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Normandy, the Soviets launched one of the most successful blitzkrieg operations of the war in Belorussia, a triumph that effectively ended any lingering hopes Hitler might have retained about stalemating the war. Despite the brave talk of miracle weapons and a split in the enemy coalition, the last nine months of the war were more about Hitler’s fanatic determination to prevent another November 1918 than any realistic chance to extricate Germany from its fate. The result, however, was not only a radicalization of the Volksgemeinschaft, as Nazi violence and terror now turned inward, but also the large-scale destruction of German cities and infrastructure as well as the death of millions of people. True to his ideology, Hitler refused to abandon the Darwinistic struggle that he held to be the key to history, nor did he waver racially, insisting in his last testament that the Nazi race laws be upheld, and urging the German people to continue the struggle against the Jewish conspiracy.
    From the outset, the German invasion of the Soviet Union had been an enormous gamble that depended for success primarily on the Soviets reacting to the shock of initial defeat as the French had, by ceasing resistance. Unlike the blitzkrieg campaign against France, however, Barbarossa had no clear Schwerpunkt, nor was it likely that the bulk of the Red Army could be trapped and destroyed in the first weeks of the conflict. Hitler also grossly underestimated the political and economic strength and resilience of the Stalinist system as well as the resources that would be necessary to win in the Soviet Union. Although Richard Overy has made a very cogent argument that Allied success in World War IIdepended on the cumulative impact of narrow triumphs in a number of key areas, the fact remains that the Germans always had only a very slight chance of triumphing in any of these sectors. Their early success owed as much to their enemies’ weaknesses as to their own strengths, a fact that has tended to obscure the hard reality facing them. In terms of population, available military manpower, and access to key raw materials, Nazi Germany had no clear advantage over Britain and France, let alone when facing a possible coalition of enemies including the United States and the Soviet Union. Hitler was, in fact, a leader with great ambitions to overturn and remake the European political, economic, and social system but whose vehicle of choice was a medium-size European power with few allies of any consequence. This fundamental weakness was revealed as early as 1940. The best chance for Germany to have won the war, if such a possibility existed, was likely a pursuit of the Mediterranean strategy urged on him by naval leaders and some at the OKW. This, however, would have forced Hitler into dependence on weak and unreliable allies (as he well knew), dispersed German strength, and contradicted his own ideology, which stressed the importance of Lebensraum in the east.
    The “right” war, for Hitler, was always the one against the Soviet Union, while all the other conflicts were secondary in importance. He meant finally to solve the “German question,” the inability or unwillingness of the British and French to accommodate the Reich in the European balance of power, by establishing German hegemony over Europe, then using a German-dominated Europe to meet the rising threat from the United States. Further, resolving the German question raised the possibility of settling the Jewish question. Nazism had always been fueled by a complex mixture of resentment, fear, and idealism: resentment at those who had supposedly undermined Germany in World War I; fear of the alleged Jewish-Bolshevik threat to destroy the German people; and a utopian vision of a harmonious racial community that would redeem past injustices and suffering. For Hitler, the purpose of a state was to promote and guarantee the existence of the Volksgemeinschaft. To do so required war