Defence of the Reich

You can attribute the final destruction of the Luftwaffe fighter force to the Western allies but from the start of Barbarossa until September 1942 the Luftwaffe consistently,month by month,lost more aircraft in the Eastern theatre. As of December that trend was restored. Hardly surprising as this is where most of them were. The glitch,most noticeable in November (224 East/595 elsewhere) coincides with "Torch"
Steve

stona said:

You can attribute the final destruction of the Luftwaffe fighter force to the Western allies but from the start of Barbarossa until September 1942 the Luftwaffe consistently,month by month,lost more aircraft in the Eastern theatre. As of December that trend was restored. Hardly surprising as this is where most of them were. The glitch,most noticeable in November (224 East/595 elsewhere) coincides with "Torch"
Steve

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In the war context most of the LW fighter force was destroyed in the West (since 1939). What some people are making confusion here, is that this does not necessarily meant the Soviets could not have defeated the LW alone. The Soviets managed to defeat the LW in the air battles of Kuban and Kursk, when it was mostly envolved in the East, and they were constantly growing in strenght and quality. By 1944, the VVS fighter opposition was a fraction of before due to the LW transfer to the West, but even so the VVS had the capability to defeat the LW if it had remained in the East.

As for the West here, it's not different. Given the overwhelming numerical and qualitative superiority the Anglo-American air forces had, it would not be the LW fighter contingent of the Eastern Front that would stop them. Kinda like the Heer contingent in the West that would not stop the Soviets in the East.

As for the ground scenario, after air supremacy was estabilished over Europe and Germany was properely "softened" (perhaps nuked), an invasion would come if she did not surrender. No Army was able to hold an invasion where the enemy has overwhelming aerial, naval and the adequated number of ground troops. People can try, but Nazi Germany would not escape from this rule.

Jenisch I agree with your basic premise,that ultimately the Western Allies would have defeated Germany even had the Soviet Union dropped out of the conflict for some reason.
It would not be fair to minimise the huge contribution of the Soviets which enabled a second land front in 1944 and a rapid conclusion to the conflict thereafter,less than a year having been at it since 1939.

As far as the Luftwaffe specifically is concerned the fighter force was minced in the West but just about everything else was destroyed in the East. With the expansion of fighter production,to counter the RAF/USAAF, at the expense of all other types these Eastern losses were never replaced.

Cheers

Steve

stona said:

It would not be fair to minimise the huge contribution of the Soviets which enabled a second land front in 1944 and a rapid conclusion to the conflict thereafter,less than a year having been at it since 1939.

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Where did I said that? The Soviets played the greatest contribution in the war, historians are not incorrect when they say that. In the war context, the Soviets were the ones which most contributed to the outcome of the war as it occured. However, as I have said, this does not necessarily meant the West was dependent of the Soviets to defeat the Nazis or vice versa.

Actually, a scenario like this is extremely complex. There are practically endless factors to considerate. People are many times inflexible in their analyzes of an alternative history scenario. For example, the Eastern Front lasted for four years, due to the losses and limitations the Soviets experienced. So, why a hypotetical solo Western confrontation with Nazi Germany could not have lasted more than historically? Time buys a lot of things. For example, since Europe was short of coal, food and oil, the Allies could have put a siege on it. Other thing would be the simple liberation of France. The Allies could have liberated France and dig in until they could have launched their "Bagrations". With France liberated, perhaps it would not be impossible to have the French motherland as allied again. Certainly the possibility of have the French ports and use the country to launch aerial operations against Germany would improve the Allied position considerably. Other possibility would be diplomacy with Japan. After Japan was severely beaten (and perhaps also nuked), the Japanese leadership was willing to negociate a conditional peace withthe Allies (I'm assuming no Casablanca here). If "save" Western Europe and defeat Hitler was more important, then Japan could be isolated if such peace was signed or put under siege. I don't know how public opinion would play out, but anyway, by 1943 the Pacific surely could have went in the defensive. The "20%" of the American war potential employed against Japan certainly was more than one "Luftwaffe". Just the USN could have fielded more aircraft than the LW.

jenisch, i dont think he's sayin you said that..he was agreeing with you i believe.


