How The Nazis Lost The War

When you're the Aryan master race,

friends don't come naturally.

People outside the room can hear, you know,

the fists pounding on the table and voices raised.

There's a great degree of mistrust there.

However, when a world war looms, allies become essential.

We won't attack you if you get involved in a war,

we won't attack you if you get involved in a war.

Hitler hadn't thought through the relationship particularly well.

With only dictators and despots to choose from,

the risks are high.

I suppose this phrase, beggars can't be choosers...

And the end results.

This is just enormous disasters, unprecedented disasters.

Dysfunction at almost every level.

November 1918,

Germany had just lost the war.

She was about to sign a deeply humiliating

and financially crippling treaty,

and she had no friends.

But this was just how she liked it,

or at least the right wing opportunists did

by placing the burden of guilt entirely on an embarrassed Germany.

And by imposing impossibly harsh reparation payments,

the West unwittingly created the ideal conditions

for populist politics and demagoguery to prosper.

Unrest, resentment, and anger

simmered in a desperate and disillusioned public.

And Hitler played them like a violin,

ruthlessly capitalizing on the massive national sulk

Germany had been experiencing since defeat.

He fermented a xenophobic hatred of outsiders

while encouraging the classic victim hero complex on a grand scale.

And guess who was putting his hand out for the hero role?

With the rise of National Socialism

and Hitler's coming to power in the early 30s,

all the elements were in place for another massive global conflict.

Hitler was a politician driven by ideology

and that ideology was ultimately confrontational

and demanded a great deal from other countries

in terms of having to sacrifice economic power or maybe even territory.

And Hitler wasn't afraid of confrontation, even if the other countries were.

As a result of that, his ideology was based upon military power

and ultimately military confrontation, if required.

And so, in a sense, what Hitler was asking for

was not going to be given without a fight.

As World War II loomed, the closest friendships

Germany could claim were nothing more than uncomfortable, uneasy alliances,

yet they needed allies

or at least short term sham friendships,

their choices were limited.

On the available list

was an international pariah to the east in Russia,

but a communist state was hardly a natural fit with fascist Germany.

There was a like-minded predator in fascist Italy

and a hyper-militaristic Japan.

With friends like those, who needed enemies?

On September the 27th, 1940,

Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano,

Il Duce's son-in-law, arrived in Berlin from Rome.

At00 pm,

in the Reich Chancellery it was announced that Japan, Germany,

and Italy had signed a military alliance directed against the United States.

The axis powers aligned in a pact with the devil,

but all these relationships were doomed from the start,

tenuous and disinterested at best, toxic and sabotaging at worst.

Germany's choice of strange bedfellows would come back to haunt them

and they would ultimately pay a high price for those decisions.

Dawn, June 22nd, 1941.

German bombers are attacking Russian cities from Leningrad to Sevastopol.

It marked the start of the largest military operation

in the history of the world, Operation Barbarossa.

It was also to become the bloodiest.

But Russia and Germany were supposedly bound

by a non-aggression pact.

So how did it come to this?

Welcome to a world of deceit and double dealing between wartime friends.

Germany and Russia had been building a secret tryst since the early '20s,

since they first began making eyes at each other,

they were always going to make strange bedfellows.

Since any military development had been prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles,

Germany needed a place to begin re-arming

out of the prying eyes of the West.

Soviet Russia was the perfect spot.

In the early 1930s there is actual military cooperation

between the Soviets and the Germans.

We have German officers going secretly to the Soviet Union

and there they're subverting the... their constraints of the Treaty of Versailles

and they are testing weaponry, aircraft,

and tanks that Germany's not allowed to have.

The benefit for the Soviets is,

they're getting the virtue of this learning curve,

they're getting the insight into how German staff work.

And they are also taking photos of some of the pieces of equipment

that the Germans are developing in those spaces.

Impeccable ideological enemies,

neither side was ever comfortable with the relationship,

but it was the Germans who did best out of the deal.

It accounts for the fact that when Hitler re-arms

after taking power in 1933,

he already has the basis for the reconfiguration of the Wehrmacht,

the German Armed Forces into, you know... you know,

into tank divisions, infantry divisions,

he already has the basis for a big air force, the Luftwaffe.

