Serious question for once: was there any realistic path to victory for Germany after 1942?

By "victory" I don’t mean conquering the world or some Reddit-tier scenario where they puppet the USSR. I mean survival as a dominant or at least intact power: forcing a negotiated peace with the Soviets, keeping the Western Allies out of France, holding most of Europe, etc.

Personally, I lean toward no. Once Barbarossa stalled before Moscow and the U.S. entered the war, the material imbalance was catastrophic. Even if the Germans win at Kursk, or avoid Stalingrad, the Allies' industrial capacity, manpower reserves, and ability to open multiple fronts made German defeat nearly inevitable. The clock was ticking.

People like to play the “what if Hitler wasn’t Hitler” game (don’t invade the USSR, don’t declare war on the U.S., etc.), but those are pre-1942 decisions. After '42, it's mostly a downhill spiral. At best, they could’ve delayed the inevitable.

That said, I’m open to arguments. Are there plausible scenarios (not total fantasy) where Germany could’ve stayed in the fight or even come out ahead?

Looking for real strategic or logistical alternatives, not anime-tier Axis victory fantasies.

>>17766917 (OP)
Yes

>>17766917 (OP)
No there wasn't. This question has been asked millions of times already

It was over when the USA seriously entered the war. Before then, anything was possible.

What if Japan attacked only the UK or USSR? US involvement is delayed, Soviets would be distracted, and a divided royal navy could be beaten by the entire axis with some luck

>>17766917 (OP)
Yes, all they had to do was assassinate Stalin. With a void in power the USSR disintegrates easily

>>17766917 (OP)
>Halt the Normandy landings and drive them back with extreme prejudice
>Somehow destroy the Soviets at Kursk and seize whatever industrial and war material you possibly can
>Pump the puppets for more weapons
>Invest HEAVILY into fighters and flak defenses and never stop making them
>Scrap the big heavy tanks and start cranking out as many medium and light tanks as possible
>Tune up the intelligence services and possibly execute all of the higher echelons of the state intelligence agencies and replace them with people who actually know what they're doing
>Slap Hitler until he stops being a retard and allows his most able commanders to actually lead the war effort
>Tell Japan to make a fucking effort to take Russia from the rear since they're busy fucking you up in the West or declare you'll war on them (bold move but desperate times)
>Change the military communication codes entirely
>Stop going after the allied shipping and have the submarine wolf packs engage the enemy navies and pick off whatever they can

This isn't a surefire victory by any means, but these, off the top of my head, are the only ways I can imagine Germany turning the tide. Hitler's break with the Prussian generals really was the moment shit went south.

>>17767003
>Halt the Normandy landings
The Allies had total air superiority and naval dominance. Even if Rommel had been given full autonomy and all the reserves were deployed early, the best-case scenario is delaying the breakout. Not a reversal. Once the Allies got ashore with functioning ports (Cherbourg, then Antwerp), the logistical faucet was wide open.

>Win at Kursk
They planned to win Kursk. Threw everything into it. Lost. Even if they’d won, the Red Army was learning to trade space for attrition, and the Soviet industrial base had already relocated east. Germany was too bled out to exploit any victory at that point. The time to destroy the USSR was in '41.

>Scrap the big tanks
Fully agree. The Tiger fetishism was a disaster. Germany needed a German T-34 equivalent in mass production, not Wunderwaffen.

>Tell Japan to attack USSR
Japan learned its lesson at Khalkhin Gol. They weren’t going to touch Siberia with a ten-foot pole, especially after the oil embargo. And Germany couldn’t pressure them, they weren’t the senior partner in that alliance.

>Wolf packs stop hunting convoys
Convoys were the strategic lifeline. Attacking warships in open battle? That’s how you lose U-boats even faster. The entire point was economic warfare, and they were already losing that race by '43.

>>17767114
>Germany couldn’t pressure them, they weren’t the senior partner in that alliance.
Can you go into more detail on this? I just assumed they were which is probably racist

>>17767121
Not racist, just a common assumption. But the Axis wasn’t like the Allies. It wasn’t even a centralized coalition. It was more like a patchwork of opportunistic powers with overlapping enemies but little coordination. Germany and Japan didn’t even share strategy, let alone command structures. The Tripartite Pact (1940) looked like Germany was the top dog because it came after France fell and Japan wanted to ride that momentum. But in reality:
>No mutual war planning. Japan never coordinated with Germany before attacking Pearl Harbor. Hitler actually found out after the fact.
>No shared goals. Japan’s war was about dominating the Pacific and securing resources. Germany’s was about Lebensraum and smashing Bolshevism. The USSR wasn’t Japan’s primary enemy: the U.S. and Britain were.
>Different theaters, different priorities: After the 1939 Soviet–Japanese border war at Khalkhin Gol (where Zhukov wrecked the Japanese), Tokyo made a strategic shift called the “Southern Expansion Doctrine.” That’s why they attacked the U.S. and British colonies in 1941 instead of going north into Siberia.
So even when Germany was begging Japan to hit the USSR in late '41–'42, Japan refused. They’d signed a Neutrality Pact with the Soviets in April 1941, and Stalin honored it, even when things were dire in the West. That let the Soviets redeploy Siberian divisions to defend Moscow.

