Why Germany lost WWII

[Wolfshanze]

@Narvik:

just my 2 cents, and if you run out of arguments, please dont fall back into plan B with ad hominem attacks

Cute use of overly-flowery wording, but I’m not attacking anyone… of course you’re making an accusation of me, so that’s an ad hominem attack you know.

You just basically agreed with everything I said… Russia isn’t invincible, and Germany could have won had the right conditions occurred… if you’d like to actually discuss that instead of using silly phrases to attack me, let me know.

[baron Münchhausen]

Does US not helping Soviet was an important condition for a shot at winning on the Eastern Front?
I heard that already active Siberian troops were not that numerous but the enrollment and mobilization in the first six months were very high.
Without  proper equipment, does Soviet armies would have been able to fought back at an higher rate of casualties than 5-6 to 1?

[Narvik]

@Wolfshanze:

@Narvik:

just my 2 cents, and if you run out of arguments, please dont fall back into plan B with ad hominem attacks

Cute use of overly-flowery wording, but I’m not attacking anyone… of course you’re making an accusation of me, so that’s an ad hominem attack you know.

You just basically agreed with everything I said… Russia isn’t invincible, and Germany could have won had the right conditions occurred… if you’d like to actually discuss that instead of using silly phrases to attack me, let me know.

First, I was not addressing you, but another member that really is a p in the a. Second, I dont agree with you. I said the Red Army was not invincible, but the Russian territory is. The distance is too long to supply an army. During winter, with snow and mud roads, a German truck use 7 times more fuel than it use on hard surface roads home in Germany. That is what broke the German attack. It become out of supply.

[StuckTojo]

@Private:

Here is a different take that resonates for me:

I have seen it argued that both Germany and Japan* were strategically weak. Both lacked natural resources and needed access to those from elsewhere to maintain their war machines.

In the case of Japan that required secure supply lines from the East Indies, which their naval losses and strategic myopia denied them.

Germany needed to conquer territories that would secure those resources.

By contrast the allies were resource rich. Command of the seas gave access to resources from across the globe. Japan challenged US command of the Pacific for only a very short time frame. German U Boats did cause the Allies difficulties in the Atlantic for a longer period of course, but denying global resources to the UK is not the same as denying them to the USA, let alone gaining them for Germany.

Axis supremacy needed victory after victory in the face superior Allied production and manpower. The Allies only needed to deny them a sufficient proportion of those victories.

Of course, those that faced the Axis onslaught did not perceive any such “inevitable” Allied victory. And for a time those victories did keep coming …

*I include Japan in this answer because one of the reasons why Germany lost WW2 is that Japan never diverted enough allied resources away from the European theatre.

I agree with this, but that may not even fully capture all the reasons Germany lost.  In terms of just pure industrial production capacity Germany could not compete against the US, especially with the latter protected by its isolation from bombing.  I recently read an interesting book, Death Ride, that made much of Germany’s failure to develop long-range bombers, and with much of the USSR’s industry moved well East of Moscow Germany could not bomb it.  Göring apparently preferred lots of little short-range bombers to fewer and larger long-range bombers.  It also made much of the Germans’ decision to divert part of its Eastern Front ground forces to Italy leaving them under-supplied and outnumbered in Operation Citadel.  The near-impossibility of maintaining distant supply lines, despite Göring’s assurances that he could make up for it, have been discussed to death.

All-in-all, I think the reasons are so many that in retrospect it would have taken a near-miraculous perfect storm of events for Gemany to have emerged victorious.