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Originally Posted by Slartibartfas
Not expensive, but I doubt the extend of the impact. Insurgency might be a nasty thing but a cold winter is nastier. After all the armies did not care too much for the civlians or their safety anyway, and its hard to cut down huge army on its way through your territory by some insurgency.
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You do have good points here, but they still don't refute some key points that remain. The Nazis certainly had no problem with genocide, and brutal genocide at that. But........one fact remains: As an army occupies more space, it becomes less concentrated, and therefore weaker. The Germans were all but officially defeated after the Russian winter. Hitler made a huge strategic blunder there, which I'll go into more below.
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Compared to the extreme over the top defensive structures on French territory it would not have mattered what the Belgians would have done, it would have always been the better choice for Germany.
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Ah yes, the mighty Maginot line... One of the most foolish strategic mistakes in history.
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Sure, nice for them. But thats not the reason the Nazis never invaded. They absolutely had no interest in invading it.
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Now this isn't true. Hitler
wanted all of Europe. He could have never successfully occupied it all, but he wanted it. And he despised the Swiss:
"Hitler himself denounced the Swiss repeatedly as "despicable and wretched", "misbegotten", "renegades", "repugnant", "a pimple on the face of Europe" which "cannot be allowed to continue". (Stalin couldn't stand them either.)
The Fuehrer despised their purely defensive military philosophy: "An army whose only goal is to secure peace" is craven, he said. "In addition to all the other characteristics of the Swiss that Hitler disliked," Halbrook adds, "he hated them because of their free market capitalism, which he associated with Judaism." The ever-abusive Voelkischer Beobachter resorted to the epithet "Berg-Semiten": mountain Jews."
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After receiving threats from Germany, the Swiss government actually invited in several Nazi generals to view their defenses. They told them they would never surrender and were prepared to repel any invasion. The generals reported back to Hitler stating they should "leave the little porcupine alone."
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I addressed that already above, the situation is entirely different. The insurgency is causing large substantial problems in creating stability and prosperity in Iraq, or even safety, but the US army does not risk military defeat in their own camps against the insurgents. The armies in WWI did not care much about civlians, and if a few soldiers had to loose their lifes to insurgents, that didn't matter either, as they fell to the thousands at the front anyway.
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I will agree with that point, BUT that still doesn't change the fact that the Nazis were not a true threat to control all of Europe for decades, or to control the world.
Hitler could have never conquered the world. Why? Because...NO NATION HAS THE ECONOMIC CAPABILITY OF SUSTAINING A WORLD-WIDE OCCUPATION. No population would work under the taxes to fund such a "machine". Also, the superiority of the German army was based on several myths. The facts are that Hitler was being routed on the Eastern front after the beginning on 1942. German factories couldn't meet the demands of the troops with equipment and supplies, as they were running low on almost everything due mainly to the severe Russian winter. Hitler had been so confident of his ability to defeat the Russians he had ordered cutbacks in war production in 1941, this from a supposedly brilliant leader.
The following quotes are from "World War 2, The Rest of the Story" by Richard Maybury:
"A little known fact is that the Germans actually had two armies. One was the high tech mechanized force you have seen so often in movies. The aircraft, tanks, and artilleries are impressive, no doubt about it. But this force was small. It was only the tip of the spear. The rest of the spear, the main body of the army, was foot soldiers and horses. Yes, horses. When Hitler's massive invasion force was poised on the Soviet frontier in June 1941, it was at its peak. Lined up ready to strike at Stalin were 3,350 tanks. And 650,000 horses. Hollywood devotes a lot of film to the tanks, but how often have you seen the thousands of horses? Most of the horses were used as substitutes for trucks, but the Germans did have a horse cavalry division that was thrown against the Russians.
(In contrast) when the British and Americans invaded Normandy in June 1944, they were fully mechanized, while the German army was still dependent on 1,250,000 horses."
No one has ever truly conquered the world. Taking it and holding it are two different things. Even the Roman Empire didn't control the entire world. The "Pax Romana" was a myth--there was actually no such thing. There were constant insurrections, revolutions, uprisings, assassinations, and all manner of violence. There was never any true lasting peace or freedom. It's an historical illusion. To say that the Romans ruled the world is false and it never really happened that way. That's why I say no one can conquer the world in a complete and lasting way--especially a centralized or socialized economy.
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Oh, we are talking about WWII, not WWI? Well than the insurgents are even less of a point, because with the Blitzkrieg the tanks were already have out of Belgians before much insurgence could have been planned at all...
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The fact is,
many under-manned, under-equipped insurgencies were having success against the Nazis.
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Probably they could have overrun it, but what for? And thats the major point.
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Because Hitler despised them and wanted to conquer all of Europe. He wanted all of Europe and he wanted to turn Berlin into Germania - the capital of Europe.