Germany had no leverage to force Japan’s hand. They weren’t supplying Japan with anything vital (Japan had to go through the Soviet Union or blockade runners). There was ideological camaraderie, sure, but no command hierarchy. In short: Japan did its own thing.

>>17766917 (OP)
there was never any possibility for germany to win at any point in time

>>17767139
Ah, I thought you were saying Japan was the dominant partner, it's more like there was no dominant partner. Thanks for the explanation.

>So even when Germany was begging Japan to hit the USSR in late '41–'42, Japan refused. They’d signed a Neutrality Pact with the Soviets in April 1941, and Stalin honored it, even when things were dire in the West. That let the Soviets redeploy Siberian divisions to defend Moscow.
Didn't the USSR eventually violate it in '45 right after the nukes?

>>17767176
The USSR did break the neutrality pact, but only when it was no longer useful. The Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact was supposed to last for five years (until 1946). The whole point was to let Stalin avoid a two-front war while dealing with Hitler, and it suited Japan too, since they were focused on grabbing colonies in Southeast Asia after the U.S. embargo choked their oil supply.

What happened next was that:
>In April 1945, the Soviets gave official notice they would not renew the pact when it expired in '46. But they did not declare war yet.
>Then, on August 8th, two days after Hiroshima and right before Nagasaki, the USSR declared war on Japan, invaded Manchuria, and smashed the Kwantung Army.
So yes, the Soviets technically violated the spirit of the pact, but not its letter. They argued it was already dead in the water after their notice in April. Classic Stalin move: bide time, then pounce at the moment of maximum advantage.

It’s often overlooked, but the Soviet entry into the Pacific war was a huge shock to the Japanese leadership. Some historians argue it was just as important as the atomic bombs in forcing surrender, since it crushed any hopes of using Moscow as a mediator for a negotiated peace.

>>17767155
That’s a defensible take, if by “win” you mean defeat the Allies or achieve long-term continental dominance. The industrial gap alone was staggering, especially once the U.S. entered the war. But I’d push back a bit on “never any possibility.” In 1939–41, there was a narrow window where Germany could’ve forced a settlement with Britain and remained dominant in Europe:
>France was defeated in six weeks.
>The UK was vulnerable after Dunkirk.
>The U.S. was still neutral.
>The USSR and Germany were cooperating via the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
If Germany had not invaded the USSR in 1941 (or if they had fought that campaign more strategically), there’s an alternate path where the war becomes a cold standoff rather than total defeat. Britain alone wasn’t in a position to dislodge the Wehrmacht from Europe without the Soviets or Americans. Now, this all depends on Germany acting like a rational power, which it wasn’t. Hitler’s ideological obsession with destroying the USSR guaranteed overreach. The consequences of autism, I guess.

>>17767114
>Fully agree. The Tiger fetishism was a disaster. Germany needed a German T-34 equivalent in mass production, not Wunderwaffen.
If Germany committed to a tank that was only just as good as the Soviet ones they wouldn't have even had a plausible sounding story about how they could win. They needed maximally efficient production of a tank that was much better than what their enemies had and even that would probably have made no difference since tank quality was a marginal factor

>>17767139
So why did Germany declare war on the USA? What was the point?

>>17767229
>Ideological delusion. Hitler believed the U.S. was run by Jews and capitalists, weak-willed and racially degenerate. He genuinely thought the U.S. would be slow, divided, and ineffective. Massive misread.
>Strategic miscalculation. He assumed Japan would return the favor and open a front against the USSR from the east (they didn’t, as covered above). He figured dragging the U.S. in fully would unify the Axis and pressure the Soviets harder.
>Overconfidence. December 1941 was the height of German territorial control. They were at the gates of Moscow, Britain was on the ropes, and the U.S. military was still a paper tiger. Hitler thought he'd knock out the USSR quickly, then deal with the Americans later.
>FDR was already helping Britain. Hitler may have figured war with the U.S. was inevitable anyway (given Lend-Lease, the Atlantic Charter, and U.S. ships escorting convoys in the Atlantic). But again, timing mattered. Declaring war let the U.S. focus fully on Germany first, not Japan.

tl;dr --> It was a premature, ideological blunder that turned a contained war into a truly global one.

>>17767238
>Ideological delusion. Hitler believed the U.S. was run by Jews
'''''delusion'''''

>>17767242
Nigga, politics go on >>>/pol/.

>>17767190
>Some historians argue it was just as important as the atomic bombs in forcing surrender, since it crushed any hopes of using Moscow as a mediator for a negotiated peace.
Yeah I was reading about the surrender earlier and it seems like in internal discussions they were talking a lot about the Soviet invasion and a potential Communist uprising even though Hirohito only mentioned the bombs in his surrender speech.