Agreed — but are there any other potential mechanisms that would explain how a rational Hitler —who had known that he failed to get Maikop and Grosny by Mar 1943 at the latest— would still have wound up in the bunker in Berlin in Apr 1945?
Sure. But he wasn't rational. My point remains, this:
> As far as I can tell he kept hanging on because he believed (correctly) that the US and USSR would soon be enemies, and believed (incorrectly) that he could cut a side deal to join one side against the other.
Yeah, you've convinced me that seems most likely. Forgive me for grasping at straws in an attempt to find a world where it was not necessarily true that a relatively small number of irrational people where able to inspire such devotion in an industrialised country that they were able to:
(a) get a convicted criminal into high office (1933)
(b) destroy democracy from within (1933)
(c) start a war of conquest (1939)
(d) discover they weren't going to win (1943), then
(e) double down, for another 640k of confirmed german military deaths
(roughly 1/3 total, so 50% of military losses they'd incurred before [d]?
I'd guess the civilian war deaths would skew much higher than earlier)
all while remaining in domestic control up until losing Berlin (1945)
Not to mention the Holocaust, of which the vast majority seems to have taken place during Case Blue (ie just before [d]).
An old jew dies and appears before G*d. "Nu," he says, "I have a joke for you".
"So tell it already," says G*d. The old man proceeds to tell a story of Babyn Yar. "And? that was supposed to be funny?" asks G*d. "Oy, for what did I think I could tell it properly?" sighs the old man, "I guess you had to have been there."