"these Eastern losses were never replaced." therein lies the crux of the issue. i just read an interesting piece on kursk. how on target it is i have no idea but the author does make a good case at casting down somoe of the myths. as i understand it the germans took a larger tool on the soviet army than was inflicted upon them. the determing factor was the soviets could afford to lose the men, tanks, aircraft...the germans couldnt. i remember reading the thoughts of a german ace on the eastern front ( could have even been hartmann )...he said if they ( the LW ) shot down 30 VVS plane they were replaced by 90. likewise the western allies could out product germany. sooner or later that is going to be the determing factor.

in case you are interested in that article on kursk...like i said i dont know enough about the battle to be able to draw a conclusion one way or the other but here it is....

The Battle of Kursk

I still didn't read Christer Bergström's books about the Eastern Front - they are higly regarded - this is a review of the one from Stalingrad:

Drawing upon a wealth of German and Russian archival material and personal accounts, Bergstrom chronicles the momentous developments on the Eastern Front from early 1942 to January 1943, events that resulted in the destruction of the 6th Army at Stalingrad. Luftwaffe and Red Air Force units were key players in the sometimes titanic land battles waged during this time. Equipped with superior aircraft flown by combat-experienced crews using proven tactics, German fighter, bomber, ground-attack and recce units overwhelmed the opposition, lending valuable support to the Panzers while decimating their poorly-trained and -led VVS contemporaries operating a smorgasbord of biplane and monoplane designs. While Russian units were being re-equipped with more potent aircraft such as IL-2s, Pe-2s, Yak-1s, LaGG-3s, etc., they often lacked time to develop effective tactics before thrown into battle. Yet despite wholesale slaughter of VVS units, Germany, as Bergstorm relates in the book, couldn't hope to win the war of attrition Stalin was willing to wage. In time Luftwaffe bombers and fighters, their numbers dwindling, became fire-brigades, switched back and forth across fronts to provide needed - if temporary - strength to a threatened location or air support for a new offensive. Germany's transports were likewise called upon for tasks - such as the aerial resupply of Stalingrad - beyond their capabilities. In the end, quantity conquered quality.

People who read his books told me that he presents evidence that the LW had a critical role in the German advances. If not for it's capability to provide "flying artillery" and interdict the Soviet supply lines, the Heer would never be able to achive the fantastic advances and victories in Russia. I'm not impressed by that, aviation was already know to be a decisive weapon for the ground fight before the war.

Therefore, it would not be possible that the "invencible" German Army of millions and millions that Parfisal says would exist with the Allies controlling the skies. With the railway system of France destroyed and the Allied fighters bombing any trucks and wagons, the German logistic system would become a bottleneck in short time - the extra millions of men would be useless. And as I already said, the Allies would not need hurry to launch the invasion and advance immediately. As soon as the Allies set a foot in the continent, they could have entered in the defensive if necessary. As soon as they were ready, they could start to advance again. This is what the Germans feared, hence why Rommel wanted to stop the invasion at the beachs, not the continent.

While Kursk wasn't primarily a tank battle, my info is that the Germans did in fact get waxed. The attack was old school blitzkrieg and the Soviet defense was mines, massed artillery and sappers. With the attack being long expected and slow developing, Soviet artillery was well sighted in and used the pakfront to concentrate fire. Tank on tank was secondary. Soviet sappers popped out of trenches and broke/poured containers of gasoline and oil into the engine compartments of the tanks. This was particularly effective against Dr. Porsche's elephant which didn't mount machine guns. Guderian commented that it was like shooting quail with cannon.

Hitler had been warned and seemed to realize that without the element of surprise the attack would be a failure. Yet he made the last grand gesture before his armies stared their final retreat.

Barbarossa by Alan Clark is my primary source.

Balljoint said:

While Kursk wasn't primarily a tank battle, my info is that the Germans did in fact get waxed.

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i am not saying that they didnt get beat...i am saying numberwise ( if i am reading that article correctly ) the soviets lost more....but were willing and able to absorb the loses where the germans werent.

Lets try for compromise. ive made my views pretty clear that the Russians were critical to Allied victory.

I am surprised and dismayed to find some arguing that is not the case. okay. But the point that generated this sub-issue was whether, if the Germans were able to make a separate peace with the russians, whether that would make defence of the skies over germany a more winnable proposition.

Hopefully that will get the debate back onto some relevance

parsifal said:

But the point that generated this sub-issue was whether, if the Germans were able to make a separate peace with the russians, whether that would make defence of the skies over germany a more winnable proposition.

