Did Nazi Germany’s Racial Policies Cost Them the War?

What if the Nazis had not spent time, manpower and resources in efforts to rid Germany of ‘non-Aryans’?

What if they had not suffered under the delusion of their racial superiority, which gave them overconfidence concerning their potential for conquering Russia on the Eastern Front, even while engaging with the Western Allies?

If not bogged down by racial politics, could Germany have won the war?

A series of films exploring the experiences of children during the Holocaust.

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The economic consequences of racism in Germany

The effort to wipe out the Jews hindered the German war effort by diverting critical resources at crucial times. Critical troop and military supply trains were delayed to allow the transportation of Jews to the death camps in Poland. Members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) hindered war production by killing key slave workers in critical industries.

—Stephen E. Atkins, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement

While the Wehrmacht certainly benefited from slave labour and wealth and possessions stolen from Jews and other victims of the Holocaust, rounding up millions of people to ship to labour, prisoner and extermination camps — which also had to be constructed, manned and maintained — was a great expense.

It could also be argued that at least some of the labour required for these projects formed a grisly component of the Nazi’s public works programme originally initiated by Hjalmar Schacht. In this way it possibly stimulated some sectors of the German economy, though it cannot realistically be seen as ultimately profitable.

Furthermore, ruining successful Jewish businesses through the process of Aryanisation, along with driving out, impoverishing and killing over 500,000 Jewish consumers and producers — what to speak of the loss of intellectual capital — cannot be seen as a shrewd economic move.

Neither was racially influenced autarky, based on an ideal of German self-sufficiency, economically beneficial for a country that was still importing 33% of its raw materials by 1939.

An international women’s meeting in October 1941. Reichsfrauenführerin Gertrud Scholtz-Klink is second from left.

Racism, like the Nazi policy on women, which severely limit half the German population’s options for work and education, was simply not economically sound nor the most efficient use of resources. According to Cornell University historian Enzo Traveso, the extermination of Jews had no socio-economic or political purposes outside of proving Aryan superiority.

The War with Russia was based on racism

Despite inbuilt and ideologically fuelled economic barriers, Germany’s economy grew rapidly under Hjalmar Schacht’s policies as Minister of Economics. Moreover, during the war Germany was able to plunder raw materials from occupied countries, notably iron ore from France and Poland.

Early victories boosted Hitler’s racial pipe dream

Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, is seen by many as a foolhardy and overconfident move by Hitler, who thought the racially superior German Forces would trounce the Soviet Union in a few weeks. This kind of delusional racist thinking would result in unrealistic ambitions and the over-extension of German forces on all fronts.

However, these delusions were supported by early Nazi successes on the Eastern Front against unprepared Soviet forces.

Of all the air raids carried out during World War Two, none are as famous as the attack by Lancaster Bombers against the dams of Germany’s industrial heartland. Commemorated in literature and film throughout the decades, the mission – which was codenamed Operation ‘Chastise’ – has come to epitomise British ingenuity and courage throughout the war.

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Lebensraum and anti-Slavism

According to the tenants of Nazi racial ideology, Russia was populated by sub-humans and controlled by Jewish communists. It was Nazi policy to kill or enslave the majority of the Slavic people — mainly Polish, Ukrainian and Russian — in order to gain lebensraum, or ‘living space’ for the Aryan race and agricultural land to feed Germany.

Nazism held that Aryan superiority gave Germans the right to kill, deport and enslave inferior races in order to take their land and prohibit race mixing.

The idea of lebensraum was undeniably racist, but racism wasn’t Hitler’s only motivation for the war with Russia. Hitler wanted more agriculturally productive land to facilitate autarky — full economic independence.

Russian soldiers.

While Soviet losses were catastrophic, their forces greatly outnumbered Germany’s. As the war went on, the Soviet Union organised and outproduced the Germans in armaments, ultimately defeating them at Stalingrad in February 1943 and eventually capturing Berlin in May 1945.

If the Nazis didn’t believe they had the absolute right to displace ‘inferior’ Slavs, would they have concentrated so much of their efforts on invading the Soviet Union and avoided, or at least postponed their defeat?