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Don't you think that had Hitler not ordered the siege of Stalingrad in 1942, and let his troops advance instead to Baku, Nazi Germany would have had much better chances at standing up in the war economy competition?

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.
by DoDo on Sat Feb 25th, 2006 at 01:34:39 PM EST
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That seems to be one of the common places where The Big Mistake by Der Fuhrer seems likely. There were others - like the Battle of Britain, which was only won by a whisker. A few extra days of heavy pressure in the early autumn of 1940 could potentially have led to a British wipe-out. Crafting an invasion after that would have been a different level of problem, but with air support gone it wouldn't have been totally implausible.

There's a recent book about Canaris which suggests that he was more active in a kind of high-level internal resistance than was previously suspected. The ideas are still controversial, but the suggestion is that he fed Hitler false information at various points to influence decision making, having realised that after 1941 there was nothing more to play for.

I like counterfactual history a lot. Although with a date of 2148 I'd guess the reality is more likely to involve people poking pointy sticks at each other, or some form of ultra-technology that hasn't been invented yet. (And since the last few years seem to have taken place in Bizarro Universe already, possibly both.)

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sat Feb 25th, 2006 at 01:49:44 PM EST
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It would have helped but it wouldn't have changed the basic equation - running out of military age able bodied men for the Wehrmacht and inability to come close to matching the US industrial juggernaut. The US on its own was capable of greater output than Germany, including occupied Europe - and both Britain and the USSR were also quite significant producers of military materiel. In terms of manpower Germany (including Austria and the Sudetenland) had roughly 80 million people - men, women, children, elderly. By the end of the war 2.3 million German soldiers had died in action, another half million of non combat causes, 2 million MIA, 1.7 million crippled. That does not include POW's or those out of action at any given moment due to non-crippling injuries.  It is actually pretty stunning to think that a major factor in both WWI and WWII was running out of people due to the massive casualties.
by MarekNYC on Sat Feb 25th, 2006 at 02:22:52 PM EST
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These numbers are interconnected, not independent.

Both German war production and the battlefield machinery itself could have been ran on a higher gear and with more efficiency had there been more fuel awailable, and the latter would also have meant less deaths for the own soldiers - and more damage to the (bombed) British and Soviet production sites. What's more, the blunder of besieging Stalingrad alone cost a fourth of the German WWII losses - going for Baku wouldn't have had that high a toll.

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Mon Feb 27th, 2006 at 04:48:01 AM EST
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