How close did Adolf Hitler come within his plan of world domination of the Third Reich?
World domination probably would never have come, but he made some mistakes that kept him from getting a good peace settlement. Any one of these could have made the allies go for a negotiated peace settlement. 1. If he had developed long range bombers instead of medium range bombers so he could have finished off the Soviets and done more damage to Britain. 2. If he had finished off the French and British armies at Dunkirk instead of allowing them to escape. 3. If he had treated the Ukrainians like humans, THEY would have finished off Stalin’s forces themselves. When he first went into Russia, the Ukrainians greeted him as liberators, as did the Baltic countries. 4. If he hadn’t been fooled by the fake allied landing farther East he could have easily stopped the landing at Normandy and that would have ended the Anglo-American treat of invasion once and for all.
He didn’t come close at all now that history has been better examined. Besides the mistake of starting the war in Europe to begin with, the lost the war by losing the Battle of Britain in 1940. By not conquering the UK, it allowed for the US to concentrate all of their naval attention on the Pacific, and let the British pretty much take care of the Atlantic. That allowed convoys from the UK and USA to Russia after he went after the USSR. I forced Hitler to fight on a three front war: Western Front, Eastern Front, and the Mediterranean. Germany just didn’t have that kind of manpower. The Germans were not as close to developing the Atom Bomb as was once thought. They were still a good 5-6 years from a working model.
OK this is a good question for me to drum on about forever. But I’ll boil it down to two major points: Politically and Militarily Politically: No, he wasn’t close. Facism only spread to several countries clost to Germany in force, notably in Spain and Italy, whereas its top competitors, democracy and communism, both were spread worldwide, controlling the two superpowers. Not to mention, you can never beat an idea. Militarily: Yes, he was dangerously close. His chief mistake was being a jerk in liberated Soviet states. Considering the Red Terror and the Purges that Stalin committed, they were glad to be liberated from Stalin. They would have helped the Germans readily in Byelorussia or Ukraine, until Germany killed whole villages and razed entire cities to the ground (notably Warsaw). He made a major mistake in not supporting Rommel in North Africa, who held a key to the back door of the Soviet Union, through Iraq and Iran. He left the wounded British Empire alive, and instigated a two-
He could have controlled all of Western Europe had he not invaded Russia. Hitler got cocky, he thought Russia would fall quickly. He believed that Communism had sucked the soul out of Russia. The Russian people did not fight Hitler in the name of Communism. They fought him to protect their homeland. Yes, they lost millions of people. But they pushed his army all the way back to Berlin.
