Why Was Germany Defeated? Part 2/2
[Der Weg 1951-08] An original translation of "Warum wurde Deutschland besiegt?"
Title: Why Was Germany Defeated? Part 2/2 [de: Warum wurde Deutschland besiegt?]
Author: Francois Aurion
“Der Weg” Issue: Year 05, Issue 08 (August 1951)
Page(s): 527-532
Dan Rouse’s Note(s):
Der Weg - El Sendero is a German and Spanish language magazine published by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos-Aires, Argentina by Germans with connections to the defeated Third Reich.
Der Weg ran monthly issues from 1947 to 1957, with official sanction from Juan Perón’s Government until his overthrow in September 1955.
In this article, Francois Aurion analyzes National Socialist Germany's initial strategic successes—such as cunning alliances and dismantling the Treaty of Versailles—before critiquing how overconfidence and psychological miscalculations united a diverse coalition of enemies against them. He contrasts Germany's rigidity with the Soviet Union's pragmatic flexibility, which effectively neutralized opposition and maintained alliances. Aurion then examines Germany's self-inflicted wounds, including propaganda vulnerabilities from labor deportations and mismanaged occupation policies, which alienated potential allies and obscured internal progress. Ultimately, he concludes that these errors, particularly on the Eastern Front where opportunities to liberate oppressed peoples were squandered, led to catastrophic consequences that sealed Germany's defeat.
Source Document(s):
[LINK] Scans of 1951 Der Weg Issues (archive.org)
Why Was Germany Defeated?
by Francois Aurion, St. Louis
Part II: Psychological Errors
Shortly before and after January 30, 1933, National Socialism demonstrated its skill and cunning. It allied with Franz von Papen against Kurt von Schleicher to secure Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg’s decision to appoint Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. On another front, it forged a pact with Alfred Hugenberg and certain industrial magnates to counter the Marxists. Once these maneuvers enabled the seizure of power, the focus shifted to retaining that power and systematically implementing the party’s program. One of the government’s initial steps was to negotiate and conclude a concordat with the Catholic Church, both to quell the unease felt on that side and to dismantle the influence of Centre Party politicians, who were exhausting every effort to heighten tensions between the Church and the fledgling regime.
The same clever, step-by-step progress marked its foreign policy and the fight against the Treaty of Versailles. Germany withdrew from the League of Nations only after proposing a general arms reduction—a proposal, incidentally, that was rejected. Yet it still managed to peacefully resolve the Saar question with France in 1935 and secure a naval agreement with Britain. With the groundwork thus laid, Nazi Germany adeptly exploited the missteps of British and French policy during the Abyssinian Crisis and the Spanish Civil War, turning Italy and Spain into bases or allies. This shrewd policy quickly bore fruit. It allowed Germany to progressively shed the shackles imposed by the Treaty of Versailles: arms restrictions, the military occupation of the Rhineland, and then, without firing a shot, the Anschluss of Austria and the unification of the Sudetenland with the Reich. Even just before the war, Germany shattered the "front of democracies" by opening negotiations with the Soviet Union, an outcome that stunned and confounded its Western adversaries.
But over time, perhaps intoxicated by its triumphs, German policy lost much of the agility that had fueled its startling successes. Propaganda from Jewish, Masonic, and other international forces played a role—and thus its enemies coalesced into a united bloc. Yet Germany, rather than striving to fracture this bloc, seemed almost intent on alarming or threatening the entire world at once: conservatives and democrats, Jews and Blacks, liberals and communists, Catholics and Protestants. The future would soon reveal how malicious and deluded most of these wildly disparate opponents were, bound together solely by hatred or fear of National Socialist Germany. Naturally, the propaganda hostile to the German government seized the arguments at hand, forming a bizarre syndicate of the most diverse figures: Ernst Thälmann and Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, alongside Pastor Martin Niemöller, flanked by Konrad Adenauer, while Emil Ludwig reached out to Fritz Thyssen. The Nazi regime believed it could crush all these foes in one blow—and it’s possible, even probable, that it might have succeeded had war not erupted. But given the escalating passions at the outbreak of hostilities, compounded by the substantial external support flowing to Germany’s enemies and the regime, it should have been clear that such a grueling struggle could not be sustained indefinitely or waged on all fronts simultaneously.
