was hitler a military genious or a lunatic?

Question

Only one anwser please and explain why or why not

Answer 1

A lunatic. He killed millions, and didn't exactly show his military prowess when he led Germany to a crippling defeat. He broke the rules of warfare by defying sanctions and agreements that he himself made, and relied more on his military council than his own wit. And THEN he took the easy way out by shoting himself after Germany's defeat rather than facing the consequences. He was a coward more than a genious.

Answer 2

No. He had some grasp of tactics, and virtually none of strategy.

His virtues as a commander-in-chief were that he could frequently tell a good idea from a bad one, and that he could hold to an overall objective. His faults were manifold.

Hitler's effects on the military were minor for the first few years of the war, and probably favored the German cause. He was a drag on the blitzkriegs, but nobody, including Guderian, knew whether they were too daring. He mismanaged the Battle of Britain, but nobody on the German side knew what they were doing anyway. He adopted the von Manstein plan of attacking France, which was dramatically successful. He ordered the Panzer III tanks to carry the long 50mm gun, and the fact that this order was not obeyed made things more difficult for the German Panzertruppen.

I don't know what effect he had on the drafting of the plans to attack the Soviet Union. The plans had no clear objective, and I don't know that anybody in the process had a good idea as to how to defeat the Soviet Union. He stuck to the objective of destroying the Red Army throughout the initial stages, which was probably the right thing to do.

Hitler's generals started to feel defeated early in 1941, when they supervised the destruction of the prewar Red Army, only to find that the Soviet Union was still fighting hard. The generals then started to propose operations they considered feasible, but which would still lose the war in the long run. Hitler would consider operations that could conceivably win the war, regardless of feasibility. This led to a breach between Hitler his generals.

The result was that Hitler chose the operations and how they were to be conducted, and the generals executed his orders. Since Hitler distrusted most of his generals, he ordered impossible tasks. Since the generals did not, or would not, commit to the near-impossible as the only possibility of victory, they persisted in recommending plans that Hitler, quite rightly, found unacceptable. The result was that the German Army was commanded by men who had no confidence in what they were doing, and was ordered to perform the extravagantly improbable in nonsensical ways. Since the generals did not understand, or did not care about, the overall situation, Hitler could not trust their judgement, and restricted their ability to use that judgement.

Hitler was not at all a good strategist. He was not content to simply demand results, but wanted events to follow his plans. Rather than retreat from a city and prepare to surround and retake it, he would insist that it be held against any attack. He also assumed that all German military formations were at their assigned strength, regardless of how battered they actually were. He had been a corporal in World War I, and kept his corporal's-eye view of the war.

He could not be everywhere at once, nor was he interested in going to the front, so he issued edicts to limit the freedom of his subordinates. The generals constantly wanted to retreat to more defensible positions, so he constantly ordered no retreats. Hitler considered that allowing the generals to retreat at their own judgement was a greater problem than having sections of the army destroyed because they could not retreat.

He was frequently irrational, but there is a chilling thread of reason through his actions in the second half of the war. He was not interested in the difference between losing slowly and losing fast, so he was only interested in operations that could win the war. He gave the slaughter of the Jews and Gypsies and other undesirables a higher priority than running the war, so that the Holocaust would succeed even if Germany fell. Only a desperate man would have let Army Group Courland be cut off to provide a safe training ground for the new crop of U-boats in the hope of victory in the West. Only an incredibly evil man would have given the Holocaust priority over the war effort. Hitler was that man.

Answer 3

He was one of the reasons that the Germnas lost.
During the invasion of Poland, Western Europe and Russia the generals were in charge of strategy and tactics.
Once things started to go wrong in North Africa and Russia Hitler lost his nerve and interferred with the plans of the generals on a daily basis.
During the Normandy invasion he insisted that the Panzer reserves could not be moved without his permission. By the time he gave it, it was too late.

Answer 4

~You've got a lot of baseless opinions here, but no intelligent answers. I strongly recommend you read a little about the man. There was a reason that Time Magazine named him "Man of the Year", 1938. You might also want to read a little about Stalin to learn why Barbarossa was launched, and why it was launched when it was. A little insight into Heydrich, Himmler, Goebbels, Goering and Donitz would not be amiss. And you really need to know something about at least Guderian, von Kleist, Klug, Manstein, Rommel, Model and Paulus.

If you suffer under the delusion that Hitler alone was responsible for war strategy (or Nazi political programs), or if you only want to pigeon hole him into a neat little box called "lunatic" or "genius", you have no chance of understanding the man, or avoiding those like him in the future.

Answer 5

A lunatic. Almost every personal decision he made cost a battle. He held back the panzer's on D-Day, kept Rommel from moving his armies south before D-Day, sent his best units on suicide missions.. it was his subordinates who led the country to victory for so long. The only plan he oversaw that worked the way he wanted it to was the Genocides. LUNATIC!!

Answer 6

Hitlers military interference shortened the war by years!

Answer 7

He was a lunatic the milatary geniuses were the soldiers like rommel. hitler had a massive army he couldnt lose for a while.

Answer 8

He made some clever military decisions but they were almost "beginners luck". Such as the ordering of the panzer divisions through the Arden - only a man not trained in "classic" military tactics would have done that as it flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

He is a good commander, but most of his decisions were just bad, therefore, he is a crazy man, who just wanted fame.

Answer 9

Both.

Someone once said that there is a fine line between madness and genius, and there's not too many better examples than Hitler... Besides, he supposedly had syphilis, which, when left untreated, drives its victims to eventual madness, so...

Answer 10

We would all be speaking German if he hadn't been such a micro-manager and let his Generals run the war. He thought he was a genius, but he was a raving lunatic.