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Parfisal, the bombing campaign was only treatned when there was not fighter escort avaliable. As soon as fighters were avaliable, the Allies would overwhelm the Luftwaffe in the same form the Russians did. Maybe the only realistic chance Germany had was to secure a substantial fuel supply from the USSR, in order to have an adequated number of pilots (and I'm not certain if only this would be viable). However, Germany was in no conditions to pay for it. And would the Russians, that already suffered so much from Germany, continue to sustain it's war effort? For them it was much more interesting to defeat Germany (and later Japan) with the West and grab some land in the process - what they actually did.

I see the scenario developing more or less as follows. There are a lot of variables, and things might not pan out in the way I would expect them to. However this is how i see it developing

June 1941, Hilter does not order the partial demobilization of the German economy. Germany maintains and increases it military outputs, such that production levels are running at about 6months ahead of historical schedules

October 1941, Hitler heeds the advice of his front commanders, and cancels Typhoon. The heer consolidates and fortifies its position, and because there is no late autumn offensive, has time to bring up its winter gear. As part of the preprations, an east front commander is appointed to run the campaign. hitler defaults and takes a more indirect role in operations

November '41- March 1942, the Red Army launches its counter attacks, as it must, but is defeated by a rested and dug in German Army. Instead of suffering the 5 million casualties that they did historically, the russians suffer about 8 million. this rips the heart out of their military cadres.

At the end of the winter, Hitler realizes he cannot win the battle outright, he finally starts to listen to the intell reports he is receiving. peace terms are put to the Soviets, which includes access to the Soviet opil sources.

The Russians have no choice but to continue to attack. They release their final reserves, about 300 divisions, from behind Moscow, and hurl them at the German front lines in a desperate bid to break the stalemate. The Germans adopt mobile defence tactics, giving ground where needed, and counterattacking and isolating pockets of the Soviet forces. the Soviets, over the next 3 months to the end of June lose another 8 million men instead of the 1 million they lose historically. The Soviet Army is utterly gutted and lays prostrate ready for defeat. Stalin faces a near revolt in his own regime, make peace or be removed.....

In late June the Germans renew their offensive on a limited basis, slicing through the now wrecked Soviet forward positions with ease. Peace terms continue to be offered to the Soviets as their army disintegrates. They make the decision to make peace, allowing the germans continued access to oil as a condition of the peace treaty.

From there, we can extrapolate what theat might mean to the german defence of the Reich. a whoilsale transefer of about 4million men, and around 2500 a/c and 3 full flak divisions (from memeory). The allies immediately cancel their 1942 bombing offensive, giving the Germans respite and the ability to defvelop their advanceed techs. The alies fall back onto their atomic progrmas, but the germans, now with reources to spare, almost match the allied efforts (now reduced because of elevated defence needs and losses to U-Boats). The war drags on into 1947-8, with both sides acquiring nuclear weapons at about the same time....

history rewritten........

parsifal said:

In late June the Germans renew their offensive on a limited basis, slicing through the now wrecked Soviet forward positions with ease. Peace terms continue to be offered to the Soviets as their army disintegrates. They make the decision to make peace, allowing the germans continued access to oil as a condition of the peace treaty.

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I'm very skeptical of your "miracle" theories, Parfisal. The main reason being that if they were so good as you say, why they were not implemented? The WM estimated that in late 1941 the Soviets had 360 divisions - they actually had 600 - it would be perfect to execute this strategy. You are also puting too much blame in Hitler. This is a cliche, the idea that Hitler was responsible for practically all the mistakes of the WM is in good part a myth created in the post-war by ex-WM members. And before you say anything of me, I'm backing my arguments with Tooze's book, which is a book with reliable economic data, which I will post more of it now:

The Wages of Destruction, page 452:

