a bunch of angry middle class shop owners, a handful of the most disturbed freikorps, and an amorphous small collection of intellectuals trying to give it meaning.

They had no more capacity to take power in Germany than the KPD after 1924, when it had been fully colonized by Comintern hacks, after all worthwhile organic leadership had either been murdered or pushed aside by the hacks.
 
While I agree that the US probably would have declared war on Germany if Hitler had not declared war on the US after PH, I don't think it would have been so quick to do so. It took a fair bit of political capital on FDR's part to sell a Germany first policy with a DoW already. Resources that stayed in the Atlantic will go to the Pacific in this scenario, and shifting resources back will take time and also production will need to alter from a primarily Pacific based strategy which has some different needs.

LL to Britain will probably continue at the same level, maybe a little more as LL to the USSR may not exist at all (Senator: "I cannot vote to send materials our brave American boys need to fight the Japs to Russia when, unlike Britain who is our ally against Japan, the Soviets are doing nothing against Japan"). The longer it takes for the Nazis to be at war with the USA the better for them, period.
 
While I agree that the US probably would have declared war on Germany if Hitler had not declared war on the US after PH, I don't think it would have been so quick to do so. It took a fair bit of political capital on FDR's part to sell a Germany first policy with a DoW already. Resources that stayed in the Atlantic will go to the Pacific in this scenario, and shifting resources back will take time and also production will need to alter from a primarily Pacific based strategy which has some different needs.

LL to Britain will probably continue at the same level, maybe a little more as LL to the USSR may not exist at all (Senator: "I cannot vote to send materials our brave American boys need to fight the Japs to Russia when, unlike Britain who is our ally against Japan, the Soviets are doing nothing against Japan"). The longer it takes for the Nazis to be at war with the USA the better for them, period.

LL in the tune of billions of dollars in loans and transfers to Stalin was already happening before Pearl Harbor.

If any one thing that pushed Hitler to declare war it was that as he couldn't bring the Soviets to the table with LL coming into them and knew American enterence into the European war was inevitable anyway.

As for the question of Hitler letting the generals lead, it depends on which general as you have a lot of generals with different stretegic and tactical thinking about the war. Hitler would pick and choose which general to go with depending on if their views dovetailed his own.
 
I don't think the re-militarization of the Reinland would have occurred, as the Germany military professionals thought it would be a disaster. The same professionals thought that a deal with Stalin to bring Soviet soldiers closer to Germany via sharing Poland was a very bad idea. Without Hitler micromanaging these first few affairs I do not see the early successes happening per OTL. Until the winters of 1941 and 1942, Hitler's micromanagement would have seemed beneficial.

Those were political decisions, not micromanagement of the war. Such calls were within poltical leaderhip's hands in any country.
 
Those were political decisions, not micromanagement of the war. Such calls were within poltical leaderhip's hands in any country.

Yes, you have to separate overall political decisions, stretegic priority decisions within the war and tactical military decisions.
 
Eben-Emael isn't taken as easily, possibly hamstringing the entire Battle of Belgium, given that he suggested landing a glider on its roof.
 
Tbh up until Barbarossa hitler's decisions and interventions had been really good- (except the decision to halt the advance in France which lead to Dunkirk). It was the early successes of hitler's gambles which led to his blunders in Russia- firstly he believed planning for winter combat as well as Streamlining the economy and declaring total war was not necessary- this and a couple of strategic Blunders I believe would have led to a German victory, albeit a narrow one. Just imagine if Rommel had been on the eastern front alongside manstein, guderian backed by superior supply lines and prepared thoroughly for a long war- it really could have been their key to victory
 
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