Nazi Germany, overhyped?

a reply to: nwtrucker

Sonar was big, I just forgot to add it. Oops.

Sonar, Huff-Duff (High Frequency Direction Finding) to listen in on, and roughly locate the wolf packs, and help to steer the convoys away from, and the hunter-killers to, them.

Aircraft, Aircraft Carriers, new tactics and equipment, all played a major roll in defeating the U-boat menace. Lack of either one? Who knows what happens. Nothing good, of that we may be sure.

a reply to: seagull

Not arguing if they needed a carrier or not, I don't care in context to this thread
The Nazis were never going to outmatch the British on the sea, never
The Nazis were fighting on land, Europe, not the high seas.
I think Jutland was a clear indication that they were never going to even try. The germans were not defeated at Jutland, they just didn't want to fight

The Nazis had an exceptional army and air force, they were not overrated
I maintain if the Nazis concentrated on the British, the British would have sued for peace or worse

Why have an aircraft carrier when you have bases in France and Italy, North Africa
Germany isn't an island

a reply to: crazyewok

You also need to read Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny.

Inside The Reich is a one-sided story, more novel than documentary. Speer couldn't keep track of his own lies, and Sereny disassembled him pretty convincingly.

That said, WWII Germany was indeed a mess with anything but clockwork precision. A conflict-based system, a micromanaging dictator, massive underestimates of their enemies... was just a question of where and when it ended.

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: Raggedyman

Actually they tried on multiple occasions to get their fleet, such as it was, into the Atlantic. Fleet units, surface raiders, and of course submarines.

That they failed to make an appreciable impact outside of the aforementioned submarines and maritime attack aircraft such as the FW-200 Condor is quite beside the point. They attempted and it cost them virtually everything they tried with.

They most certainly did try to form a navy to rival, in some ways, the Royal Navy. Not to the extent of fighting another Jutland, but a fleet in being, to quote Mahan, that had to be taken seriously by the Royal Navy. Given the resources that were tied up by Home Fleet, they succeeded admirably.

Too bad the execution sucked. Graf Spee, Bismark, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Geisnanau (sp?), and many other surface combatants, including the never finished Graf Zeppelin, all were either sunk, or rendered useless.

The fact that they didn't have an aircraft carrier ever in commission isn't because they didn't need one, their gloriously deluded leader didn't see the need. More idiot, he.

The exception that proves the rule was the Admiral Scheer, A Graf Spee class heavy Cruiser/Pocket battleship operated in the North and South Atlantic as well as the Indian Ocean. She sank/captured an amazing amount of tonnage during her years at sea. Eventual sunk at port, not unlike Tirpitz.

I'm guessing she had more tonnage to her credit than any ship in WWII.

a reply to: crazyewok

That book of Speers is fascinating.

Martin Bormann = Steven Bannon

Adolf Hitler over-hyped himself. He thought speed and brutality like Genghiz Khan could found him a world state.
On 22 August 1939, a week before the German invasion of Poland, Hitler made a speech to Wehrmacht commanders at his Obersalzberg home:

Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy.
Hitler's Obersalzberg Speech

The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but . . . I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction.
Speaking about the invasion of Russia

I want war. To me all means will be right. My motto is not "Don't, whatever you do, annoy the enemy." My motto is "Destroy him by all and any means." I am the one who will wage the war!
As quoted in, Hitler and Nazism (1961) by Louis Leo Snyder, p. 66

He over-hyped himself as a prophet.

In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power it was in the first instance only the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then among other things settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious, but I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!
Speech to the Reichstag, 30 January 1939

In a hundred years time, perhaps, a great man will appear who may offer them (the Germans) a chance at salvation. He'll take me as a model, use my ideas, and follow the course I have charted.
“Der Führer als Redner,” Adolf Hitler. Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers" (The Fuherer as a speaker) by Joseph Goebbels.

I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in this battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual—I would say divine—creation... Rudolf Hess, my assistant of many years standing, would tell you: If we have such a leader, God is with us.
As quoted in Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews (1971) by Richard Breiting, p. 68

Hitler underestimated and mocked US and UK

When Churchill and Roosevelt state that they want to build up a new social order, later on, it is like a hairdresser with a bald head recommending an unfortunate hair-restorer. These men, who live in the most socially backward states, have misery and distress enough in their own countries to occupy themselves with the distribution of foodstuffs…. We are allied with strong peoples, who in the same need are faced with the same enemies. The American President and his Plutocratic clique have mocked us as the Have-nots-that is true, but the Have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.
“Speech Declaring War Against the United States" (December 11, 1941)

a reply to: EasternShadow

His doctor was shooting him up with meds, wonder if that contributed to his psychosis?

a reply to: soccermom

LOL I guess so.

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

If he wasn't, he was in the conversation.

Deputy Fuhrer (whose name totally escapes me) was another who was fairly bright.

