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Was Hitler a great leader?


Lantairu
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Was the Four-Year Plan--almost wholly organized and conducted by Göring, who possessed plenipotentiary power (the ability to write law)--not successful in rebuilding the German economy? That sounds like a demonstration of competence to me. The Luftwaffe, under Göring's command, was a major player in the German victories in Norway, Belgium, and France: again, an apparent demonstration of competence.

Toward the war's end, Göring fell out of favor, in part because he made rash promises he couldn't keep (like promising to keep the Sixth Army stocked with supplies by air-drop), but for the pre-war period and (very roughly) the first half of the war, Göring proved pretty effective. Perhaps he would've been better if he'd stuck purely to civilian administration?

The four year plan was mostly Schact's handiwork, and I would dispute the success of the Luftwaffe. Guderian was the one who came up with how it would be used, Göring just followed those instructions. Also he screwed up royally in the Battle of Britain; the Luftwaffe could have destroyed the RAF had Göring not ordered them to focus on London.
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The four year plan was mostly Schact's handiwork, and I would dispute the success of the Luftwaffe. Guderian was the one who came up with how it would be used, Göring just followed those instructions. Also he screwed up royally in the Battle of Britain; the Luftwaffe could have destroyed the RAF had Göring not ordered them to focus on London.

Schacht certainly got the thing started, I can't question that--and he was definitely better than Göring, for a given definition of "better."* But the latter had already replaced the former by 1936, when the Four Year Plan actually started, and three years before the outbreak of the war. From what I've been able to research, Göring was a ruthless taskmaster in the Office of the Four Year Plan, sacking anyone who displeased him and personally making decisions about quotas, price controls, and labor allocation. (The last, particularly using concentration camp prisoners as slave labor, was a major factor in his guilty verdicts during his war crimes trial.)

I don't know enough about the military side of things to say anything more than I have, though I will note that the battles I mentioned (Norway, Belgium, and France) were all prior to the Battle of Britain...which, I will freely admit, is the point at which Göring began to fumble. But he certainly demonstrated enough competence in the first year or two of the war that I think it is incorrect to label him a total abject failure. I can agree that, in the long run, it was certainly unwise of Hitler to have trusted Göring so much, but if anything, that merely illustrates that Hitler himself wasn't exercising good judgment--which would, again, be the mark of a poor leader.

Long story short: In many of the areas where Germany did well before or during WWII, Hitler was not particularly responsible; in many of the areas where mistakes were made, it was either Hitler's own mistaken choices/priorities, or his tendency to dismiss competent underlings when they defied his will (and, consequently, favoring less-talented but more-obedient underlings) that was the root cause of the problem. Regardless: not a good leader in the sense of making sound decisions himself. Good at inspiring the populace, certainly, and often (but not always) good at securing loyalty to himself. (Though one could argue that "loyalty to Hitler" that trumps "loyalty to Germany" is, itself, a kind of "bad" leadership.)

*Technically, neither the Schacht's plan nor Göring's actually achieved "Autarky"--German self-sufficiency--nor the lasting base-economy improvements they desired. Schacht got the fiscal policy back in place, and Göring got the industrial and chemical output up to among the best in the world. But neither one actually created, for example, lasting growth in collected wages, and both had played a dangerous game, more or less banking (no pun intended) on future influx of resources, capital, and labor from German acquisitions (such as the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in '38).

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I will say that Hitler knocked it out of the park with his judgement of talent in the Wehrmacht. The OKW reads like a dream team of military geniuses. Too bad for Hitler that he didn't bother listening to them.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hitler was not a good leader even if you ignore his genocidal policies. His economic policies nearly ruined the country (the idea of an "economic recovery" under Hitler is a myth), and as a military strategist he was comically bad. Stalin was too, but he at least was able to realise this, and it was when he backed off and let his generals do their jobs that the Soviets actually started winning battles. Fortunately for us, Hitler never learnt that lesson. The British actually cancelled a plot to assassinate Hitler for fear of someone actually competent taking control of Germany's war effort.

So yeah. Even if you ignore the fact that Hitler was a genocidal megalomaniac, he was not a great leader, or even a good leader. In fact, he was kind of shit.

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Hitler was not a good leader even if you ignore his genocidal policies. His economic policies nearly ruined the country (the idea of an "economic recovery" under Hitler is a myth), and as a military strategist he was comically bad. Stalin was too, but he at least was able to realise this, and it was when he backed off and let his generals do their jobs that the Soviets actually started winning battles. Fortunately for us, Hitler never learnt that lesson. The British actually cancelled a plot to assassinate Hitler for fear of someone actually competent taking control of Germany's war effort.

So yeah. Even if you ignore the fact that Hitler was a genocidal megalomaniac, he was not a great leader, or even a good leader. In fact, he was kind of shit.

Actually, at least in the early to mid 30s, Germany was making some very meaningful movement, economically speaking. Employments was way up; industrial capacity was way up; real (not nominal) wages paid to workers were way up. By many standards, it was a recovering economy. Not recovered, but recovering.

