Consume Product

My understanding (not reading other comments so I might get a lot wrong.)

> poland

Russia was invading poland. Polish were murdering ethnic Germans. Hitler gave a speech about it. Poland was the buffer state between USSR and Germany. Russia broke the "agreement" and so Hitler moved in to secure his borders and his ethnic brethren.

Basically, almost exactly what Putin is doing to Ukraine, except NATO wasn't taking over Ukraine with military force.

> invasion of France

IIRC, the key event was that France and England posed a threat to the western border, and Hitler had an existential threat to his east (USSR.) France and England were paper tigers, unwilling to actually fight, and they were doing nonsense, so strategically, he had an opportunity and he seized it. The idea was that by settling the threat from the west he could focus on strengthening the core and settling the threat from the east.

He was right, by the way. It wasn't until much later in WWII that England and the US posed any threat at all, and even then, it was a huge miscalculation that lead to them being able to get a foothold in western Europe.

> betraying Russia

He didn't betray them. They betrayed him.

Hitler rightly identified Russia as the real threat. Look at the geography. They could zoom their tanks in and walk into any area of Germany without even stopping for gas. The only reason why Russian and Germany were not unified historically is because of interference from the west, AKA "the balance of powers". Because there are no natural borders between Germany and Russia they naturally should be unified.

Hitler never thought they would be easy to defeat. He miscalculated their economic capacity, severely. However, his strategy was sound and had it not been for the problems in the West he still might have pulled it off. It was a similar strategy that Napoleon had a long time ago because it's the only possible strategy that could work.

By the way, I believe Sweden followed the strategy in the Thirty Years War and completely defeated Russia's military early on. I could be wrong. But it isn't a losing strategy. Russia's strategy of burning fields and retreating isn't new either. It's sound doctrine.

The big surprise that Hitler faced was that they were destroying tanks left and right and the sheer volume of tanks was completely unanticipated. Had he known, he would've approached it slightly differently.

If I can say one word about Germany in WWII, they could've won, and Hitler's strategy was the only one that would've won. The only alternative was for Germany to form a strong alliance with the USA to keep the natural predators out of Germany. No one understood exactly how far the USA had progressed in the economic game though.

The things that caused Hitler to fail were (a) he had to fight on 2 fronts, and (b) his enemies were much better at making bulk military goods. That's it.

Hitler wanted peace, he pursued peace, but that wasn't an option and everyone knew it. WWII was not avoidable. There had to be war, and it had to be over Germany.