"Screw your optics, I'm going in!"

Ultimately I see it as Germany being a very competent nation vs Italy which is known for its pizza and gelato

and losing almost as much as France...

Well sure, that too. My takeaway is that optics are directly proportional to scale.

lol France hasn't actually lost often

but w/e 😉

Yeah I would agree with that. Also Mussolini had impracticle goals while Hitler's goals were daring, but not beyond possibility.

That goes way beyond my knowledge

Hitler accomplished all of his goals but his interference in his own plans ensured he couldn't hold onto them.

Ya he shouldn't have blamed and gassed the Jews

Big mistake

He also shouldn't have redirected his assault on Moscow when they were only 50 miles away with almost 0 hard resistance

Hitler was bluffing throughout most of his conquests

The more I'm studying his wars, the more I come to believe that, had just one nation called his bluff, he would've been stopped

In the beginning definitely

Germany's army was not mechanized.

The English and French were and their biggest blunder was not advancing into Germany. They would've easily dominated.

Well, not sure about domination, but

France was weakened, so that's the one I understand the most

But Austria simply gave up, we didn't fight at all

I doubt Hitler could've annexed Austria had we actually faced him

To me it looked like Austria was kind of meh about it.

From all the wars, I know about Austria's annexation the most

Most articles and books I've read mostly focus on the invasion of France

The short version goes like this:
Over many years, Nazis took key roles in our politics, which was tolerated for reasons I will likely never understand. Austria experienced very troubling times due to violent political conflict between the parties and their supporters. A lot of people died due to terrorism.
There was also a lot of miscommunication at the highest levels between the Austrian president and the chancellor and so forth. And there were elections to be held, but they were unfortunately illegal and so the situation was very tense. Hitler moved in just at the very moment when elections were supposed to be held. He was afraid that after the elections he'd lose his chance to annex Austria.

Basically Hitler was carefully spreading chaos in Austria's politics with the help of Nazi infiltration. This chaos is what made it possible for him to just march in with no resistance, which comes down to the Austrian chancellor being a complete bitch who was too afraid for, well, we don't know exactly what he was so afraid about.

Civil unrest strongly added to everything.

Probably an imagined fear which materalized into a completely different one.

Yeah it was a lot of backdoor politics, so we'll never know.

I know people fled Austria because of the civil unrest.

Since Hitler made sure to kill his political enemies, there were not many survivors to tell the story from their perspective.

There was this Austrian guy who immigrated to the US and joined the Marines to go fight and ended up in the Pacific.

A relative of Hitler?

No he was Jewish

🤔

He didn't like the idea of hearing people singing about jewish blood flowing from their knives outside his window at night

Hitler had a relative who was in the US Navy iirc

His surname wasn't Hitler, he changed it.

SS was so fucking insane and unlikable there was a battle after Hitler yeeted himself where US GIs and Wehrmacht soldiers allied to fight against wafen SS to rescue political prisoners from an austrian castle

***OOF***

SS were the top Koolaid drinkers