has germany ever won a war
He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country.". When it comes to alternative history, the Second World War is king. The Allied occupation was vigilant and comprehensive, and it quickly suppressed even the slightest act of resistance. Defeat never came down to one battle or one campaign. And so, bizarrely, when I first saw the Neue Wache in the early 1980s, GDR soldiers stood outside in uniforms similar to older German army uniforms, and even goose-stepped when changing the guard, a disturbing sight to those with memories of goose-stepping German armies of the past. In 1947, to symbolize this forced reinvention of German political culture, the Allied Control Council, which governed Germany at the time, formally abolished the state of Prussia, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, the council claimed. World War I - World War I - Armistice, Treaty, Legacy: Germany's deteriorating military situation was revealed to its civilian leadership and they requested an armistice and negotiations with President Wilson. Just what Germany could have accomplishedhad it been able to concentrate on just one frontbecame painfully clear in 1918. Whenever a new war starts all other factions get boni because they are less players. How Nazi Germany Could Have Won World War Two Without Having to Fight Larger, more elaborate forms of memorialization took shape, as well. As the brief rise of the National Democratic Party in the late 1960s showed, when a coalition government of the two main parties holds power, as they did then and as they did under Chancellor Angela Merkel until the 2017 elections, the lack of any adequate political opposition encourages the rise of right-wing protest movements in Germany. But such aircraft were unable to defeat Great Britain. Russia could boast of a population of 167 million people, yet shortages of weapons, supplies and infrastructure rendered it a giant with feet of clay. But that backfired in 1985 when a cemetery he had invited US President Ronald Reagan to visit in Bitburg turned out to contain the graves of elite SS Nazi troops. by David T. Pyne. This is the first in a series of five articles providing critical analysis as to how Germany Might Have Won World War II. Such revelations were not uniformly accepted. If it is plausible to imagine a historical timeline where Hitler won, then why not one in which the tsars still rule Russia, the British Empire was never exhausted by war, and the Ottoman Empire still controls the Middle East? From a military perspective, advancing to Belgium was a brilliant move to sidestep north of the French armies and fortifications on the Franco-German border, and then turn south to capture Paris and encircle the French armies from the rear. But its main contribution was provoking the British into regarding Germany as a threat even before the war began. Has Germany (the political entity that has existed since 1871) ever won Wiki User 2013-03-16 01:22:52 Study now See answer (1) Best Answer Copy nope Wiki User 2013-03-16 01:22:52 This answer is: Add a Comment Study guides World War 1. Other than the tragic loss of the lives of the soldiers who served in Vietnam, and the cost of equipment, the United States didnt technically lose. Evan Evans The United Kingdom once held the world's largest empire. However, Russia did attack into East Prussia in August 1914, only to be surrounded and annihilated at the Battle ofTannenberg. So with this year marking the 100th anniversary of the War to End All Wars (but didn't), let's look at what might have been. It was widely claimed that Nazi war crimes had been committed by the SS and other elite units, while the mainstream Wehrmacht army had - like most of the German population - remained ignorant of and uninvolved in the Holocaust. Others - including the rapidly growing Nazi movement - insisted it should continue to celebrate military triumph. Much as kung-fu movies make fighting multiple opponents look easy, it's generally better to defeat your enemies one at a time. Yes, Germany Could Have Won World War I (And Changed History Forever) Yes, this could have happenned. Yet, the Germans lacked in numerous other ways. Imperial Germany's High Seas Fleet was the second most powerful navy in the world in 1914, behind Britain's Grand Fleet. What would the world be like if Nazi Germany had won? 1.8M subscribers in the AskHistorians community. There can be no doubting the scale of grief felt by many millions of German families who lost fathers, brothers or sons in the world wars. What would happen if Germany won the Battle of Britain? According to Wikipedia, there have been about 10,624 battles in the history of mankind. It was Britain's Grand Fleet that made possible the blockade that starved Germany of raw materials and especially food, which starved 400,000 Germans to death and sapped civilian and military morale by late 1918. With Great Britain in the war it meant Germany was dragged into various side campaigns from Greece to North Africa. To date, more than 56,000 Stolpersteine have been placed in urban locations in some 22 countries, the vast majority in Germany itself. When Adolf Hitlers thousand-year German Reich came crashing down in 1945 with the Allied victory in World War II, reminders of the 12 years of its actual existence were hastily scrubbed away as Germans scrambled to adjust to life after Nazism. Germany's defeat came about from a number of much larger