5 Reasons Nazi Germany Could Never Have Won World War II

In popular history, the narrative of the Second World War in Europe is pretty well defined at this point.

After the seizing power in Germany, Hitler annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, with Britain and France promising to come to Poland's aid should the Nazi's attempt to extend their conquest for lebensraum further east.

Then British PM Neville Chamberlain received assurances that Hitler was content with his territory as it stood, which obviously turned out to be insincere. (The Nazi's were liars, who knew?)

The Soviet Union then shocked everyone in 1939 by signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, guaranteeing peace between the two countries and carving up Poland between them, leading to British and French intervention and starting the Second World War in the process.

Eventually though, Hitler would betray his nonaggression agreement, launching Operation Barbarossa and invading the Soviet Union (Again, if you hadn't been following along: Nazis = bad guys) with ultimately disastrous results.

And this is generally where the alternate history timelines tend to diverge from real life. It's not uncommon for people, generally on the internet, to armchair quarterback one of the largest war machines in human history and explain how, with some changes, the Nazis could have emerged victorious.

But the truth is, that just isn't the case. Though the war certainly could've been prolonged had different decisions been made, with the sides as they were, there was no way that fascism would have eventually prevailed.

Though now more-commonly discussed as something that wars are fought over, it isn't widely known outside historians just how big a role the need for oil played WW2.

In order to facilitate the rapid expansion of the Nazi empire across Europe, Hitler and co would need an almost ungodly amount of oil. Without a sufficient supply, the armoured divisions that had rolled both east and westward with such unprecedented success would be ground to an almost immediate halt, with Germany just not having the natural resources to remedy this.

With that in mind, Hitler knew he needed to source a supply of liquid gold right from the early stages of the war. Even while the German-Soviet pseudo-truce was ongoing and the two powers had agreed to carve up Poland between them in the 1939 'friendship' pact, Hitler was well aware of the acute oil shortages his regime faced, and how unlikely it was that a war on the scale of WW2 could be maintained without capturing a massive source of oil.

This is the primary reason that Hitler chose to invade the Soviet Union when he did. British naval blockades had starved the axis power of one of the war's most pivotal resources, and if the invasion of the USSR had been delayed any longer, Nazi Germany simply wouldn't have had the resources required to make the necessary advances.

This is also the reason Hitler was so fixated on capturing Stalingrad. Of course, it would've been nice for him to get one over on his fellow dictator by capturing a city named after the Soviet supreme, but it was what laid beyond the city, the oil-rich Caucasus area that was the true prize in the eyes of the Führer.

By failing to succeed in having Operation Barbarossa be the quick and fatal blow against the USSR as it was intended, the war had already turned decisively against Germany and though the regime could continue to wage war following that point, the opportunity to emerge with any kind of victory was all but lost from the defeat at Stalingrad onwards.