Original subtitles

Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

What happens when you put a delusional lance corporal

in charge of a massive military machine?

When you talk about Hitler's strategic errors during World War II,

where does one begin?

Early victories over woefully underprepared adversaries, however,

gave Hitler a massive superiority complex.

The problem with this arrogance, though, is that Hitler started to feel

like he truly was, you know,

this supreme general of the Third Reich.

But when the mistakes started, they came thick and fast.

They would surround them,

they would destroy them.

Everything Hitler touched militarily after 1940, you know, turned to dust.

And in the end, hubris and self-interest

led to catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Allies.

The command and control in Normandy was a mess.

And that was a massive failure on their part.

Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!

Hitler's plans were big, yet relatively straightforward:

Expand his borders by reclaiming lands

stripped from Germany after defeat in World War I,

obliterate the population of Russia and Poland,

and open up Lebensraum in the east,

new lands for the Aryan race

to settle and prosper for the next thousand years,

and along the way, settle some old scores.

Hitler started his reimagining of Germany with typical bombast.

Early on, he's a bit of a hero, you know,

he's the one who argues for the remilitarization

of the Rhineland in 1936.

And his generals say, this is not prudent, you know,

the French are too strong.

If we go in there, they're gonna fling us out.

It'll be humiliating. We'll suffer an early defeat.

Hitler thinks that he can bluff the French into going along.

He does.

He's counseled not to undertake the Anschluss of Austria in 1938.

He does, he gets away with it.

He's counseled not to threaten Czechoslovakia

against Allied resistance.

He does and gets away with it.

This gives Hitler a feeling of almost messianic superiority.

But was Hitler and Germany equipped with a bulletproof strategy

to withstand the war of attrition and deliver ultimate victory?

The answer came the day Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939.

As with Austria and Czechoslovakia, military confrontation was swift,

the brutal German war machine quickly and easily

overwhelming Polish forces

in its latest demonstrating of blitzkrieg, or lightning war.

Aircraft, tanks, shock infantry, and punishing mobile artillery

combined to bring Poland to its knees in a matter of weeks.

But the longer-term consequences of Hitler's folly

would be played out over the next few years.

I mean, the whole idea of war for Nazi Germany is a bad choice,

and it's particularly a bad idea, Poland, because it's going to bring them

into conflict with France and Britain.

And it's not just France and Britain. It's France and Britain and their empires.

You're already at that point fighting a very global war.

And what is the pathway to success there?

What is the long-term planning?

Did you really think how we're gonna end this war?

Hitler was a smash-and-grab merchant

who was banking on a quick war.

And for a while, it seemed he might just get one.

Hitler was a great opportunist and somebody that would very much

want to ride the wave of success.

He was a man in a hurry.

And everything about the way that he led in the Nazi regime

gives that sense of not wanting to see how events pan out.

Not wanting to develop a strong military machine.

Not wanting to embrace total war.

Wanting to get things done very, very quickly.

Hitler was perhaps right to go hard and go early

in the sense that many were taken by surprise at his naked aggression.

And it took some time for the world to figure out

how serious this Hitler guy was.

But if it was a mistake to attack Poland,

then greater mistakes were to follow, and quickly.

When you talk about Hitler's strategic errors during World War II,

where does one begin?

Maybe one has to proceed chronologically

in order to capture the full richness of Hitler's strategic bungling.

Start with the, uh, decision spring of 1940 to invade Norway

to convey the iron ore deposits of Sweden

more easily to German factories.

Well, it works.

He beats the British and French, takes the Norwegian Coast.

But why?

I mean, he basically loses half of his destroyer fleet.

He loses a light cruiser and a heavy cruiser,

loses a lot of aircraft.

And so he's not in a position to, uh, you know, use his navy

from these Norwegian ports that he took in part to harass

British shipping and to cut off supplies to Great Britain.

Holland, Belgium, and the big one, France,

were next on Hitler's hit list.

And the French, like everyone else, would succumb surprisingly fast.

Ostensibly, a brilliant strategic victory for Hitler,

yet in the bigger picture, the relative ease of victory

merely served to further inflate the German sense of overconfidence,

and to extend their already heavily stretched resources and supply lines.

It did make him even more arrogant in terms of thinking,

you know, we are truly an invincible power.

And surely, you know, that's the end.

We won't have to continue in Europe,

because who else would dare oppose us?