factors. Uprising exposes weakness of Putin's rule, says Zelenskiy - as it On the one hand it was described as a memorial to the "victims of fascism" - a fascism the communists claimed they were solely responsible for defeating. Pastor Werner Krtschell is descended from a distinguished Prussian family of clerics and cavalry officers. Despite keeping much of their army in France, the Germans were still able to drive Russia out of the war by 1918. More importantly, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam fought a border war with the Peoples Republic of China in early 1979 and while both sides claimed victory, it was Vietnam that lost territorymore than the U.S. lost in 1973. This event sparked the German Revolution. The question then becomes what nations have never lost a war, andon YouTubeand Facebookthere have been shortlists compiled that attempt to argue why certain nations belong on those lists. Many still seethed with anger at the Allies carpet-bombing of German towns and resented the expulsion of 11 million ethnic Germans by the postwar governments of Hungary, Poland, Romania, and other eastern European countries. War commemoration was diplomatically sensitive too. This time the focus was on a sculpture from the 1930s by the artist Kthe Kollwitz installed in one of the building's chambers, depicting a woman holding a dead child. Copyright 2023 Center for the National Interest All Rights Reserved. All the other main political parties support Merkels refugee policy and are even more committed to the dominant German culture of memory. Then there is the fact that Vietnam achieved independence from France, which also means it had been overtaken by another power and in that case, it was the French, which hadruled the regionsince the 1880s. Britain had guaranteed Belgium's neutrality. Military Wiki is a FANDOM Lifestyle Community. Municipal officials converted the Luitpold Arena back into a public park, as it had been before Nazi times, and blew up the massive grandstand known as the Tribune of Honor, where 500 Nazi dignitaries had seated themselves to watch the mass choreography of party rallies. And even the moderate factions leader, Frauke Petry, who has since left the party, showed no reluctance to use Nazi terms that have been more or less anathemas to German politicians since 1945, such as Volk, which means folk, people, or nation but now has strong racist overtones, owing to its usage by the Nazis. Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said he discussed the weekend's turmoil in Russia in a phone call with the US president, Joe Biden, on Sunday and that the events had exposed the . Has the US ever won a war? - Answers R May 6, 2020 Topic: Security Blog Brand: The Buzz Tags: Hitler World War II Military Defense Technology Fact: Adolf Hitler Could Have Won World War II As we celebrate the ending of the war. Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. From then on, Germany had to spread its forces between West and East, while supporting its Austro-Hungarian and Turkish allies. Modern debate about the Neue Wache has also involved another question - whether as part of the restoration of Berlin's Prussia-era architecture, its statues of famous generals should be restored to their original positions in or near the building. But if Germany had managed to stave off British entry for months or years, it would have enjoyed more time and more resources to defeat its enemies. It failed in 1870, and it would have failed in 1914. As wartime gravestones eloquently testified, many Germans had fought and died for Fhrer and Fatherland. But with the fhrer gone and the fatherland under enemy occupation, there seemed no point in fighting on. Despite ambitions of becoming a global colonial empire, Germany was still a Continental power in 1914. While the Japanese did draw away British resources to the Far East, which included the Commonwealth forces of Australia and New Zealand, as well as the Indian Army, this really didn't benefit the Germans all that much. When did England go to war with Germany? What could Germany have bought with the money, material and manpower tied up in the High Seas Fleet? The concentration camps went through a similar series of phases after the war, reflecting changing German attitudes to the Nazi past. Various French Kings conducted some raids, the Spanish planned to use its Armada, the Dutch managed to at least burn some English warships in the Thames but even Napoleon never dared mount what would have been a futile invasion. That this cannot be brought about merely by getting the Germans to promise to remain disarmed is shown by what happened between 1919 and 1939. Nazi Germany had a powerful High Seas Fleet, but it was still really no match for the British Royal Navy and it never really could be. Remembering soldiers lost in WW2 has been especially sensitive. No country has placed more weight on stability and continuity, a preference expressed most succinctly by Adenauers famous electoral slogan of the 1950s: No experiments! And no European country has been more welcoming to immigrants and refugees, including Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) drawn by the economic boom of the 1960s and more than a million refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere looking for a safer and better life who have flooded Germany in recent years. Want to know what happens when aNimitz-classsupercarriergoes back in time to battle the Japanese fleet at Pearl Harbor? Italy was a reliable partner but its army was neither prepared nor even eager for war. Valdemar, King of Sweden is deposed; Magnus Laduls is crowned king of Sweden; 1276-1278 6000 . The decisive factors were British capability and determination, but German mistakes, before and during the battle, contributed significantly to the outcome. After Nazism was defeated the Western allies initially banned the country from having an army. Would the Third Reich have triumphed if it had developed jet fighters sooner? 