Neither one, of course. Nothing ensured anything at the time when the decision makers had to take their decisions. But I'll add that the idea of a mutual exhaustion is particularly unlikely.
Not in the age of industrial warfare, espeically if it's an attrition one (which would be most familiiar in 1939 thanks to WWI).
The much more likely outcome would be one winner takes all, and notwithstanding horrific losses he's now got the resources to be the European superpower.
"Winner takes all" in this contest means the Wehrmacht marching to the Urals or the Red Army marching to the Atlantic. Not terribly likely outcomes. The latter is rather outlandish given the rersources DE and SU have here, and the former is not terribly likely either, with Hitler at the helm.
I concede however that this may be difficult to foresee in 1939-40, without hindsight.
A possible alternative is indeed a draw, which however leaves both dictatorships standing.
But weakened, and rather liable to downfall and/or containment. An intact British Empire would little difficulty at this point to keep at least Western Europe free (which replicates OTL outcome but with less destruction) or to prod the internal downfall of at least one dictatorship, most probably the Nazi one, which would be way better than OTL.
Oh yes, but not in this case.
Precisely in this case. Notwithstanding the overwhelming horrid record of the Nazi regime as human rights goes, they were in the right as they rejected Versailles limitations on their nation's economy and territorial integiry, and pushed for the reintegration of ethnic nationals which had been separated against their will. These are the things that any other German leadership caring to redress balance for their nation would have done, even if they had not had an aggressive agenda on other peoples.
If the real reason for developing nuclear capabilities for a dangerous, fanatical state is not to have peaceful nuclear energy but to develop nuclear weapons, then sorry, even though having peaceful nuclear energy would be a fair ambition, I'll subscribe the policies that try and prevent that state from developing nuclear capabilities.
Denying national self-determination on the excuse that the involved populaces will use their independence wrongly is besides a greased out slippery slope to preemptive wars and permanent military occupation, a self-fulfilling prophecy to stir up precisely that kind of aggressive nationalism you hop to shield against. Versailles and the 1923 occupation of the Ruhr worked so well to keep the Germans down. The only way to enforce Versailles permanently was permanent military occupation of Germany and Austria. Good luck to Britain and France with that.
The difference between claiming a nuclear program and claiming self-determination for your nationals is huge, the same between buying a rifle and having the wage to afford and buy a rifle (among many other things).
National self-determination was but one of the considerations, and others were just as important.
Only if you assume the agenda of keeping Germany shackled to its 1919 status of a pariah nation with unequal rights was a valid, just and sustainable one in the long term, which besides being a pipe dream of extreme French and Polish nationalism, the demographic and econ omic ablance of 1900s Europe being what it is, was a big part of what caused Naqzism in the first place.
The argument seems ridiculous because you misunderstood it. I never claimed anything of the above. I only pointed out that your statement that the Sudeten were populated by Germans was, and remains, inaccurate.
Sudetenland Germans were one-fourth of the whokle population of Czechoslovakia and 90% of the Sudetenland areas, plus an handful of other enclaves which lacked territorial continuity with Germany. This makes those areas "German" to all criteria that matter.
While we're talking about ridiculous statements, I find ridiculous both to mention "collaborationist minorities" and "empires" when it comes to the Czechs in the Sudeten. Not only you seem unaware of the basic mechanisms of ethnic population; the mingling of ethnic groups, sometimes from village to village, sometimes within the very same damn small hamlet, was a rule since medieval times and had nothing to do with deliberate colonizing or with collaborationists in the case at hand. Those deliberate policies have taken place in the last decades in Tibet, but they are out of the picture in the Sudeten.
You grasp the straws and fail the crux of my argument. Which is: to deny the 90% of a population of an area national self-determination because the 10% wants to stay with parent nation is a ridiculous and tyrannical argument, notwithstanding the way the 10% ended there, be it conmingling since time immemorial or immigration over the last generation or two. I just quoted colonial immigrations since they were just the easiest examples.
Finally, the Czechs who ended up in Germany were not a puny number.