The problem with this arrogance, though, is that Hitler started to feel like

he truly was, you know, this supreme general of the Third Reich.

Despite the fact that he'd only had combat experience as a corporal,

he was suddenly in control of the army, and the navy, and the air force,

and was trying to apply tactics and technology

that really he didn't understand.

He often didn't listen to the people that were telling him

about all of these strategies and technology,

because he was just interested in the end result.

In the euphoria of their quick defeat of France,

Hitler and his generals made one of their greatest

strategic blunders of the war.

In May 1940, Nazi tanks were heading steadily

towards the French Coast.

It had taken less than two weeks for the German army

to steamroll across Europe and into France,

forcing the French and Allied troops into desperate retreat.

The Allied troops were surrounded and about to be trapped

in a coastal pocket at Dunkirk.

The question was,

how could nearly 400,000 British and French troops

be safely evacuated through a moderate-sized port

whose docks were being destroyed by bombs and shells,

and which would shortly be overrun by German troops?

It was shaping up to be a massacre.

Then, inexplicably, just as they were on the verge

of routing the British and French armies for good,

Hitler and the High Command hit the pause button.

Dunkirk is another one of Hitler's missteps.

He's got German Panzers in 1940 18 miles from Dunkirk,

the only really serviceable port available

to much of the British army on the Western Front.

And he halts the Panzers and he gives the "honor"

of destroying the British Army in France to Goering's Luftwaffe,

which is not equipped to carry out this kind of mission.

And by the time Hitler allows the Panzers to resume their advance,

the British, who were further away from Dunkirk

than the German Panzers were when Hitler gave the halt order,

have built a defensive perimeter around the port

and are able to hold it long enough to get over 300,000 troops

away to the United Kingdom.

This was a catastrophic mistake by Hitler.

One theory says he was actually giving Britain a chance to surrender.

He was showing them mercy but expected something in return,

or maybe Hitler, the ultimate high-rolling gambler,

was worried that with so much success so quickly,

he had pushed his luck, and wanted to conserve his energies

for the coming battle in the east.

Whatever the reason, while the Germans dithered,

the British seized their chance to escape.

Hitler had let slip his biggest opportunity to crush the British spirit.

This was an utterly fateful decision for Hitler because if he had destroyed

what remained of the British army at Dunkirk

and destroyed the 100,000 or so French troops that he...

They took away at Dunkirk, he would have completely lamed

the British war effort going forward.

What that would have done for British and French morale

can only be imagined.

It would have plummeted.

What would have happened therefore to Winston Churchill?

Probably he would have been ousted from power.

And the what ifs, therefore, are absolutely fascinating.

So this British escape at Dunkirk was absolutely momentous

because it meant that the British could stay in the war

and fight alone until the Americans intervened.

In fact, as the war went on,

the idea of the Dunkirk spirit was often used as a rally cry

to inspire the nation to fight on until victory.

The near-disaster for the Allies turned out to be a strategic catastrophe

for Germany that echoed long after the war was lost.

But even as he allowed the British army

to slip through his fingers, it seems Hitler just did not get it.

He was still hoping the British would simply give up.

To make very clear to Churchill that Hitler meant business,

barges and equipment began gathering ominously at the French Coast

in preparation for a planned invasion of Britain,

codenamed "Operation Sea Lion".

Before they disembarked,

Hitler ordered Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe

to destroy Britain's coastal defenses.

Goering had boasted that his Luftwaffe could destroy British Fighter Command

in four days, thus clearing the way for the invasion.

When Britain refused to capitulate,

encouraged by Goering's bloated confidence,

the Luftwaffe was given orders to attack

and quickly overwhelmed the RAF as promised.

Just to keep up, they had to shoot down

three German fighters for every one of theirs they lost.

Yet as they cultivated their famous swashbuckling hero image,

the British, Polish, Canadian, Czech, Aussie,

and Kiwi pilots managed to do just that,

and they kept Britain in the race.

This was another chance to knock Britain out of the war early,

and they were about to blow it.

For a start, Goering stupidly pitted his big, long-range

Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter bombers

against the more nimble Spitfires and Hurricanes.

The matchup was a disaster.

The Bf 110 Zerstorer often gets this sort of bad rep

because of the fact that it got absolutely massacred in the Battle of Britain.

