Conclusion
Some readers may regard the strategic history told in this chapter virtually as a
choreographed tragedy for Germany and a similarly predetermined course, though
a mixture of tragedy and eventual triumph, for the Allies. Others may be impressed by
the power of contingency and will be inclined to speculate that a decision here, a change
in the weather there and so forth might have sufficed to produce a German victory.
So how fragile was the Allied victory? Was it vulnerable to one or two serious strategic
or operational errors, or was it massively and redundantly overdetermined? There is no
way of knowing. Moreover, further research will not tell us. This is the realm of historical
judgement. It is useful to remember that people today are infinitely more confident of the
ultimate victory of the Grand Alliance than were the historical players at the time, at least
until late 1944. For example, it seemed highly improbable that Germany would succeed
in developing an atomic bomb, but the Allies could not be absolutely certain of that. From
Stalin’s ideological and realpolitikal perspective, there was always some risk of his
Western Allies making a separate peace with Germany and joining it in a new Grand
Alliance, this time against the Soviet Union.
The strategic history of 1939–45 in Europe can be summarized with a simple claim.
After the United States entered the fray at Hitler’s irresistible invitation on 11 December
1941, Germany was certain to lose eventually, provided the Grand Alliance did not
make some terrible mistake or suffer appalling bad luck. However, one should recall
Clausewitz’s warning about war being ‘the realm of chance’, and the experience of 2,500
years warns that history can, and sometimes does, mount great surprises. Although
Germany’s defeat was strongly probable, at least from late 1942 onwards, it was not an
absolute certainty before the autumn of 1944.
The next chapter unwraps the ways in which the war was waged, and explores the
plausibility of somewhat rival explanations of Germany’s defeat. But a subject of
immense importance, if not strategically so, has thus far been ignored in these pages: the
Holocaust. So, this chapter now concludes with a brief explanation of how the Holocaust
relates to strategic history.
The Holocaust was a tragedy. A crime, certainly. But it might be claimed that it played
no strategic role of significance to the course and outcome of the war. Such a view has
strategic merit, but there is a lot more to strategic history than narrowly strategic concerns
alone. Hitler’s visceral hatred of the Jews was entirely genuine; at least, it became so
after the Great War. This commitment to their persecution and physical eradication
was founded on an ideology that regarded Jews as both a racial virus to be eliminated
as a duty for public health and as the authors and agents of a malevolent and hostile
international conspiracy. One cannot just dismiss this nonsense with ridicule, because
Hitler believed it, and from 1933 to 1945 he was increasingly able to match his beliefs
with deadly actions.
The Third Reich did not have well-prepared plans for the extermination of all of the
Jews in Europe (and eventually the world, had the war in Europe been won). But in a
speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, to which he referred many times during
the war, Hitler declared that in any new war the Jews of Europe would all be killed. Since
he himself intended to begin that war in 1939, one is entitled to regard his prediction as
a serious intention.
140 War, peace and international relations