4500 years of Battles in 5 minutes "These numbers are not final. Let's look at what might have been. The Atrocities Of The British Empire | Historic Cornwall ", But then a 1990s travelling exhibition called The Crimes of the Wehrmacht showed how the army had often been complicit in atrocities. We have actually won almost all of them. Only once has federal Germany been ruled by a single party with a parliamentary majority. Would the Third Reich have triumphed if it had developed jet fighters sooner? Had Germany been on an actual wartime economy from 1939 things could have been vastly different. From a military perspective, advancing to Belgium was a brilliant move to sidestep north of the French armies and fortifications on the Franco-German border, and then turn south to capture Paris and encircle the French armies from the rear. At the same time, a number of memorials created during the Nazi period have not been removed and have aroused considerable controversy and debate. World War II | Facts, Summary, History, Dates, Combatants, & Causes Much of the book is critical of war and the German war effort, yet contains multifaceted accounts of various Germans who resisted war (especially Nazism). What if the Germans had won the first world war? | Martin Kettle The entry of Britain and her empire added nearly 9 million troops to the Allies. No Bastard Ever Won a War by Dying for His Country Many of the most fanatical Nazis did not survive: they either perished in the final conflagration or killed themselves, along with Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and many others, in one of the greatest waves of mass suicide in history, unable to imagine anything beyond the all-encompassing world of the Third Reich, the only thing that gave their lives purpose and meaning. Germany had to deal with resistance and partisan efforts, and as the tide of war turned its "allies" left the fight. World War I - Armistice, Treaty, Legacy | Britannica Yet the Russian advance also frightened German Army Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke into transferring three corps from France to East Prussia. But if Germany had managed to stave off British entry for months or years, it would have enjoyed more time and more resources to defeat its enemies. Defeated regimes are not only swiftly removed from power but often immediately erased from memory as well. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear includingA Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. Stone swastikas were chiseled off the faades of buildings, Nazi insignia were taken down from flagpoles, and, in towns and cities across Germany, streets and squares named after Hitler reverted to their previous designations. The Germans honored this convention until 1915, and then switched to unrestricted submarine warfare in which ships would be sunk without warning. The country has given material expression to this acceptance by preserving physical traces of the Nazi era and building fresh memorials to its victims. Here are a few possibilities in which history could have been very different for Germany: If twentieth-century Germany had a tombstone, it would say"This is What Happens to Those Who Fight on Two Fronts". The United States was never within striking distance of Germany and it should have been obvious that Japan couldn't mount an invasion of the American west coast. Moreover, Communist North Vietnam did achieve its main goals of defeating South Vietnam and unifying the country, and that occurred after the United States pulled out its military ground forces. Has Germany ever won a war? What would the world be like if Nazi Germany had won? France had a population of 39 million in 1914, versus Germany's 67 million. July 6, 2023. Not much. There was a limit, as well, to what the Allies could achieve in encouraging or forcing the Germans to come to terms with what they had done. Not much. The party has said that it wants to end Germanys sense of responsibility for the German past, but with so many solid and prominent memorials to the victims of Nazism scattered all across the land, from the Stolpersteine to the concentration camp memorials, it is difficult to see how that would happen. It reflected the traditional German preference for mobile warfare (Bewegungskrieg), which favored superior German tactics, rather than a static war of attrition (Stellungskrieg) that could only favor their numerically superior opponents. Plenty of novels paint a dark portrait. RICHARD J. EVANS is Provost of Gresham College, in London, and the author of. If Germany had won on the Western Front, it would have acquired some French territory and maybe Belgium. In the aftermath of World War II, the victorious Allies moved swiftly to prevent any of the sites associated with Hitler and the Nazi leadership from becoming pilgrimage destinations for those who still adhered to Nazism. Yet even when the physical damage of