What Made the Nazis so Strong in WW2? On Thursday, the 24th February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, bringing conflict to Europe on a scale that hadn't been seen since the Second World War. At the time, most, if not all, political commentators believed victory for Russia would be swift and decisive, with the only real question being just how far Putin would go before he was satisfied. The reasoning behind those bold predictions was pretty simple. In the red corner was Russia, one of the largest and most feared military forces on the planet, led by seasoned campaigner and notorious topless horseback rider Vladimir Putin, while in the blue (and yellow) corner was Ukraine, outnumbered and outgunned in every conceivable department, and led by a former comedian - Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But as the weeks and months dragged on, it became abundantly clear that victory for Russia was nowhere near.

And that got me thinking. If one of the 
world's most powerful countries could be thwarted by a far smaller foe today... 
what the f*ck happened in World War 2? Think about it - in only a few months, 
between the end of 1939 and 1940, Nazi Germany somehow conquered half 
of Europe and a chunk of North Africa, growing so powerful that it took 
the combined efforts of Britain, the Soviet Union, the USA, and a whole host of 
other countries, to finally bring them down. When viewed alongside the 
war in Ukraine, that kind of freewheeling military domination 
just doesn't make any sense. Also, consider that Hitler's assault on world 
freedom came just 20 years after Germany suffered crushing defeat in World War 1 and 
the whole situation is downright baffling. So, how did the Nazi’s snowball so suddenly, 
and why was the rest of Europe so utterly

powerless to stop Hitler's war machine in its first few years? ... I'm glad you asked. After the First World War, Germany posed about as much threat to world peace as a damp flannel. Under the Treaty of Versailles - signed by the newly installed Weimar government as part of the German surrender - Germany reduced its military to 100,000 individuals and disbanded its air force altogether. After some vigorous political arm-twisting (and the odd persuasive nipple cripple thrown in for good measure), Germany also accepted full responsibility for the war and agreed to pay billions of dollars in reparations to the rest of Europe. That was all very good in principle, but in practice Germany was practically penniless, and so the Weimar government came up with a genius economic plan to pay off its mounting debts - it started printing money by the truckload. Yeah, you don't need an economics degree to see where

this one’s going. All that shiny new money flooded 
the German economy, triggering mass hyperinflation, that at its worst, saw 4.2 trillion German 
marks being worth a single US dollar. If you were unfortunate enough to be a German 
citizen in the early 1920s, you didn't keep your money in a wallet, you needed a wheelbarrow 
- like, literally - people actually did that. By 1924, the German economy was on the floor, 
industrial output was at an all-time low, and widespread food shortages left 
millions on the point of starvation. But just when the fields were fully fallow, help 
came from an unlikely fellow - the United States, a country with which Germany had 
been at war just 6 years before. Under what became known as the Dawes plan, Germany 
borrowed huge sums of money from American banks to fund a booming cultural and economic recovery in 
the mid to late 1920s. Running your country on

foreign credit might sound risky, but the Weimar 
government wasn't worried. They were borrowing   from America, the wealthiest, most stable country 
in the world. What could possibly go wrong? As it happens, that question had a 3-word answer - the Great Depression. That little clusterfuck hit the 
US markets in the summer of 1929,   and Germany suddenly found that those nice 
American bankers who'd been giving them so   much money over the previous 5 years 
were no longer picking up the phone. So, to sum it all up, by 1930, Germany was 
basically broke, bereft of allies, and barely   had the army to battle a beehive. And yet, fewer than 
10 years later, they would kick off World War 2,   having somehow transformed themselves into a world 
superpower with the most feared army in Europe. When you say it like that, such a transformation 
sounds literally impossible - there simply wasn't