Well, in the right TL, the Sudetenland and Austria would have been awarded to Germany in 1919, the lessened national humiliation maybe would have prevented the rise of Nazism, and according to the typical way of solving the issue of "residual" minorities post-WWI, namely population exchange. The Czech gets their independent republic in Czech lands, the Sudetenland get their reunification with Germany in German lands, tiny Czech minority in Sudetenland gets moved to Bohemia-Moravia, tiny German minority in Bohemia-Moravia gets moved to Germany. Problem solved.
Highly irrelevant. You were claiming the British were paying no price for letting Germany bloat out of proportion and, as you yourself stated above, build its own stepping stones to continental domination.
Denying German people national self-determination was not the answer. Besides the fact it was already tried nd failed, and that it would only fan the flames of aggressive German nationalism, it was essentially petty as Austria and the Sudetenland went. Germany was almost double the size of France as manpower and economy went, and could have undergone the path to continental domination, whether they had Austria and the Sudetenland, or not. And the 1939 borders were not "Germany bloated out of proportion". It was the 1848 unification accomplished.
I pointed out that strategically, letting Germany get rid of its 1930 vulnerabilities (the Rheinland demilitarization, the Sudeten arrow pointed at its side) was not a no-price option.
There are such things as an untenable position, in the long run. Upholding the Versailles settlement was one. An attempt to do so was simply to make things worse in the long run (such as causing a revanchist German leadership to come into power, which was much more competent than the Nazists).
The fortifications lost are, from a practical point of view, a huge figure in the losses column for anybody considering Germany a potential enemy.
As if the Germans could not simply outflank them through the Austrian border in a war, which totally lacked them. The Anschluss made them wholly obsolete anyway. Sure, the Czechs might rebuild them there, too, but if they can do so, they can rebuild them at the Sudetenland border anyway.
Yes. Chamberlain made the mistake of believing Hitler when he said that the Sudeten were his last territorial claim.
About this, Hitler made an even worse mistake making that statement in the first place. I'm an ardent believer that invading Bohemia and Moravia in 1939 was the first big foreign policy blunder that led to German defeat in WWII (there were several others previosuly, such as not switching to diesel for military vehicles, but they were related to mistakes in military buildup). It was petty and stupid, letting the whole world witness your word is blatantly worthless, when they could have obtained 80% of what gained with military occupation, with economic pressure, since the Czech rump was landlocked among German lands and the Slovak satellite anyway.
Anyway, making that statement was another stupid blunder, the liar overreaching himself with gratuitous lies, when it was obvious that Germany was going to restate a claim over the Polish border sooner or later. He should have qualified that statement, as in the Sudetenland being his last claim in Czechoslovakia, and sticked to that.
Anyway, Chamberlain was stupid too to believe that statement, even without having real insight about the depth of Hitler's Lebenstraum agenda, one just ought to compare the list of long-standing German irredentist claims in Europe (Reinland, Austria, Sudetenland, Danzig, the Corridor, Upper Silesia, Memel), which long predated Nazism, to knwo that the Sudetenland were not "last German territorial claim" (the same way that Abkazia-Ossetia by all likelihood is not the last Russian claim in Europe, and any contrary statement would be a blatant lie).
Hitler promptly showed he was wrong, and in the face of the fait accompli, Chamberlain's option was to draw a line at the _next_ aggression. It's all rather linear, actually, once you get rid of Nazi obfuscation of the issue.
Well, one might argue that a possibly much more profitable alternative strategy (especially taking the very poor Anglo-French performance in 1939-40) was for Paris and London to wash their hands out of Poland, keep on with their rearming, and using their intact strength to enforce a favourable deal on the weakened victor of the coming struggle between Germany and Russia. Since that stretegy would have been even much more effective done in 1939, with France intact and Benelux free, than in 1940.
Chamberlain's choices only make sense if one assumes British garantee would keep Germany away from Poland forever, which was not really believable. The 1919-21 border was unacceptable for the German public before Hitler.
Again the coming clash between Germany and Russia was predictable, once Poland was done away one way (partition) or another (satellization), and it was not in the Western Democracies' interest to take one part decisively in that struggle. Or truly (but the occupation of Bohemia-Moravia was a serious sign against that) Polish claims would have been the end of German expansion in Europe, and that it was not worth a war.