It was a very powerful twin-engined, you know, sort of heavy fighter,

and it could be very effective.

But as was often the case with the Luftwaffe, you know,

the Bf 110 was forced into a role it shouldn't have really been in,

it shouldn't have been a bomber escort.

And indeed, it was so slow that it was often joked that really,

the escort needed an escort.

Meanwhile, squabbling and one-upmanship

by the air commanders was eating away at Germany's success.

Despite all of this, the Luftwaffe came close

to overwhelming the RAF several times,

not least by targeting and destroying radar installations at key airfields.

The tactic was working

and they had the Royal Air Force on the ropes,

but Goering failed to stick to a winning strategy.

What the Germans don't have,

and we see this particularly early in the war,

is the tenacity and the patience to see the development

of a campaign through to its fruition.

Thus, although it was quite militarily sound to target the RAF,

to target its anti-aircraft defenses and its radar,

just when they were on the cusp of succeeding in that aim,

they feel as though time has overtaken them

and they switch their targets more on to the bombing of urban centers

to move on to that psychological part of the campaign

that they hope would speed victory,

and that was a massive failure on their part.

They took their eye off the prize and had moved to an area

that was going to be far less militarily successful.

The switching of focus of Luftwaffe attacks

from RAF airfields, radar stations, and aircraft

to industrial targets and cities was the turning point.

Germany would lose the battle,

and with it any chance of launching its invasion.

The myth of German invincibility had been shattered.

Hitler is left in a war, a long-term war

that he cannot solve against Great Britain.

Battle of Britain has failed,

there's not gonna be an Operation Sea Lion.

And he believes that the one reason that Churchill is holding out in this war

is he has a hope that the final continental power, the Soviet Union,

will ultimately come in on his side.

And so Hitler thinks if I wanted to negotiate any kind of peace deal,

if I can remove the Soviet Union,

I've removed Churchill's last hope in this war.

If the strategic failings during the Battle of Britain

exposed the chinks in Germany's military armor,

the devastating failings of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union

split those cracks asunder.

Hitler's overconfidence in his political and military abilities

were about to be magnified as he attempted

the invasion of Soviet Russia.

He and his generals were about to badly underestimate

the size and scale of the Soviet Union

and the capacity of its people to endure extreme suffering.

One of the most important studies that's produced at this time

is the military geography study, which starts to look

at where are Soviet assets organized, and it identifies

that some 14 million people live beyond the Urals,

that there is a significant amount of Soviet heavy industry

that's built in Central Asia and in the very Far East,

enough to sustain high-intensity warfare,

and that this is well beyond the reach not only of the German army,

but even of German bombers.

And therefore the ability to actually end this war,

not just on the blitzkrieg timetable that they're setting,

but in the war at all, is already in question.

And that is clear from 1940.

And yet, this never manages to stop this idea that we might invade.

The Russia problem was one that would eventually see

the Germans lose the war.

But as soon as the Germans had invaded France

and utterly altered the balance of power in Europe,

there was no way that in fact the Germans could not afford

to invade the Soviet Union, because the Soviets

would have invaded Germany.

So Hitler was forced to attack perhaps more quickly

than his generals, certainly, would have liked.

And it led him into a campaign that he couldn't win.

Even before he ordered his troops into Russia,

Hitler was having to deal with unexpected problems.

In October 1940, Germany's new Axis partner, Italy,

had unilaterally decided to invade Greece,

but suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a far inferior force.

Forty-eight thousand Italians are prisoners of war.

This military blunder was to have a devastating impact

on the Nazi plans for the invasion of Soviet Russia.

Hitler had wanted to leave the Balkans, including Greece,

as a neutral space that he'd control economically.

He didn't wanna start a war there because then the British

might try to expand their presence in Greece,

imperiling the southern flank of his advance into the Soviet Union.

And then without telling him, Mussolini lunges into Greece,

forcing Hitler to delay his invasion of Soviet Union by 38 days

so that he can, like, send forces into Yugoslavia and Greece

to kind of prevent the British from establishing themselves there.

And of course, the six weeks that Hitler loses

end up being really consequential, because it means that Hitler

will not get to Moscow before the roads turn to mud

and the snows come and the reserve divisions

come out of Siberia to drive him back.

Anticipating a swift victory in Russia,

Hitler committed his troops

without long term supply and logistics consideration,

and even a lack of winter equipment.

