I know, Hitler ימ”ש וזכרו, שר”י was far, far worse than a fool (not to mention his wider circles). And you know that already. But what can I do? Since there is a campaign to rehabilitate his reputation among Goyim, I must do my small part in cutting him down to size in the only area the targets might care about: Hitler was a fool and a loser!
As Rabbi Dr. Dovid Katz correctly notes (podcast blurb):
There is a centrally-directed evil conspiracy to popularize Hitler and everything he stood for in order to attack Israel (which has benefited from the Holocaust Narrative) and to attack the Jewish People and provoke another Holocaust. Really.
Such is the price of the unregulated internet…
End quote.
So, standing in Esther’s shoes, I below reproduce genius Austrian-school economist and professional historian Dr. Gary North’s written assessment of Hitler’s economic and military decisions (consolidated and abbreviated from his freely available online articles). He uses strong language, but it’s an authoritative analysis by a PhD. I’m appealing to his authority, not my own, of course.
[In other words, this isn’t for you. Spread this far and wide. Link or repurpose this resource; whatever works in context.]
Dr. Gary North, parsed and paraphrased:
Adolf Hitler was the greatest fool in the history of warfare.
Overview of decisive errors:
- In May 1940, he let the British army escape from Dunkirk. Had the German army attacked as the escape began, this might have ended the war. The German army easily could have attacked. Hitler held back. That lost the war against Great Britain.
- He commanded the invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, a decision that lost Germany the war on the eastern front. The war was basically over by December. Hitler decided that he could defeat the four unbeatable Russian generals: General Mud, General Dust, General Fire, and General Cold. These four generals had defeated Napoleon in 1812-13.
- He declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941, when he did not have to. The Axis Pact with Japan was strictly a defensive alliance. Japan had started a sneak war, imitating Hitler. This lost Germany the war on the Western front.
The word “fool” does not do him justice. The word “madman” does.
[Closer analysis:]
Returning to 1939, Hitler was too militarily stupid to recognize that if he invaded Poland, the British would declare war on Germany. He never wanted to go to war with Britain. That was a matter of public record. But he simply dismissed the likelihood that Britain would support Poland, just as Britain had agreed to do in March of that year.
And there was almost no way he could defeat the British Air Force in the Battle of Britain. (This may just have been the stupidity of relying on his drug-addicted flight field marshal, Hermann Göring.)
Operation Barbarossa. There was no possibility that the inefficient socialist economy of Germany could have held out against the systematically militaristic economy of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was always a massive military economy. At the end, in the classic words of Richard Grenier, the USSR was “Bangladesh with missiles”.
Hitler was a strategic fool from start to finish. There was a consistent pattern of utter foolhardiness in his entire career. But the consummate act of foolishness was to start a third front with the United States.
In the minds of the American population, the bad guys were the Japanese, not the Germans. There was no possible political way that Franklin Roosevelt, apart from the declaration of war by Hitler, could have expanded the war into the Atlantic on the official basis. He never would have gotten Congress to go along with that. He had that opportunity in his call for Congress to declare war on December 8, his “day of infamy” speech; he did not mention Germany. The country was mobilizing to fight Japan at the time Germany declared war on the United States.
The public wanted to get even with Japan. Congress wanted to beat the Japanese on December 8, 1941. Americans did not want to go to war against the Germans until December 11. Hitler made this politically possible.
Hitler also underestimated the ability of the United States’ population and its industrial capacity to inflict enormous damage on German military forces. Count the costs before you start a war. He had made that mistake in September 1939. He made that mistake again on June 22, 1941. He kept making this same mistake. He was a slow learner. Actually, he was a non-learner. He was a fool.
Germany was not an economic powerhouse. It was a centrally planned economy. Every invasion, westward or eastward, depleted the fragile economy of National Socialism. As a centrally planned economy, it was inherently irrational. That had been Mises’ point in 1920 in his classic essay, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” For details on just how irrational Hitler’s economy was, read Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (2006).
Hitler was the consummate military fool. There has been no national leader in history to match him in this regard. Yet he had the full support of the vast majority of the German people in late 1941. There is no better example in history of the phrase, “the blind leading the blind into the ditch.”
Think “Switzerland.” Hitler was not dumb enough to invade Switzerland. He knew there would be no net payoff for a victory. He ran a cost-benefit analysis. This was by far his best military decision. He did not have many of them.