However optimistic the Wehrmacht may have been in the assessment of its own capacities, the sheer size of the task facing them in the Soviet Union could not be denied. Most fundamentally, the Germans were grossly outnumbered. Even allowing for the unreliability of Stalinist statistics, the population of the Soviet Union cannot have been less than 170 million in 1941. The population of Germany was less than half that: 83.76 million people in 1939. Though the German army that invaded the Soviet Union probably outnumbered the Red Army troops stationed in the western sectors, the Germans had already conscripted virtually all their prime manpower. By contrast, the Red Army could call up millions of reservists. From the outset, therefore, it was clear that the Wehrmacht must not be sucked into a battle of attrition. And this imbalance of manpower was compounded by the enormous expanse of Soviet territory and the sheer impassability of the terrain. If the Red Army were able to withdraw in good order this would present Germany with insuperable problems. If on the other hand the coherence of the Soviet force could be broken, then the difficulty of maintaining communications would hamper their efforts to restore coherence no less than it impeded the German advance. Everything depended on deciding the battle, as in France, in the first weeks of the campaign. This was the assumption on which Barbarossa was premised. A massive central thrust towards Moscow, accompanied by flanking encirclements of the Soviet forces trapped in the north and south, would allow the Red Army to be broken on the Dnieper-Dvina river line within 500 kilometres of the Polish-German border. The Dnieper-Dvina river line was critical because beyond that point logistical constraints on the German army were binding. These limitations on Germany's new style of 'Blitzkrieg' had not been obvious in 1940, because the depth of operations required by Manstein's encircling blow (Sichelschnitt) had never exceeded a few hundred kilometres. The entire operation could therefore be supplied by trucks shuttling back and forth from the German border. On the basis of their experience in France, the Wehrmacht's logistical staff calculated that the efficient total range for trucks was 600 kilometres, giving an operational depth of 300. Beyond that point the trucks themselves used up so much of the fuel they were carrying that they became inefficient as a means of transport.

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. Given the vast distances encountered in the Soviet Union, an operational depth of 300 kilometres was absurdly restrictive. To extend the range of the logistical system, the Wehrmachtt therefore split its motor pool into two segments. One set of trucks would move forward with the Panzer units and would ferry fuel and ammunition from intermediate dumps that would be resupplied by the main fleet operating from the borders of the General Government. By this expedient, it was hoped that the initial logistical range could be extended to 500 kilometres. By happy chance, this coincided exactly with the Dnieper-Dvina line. Haider, the army's chief of staff, was clearly aware of the fundamental importance of this constraint. In his diary at the end of January 1941 he noted that the success of Barbarossa depended on speed. 'Speed! No stops! Do not wait for railway! Do everything with motor vehicles.' There must be 'no hold ups', 'that aloneguarantees victory'. If serious fighting were to extend beyond this initial phase of the assault, it was clear from the outset that the Wehrmacht's problems would progressively multiply. If the Red Army escaped destruction onthe Dnieper-Dvina river line, the Wehrmacht would not be able to engage in hot pursuit, because it would first need to replenish its supply bases closer to the front line. After that, all operations would ultimately depend on the capacity of the Soviet railway system and the speed with which the Wehrmacht could build up forward supply bases to support Germany itself. Most German freight transport in the 1940s was accomplished by rail. For short distances, the horse was still essential in both town and countryside. Of course, the German motor vehicle industry might have been coaxed into producing more trucks. But the basic constraint on the use of motor vehicles in wartime Europe was not the supply of vehicles, but the chronic shortage of fuel and rubber. As we have seen, the fuel shortage by the end of 1941 was expected to be so severe that the Wehrmacht was seriously considering demotorization as a way of reducing its dependence on scarce oil. Everything therefore depended on the assumption that the Red Army would crack under the impact of the first decisive blow. It was hoped that, like the French, the Soviet forces would disintegrate, allowing