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Are we sure? The person who did the most damage to Hitler's ideals was arguably Hitler, though the mechanism is a tossup between "Let's fight on two fronts; doesn't getting involved in a land war in Asia sound fun?" versus "Let's get rid of all the Jews; what good are their wacky nuclear physics ideas ever going to be anyway?" The latter dumb idea was probably baked into the Nazi ideology, but the former dumb idea might have been a Hitler-specific mistake. If Hitler dies, do we end up with something like the Germany of today where anti-immigration polling above 20% sends the country into an introspective panic, or do we get a Germany (plus half of Poland, plus France, plus...) where hatred of The Other hasn't been so massively discredited, because its banner got taken up by somebody more competent?
Yeah that's true. I was thinking about the period between eg the Beer Hall Putsch and him actually taking power but once he's already started WW2 it's far from clear that taking him out improves things. Decisions like choosing to stop focusing on RAF bases to instead bomb London were pivotal and the war could have gone very differently.
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Check out the Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. It's by no means obvious that Operation Barbarossa was a dumb idea. Opinions to the contrary often seem to assume that militaries and societies can run on orders, rather than oil and bread.
However, I think that Hitler's earlier decision to go to war in 1939 was the beginning of the end of fascism. The promise of fascism was military power. By fighting a war against two of the main powers of the day (France and Britain) with backing from an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA) Hitler was taking a huge gamble with the risk of defeat. And the defeat of fascism militarily was its defeat ideologically. Soon, even the Spanish and Portugese regimes were moving in a conventionally conservative direction.
Similarly with communism: once the hydrogen bomb ended the prospect of a Soviet military victory in the Cold War, it was stuck in an economic competition with an economic juggernaut of unprecedented proportions (the USA again) and in comparisons with countries that had fundamentally better economic systems. The promise of communism was prosperity, which became a joke once Soviet citizens had a standard of living that trailed increasingly behind such erstwhile primitive backwaters as Finland, Spain, and even Taiwan.
There is no good evidence for intelligent design, but the closest is that God apparently directed history so that fascism was defeated militarily and communism defeated economically, i.e. on the grounds of their main promises. It's as if e.g. communism was able to deliver a more free society than classical liberalism or fascism a more stable society than classical conservativism.
Some might argue that the mandate of heaven is its own evidence 😉
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Not that Hitler getting rid of jews had any practical effect on Germany hypothetically getting nuclear weapons. That was never on the table for plain old economic and resource reasons.
That's true, but if hypothetically all of the notable Jewish scientists stayed in Germany, it's possible other powers would have gotten nuclear weapons much later. Einstein's letter to Roosevelt in 1939 may have been instrumental for the start of the Manhattan Project.
In which case they still would've lost, all else being equal, but overall it definitely benefitted their allies. The ideology spawning things like Aryan Physics (which sought to deny relativity and all other "Jewish physics") shows how untenable it was for scientific superiority.
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Huh. You might be right? I remembered Namibia having significant uranium ore, but I misremembered Germany losing control there after WWII when it was really in+after WWI.
Yeah it was never happening, read about it in The Making of the Atomic Bomb (good read, if a bit scientifically technical, though I liked that). I mean even if we say that D-Day failed or something, Germany had taken almost no actual steps because they recognized it was near impossible right away. Even the US who had pretty close to an ideal scenario - with tons of money, willing scientists from multiple countries, scouring the globe for resources with Atlantic maritime control, years of work, and who never had any of the facilities in the States bombed (a big deal, if you recall Germany got bombed quite a lot, as an understatement) only got a few bombs going by mid 1945. Even the Soviets took four years after the end of the war (so again, no bombing!) to make their own bomb, and they had espionage help too.
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