The result was one of the biggest and costliest failed campaigns

in military history.

One of the problems with Operation Barbarossa

and understanding why the Germans aren't successful there

is that there are actually two German armies, in essence.

There's one German army that is largely built of infantry divisions.

They have all of their material being moved

largely by horses and wagons, and they're invading at one speed.

And then in parallel, there are separate, not armies but Panzer groups

that are built with everything being motorized and mechanized.

And they move at a very, very different speed.

And what that means is we start to see a gap.

There is a gap between the Panzer groups,

which are way out in front, and the infantry divisions,

which are marching at the speed that a man can march

into the Soviet Union.

As the Germans move deeper into the forbidding vastness of Russia,

they left a trail of broken-down tanks and abandoned trucks

wrecked by the insidious dust and appalling roads.

To give you an illustration of just how bad it is,

Mark IV tanks in the 7th Panzer Division

are 75 percent out of action by the end of June.

And all they've done is basically drive through, uh, Belarus.

The one conclusion you can always make

is Barbarossa is predicated on a timetable of success.

And if it's not able to meet that timetable,

then you have to question to what extent is there a contingency plan

for not achieving success in what is a very high-intensity war.

What does that mean for the German army?

What does that mean for the German war economy?

And you discover there is no plan for this.

As supply lines shrank into the distance,

logistics began to collapse, leaving the troops

short of food, ammunition, and fuel.

Although the Red Army was in retreat,

they were at least able to fall back on their supply bases,

and they had massive numerical advantage,

and were prepared to send an endless stream of troops to their deaths

in a bid to repel the invaders.

Remarkably, despite their hardships,

victory was still in sight for the Germans

when Hitler makes yet another strategic blunder.

In August, when they're, like, punching their way toward Moscow,

where they can win the war... Why?

Because the political leadership is there,

industry is there,

all the roads and railroads are centered there.

Hitler makes the decision to take a Panzer Army

out of Army Group Center and send it south to participate

in the big battle for the Kiev pocket,

where they take 600,000 Soviet prisoners.

But they lose like a whole month doing this,

to take Kiev, because he says,

"Oh, we need the... We need the food of Ukraine

and we need the oil of the Caucasus."

And his generals say, "No, no, Führer, we need to take Moscow.

We need to win this war with one punch."

And Hitler goes, "My generals, they know nothing of economics."

Then to make matters worse,

just as the Germans once again set their sights on Moscow,

the mud began to freeze.

It signaled a far bigger threat, the Russian winter.

Hitler had bet on a quick victory.

Who needed winter clothing

if Moscow was already captured?

And it was a bad one.

Temperatures dropped

to minus 40 degrees centigrade,

machine guns froze solid,

with soldiers resorting

to urinating on them to warm them up.

Soldiers froze to their guns.

Sometimes, they just froze to death

where they stood.

There's a lot of self-belief in the German army.

And the idea of not planning for contingents

is because they believe

we're not gonna be in that scenario.

We are not going to be there for the winter,

that's inconceivable to us,

to the point of we're not planning for this.

And the Germans are also deluded by the idea that

even if we are here for the winter,

well, we'll just stop the operations,

we'll bunker down,

we'll survive the winter.

There's very little understanding,

and they should have known this,

that the Soviets might have the force generation

to continue the war against them

even through the winter.

Debilitated by the bitter Russian winter,

the Nazi forces were completely unprepared

for a massive Soviet counteroffensive.

Warm and cozy

in fur-lined jackets, boots,

and white camouflage snowsuits,

the Soviet troops smashed

into the pitiful German lines

like ghosts emerging from the mists.

The German survivors,

somehow still an intact army,

were forced to retreat,

and Moscow was lost.

And of course the Germans hadn't taken St. Petersburg.

They hadn't taken Moscow.

They hadn't taken Rostov,

and they were fast running out

of the resources that they needed to continue the war.

And so Hitler therefore began to think

about a campaign in 1942

that would raise the morale of Germany,

raise the morale of the troops and gain resources,

taking the city of Stalingrad.

The city that bore the name of the Soviet leader

would be a great boost to morale.

And so Hitler rolled the dice again.

The Battle of Stalingrad

was to prove the worst defeat

in the history of the German army.

It was like the entire World War II in miniature,

shrank down and encapsulated

into one bloody battle.