enough time. And granted, that’s completely 
true. But it turns out the first seeds of recovery had been planted more than a decade 
before the Great Depression even began. You see, ever since the Treaty 
of Versailles, way back in 1919, Germany had been rebuilding its 
military capabilities in secret. Under the Weimar government, the 
German police force was quietly given training and equipment of 
a distinctly military nature, paramilitary groups were allowed to grow 
unhindered into what soon became small private armies, and money was discreetly funnelled into 
the research of forbidden military technologies. At the same time, state-sponsored clubs started 
popping up all over the country. Publicly they were perfectly innocent - sports teams, youth 
programs, aviation clubs, that sort of thing. But privately, they were little more 
than military training camps, in which potential leaders were picked out, and 
future Luftwaffe pilots were primed. An

entire generation of Germans was being 
readied for war behind closed doors. As per the Treaty of Versailles, this was all 
totally illegal, so these efforts had to be hidden from the international community, and that imposed 
a kind of natural limit on German rearmament. But the arrival of the Great Depression dealt 
fiscal death to the Weimar Republic, and it's safe to say that the bloke who took their place 
didn't overly concern himself with the opinions of Europe. You might have heard of him actually 
- he went by Adolf, and when he consolidated power in Germany in 1933, he was well and truly 
tired of the Treaty of Versailles - in fact, he planned to tear the document into neat little 
squares so he could wipe his arse with it. During the mid to late 1930s, Hitler kicked 
off the biggest industrial expansion in Germany's history as he tuned the economy 
in its entirety towards a single end: war.

Every man, woman, and child with a functional body 
was put to work for the greater good. Many were funnelled into factories producing munitions 
and vehicles of war, some furrowed the fields, and others built massive public projects, 
including the now famous autobahns. Hitler paid for all of this with what amounted 
to little more than financial smoke and mirrors involving shell companies and shady promissory 
notes known as MEFO bills - the whole thing was entirely illegal and hopelessly unsustainable, but 
Hitler wasn't interested in Germany's long-term financial stability. No, he was going to war, 
and so long as he won, he'd be able to pay off Germany's mounting debt with all the loot. In 
other words, he was turning Germany into the biggest bully in the playground, and he was about 
to go after the rest of Europe's lunch money. By 1935, Germany's army had tripled to 
300,000 men, and its air force - something

that's very existence was outlawed - 
boasted 2,500 cutting-edge warplanes. Hitler wasn't exactly known for his modesty -
this is a man who believed his people were part of a master race that deserved to rule over mankind - and so he simply couldn't resist showing off his shiny new army to the rest of the world at what he dubbed the 'Freedom to Rearm' rally. Publicly admitting to breaking the Treaty was a risky move, but Hitler had come up with a nifty little excuse - he claimed he was rearming as a purely defensive measure, and that by doing so he wasn't threatening European peace, but actually helping to maintain it. That might sound ridiculous, but what happened next was downright insane - people actually believed him. Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to say exactly why that was. Perhaps Europe's other political leaders simply underestimated just how

dangerous Germany was becoming under Hitler, 
or maybe they were too wary of rocking the boat for fear of plunging the world back into 
war. But no - Hitler put on a literal fucking military parade to shout about his giant 
illegal army, and the rest of the world simply rolled over. Which only served to make 
the man with the tiny moustache even bolder. By 1939, on the cusp of 
the biggest war in history, all those years of fevered preparation had 
borne lethal and abundant fruit - Hitler's army contained more than 4 million 
soldiers, and his power was absolute. But that alone doesn't entirely explain 
why Germany was such a juggernaut in the first two years of the war. Hitler may have 
commanded a stronger army than any of his enemies in a one-on-one comparison, but World 
War 2 wasn't a singles match. It wasn't even

tag team - it was a royal rumble involving more 
than 50 countries, and the combined forces of   the Allies far outnumbered those of the Axis 
powers from day one. Well, actually day two. When Hitler fired the World War 2 
starting pistol by invading Poland,   it took Britain and France two days to decide 
that might be a problem and declare war. So,   just 54 hours into a war that would last 
6 years, the Nazis were vastly outnumbered   by the combined forces of the Allies, 
who also happened to have more money,   more resources, more ships and planes, 
more pastries… more pretty much everything. And yet, we've all read the history 
books. During the early part of the war,   this apparent underdog tore through Europe 
like a genetically-enhanced pit bull.   In just 19 months, Hitler successfully 
invaded Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium,   the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, 
and Greece, with the Allies powerless to stop him.