the war had been repaired, by the 1960s, many reminders of the Nazi regime persisted in most German cities; quite a few of the physical remains of the Hitler regime proved simply too massive to dismantle easily. After forcing the new Soviet government to sue for peace, the Germans quickly transferred 500,000 troops to France. At the Zeppelin Field, another vast arena used for the Nuremberg rallies, the Allies had blown up the huge swastika that topped the main grandstand, which had been constructed by Hitlers architect, Albert Speer. How Germany Could Have Won World War I | The National Interest Meanwhile, the canal that camp inmates had been forced to build was leased to a commercial enterprise, as was a wing of the former camps brick factory. But the memory of the vast numbers of other victims of Germany's wars will always be present too. Even the other countries on those lists should be questioned. It might not have been easy, but it would have been far easier than fighting on two fronts. Coalitions are therefore the norm. Finland was only in the war to fight the Soviet Union, while the same was largely true of Romania and Hungary. Yet, many of those same lists include Australia as never having lost a war, but that is dubious as Australia also supported the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and disengaged its forces before the bitter end. Germany built no heavy bombers and lacked any truly effective long range aircraft. After four years of unrelenting combat and economic blockade, Germany still had the strength to achieve more in weeks than four years of bloody Allied offensives at the Somme, Passchendaele and Chemin des Dames. As well as being anti-Islam and anti-immigrant, the AfD denies human influence on climate change, wants to ban same-sex marriage, supports what it calls traditional family values, opposes European integration, and repudiates what it sees as a culture of shame and guilt over the Nazi past in favor of a new sense of national pride. Kennan Cable No. 75: Victory, Defeat, and Russian Ways in War In 1994, the city council decided to put up a permanent exhibition about the Nuremberg rallies and the surviving buildings in the complex, housed in a wing of the great hall, placing the events in their historical context and explaining the function and impact of the rallies in winning over people to the Nazi movement. The entry of Britain and her empire added nearly 9 million troops to the Allies. It is quite possible that Britain might have declared war on Germany anyway, just to prevent a single power from dominating the Continent, and to preclude hostile naval bases so close to England. The days when a genuinely neo-Nazi party could win significant numbers of votes are long over, and despite some flirtation with Nazi ideas and even acts of violence on its ultra-right fringes, right-wing populism in Germany no longer has the Nazi ties it used to have. But these exhibitions framed their messages in Cold War terms, decrying totalitarianism yet making little mention of the fact that many of the prisoners were held there because they were communists. Has Germany ever won a war against England? In the Vietnam War we had to fall back, though. A history of Germany's coalition governments There are numerous problems with any argument that suggests that Vietnam didnt lose a war, and it is a matter of putting things in perspective. Great Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany on September 3. Interestingly, however, Germany doesnt get the same disrespect despite being on the losing side of both World Wars while France was in the end among the victors of both, and even Italy found itself among the winners of the First World War. It had Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria on its side. Don't underestimate the power of Imperial Germany. They arrived too late forTannenberg, while depriving the Western offensive of vital troops at Germany's best time to overcome France and possibly end the war. The sense that no matter what, the conflict would have been one long, miserable slaughter, a four-year live performance of "Paths of Glory." World War II in Europe was Germany and Italy, which was joined by Finland, Hungary, Romania, and to some extent Bulgaria. Kaiserschlacht ("Kaiser's Battle") offensives shattered several British armies and compelled British commander Douglas Haig to warn his troops that their backs were "to the wall." Werner Krtschell, a Protestant pastor in Berlin, told me that "the wounds of the Second World War are very vivid until today," as children were left without fathers, wives without husbands. "The vast burial grounds are a reminder of the past that also confront the living with the consequences of war and violence," it says. The German Army was practically at the gates of Moscow in late 1941. The modern Neuengamme prison was closed in 2006. Only after groups formed by ex-prisoners pressured state authorities did they agree to open exhibition centers at the camps: at Dachau in 1955, Bergen-Belsen in 1966, and Neuengamme in 1981. And yet much of this grief had to remain private. This is intended to cause paralysis in . Has France ever won a war? These developments lent urgency to the question of what to do with the remaining relics of the Third Reich. The process of doing so was halting and hesitant at first, and complicated by the countrys division during the Cold War. Despite keeping much of their army in France, the Germans