Reddit reviews Why the Allies Won

I agree on all points except the efficiency of the soviet system. Collectivization may be bad for peacetime economies but it worked minor miracles for the Soviets during the war. In 1943 the Soviet Union produced half as much steel as Germany and used it to make literally twice the number of tanks. For all their technological sophistication the germans never mastered mass production.
[source]

A rebuttal in support of Hitler was a Christian, was anti-Catholic (or had significant issues with the Vatican - even though the Vatican and Pope gave tacit support to the Nazis), and that Hitler's Table Talk (the source of most of the "Hitler was not a Christian") is a flawed source (unless the original German edition (in German) is used).

{from previous post re: Hitler and his strong Christian moral and belief
foundation}

Nazism, based upon and supported by Christian morals and tenets, and
lead by and staffed by True Christians^TM , is responsible for the
largest (by death toll) genocide in modern history. Perhaps you have
hear of this genocide? The Holocaust (Lower figures (5-6 million) are
for the Jewish genocide, and the higher figures (11-17 million) is for
the total killed in all Nazi genocides and War Crimes.)

Adolf Hitler was a God fearing Christian and promoted, and advocated
for, Christianity; Hitler was a really good Christian.

The evidence is credible and overwhelming that Hitler was (1) a
Christian, (2) held Christian values (as Hitler saw them), (3) was
informed of his morality that he put into policy from Christian
doctrine/dogma/morality, and (4) all indications were that that if
Hitler had created the fascist empire he worked towards, this empire
would have continued to use Christianity as a means (one of many) to
maintain control over the populace.

Adolf Hitler labelled himself as a Christian and promoted, and advocated
for, Christianity in the Nazi ideology; and used violence and genocide
to promote Christianity for the sake of Christianity as part of the Nazi
Party regime.

In Hitler's own words....

“My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a
fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded
by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and
summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest
not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian
and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord
at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the
Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight
against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with
deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact
that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As
a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have
the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice… And if there is
anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is
the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty
to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and
work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only
for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning
and see these men standing in their queues and look into their
pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very
devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two
thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people
are plundered and exposed.”

Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, countering a
political opponent, Count Lerchenfeld, who opposed antisemitism on
his personal Christian feelings. Published in "My New Order", quoted
in Freethought Today April 1990

“I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the
Almighty Creator.”

Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 46

And let's not forget Hitler's book, Mein Kampf - My Struggle:
Unabridged edition of Hitlers original book - Four and a Half Years of
Struggle against Lies, Stupidity, and
Cowardice,
where the morality was informed and supported by Hitler's Christian
beliefs and canon Christian morality.

And, and try to stay with me here OP, I have actually researched the
assessment of historians that have claimed that Hitler was an atheist
(irreligious and an opponent of Christianity) and find their evidence
and arguments lacking and often based heavily, and often primarily, upon
a series notes from private talks between Hitler and others (Hitler,
Adolf. Hitler's Table Talk: His Private Conversations, 1941-1944.
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953) which depicted Hitler as an
anti-Christian atheist, but where the sources usually referenced were
actually translated from a French version and not the original German;
and that the French translation radically altered the original meaning
of the German (Carrier, R.C., 2003. "Hitler's Table Talk": Troubling
Finds. German Studies Review, 26(3), pp.561-576). In the 3rd edition of
Table Talks, the faulty translations are acknowledged in the Forward
(but, oddly, without any correction of the translations in the
subsequent text).

While it can be concluded that Hitler became anti-Catholic (or more
specifically, anti-Pope and anti-HolySee/Vatican) and criticized many
aspects of Catholic, and other Christian sect, tenets, as well as
questioning many of the supernatural Christian claims - this criticism,
in and of itself, especially against the very wide variance of Christian
tenets and beliefs, as well as the expressed public affirmation of
Christian belief, tenets, traditions, and morality, by Hitler, at best,
allows one to conclude that Hitler was not a "mainstream" Christian.
But to posit that Hitler was atheist/irreligious and a not a Christian
requires a better argument to avoid the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Bottom line - Hitler's Table Talk: 1941 - 1944, by H.R. Trevor-Roper, is
a questionable source (and shown to be fraudulent at least in part),
and the quoted material requires verification from another source.