them to be finished off in a series of encirclement battles. In the second phase of the operation, the German army would advance towards Moscow against disorganized opposition, precipitating the political collapse of Stalin's regime. In World War I it had taken almost four years for the combined forces of Austria and Imperial Germany to bring about the final disintegration of the Tsarist army. The assumption was clearly that the Communist regime was weaker and that the initial blow struck by the Wehrmacht would be far more dramatic. The racist assumptions built into this axiom of German planning are obvious. It was not, however, devoid of all rationality. Expressed most succinctly in terms of per capita GDP, there was a major developmental difference between Germany and the Soviet Union. According to the best modern estimates, German per capita GDP was two and a half times that in the Soviet Union in 1940. On this basis there was good reason to think that the huge quantitative advantage apparently enjoyed by the Red Army would turn out to be illusory. The far greater organizational capacity of theWehrmacht, the superior quality of its equipment and the greater training of its soldiers would carry the day. After all, this was the army tha thad defeated the combined forces of France, the British Expeditionary Force, Belgium and the Netherlands in six weeks. By launching its army against the Soviet Union, rather than prosecuting a direct air and sea assault on Britain and its backers in the United States, the Third Reich was not making an irrational strategic choice. It was deploying its best weapon against what still appeared to be the 'weakest link in the chain'.Not that the Germans were oblivious to the modernization of the Soviet Union since World War I. As the Wehrmacht's own economic staff well knew, Stalin's Five Year Plans had substantially transformed the geography of the Soviet economy. According to credible Western estimates we now believe that Stalin's regime increased total industrial output by 2.6 times between 1928 and 1940, and armaments outputgrew by vastly more. In their haste to industrialize, the Soviet planners had placed a large amount of investment in Western economic zones vulnerable to the German onslaught. But as the planners in Berlin fully understood, the First Five Year Plan of 1928-32 had established a new Soviet industrial base, safely to the east of the Urals, which had the capacity to sustain a self-sufficient population of at least 40 million people. Even if an invader managed to overrun a large part of the western Soviet Union, war production could continue at new industrial centres, such as the gigantic engineering works at Sverdlovsk. Overall,Soviet industrial capacity was clearly very substantial. In 1939 the German steel association put the Soviet Union well ahead of Great Britain, in third place behind the United States and Germany, with an annualoutput of 18 million tons of steel, compared to Germany's 23.3 million tons. And on paper at least the Red Army was a formidable force.Throughout the spring of 1941 Franz Haider recorded Hitler's ruminations about the Soviets' immense stocks of tanks and aircraft. Hitler knew that the Soviets had modern aircraft and 'mammoth' tanks with normous guns. But he comforted himself with the fact that most of the Red Army's equipment was obsolete. On the assumption that the Wehrmacht would be able to achieve a massed concentration at strategicpoints he was happy to predict that the Soviets would 'crumple under the massive impact of our tanks and planes'. No one, however, could deny the sheer vastness of the Soviet Union, and this alone made Barbarossa into a daunting proposition. Beneath the thick layer of hubris and optimism that surrounded the planning forBarbarossa, there were those in Berlin who expressed severe misgivings from the start. The doubts, interestingly, were of two kinds. There were at least some officers who questioned the feasibility of the operation itself. Significantly these included Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commander of Army Group Centre, to whom fell the awesome task of crushing the main body of the Red Army en route to Moscow. By the end of January 1941, Bock was so concerned about the scale of the mission assigned to his army group that he forced Haider, the chief of army staff, to concede that there was a distinct possibility that the Red Army might escape beyond the Dnieper-Dvina line. What wouldhappen in this eventuality was the key question. One of the earliest wargames done to test the Barbarossa plan concluded that unless both the destruction of the Red Army and the capture of Moscow could be accomplished within a matter of months, Germany would face a 'long-drawn-out war, beyond the capacity of the German armed forces towage'.[/I]

