8. THE NAZIS WERE THE UNDERDOGS
Fundamentally, the European Axis – and Japan – lost because they were much weaker than the Allied coalition. The Second World War was fought between the haves and have-nots, between established powers and ‘revisionist’ ones. To the Axis leaders, world resources – both overseas and in territories within Eurasia – had been divided up unfairly and without their participation, in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and before. To quote the Axis Tripartite Pact of September 1940, it is “a prerequisite of a lasting peace that each nation of the world receive the space to which it is entitled”. They lacked these resources in 1939, and Germany faced the additional problem that the treaty had restricted its armed forces until the mid-1930s.
There is no space to discuss Italy or the smaller Axis satellites; they too had a sense of entitlement, but could never have won without Germany. Hitler believed he could deal with the established powers by knocking them out one by one, and at the same time consolidate a blockade-proof resource base deep in Eurasia. Related to this was the Prussian-German military tradition, which counted on better-led armed forces winning quick victories in ‘wars of movement’ rather than protracted wars of attrition. This failed: by late 1941 Hitler faced a situation where he could not invade Britain nor control more than the deep borderlands of the USSR. As Hitler put it in his ‘Testament’, written in a besieged Berlin in the war’s endgame: “The tragedy of the Germans is that we never have enough time.” Historically the Axis powers were late-comers, trying to catch up from a position of weakness. Because they were weak, they failed.