Hitler decides, you know, he's gonna launch this campaign in late '42

to kind of bend south into the Caucasus, take the oilfields.

But on the way, he decides as a sort of political operation,

he's gonna take the city of Stalingrad

to kind of give Stalin a black eye.

And then when it turns out this is gonna become a battle of attrition

that doesn't really serve German interests in any way

because the Soviets can afford attrition a lot more than the Germans

because they have more men

and they have a pipeline from the United States,

replacing all the tanks, and trucks,

and everything else they lose.

Stalingrad is a trap.

They are soaking the Germans into that city.

They would surround them,

they would destroy them,

and then they would launch their own counterattacks,

and those counterattacks would gain momentum

that the Germans just can't cope with.

Trapped,

demoralized, starving,

the once-feared German 6th Army

was utterly dismantled.

Three hundred thousand German soldiers

were lost in the rubble and ruins of Stalingrad.

In 1943,

the half-dead survivors began to surrender.

Hitler's initial errors

and his latest micromanagement and meddling

had sowed the seeds for catastrophic failure.

It was a massive strategic, political,

and psychological loss.

From that moment,

Germany was just forestalling defeat,

and the Allies smelled blood.

The Allies already controlled the skies.

What was left of Goering's much-vaunted Luftwaffe

was left in smoking ruins in the east.

Now, the Allies turned their attention

to the seas.

The Battle of the Atlantic, which took place

from the beginning of the war to the end,

was quite possibly the most crucial front

of the entire war.

The Atlantic Ocean was the highway

by which the Allies were able to supply Britain

with munitions and supplies

from North America.

The only way those supplies could be stopped

was through the Kriegsmarine efforts with the U-boats.

They needed to strangle those supplies

and sink those merchantmen

before they could reach their ports in England.

The German navy

could never confront the combined Allied navies head-on.

Instead, the German Naval Command

opted for a campaign of commerce raiding.

This allowed the less powerful

but more mobile German U-boat wolf packs

to pick off targets of opportunity,

mostly merchant ships,

while eluding the larger Allied naval units.

To combat the threat of attack,

the merchant ships were grouped into convoys,

escorted by warships,

and if possible, aircraft.

You know, the Germans were successful in the early days

because there were all these ships just kind of crossing the Atlantic

and there were just targets everywhere,

you know, oilers, freight ships, this and that.

And so the... by putting them in convoys,

you create a smaller target.

Yes, you've got 60 ships assembled,

but they're all moving as quickly as they can across.

So a U-boat looking for a target

has to be on the surface looking around

when that convoy comes steaming past

or you're gonna miss it.

Before, they could just kind of loiter

and there was always gonna be a ship or two nearby.

The Germans had arguably

the best submarines of the war.

As well, they were crewed

by battle-hardened submariners,

who had learned hard lessons from World War I.

Protected by their seemingly

unbreakable Enigma codes,

the U-boat fleets were attacking at will

and enjoying rich pickings.

Would they be allowed to continue their campaign unchecked

or would they too be thwarted

by poor leadership

or forces beyond their control?

At many points during the war,

these U-boats almost succeeded in their mission.

However, more than any other front,

the Battle of the Atlantic was a war of technology.

Superior technology meant that the U-boats would have an advantage

with better weapons or better technology

in order to evade detection

or coordinate their attack efforts.

Conversely, the Allies were developing technology

of their own at an alarming rate,

better radar, better sonar, better weapons.

This was a war of technology that needed

every ounce of industrial might

and funding in order to win.

Unfortunately, because submarines

were not as glamorous as jet aircraft

or large impressive tanks,

Donitz did not get the funding he required

in order to outfit his U-boats

with sufficient numbers and sufficient technology

in order to maintain the edge against the Allies.

Once again,

by throwing money at his air force

at the expense of his navy,

Hitler had made a critical mistake.

The German U-boat fleet

was potentially the Nazis' ticket to victory

in World War II.

But Hitler overlooked

and undervalued their strategic importance.

The question is, why?

Hitler was no different from most leaders

of great powers at the time.

They wanted a big and showy surface fleet

to show the flag around the world.

They wanted cruisers, they wanted battleships,

they wanted destroyers

painted in the German colors,

flying the German flag.

Submarines were invisible. They didn't confer any prestige.