He's got the shape of the... Of the Kriegsmarine,

the Nazi Navy, worked out.

It's also good for the Russians,

the Russians are poised to become what they are in 1949,

the biggest mechanized military in the world,

thanks in large part to the training and technology transfers

given to them by the Germans in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Soviets might have secured a bigger advantage

from their relationship, had Stalin not set out

on a murderous purge of the Red Army leadership in 1937.

With the world lurching towards war, it was a policy of utter madness.

Stalin basically kills off almost every marshal in the Soviet army.

Kills off almost every army commander, corps commander, divisional commander,

kills eight of nine admirals.

Because he fears that they'd become tainted by this collaboration

with the Germans.

What he was left with was nothing but incompetence

at the top of his military.

It is shooting himself in the foot,

but such is the mammoth weight of the Soviet Union

in terms of manpower and industrial resources,

and its ability to replace these people with often less capable commanders

but good enough that they survive.

Stalin was under no apprehension as to Hitler's intentions.

After all, he was a man after his own heart.

He'd already walked into Austria

and those areas of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland,

inhabited predominantly by German speakers.

Having been unable to reach an agreement with Britain and France

against Nazi Germany, with whom he'd been playing footsy behind Hitler's back,

Stalin was left dangerously exposed.

The problem for the Soviets is they see what happens

to Czechoslovakia. And they start to realize

those Western powers have walked away from their Eastern ally,

they have left them in the lurch,

and therefore, if we're interested in security,

we cannot rely on those Western powers.

And this starts to change the idea for Stalin,

who's looking always to buy time.

By early 1939, he faced the daunting prospect

of having to resist German expansion into the East all alone.

For his part, Hitler needed a pact with Russia,

so he could invade Poland unopposed.

After which he could deal with Britain and France to the West,

importantly he wouldn't have to worry about fighting the Russians

at the same time, in the East,

but Hitler was always going to betray Russia and Stalin knew it.

On May the 3rd, 1939,

foreign ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop with Stalin

gravely looking on, signed a non-aggression pact

between Russia and Germany.

How they all kept a straight face remains one of the great achievements

of totalitarian international diplomacy.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is gonna buy the Soviet Army more time

to build weaponry and it's also going to give the Soviet Union the opportunity

to watch Germany fight against other capitalist powers

and hopefully wear each other down over years.

For Hitler, the idea is very simple, this is a tactical maneuver,

this is going to allow him to have a free hand to fight in Poland.

Germany promptly put Poland to the sword,

and unfortunately for Stalin,

then conquered much of Western Europe easily.

The inevitable eventually rolled around.

Nazi Germany attacked Russia without warning in Operation Barbarossa.

By June 1941, the agreement between Germany and Soviet Russia

was dead and buried.

Did Hitler betray Stalin?

It's hard to summon any sympathy for either of these two brutes, you know?

I think they both knew what they were getting into

by signing this pact with each other.

So they were both playing a very cynical game,

it's just that Hitler broke the agreement first.

Hitler had stabbed his partner in the back.

Who in their right mind would ever trust the Nazis again?

As the self-proclaimed master race,

there was no room for Germany to foster any genuine

or lasting international friendships.

However, expedience ruled,

and the most natural match for the Nazis

was their fellow fascist European power, Italy.

The partnership between the two powers was to prove an unmitigated disaster

as reflected through the prism of the personal relations

between Hitler and Mussolini.

You can make a case that both of them were supreme narcissists.

Now what happens if you put the two of them together,

do you have atomic fission or a nuclear explosion, in psychological terms?

What you really have is the stronger narcissist will win out in the end.

And if you look at Mussolini,

he was a far more complex figure than Hitler and prone to obvious depression.

Since 1925, the Italian people had been laboring under a fascist regime,

ruled over by Benito Mussolini or Il Duce.

Italian fascism was regarded as the original and the best,

and very much the elder brother of Nazism.

In 1922, when Mussolini led thousands of fascists and supporters

into the Italian capital in his defining March on Rome,

Hitler was hooked.