Germany lost the WWII before the Battle of Stalingrad or after that.

Germany lost the WWII before the Battle of Stalingrad or after that.


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And look at this, my God.
RIAN_archive_602161_Center_of_Stalingrad_after_liberation.jpg

The center of Stalingrad after liberation.
Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-E0406-0022-011%2C_Russland%2C_deutscher_Kriegsgefangener.jpg

A Red Army soldier marches a German soldier into captivity.
 
I would argue that World War II was unwinnable for Hitler from the get-go, and much of that entirely goes onto himself and the mad ideology that he had set up to begin with. Had Hitler learned anything from history (which he didn't, obviously :rolleyes2: ) then simultaneously going on Britain and Russia simultaneously is a horrible idea, and this is where Napoleon failed back in his day, and this is also - to a lesser extend - where Imperial Germany faltered. From a strategic perspective, the Molotov-Ribbentrob pact made sense, but from his own ideological perspective, he eventually had to attack the Soviet Union.
For somebody else, it would have made sense to focus on defeating Britain first - perhaps by orchestrating Operation Sealion (though that was in itself entirely unrealistic), or by focusing on a Mediterranean victory first (conquest of Egypt and the Middle East, and securing the oil fields), and preventing the United States from entering the war in Europe for as long as possible. Had the UK surrendered by mid-1941, this might have been a major game changer.
But the way things were, and under the conditions they were, fighting a war against the Soviet Union was entirely unwinnable: the Soviet army was in a terrible condition in 1941 thanks to Stalin's own purges, and this was certainly a factor that was in favour of Hitler at that point, but there were many other factors that worked against him. First and foremost the massive size, population, resources and also geographic depth of the Soviet Union. Another factor was that the peoples who under different circumstances might have been sympathetic in fighting against the Soviet Union (ie. the Poles and in particular Ukrainians) were the ones that were scheduled for annihilation by the Nazi ideology.


Thus, the only way this could end for Hitler and for Germany was utter defeat.
 
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