Word: whether
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...landed in Belgium. The Belgian authorities thus found themselves in possession of the entire German invasion plan -- but could not be certain that this was not all a German trick. Conversely, Hitler soon learned that the Allies knew of his plans -- but the furious dictator could not be certain whether they knew what they...
...least as important and interesting as the question of what might have stopped Hitler early on is the question of whether he might have emerged victorious. First, by not going to war at all. If, instead of invading Poland, he had limited himself to threats and bullying, he might have achieved his main demands, control of Danzig and freedom of movement through the Polish Corridor. It is possible, of course, that the whole dynamic of Nazism required war, but if Hitler had been able to stop short of that, he would probably have been widely regarded...
Once he had started the war and quickly conquered Poland, most of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, Hitler confronted his next great choice: whether to invade England, his last belligerent enemy. It is now known that he seriously planned an invasion in the summer of 1940. And in outlining the future, the German army issued orders that all able-bodied British males between the ages of 17 and 45 were to be interned and shipped to the Continent. The list of people to be arrested by the Gestapo ranged from Bertrand Russell to Chaim Weizmann to Virginia Woolf...
...major dissenters were the German commanders who feared British naval and aerial supremacy, and that was why Hitler called off the invasion. But the Germans thought Britain was virtually defeated whether Hitler invaded or not, and a number of historians agree. "Even if he didn't invade us, he could have put resources into the war at sea . . . and starved us out," says Howard. "There's very little chance that we would have been able to survive." The strategist B.H. Liddell Hart, in History of the Second World War, applied the term "slow suicide" to Churchill's policy of fighting...
...question in any such speculation about a partial or complete Hitler victory is whether peace would have brought any kind of stability. Could Hitler have established a continental network of satellite states under German domination, like that in Vichy France? And could such a network of satellites have lasted as long as the one created by Stalin after the war? It was partly wartime hysteria that led to the savagery of Nazi rule in the occupied lands, not only against the Jews but also against the Slavs, some of whom had originally welcomed the Wehrmacht for liberating them from Stalin...