Soviet Russia avoided this blunder. In peacetime, it shrewdly slowed the pace of agricultural Sovietization and introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), defying some of Marxism’s holiest tenets. During the war, Stalin softened measures against the clergy and religious freedom to win over the churches, muted the atheist propaganda, dramatically dissolved the Comintern to ease capitalist fears, and entertained the public with "democratic" reforms—moves that let Allied propaganda crow about the Soviet system’s profound transformation. Later events proved these were mere acts of political opportunism, but at the time, they fully achieved their aim: lulling the Western Allies’ vigilance and stripping anti-communist propaganda of its sharpest weapons.
Germany, however, far from dividing its enemies’ front, gleefully handed their propaganda a vast new theme by providing the pretext of worker deportations—soon painted as the enslavement of millions subjected to the harshest living and working conditions.
It was child’s play to portray the various "combing operations" as dramatic manhunts and the lives of foreign workers in Germany as those of slaves toiling day and night under ruthless overseers.
The intent here is not to downplay the painful and cruel realities of this forced displacement, which brought tragic separations, upheavals, and family struggles, not to mention countless lesser hardships. Yet honest workers consistently acknowledged that, generally, the pace of work in Germany was less frantic than in their homelands and that, in terms of wages and conditions, they stood under the same laws as German workers—laws often more progressive than those in other European countries. This rings so true that, despite the risks posed by these massive gatherings of foreign workers in the war’s final months, despite the intensified agitation stoked by Allied propaganda and agents, and despite all these adverse conditions, no serious unrest—or even a notable incident—disrupted internal peace. In cities like Berlin, for instance, the number of foreign workers—both free laborers and prisoners of war under special administration—matched or even surpassed that of German workers.
It’s also worth noting that, had the war dragged on, most workers returning to their homelands would not merely have been compelled to work but mobilized and sent to the front. Conversely, once the Allies had the means, they subjected the German populace and prisoners to conditions at least as harsh as those endured by foreign workers in Germany—a practice that persisted for years after the war.
One might argue it wouldn’t have been a bad thing if millions of foreigners had personally witnessed and confirmed the true conditions under which the German people lived—workers and peasants alike—and seen that the Nazi Reich had forged a social climate starkly different from the one Allied propaganda so passionately and dishonestly depicted. That propaganda, by the way, didn’t hesitate to contradict itself, portraying the German people as tyrannized by "those dreadful Nazis," only to later hold them collectively accountable for "crimes" that, by logic and law, should have fallen solely on their oppressors.
Yet while the wartime image of Germany broadly exposed the mendacity of certain propaganda, the conduct of German authorities in occupied territories scarcely allowed a fair view of the significant social advances made within the Reich. One must conclude that, like National Socialism itself, these advances weren’t meant for export. Not only did German authorities do nothing to encourage foreign governments to extend these benefits to their workers, but through clumsiness and neglect, they even let measures like wage freezes be pinned on them—a glaring example among many. Often, social reactionaries hid behind supposed German directives to deny their workers inevitable improvements, safeguarding capitalist interests while inciting laborers against the occupiers. Thus, the occupation became a scapegoat for capitalist selfishness, bearing the brunt of grossly unjust and predictably unpopular measures. They struck two birds with one stone: patriotic sentiments were appeased, and the money chest’s interests preserved—all at the expense and mockery of a blind, or even complicit, occupation!
In another arena, German policy committed psychological errors that unsettled its allies and alienated people in lands occupied by Reich troops. Many frictions with Italians, Romanians, and Hungarians could have been avoided had Reich offices adopted less offensive and harassing methods. But the gravest mistakes in this regard were made in France and, above all, Russia.
We’ve seen that in France, a sensible and relatively lenient peace treaty was never seriously considered, though it was undoubtedly the obvious solution in the months following the armistice. Instead, the German government took or permitted measures bound to prejudice a final settlement. Designating a forbidden zone within the occupied area and placing certain French departments under Belgium’s military administration seemed a substantial amputation of French territory. Meanwhile, occupation authorities tolerated absurd propaganda in some Belgian circles advocating a restored Burgundian state—an irony, given the Reich’s complaints of being thrust back to the conditions of the Peace of Münster and Osnabrück and the era of Louis XIV, yet allowing issues dormant since Louis XI to resurface. Considering that Belgium’s military administration was entrusted to a dubious figure whose opposition to the Nazi regime surfaced in the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt, it’s hard not to suspect this tolerance of "Greater Burgundy" tendencies was deliberate, serving all too well to stoke Franco-Belgian tensions and undermine any Berlin-led vision of European unity.