As for how he did it - well, it turns out Hitler had a trick up his well-starched sleeve. Just 21 years separated the end of the First World War and the start of the second, but during that time warfare had changed forever. The trouble was, only the Germans had actually noticed. World War One was fought largely in the trenches, with long periods of stalemate as huge forces dug in behind fixed lines. Attacking such heavily defended positions was certainly possible, but it cost the aggressor dearly. However, in World War version 2.0 fortified trenches received a huge nerf. Thanks to advances in tanks, planes, and other new-fangled weaponry, trenches had become defenceless. German tactics heavily hinged on these hulking machines, using their speed to surprise enemies with a torrent of tanks and motorised infantry. The objective was to daze the enemy and decimate their defences. This rapid shitstorm on the

ground was simultaneously supported in the 
sky by newly-designed dive bombers that focused their efforts where enemy resistance was 
strongest, while also harassing support lines. You probably know this approach to murdering the 
enemy as the famous Nazi 'blitzkrieg' tactics - a word that literally translates to 'lightning 
war.' But oddly enough, the term 'blitzkrieg' was never actually used by the Germans. The term 
was picked up by western media and somehow stuck. Anyway, in reality - and contrary to popular 
belief - the foundational principles of blitzkrieg - strike fast and strike hard with combined arms - 
weren't anything new. The Germans simply combined classic military ideas with modern technology 
in ways that nobody had ever seen before. The final piece in the devastating 
blitzkrieg puzzle was the humble radio. Much like tanks, radios were readily used in 
the First World War, but they were large and

unreliable, and their pitiful range made them 
about as viable as shouting really loudly. But in World War 2 radios were much smaller, with much better range. And you don't 
need to be Sun Tzu to know that effective communication is an incredible asset on the 
battlefield, and the Germans were quick to adopt the radio as a means to coordinate 
their devastating blitzkrieg attacks. Of course, the Allies had access 
to all these tools too. They just hadn't had the time to figure out 
how to use them as effectively. At the start of the war, the British didn't have a 
single dedicated armoured division in their entire army, the Poles were still heavily reliant on 
cavalry, and while the French actually had more tanks than the Nazis, they didn't arrange them 
in mass ranks like in German panzer divisions, but sprinkled them here and there among their infantry. Most French tanks also lacked radios,

meaning they simply had no way to match the 
seamless coordination of Hitler's ranks. The tactics we now call 'blitzkrieg' 
were so effective that they allowed the Nazis to defeat their enemies incredibly 
quickly and often with minimal losses. France fell to the Nazi war machine in 6 weeks, 
Poland in 35 days, and Denmark in just 6 hours. OK, so there's been a lot of background to 
cover in this video, but if I had to sum it all up in a TL:DW, it would be this: the 
Nazis were so unbelievably successful in the first two years of the Second World War because 
they were better prepared than everyone else. That extra prep time allowed Hitler and his 
generals to amass a huge, well-equipped army; gain a technological edge over their enemies; 
and master the nuances of mechanised warfare before anyone else. You have to remember,

for the Allies to build up their forces and coordinate their efforts, but eventually, they turned the tide against Hitler and his Axis powers. By 1945, the war in Europe was over, and Hitler's dream of a thousand-year Reich lay in ruins.

but eventually, the stronger, larger economies 
of the Allies started to outproduce those of the Axis powers. Allied defeats became 
the exception rather than the rule,   and, thanks to the bravery and sacrifice of 
countless people from many different countries,   one of the darkest periods in human 
history was finally brought to an end. Thanks for watching.

How Hitler Destroyed Europe So Easily

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