Dude, if you wish to read my posts without tearing your eyes out, kindly please learn to ignore my misspellings. Due to my horrid typing skills
, I make an awful legion of them, so no use in going Da Vinci Code on them.
About my overwhelming lack of sympathy for 1919-39 Poland, I stated it clearly in other threads. They thought they could bully both Germany and Russia forever with French help, and reaped what they sowed.
He overestimated his own country's war potential, he thought the French army was the best in the world, he did not think the USSR and Germany would have come to a partition agreement, and I could go on.
Now, lack of hindsight in the British is one thing, but the 1939 Polish policy is undefensible. Polish nationalists were megalomanic idiots who hoped the once-in-a-blue-moon political accident of 1919 (both neighboring great powers crippled by defeat and revolution) was a permanent geopolitical fact and they could rebuild the huge Kingdom of Poland over the corpses of two powers way mightier than them, on the demograhic and economic rise since last century, with the help of another great power which had been declining for a century. The policy they had kept since 1919 was bringing them to a crash course to another partition, since the moment Germany and Russia had agreed, even momentarily, about that, France could do zero about that. And besides the long-term threads, which were obvious to anyone with insight, the coming patition was obvious the moment the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed.
And the German victory was not a foregone conclusion, especially the one in the West in 1940 was far from the cakewalk some still believe today – it was a close-run thing.
Only true to some degree, but true as one takes into account the complex causal chain that allowed the Manstein plan to be adopted.
Anyway, the best realistic outcome for the Anglo-French was another long-stretch of attrition warfare and blockade.
Nobody can say anything for sure, of course. What can be said for sure is that sooner or later Germany deemed it necessary to directly run plenty of places,
Typically only when the vassal tried to escape the alliance. Cfr. Italy, Hungary, Vichy France. Also probably either Romania or Bulgaria, I would need to check forsure.
I wouldn't bet on Poland being as far from the German grasp as Finland and Bulgaria.
The issue was not the nearness of the grasp. Hungary was well within it, but they didn't occupy it until the satellite tried to drop from their alliance, and Hungarian Jews were not included in the Final Solution until there. was direct German occupation. Same happened in Italy and Vichy France. Until then, discriminated, but alive.
I find this rather amusing. What you are saying implies that the current German leadership is not rational because it's not trying to "throw off the chains" of 1945 and retake Stettin.
Too bad that thanks to the extensive Russo-Polish ethnic cleansings post 1945, there is scarcely an ethnic German in Stettin, or elsewhere in Poland or the Czech Republic anymore.
I gather you are not informed about the terms of the Brest-Litovsk treaty, imposed by Germany onto Russia.
I am rather familiar with them, thank you. There is a big difference, however, the lands and peoples that B-L wrestled from the Czarist (soon to be the Soviet) Empire, were never Russian in the first place, they were subject nationalities that were not exactly enthusiastic to be subjects of the Russians, not too much reluctant to become independent vassals of the (relatively rather more enlightened, econimically advanced, and liberal) German Empire than the Czar's, or Lenin's.
Besides, in WWI it was exactly the same British policy as against France, and Spain, and again Germany later: gang up against the would-be continental superpower.
A policy that had become more and more outdated and untenable in the XIX and XX Centuries, with the inevitable coming of widespread industrialization and big national states in Europe. The balance of power was really feasible only as long as half of Europe was a mess of tiny feudal-dynastic minors, and the existing great powers were pre-industrial.
While a Nazi victory would mean just that, a sole superpower in Europe.
Only if they reach the Urals, and go Sealion.
I'm not surprised that no statesman subscribed to such a dubious and unlikely policy. In any case, if there is a victor, he'll be Pyrrhic for five years, maybe. The manpower pool is there. The raw resources are there. The territory is there. The know-how is there...
And the Nazis or the Soviets were so efficient managers of their empires ... They won't shoot themselves in the foot with terrible economic management, hamhanded use of brute force, lousy education, and a more and more unappealing political system, and go the way of the Assyrians.
oops, save for the nuclear one. The scenario you portray, however unlikely, probably has a series of mushrooms over Europe looming, no matter if they are against the Nazis or the Commies. Nice job.
Hence, Patton was right. In 1945, don't stop at the Elbe, go all the way to Moscow.