With Alsace and Lorraine, however, it wasn’t a matter of tolerating non-German elements but a clear German initiative. Despite the armistice saying nothing of it, the old territory of Alsace-Lorraine was promptly reannexed to the Reich. The issue demanded at least a thorough inquiry, for experience since 1871 had shown that prior solutions were far from satisfactory, leaving a festering wound in both nations’ sides—unacknowledged by Lorrainers or even Alsatians. This question should have been resolved organically and durably within a Europe built on fresh foundations. German policy had a chance here to prove its readiness for bold, innovative solutions. Instead, it reapplied the stale theory of retaliation, from which nothing good could come for anyone—a stance blatantly at odds with all prior declarations. Rather than forging something new, it retraced old steps, only worsening matters. The same inconsistency plagued the expulsion of Lorrainers. The Montoire meeting occurred on October 24, 1940, and there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of the collaboration offer extended to France, aligning as it did with the Reich’s clear interests. Marshal Pétain responded with a fundamentally clear acceptance. A possibility existed, and every effort should have been made not to burden this delicate diplomatic move. Yet in the weeks—even days—following Montoire, mass expulsions of Lorrainers resumed. Victims were often roused at midnight, given mere hours to prepare, and permitted only hand luggage—all in the depths of a cold season. Imagine the impact on France’s interior, seeing these destitute families arrive, stripped of everything, their feelings toward collaboration shaped by such grim beginnings.
Yet these missteps pale beside the policy pursued on the Eastern Front, which proved militarily devastating. The starting point was promising: two worldviews—National Socialism and Bolshevism—clashed. Germany had a golden opportunity to cast itself as the liberator of peoples oppressed by Bolshevism, promising peasants an end to land collectivization and granting them ownership of Russian soil long denied them.
Likewise, Germany could have turned the Baltic states’ plight to its advantage. These nations enjoyed independence for twenty years until 1940, when—amid the chaos of the Western front’s collapse—they were brutally annexed by the Soviet Union. They knew mass arrests, executions, deportations, resettlements, and the collectivization of industry and agriculture, enforced with draconian measures. In these Baltic lands, where German influence held centuries-old prestige, rekindling memories of a recent past should have been easy. Indeed, among the first occupied by the Wehrmacht, they greeted German troops as friends. But these genuine outbursts of joy soon turned to bitter disillusionment. The occupation didn’t restore their 1918–1940 independence but imposed an administration barely distinct from that endured under Soviet rule for two decades.
In Ukraine, where memories of revolts against Moscow lingered, peasants warmly welcomed the German army. With their earthy, practical sense, they believed it would lift Bolshevism’s barriers to peasant ownership and ease, if not end, the despised kolkhoz system. But Ukrainians saw no such change. Occupied Russian territory was carved into vast administrative units, governed with colonial methods; kolkhozes persisted, with Bolshevik commissars merely replaced by German ones. The sole German innovation was to ignite an ethnic struggle where an ideological one was needed. It’s hard to imagine a more ill-suited, clumsy, or unjust endeavor. Even ethnically, distinctions should have been drawn between Baltic peoples, Great Russians, and Ukrainians on one hand, and purely Asian groups unassimilable to European civilization on the other. Yet German policy ignored such nuances, lumping all—good, tolerable, and bad—into the crude label "Eastern subhumans," a term even appearing in official directives.
Still, vast possibilities remained. We’ve noted those existing before June 22, 1941, but the war birthed others. Organizing a national Russian army from millions of prisoners of war was no fantasy—cadres and volunteers were ready.
In A. Holmston’s "Auf magischen Wegen," one reads how Germany squandered the aid of 30,000 Ukrainian volunteers through the harassment and ill will of certain German offices—delusion or sabotage, the future may judge—but the result struck Germany as a catastrophe.