Edit:

As to Richard Overy's work as a source in support of 'Hitler is not a Christian,' In Overy's book,
Why the Allies Won, Overy references Hitler: Table Talks from editor Hugh Trevor-Roper. Which is the English translation of the French (flawed) version of Table Talks (and not a direct English translation of the original German edition. As this source to Overy has been shown to be flawed (a flawed and misleading translation), Overy as a source to the Christian beliefs of Hitler is suspect, and the argument from authority highly questionable.

Edit 2:

Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War. A search of my copy of Evan's book, The Third Reich at War also reveals that Evan used "Trevor-Roper, Hugh R., The Last Days of Hitler (London, 1962 [1947]). ——, ‘The Mind of Adolf Hitler’, in Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk vii-xxxv." Which has the same flawed information as used by Overy. And like Overy, using Evans as a source to the Christian beliefs of Hitler is suspect, and the argument from authority highly questionable.

As to Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, I do not have a copy nor the time (currently) to track the text down - so no direct rebuttal.

Short and simple answer: Germany was really really good at playing up the idea that they had a technological and numerical edge over the French and BEF. They also used a number of deceptive practices to convince the Allies they had more forces on their Western Frontier than they actually did. This gave the French and the British pause on any major offensive actions in Western Europe, and they decided that maintaining a defense posture against an inevitable German offensive was the best strategy for the time being.

Longer answer: As I previously mentioned, the French and the British forces deployed in France during the Phoney War didn't do much. The plan that had been agreed upon by both parties several weeks into the war was to build up their forces and maintain defensive positions in Western Europe, utilize the Maginot Line (which brief sidenote: worked as expected contrary to popular belief) and await the eventual German offensive, which they believed the main thrust of which would most likely come through the Low Countries. Attempts were made to get the Belgian government to allow the Allies to move into their territory to give themselves even more breathing room against a German offensive, but the Belgians, fearing a German invasion if they granted this request, denied it.

Now the French did engage in the Saar Offensive four days after the start of the war, but this operation was half-hearted at best. Initially it called for up to 40 divisions of the French Army to push rapidly into Western Germany. 30 Divisions did end up coming up to the border areas, but only 11 actually crossed into Germany, and even then, they only advanced 5 miles at the furthest before the decision was made to halt the advance and to undertake defensive positions before withdrawing entirely.

French forces eventually withdrew back to their starting positions along the Maginot Line, and aside from German counter attacks against gains the French continued to hold onto, no major offensives took place on the part of the Allies until the end of the Phoney War. This was in large part due to the idea that Germany held an advantage in air and manpower on the Western front, and that any attempts to offensively engage with or neutralize it would come at a high cost. Years of Nazi propaganda as well as common deception methods (making a big show of moving around the forces you did have, radio transmissions in the open to ghost divisions, etc) helped to mask the hollow shell that was Germany's forces in Western Germany while operations in Poland took place (and while they recovered, the invasion of Poland took did take its toll on Germany's military) were mostly to thank for the Allies decision to dig in and wait.

The irony in all of this, is that Germany only had about 23 divisions at the ready to defend against any Allied offensive into Germany while operations in Poland continued to take place. The Luftwaffe also had significant shortages of aircraft in Western Germany at this time due to having the majority of its ground attack aircraft deployed for operations in Poland. Had the Allies known that they held a significant manpower and airpower advantage, it's still hard to say if they would have undertaken any major offensive operations against Germany. Though the opportunity to hamper if not defeat Germany was certainly there during the Phoney War.

If you're interested, I recently spoke at length about all of this on the AskHistorians Podcast. Check it out here!

Sources:


The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941 (The War in the West) by James Holland

Case Red: The Collapse of France by Robert Forczyk

Why the Allies Won by Richard Overy

For tips on this exact subject, check out Richard Overy's book Why the Allies Won - it's an excellent summary of why the Allies won World War II, and a number of ways that allied manpower, organization, technology, industry, and morale contributed to allied victory. Even with a super-metal, Germany could likely have caused more damage, conquered more territory, but still lost the war.

This video is a decent introduction to the topic, mainly focusing on tank production (the part before the timestamp is about the battle of Kursk, mostly). Why The Allies Won has a chapter that's fairly in-depth about the differences in production methods as well.

>WW2 is a perfect example of logistics winning the war.

>~

>Turns out when you have enough bombs/napalm to remove four/five of their cities it isn't that hard to win the war.


Preeminent historians would disagree with those statements.

Not being petty; read this book and about 70 others

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Allies-Won-Richard-Overy/dp/039331619X