Then Hitler dismissed his actually very talented economic minister (the aforementioned Schacht) because said minister told him, point-blank, "Germany isn't ready for a war, and you'll eliminate all of the economic progress we've made." The only thing that sustained Germany by the midpoint of the war was the fact that it could scavenge resources from recently-acquired territory (the Sudetenland, Poland, France)--and by the time the Allies rallied, Germany's economy and industry were in the toilet.

So, you're right: Hitler was a godawful leader economically and militarily. However, at least with his initial rise to power, he had an excellent pool of advisers--economic, military, political, scientific. As Blah said, it reads like a dream team. Hitler just had his head so far up his own ass by the late 30s, he began to ignore them, or worse, dismiss them for far less talented yes-men (which Göring eventually proved to be--making promises he couldn't actually fulfill). *Hitler's* policy did absolutely nothing to improve Germany's native economy; his political maneuverings and annexations only served to temporarily patch its weaknesses. The Third Reich government, in general, did in fact actually make SOME economic progress--which Hitler almost immediately squandered.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Okay, my as requested analysis of Operation Barbarossa: it is true that Hitler could have taken Moscow if he had struck towards it in August. It is also true that to do so would have been a mistake. Instead of striking towards Moscow, Hitler attacked the Ukraine, which was a. where a huge amount of Red Army divisions were surrounded and destroyed, b. essentially a checkpoint in terms of supplies; the farmlands of Ukraine were absolutely vital to making sure the Wehrmacht didn't starve, and c. home to a people who had every reason to want Stalin dead. To not take the Ukraine would have left the flank of the army taking Moscow vulnerable to attack and diasaster. Hitler failed to capitalize on the fact that the Ukrainians hated Stalin by showing them that he would make Stalin look like Jesus Christ himself, but even then there were a good deal of Ukrainian recruits into the SS. So I would say that not going for Moscow in August actually was the right move. Of course, Barbarossa itself was a stupid decision, because Stalin had every intention of leaving Europe to Hitler and taking Asia, but I digress. Barbarossa itself was held back by two factors. Firstly, Hitler had to pull Mussolini's ass out of the fire after he got bitchslapped by the Greeks, which delayed Barbarossa from May until June. If Hitler had invaded in May it is quite possible he could have taken Moscow. Of course, that would also have given the British a foothold in Europe, which was with good reason unacceptable. Secondly, Hitler made no real effort to capitalize on the fact that everyone fucking hated Stalin. At the beginning of the war, the average RedArmy soldier ran away from the Germans because he felt no need to die for Stalin. By 1942, Hitler had made clear that the Red Army wasn't fighting for Stalin or even Communism, they were fighting for the survival of the Russian race. Literally all Hitler had to do was practice what he preached about liberating people from Bolshevism, and he would have won Barbarossa easily. He had to go and be a Nazi, though, and the thought of an Aryan working with inferior Ukranians and Estonians was too much to bear. Despite all of the ways in which Hitler could have won Barbarossa, though, the only winning move remains not to play, as Stalin was quite receptive to the idea of joining the Axis, and even if Hitler won in Russia the cost to the Wehrmacht would have been so great they wouldn't have been able to beat the Western Allies. So there you have it; why Hitler was almost as shitty at being a strategist as he was shitty at being a good person.

I like this analysis another debated point is that Hitler should have listened to his military advisers and stuck to attacking and taking the oil fields to the south and forgetting about Moscow entirely. Another complete strategic failure was in his conduct of the Battle of Britain where the Luftwaffe was decimating the RAF by attacking tactical air targets (radars, airfields so on) but because of a night bombing on Berlin in 1941 Hitler mandated that bombing be shifted to London and English population centers. This gave the RAF breathing room to repair their air assets and bleed the Luftwaffe by intercepting their bombers and fighters over cities. Long story short they nearly had the necessary air superiority to conduct an invasion of England but good ol Adolf dorked it up yet again.

As far as to if he was a good leader, well he did say the 3rd Reich was supposed to last 1000 years and ended about 987 years short with a divided Germany and its population decimated so I think that answers that question pretty objectively.

America also came out its depression by waging a war. This must just be a weak correlation.

Actually, if you look at the Government spending between FDR's New Deal programs in the 1930's and the massive increase in the US armed forces the United States had a massive amount of debt and was going broke as all hell. While the atomic bomb was a primary factor in reducing the military's size so to was its massive cost at the end of WWII. What actually "fixed" the Great Depression was the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Europe. Since the United States was effectively the only country physically untouched by the war (factories, farms, infrastructure and so on) they were ones the west relied on for raw material and produced goods. The mass influx of demanded exports and production of consumer goods made businesses boom in the 1950s particularly in Western Europe and somewhat in Japan.

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No, not at all. Its Germany which carried Hitler rather then the other way around.

If Hitler had successes then he undid each and every one of them. That's not him being a victim of the victors either. A lot of the problems the German army faced can be traced back directly to him. Hitler did not have to declare war on America, he did not have to overstretch by occupying every country he could get his hands on and he did not have to try and micromanage his generals. The racial policies Hitler was so fond of were also directly draining resources from the army, even if it was losing.

Hitler isn't a Napoleon. He left the world nothing of value and he's not brilliant enough to warrant admiration from that either.

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