were still able to drive Russia out of the war by 1918. Don't Resort to Unrestricted Submarine Warfare. Challenging the Royal Navy's maritime supremacy through a naval arms race was the one move guaranteed to arouse the British lion. The threat of right-wing populism in Germany has proved to be far weaker than in a number of other European countries. Here are a few possibilities in which history could have been very different for Germany: If twentieth-century Germany had a tombstone, it would say "This is What Happens to Those Who Fight on Two Fronts". List of wars involving Denmark - Wikipedia Their love affair across one of the world's most heavily guarded borders had begun on the virtual battlefields of a video game where players bond over having one another's back . September 1 marked the eightieth anniversary of the . Depending on how that one gets chalked up will finally determine if Canadas perfect track record continues. However, the UK has certainly lost its fair share of wars and battles. It was really the only time Nazi Germany had actually declared war on an enemy, and it needed not to have happened. Historians, most notably at Munichs Institute for Contemporary History, began to research the Nazi period seriously and critically, as the documents seized by the Allies for the Nuremberg prosecutions were returned to German archives. The project quickly became popular as a way of memorializing the dead. As noted, it dragged the Germans into campaigns that were unnecessary including in Greece and North Africa, and then when Benito Mussolini's government was toppled Germany was forced to occupy its former ally. Adolf Hitler joined a list of would-be invaders of the British Isles but clearly didn't remember that no one successfully invaded since 1066 when William the Conqueror defeated Harold II, the last crowned Anglo-Saxon king of England. Defeat never came down to one battle or one campaign. The democratic traditions of the United Statesand, to a lesser extent, those of France and the United Kingdomexerted a powerful influence on West Germany, whereas the Russian Revolution, Leninism and Stalinism, and the social and political precedent of the Soviet Union provided the model for the socialist state in East Germany. Germans by and large wanted to focus on the gigantic task of rebuilding and reconstruction and to forget the Nazi past and the crimes in which, to a greater or lesser extent, the vast majority of them had been involved. Would the Third Reich have triumphed if it had developed jet fighters sooner? For example, in 1948, the British occupying forces returned the camp at Neuengamme, near Hamburg, back to the Germans, who immediately converted it into a state penitentiary, removing the wooden huts and replacing them with a large new prison complex. In January 2017, the leader of the ultra-right faction of the party, Bjrn Hcke, demanded a 180-degree about-face in the politics of memory, a statement that aroused controversy even within the AfD. It was one thing to remove a concrete Nazi eagle and swastika from a public building, but quite another to demolish the huge stadium constructed for the track-and-field events of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for example, or the grandiose and largely intact Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, originally designed by the Nazis as one of four terminals that would serve what they imagined would be the World Capital of Germania after their eventual victory. Can anyone imagine France alone defeating Germany? German Empire (1871-1918) Weimar Republic (1919-1933) Nazi Germany (1933-1945) Federal Republic of Germany (1990-present) Military Wiki Or best of all, more U-boats, the one element of German naval strength that did inflict immense damage on the Allies. Although some members of the city council were keen to dissociate the city from its Nazi links by appealing to a more distant, medieval past, others thought this smacked of dishonesty and deception. That "scrap of paper" had been derided by German leaders, but the parchment would cost Berlin dearly by giving London a casus belli to declare war. George Patton's last words to us before we left Africa came home with meaning: "No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. More importantly, it added the Royal Navy. This revolution effectively caused Germany to surrender to the Allies and ended World War One. The camp at Sachsenhausen, to the north of Berlin, in the former East Germany, was cleared of rubble, and a new exhibition center was opened there in 2001. But when World War II has considered it is really Germany and Japan against most of the world. p. 164 (KIA: 676, MIA:76, WIA: 907, died from disease: 689, civilians: 100), No German soldiers have been killed by ISIS, however, many German civilians have been killed in terror attacks claimed by ISIS. But the fact that it incorporated the old concentration camp implied that the latter, too, had housed a population of criminals rather than the innocent victims of a genocidal regime. Japan had attacked the United States, so Germany was never required to join with its Axis partner. Indeed, echoes of Nazism on the fringes of the AfD have on occasion plunged the party into crisis and have led to the resignation of some senior members. But perhaps it is the way those lists are worded, in that each calls out countries that never lost a war, and conflicts that ended indecisively arent considered a defeat.