So Hitler, no less than the Kaiser before him,

you know, was averse to submarines,

and in favor of big surface ships.

But that doesn't excuse him for the fact

that he should have been thinking along these ways.

But again, Hitler was an old infantryman,

he was a corporal in the German army,

he didn't know anything about sea power,

about naval affairs.

The U-boat surfaces

and automatic wing cameras photograph the kill.

This critical lack of strategic foresight

led to Germany losing control of the oceans,

and with it

any chance of preventing an Allied invasion of Nazi

occupied Europe.

The final, bloody battle of the war

was about to begin.

It was the day that marked the beginning of the end

for the German war effort.

And it brought into sharp focus

the massive gap in intelligence

and strategic capability

which had now built up

between the two sides.

The invasion had been a long time coming.

The Germans were expecting it.

So how did the Allies manage to disguise

such a gigantic buildup

of arms, navy, aircraft, and troops

almost within sight of German-occupied France,

and then wage such an effective campaign

of disinformation and misdirection

that the Germans were duped into believing

the invasion would come through Calais?

The Germans were also fighting blind

and they had poor intelligence

on what the Allies were going to do,

and of course Allied deception techniques

were really successful.

Operation Fortitude, for example,

gave the Germans the impression

that the Allies were going to lead

with an attack by Patton

into the Pas-de-Calais area,

when, of course,

we all know that they eventually landed in Normandy.

The Allies also had the Enigma decrypts

provided by Bletchley Park

that gave them a very strong sense

of German capabilities

and German deployments.

And so the Germans were

strategically finding it very difficult

to produce what they needed

to develop a coherent defense

against the new Second Front onslaught.

That Germans swallowed everything they were fed,

hook, line, and sinker.

Apart from creating an entire fake army,

featuring their rock star General George Patton,

there were fraudulent radio transmissions,

as well as a legion of double agents

feeding the Germans all the fake news they could lap up.

But that wasn't the Germans only problem.

Ultimately,

preparation for the Allied landings in 1944

is complicated for the Germans

by the absence of a very clear strategic reaction.

The debate is always between do we hold our forces back,

allow them to land

and then use one big concentrated blow

to push them back off,

or do we oppose the landings

on the beaches forward?

And there was a real debate in the German High Command

between which one of these policies should we pursue?

And Hitler, typically unsure of which one is the best

and trying to listen to all different kinds of advice,

basically, ultimately pursues both at the same time.

The upshot was the German troops were concentrated

in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And those that were there were second-rate

and lacking heavy tanks

or motorized transport.

Meanwhile, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt

was complaining that too many troops

were wasting their time at the Italian Front,

which should have been abandoned.

He sorely needed them

where the real action was kicking off

on the French Coast.

Meanwhile, Hitler compounded

his initial mistakes and indecision

by refusing to believe initial reports

that Allied troops were storming the beaches

at Normandy.

Reinforcements, stationed nearby,

were not permitted to move

to support heavily outgunned German positions in Normandy.

Hitler ordered them kept in reserve

to repel the Allied thrust

he was convinced would come through Calais.

D-Day in 1944,

you know, Hitler, you know, holds back six Panzer divisions

and 19 reserve divisions near the Pas-de-Calais

because he doesn't believe

that the real American and British thrust

is coming through Normandy,

even when it's apparent it is.

And so when he finally releases these divisions for use

against the British and Americans, it's too late.

They've got a beachhead, they're ashore,

and they're proceeding inland.

He then compiles the error by ordering the troops in Normandy

to fight to the last,

guaranteeing that, you know, thousands of them will be destroyed

by Allied airpower and Allied, you know, ground thrusts.

Once again, the Nazi leadership

had nobody to blame but themselves.

The command and control in Normandy was a mess.

It was divided amongst various individuals,

each wanting to see their own

defensive philosophy played out.

And Hitler, of course, was not quite sure really what he wanted.

It depended upon who he was talking to and when.

And what we find, therefore,

is no true decision being made either one way or the other,

and a compromise being made

with some of the tank forces

being held quite close to the coast,

some being held in reserve as von Rundstedt wanted,

and of course a chaotic command and control system

that would eventually be exploited by the Allies.

And for Hitler,

the failure was especially ominous.

The moment boots hit the beach at Normandy,

he was fighting a war on two fronts,

with sharply diminishing chances of victory on either.