Again: who is saying that Germany could not win an attrition warfare with Russia? Not Jenisch, but the Germans themselfs.

a whoilsale transefer of about 4million men, and around 2500 a/c and 3 full flak divisions (from memeory).

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It would not be 2500 planes (of which only a part where fighters) that would stop the USAAF and the RAF. As for the 4 million men, the Allies had conditions to overcome them.

history rewritten........

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Yeah, but there are many things that defy common sense in what you wrote. First, there's the "Aryan" German Army, which only because it entered in the defensive, has a qualitative improvement beyond imagination of us Untermenschens. Second, the idea that Germany would be able to invade the Soviet Union, kill millions of it's population, inflict severe material damage in the country, and then force the Soviets to sign a peace with Germany that would include they would supply it with a huge quantity of oil (Adios Red Army, Red Air Force and much of the Soviet economy). To go further in show how this is a castle of cards: even if the Soviet government was treated, while still having power they could have sabotated the Caucasus oil industry if they felt it was a blackmail from a desesperated Germany (the system was actually producing much less than normally, hence the Soviets received substantial Lend-Lease petroleum products: View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IGbjPqFFvA

It would have made no substantial difference to the air war in the West and I see no reason why the allies would have reduced or abandoned the bombing campaign of 1942onwards.
The RAF offensive was starting to fulfill the objectives set by Harris.I don't mean in terms of shattering German infrastructure or even the effects on production.The night bombing attacks had a serious effect on civilian morale as evidenced in innumerable SD reports (Sicherheitsdienst). Details of the Hamburg attack spread quickly through Germany and attacks in the South led to the population being describes as "restive,angry and bitter." The reports also note that people no longer exchanged the nazi salute,reviled the party as the author of their trouble,rarely wore party badges and regarded Goering as a liar. Women of "the lower classes" were reported as saying that even 1918 wasn't as bad as this.
The nazis,it is often forgotten,were a populist party. These continuing reports about severe problems with civilian morale were read by the leadership and informed its decisions.
Reports on popular dissatisfaction and low morale made the party nervous of squeezing the population as hard as the WWI government had done and running the risk of a popular explosion like that of October/November 1918. Total mobilisation of the Reich's human and economic resources did not occur until far too late,the war was already lost. That's one for Harris.
The leadership's enthusiasm for V weapons in order to retaliate is a function of popular dissatisfaction too. This seriously skewed late war production. The USSBS estimates that the resouces invested in the V-1 and V-2 programs from 1944 until the end of the war was equivalent to 24,000 fighter aircraft. The regime was reacting to popular pressures and political factors bought about by the bombing and not military realities.

The military,industrial and economic weight of the Western Alliance would eventually have prevailed.

As a minor detail,how many resources would the Germans have required to hang on to their newly acquired territories in the East? It's a big place! I don't see any way that a system like that employed by the British in India would have worked.

Cheers

Steve

stona said:

II don't mean in terms of shattering German infrastructure or even the effects on production.

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Well, according to this interview with Adam Tooze, the bombing could have been much more effective than was thought:

LAURENCE REES: And the single most mistaken decision of the war?

ADAM TOOZE: Well, there's something I'd like to talk about that we haven't spoken about so far, which is the strategic bombing campaign. I actually think that the RAF had the German war economy by the throat by the summer of 1943. The series of attacks launched by the British from March 1943 through to the cataclysmic attack on Hamburg at the end of July has a devastating impact on the German war effort that's been very, very largely underestimated so far. But from the inside of the Speer Ministry there's no question that this is seen as a fundamental turning point in the war and a moment potentially of no return. They expect the German war economy to be crippled in the winter of 1943 and the reason why that doesn't happen is that the RAF turns its attention from the west of Germany to Berlin, and makes a vain attempt to destroy Berlin. However, Berlin is an inappropriate target. It's too large, it's too far away and it's at the end of the productive chain, whereas the Ruhr stands at the very beginning because it's the centre of German coal mining, without which the heavy industrial economy of Germany grinds to a halt.

And the Germans are deeply puzzled why the British make this move. And in the autumn of 1944 and into the spring of 1945 when the attacks on the Ruhr are resumed and focused on the shunting yards which are necessary to move the coal around they have an immediate and absolutely dramatic effect on the German war economy. So I think the RAF's decision to shift its focus from the west of Germany and the Ruhr in particular to Berlin does count as a pretty major strategic miscalculation.

LAURENCE REES: And it also follows from that that you think the strategic bombing campaign was extremely effective?

ADAM TOOZE: Yes. There's no question that it had an absolutely devastating impact on the functioning of the German war economy from as early as the spring of 1943. The Germans just about begin to believe by the beginning of 1943 that despite the setbacks on the Eastern Front the Russians are a long way away, and they actually began to get a real grip of their armaments production and are beginning to shuffle resources around in a quite strategic, and deliberately calculated way, and had put the organisation in place to do that. That's the substance behind the Speer 'miracle'. What then happens is that steel output becomes completely unpredictable because of the impact of the British attacks and begins to fall, and immediately you see a plateauing off of armaments production. Instead of continuing to rise it grinds to a halt at a moment when everybody else's is ramping up and the American war economy in particular is hitting top gear. And this is a complete disaster for the German war effort and produces a major political crisis. Speer begins to lose his grip on power and has, in the end, to solve this problem with his ill fated alliance with Himmler which emerges in the autumn of 1943 and unlocks a whole new supply of slave labour for the German war economy.

Most mistaken decision of WW2 > Professor Adam Tooze > WW2History.com


As for the mobilization of the German economy, Stona, it's a myth that it was not mobilized at the start of the war.

In Mein Kampf Hitler writes about, obsesses about, Lebensraum in eastern Europe.
He wrote of the Germanic British, cousins of the Germans.
Clearly, the goal was not the West but the East.

So instead of the what if being peace with the East, what about peace with the West?
Hitler's pre-Poland gambles paid off. But his luck ran out with Poland when the West declared war.
But what if the West had not declared war and reached an accommodation, sacrificing Poland?