Rudolf Hess, though in 1941 in he saw the writing on the wall and stole a plane and defected to England.....who then jailed him!

a reply to: crazyewok

That's who it was!! Couldn't remember to save my life...

Thx. 'course there's debate as to whether or not that was really Hess in Spandau all those years...

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: crazyewok

Didn't he commit suicide? Cyanide capsule, or some such??

Yeah he did, like I said attempted to hang haha

a reply to: crazyewok

Did he get to the gallows? I did not know that. That's nasty. Attempt to hang someone and fail...eewwwe.

originally posted by: gb540
a reply to: crazyewok

You also need to read Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny.

Inside The Reich is a one-sided story, more novel than documentary. Speer couldn't keep track of his own lies, and Sereny disassembled him pretty convincingly.

That said, WWII Germany was indeed a mess with anything but clockwork precision. A conflict-based system, a micromanaging dictator, massive underestimates of their enemies... was just a question of where and when it ended.

The main lie that deals with his he claim that he never new about the holocaust.

While true he never had any direct involement or was in any position to influence or stop it, Fact is in 1943 he would of found out at the posen conference which was shown he attended. Himmler made a point of telling all high officials, the logic being they would all share in the collective guilt and hence have to work harder for victory to save there own necks.

If he had admitted that fact at the Nuremberg trials he would of hung. Hence that lie.
As sorry as he was, like most people I don't think he wanted to die.

originally posted by: nwtrucker

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: Raggedyman

Actually they tried on multiple occasions to get their fleet, such as it was, into the Atlantic. Fleet units, surface raiders, and of course submarines.

That they failed to make an appreciable impact outside of the aforementioned submarines and maritime attack aircraft such as the FW-200 Condor is quite beside the point. They attempted and it cost them virtually everything they tried with.

They most certainly did try to form a navy to rival, in some ways, the Royal Navy. Not to the extent of fighting another Jutland, but a fleet in being, to quote Mahan, that had to be taken seriously by the Royal Navy. Given the resources that were tied up by Home Fleet, they succeeded admirably.

Too bad the execution sucked. Graf Spee, Bismark, Tirpitz, Scharnhorst, Geisnanau (sp?), and many other surface combatants, including the never finished Graf Zeppelin, all were either sunk, or rendered useless.

The fact that they didn't have an aircraft carrier ever in commission isn't because they didn't need one, their gloriously deluded leader didn't see the need. More idiot, he.

The exception that proves the rule was the Admiral Scheer, A Graf Spee class heavy Cruiser/Pocket battleship operated in the North and South Atlantic as well as the Indian Ocean. She sank/captured an amazing amount of tonnage during her years at sea. Eventual sunk at port, not unlike Tirpitz.

I'm guessing she had more tonnage to her credit than any ship in WWII.

Those bastard Graf Spee classes where more dangerous than the U-boats.
Maybe Germany should of invested more in those buggers.

originally posted by: seagull
a reply to: crazyewok

Did he get to the gallows? I did not know that. That's nasty. Attempt to hang someone and fail...eewwwe.

No attempt as in he commited sucide before his hanging.


Though a hanging did go disastrously wrong for Julius Streicher, who was in charge of anti Jewish propaganda. The drop failed to break his neckso so it took 20 minutes to die.

Apprently the hang man John C. Woods was infamous for botching hangings

originally posted by: seagull
Not sure I'd go that far...

But I don't think people realize just how powerful the Royal Navy was. If they hadn't had the Japanese to worry about, the battle of the Atlantic wouldn't have been the close run affair it was during the early days.

Why? Enigma would have been cracked, the amount of tonnage being sunk by the Germans was not debilitating and the loss of hard to replace U-boats made it inevitable. Plus the Royal Navy could bottle up most of the German fleet in the Baltic and North Seas, German see power was ineffective.

originally posted by: nwtrucker
Oh, I don't doubt you in the least. I am somewhat torn between 'recently released information' and the recent trend towards revisionism. Especially, when it's the victors...

Shirer wrote this in 1959 as the declassified documents were fist being released, the revisionist aspect would not have been present.

Found it, page 777:

And then suddenly Goering made his second tactical error...the Luftwaffe switched its attack on September 7th to massive night bombings of London. The R.A.F. fighters were reprieved.

Belittlement of the nazi's systematical murders is under penalty in germany.
just this.

and anything out of the 'good nazi' Speer's mouth is a piece of s***.

fight the beginningd of any facist socialism, worldwide.
watch turkey with a sharp eye.

originally posted by: anti72
Belittlement of the nazi's systematical murders is under penalty in germany.
just this.

1) I dont live in Merkals fascist Germany nor do I live in the fascist EU.

2) I am not belittling the murders.

originally posted by: anti72and anything out of Speer's mouth I would take with a big grain of salt.

Why? When it comes his manufacturering facts and figures why would he lie about that after the war


Only thing he has motive to lie on is knowlage about the holocaust and thats not the topic her.

a reply to: crazyewok

Interesting thread, with great points and debate from both sides!!