Rather than accept tactical retreat

and conserve his dwindling forces,

he would ask them to sacrifice themselves

to the last man.

On the other front in 1944,

as he's fighting in Normandy,

the Russians are launching Operation Bagration

in Belarus.

And Hitler gives the stand or die order there.

He says, you know, we can't give ground.

His generals, they wanna retreat back to the Vistula River

and they wanna take up more defensible positions

along shorter lines

to hinder the Soviet advance, and Hitler says,

"No, we have to hold every inch of ground.

He loses 20 divisions in Operation Bagration

because of this stand or die order.

Despite the writing being quite clearly on the wall,

Hitler was to have one last throw

of the dice.

Unable to break the Red Army in the east,

he would make his last desperate bid

to break the vice closing round Germany

by throwing his remaining Panzer divisions

at the Americans and British

in the forests of the Ardennes.

The Allies wanted to believe the Germans

were a spent force,

but they underestimated

the lengths to which Hitler was prepared to go

to wreak carnage and destruction.

Even as the Nazi Reich

was in its death throes,

Hitler's aim was to split the Allied force

and halt its progress

in a surprise counterattack

where they would least expect it,

a densely wooded area in the Ardennes,

Northeastern France.

Hitler says,

you know, "I'm gonna commit the last mobile reserve

of the German Wehrmacht,"

in this, like, harebrained effort to, like, thrust between

the British and American armies through the Ardennes,

drive on Antwerp in the winter snows,

take the Allies' best port from them

and make it impossible for them

to supply their advance across Europe.

Well, it's, like, crazy.

He should have been welcoming the Allies,

the Western Allies to advance into Germany

and setting that mobile reserve to hold up the Soviets

who were gonna treat the Germans a whole heck of a lot worse

than the Western Allies were.

Lasting six brutal weeks

in freezing conditions,

the Germans pushed into a section

of the Allied lines,

creating the infamous Bulge

after which the battle was named.

But eventually, the Germans became bottlenecked,

and after a brilliant relieving march

by General Patton's Third Army to Bastogne

to reinforce American resistance,

they were outnumbered and surrounded

before the Bulge could become an outright breach.

Hitler's final gamble had failed.

Battle of the Bulge

was too little, too late,

but just like Operation Barbarossa,

we see the initial surge

begin to find itself

stuck in enemy defenses

in the terrain,

problems with logistics.

And that lack of momentum

allows the Allies to understand

that they could catch the Germans

before the River Meuse,

they could counterattack using Patton's forces,

and they could do it in a calm

and considered way.

They weren't going to be panicked.

So the Battle the Bulge was really the last-gasp effort

of a desperate army.

Personal ambition and amateur planning

doomed the attack.

The plan had hinged on capturing

the Allied fuel depots.

When that didn't happen,

the German Panzers just ran out of fuel,

a perfect illustration

of the Nazi war effort.

They displayed everything

but basic common sense.

Hitler's overall strategy

was apocalyptic,

the policy of limitless violence.

His goals were extreme

and often unachievable.

They were rarely based

on objective analysis.

Ultimately, Hitler's warmongering

was really just Nazi ideology

dressed up as military strategy,

all corrupted by fixations

of racial purity,

destruction of entire races,

and unremitting brutality.

Hitler was as inflexible

as he was indecisive,

incapable of rational thought

or taking into account

the dynamically changing situations he faced.

He was blind to geography, available resources,

and reasons for enemy resistance.

The Third Reich's flawed ideological approach

led it to declare war on the Soviet Union

and the United States at the same time,

both with powerful industries,

larger populations,

and reasons to stick together

in a common cause.

I think it's clear that the Nazi personalities

are delusional.

But we also have to ask the question, why is that the case?

And I think it's partly because their ultimate goal

is self-aggrandizement.

This has seemed to be a theme through all of their decision-making.

They're always out for themselves,

they're not necessarily out for the war effort,

and they are always informing their decisions on this basis.

Hitler's geopolitical gambits

were fueled by a fatal cocktail

of hubris, fanaticism,

and paranoia.

He saw ultimate German victory

as a divine right,

although deep down,

he must have been increasingly terrified and despondent

with each catastrophic defeat.

His much-vaunted strategies, little more than a series

of wild, opportunistic gambles,

take him on the run.

For nearly a decade,

Hitler rolled the dice right across Europe,

and in the end,

the house won.