Operation Barbarossa

And you see that manifest itself on D-Day, where you've got 6,939 vessels, of which there are 1,213 warships, 4,127 assault craft, 12,500 aircraft. 155,000 men landed, and dropped from the air, in a 24-hour period. It is phenomenal. It is absolutely phenomenal.

The following is a conversation with James Holland, a historian specializing in World War II, who has written a lot of amazing books on the subject, especially covering the Western front, often providing fascinating details at multiple levels of analysis, including strategic, operational, tactical, technological, and of course the human side, the personal accounts from the war. He also co-hosts a great podcast on World War II, called We Have Ways of Making You Talk. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, or at lex fridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here's James Holland.

In Volume One of the War in the West, your book series on World War II, you write, "The Second World War witnessed the deaths of more than 60 million people, from over 60 different countries. Entire cities were laid waste, national borders were redrawn, and many millions more people found themselves displaced. Over the past couple of decades, many of those living in the Middle East, or parts of Africa and the Balkans, Afghanistan, and even the United States, may feel justifiably that these troubled times have already proved the most traumatic in their recent past. Yet globally, the Second World War was and remains the single biggest catastrophe of modern history. In terms of human drama, it is unrivaled. No other war has affected so many lives, in such a large number of countries." So what to you makes World War II the biggest catastrophe in human drama in modern history, and maybe from a historian perspective, the most fascinating subject to study?

So let's talk about the Hunger Plan. How important was the Hunger Plan and Lebensraum to Nazi ideology, and to the whole Nazi war machine? Essential to the whole thing. This is all about this notion that is embedded into Hitler's mind, and into the minds of the Nazi party, right from the word go is, there is a big sort of global conspiracy, the Jewish Bolshevik plot, I mean, completely misplaced, that Jews and Bolsheviks go hand in hand, and that somehow dovetail. They don't, obviously.

Is there a case to be made that there, he was indeed, at times a military genius? No, I don't think so. Because none of the plan, I mean, even the plan for the invasion of France and the Low Countries isn't his.

It is because it's simple. And what Hitler does throughout the 1920s, is he sticks to this. There is actually, when he comes out of prison, so it is the Beer Hall Putsch in November, 1923, he gets charged with treason, which he has been, because he's attempting a coup, and he gets sentenced to five years, which is pretty lenient for what he's done. And he then gets let out after nine months. Nazi party is banned at that point, but then comes back into being. And the year that follows there is then a substantial debate about where the party should go. And there are actually a large number of people who think that actually they should be looking at how the Soviets are doing things and taking some of the things that they consider to be positive out of the communist state, and applying those to the Nazis. And Hitler goes, "No, no, no, no, no, no. We've just got to stick to this kind of Jewish Bolshevik thing. This is how we're going to do it. This is how we're going to do it." Goebbels, for example, who is very open, Joseph Goebbels, he's a not very successful journalist, but he does have a PhD in German literature. He's very disaffected because he was born with talipes, which is more commonly known as a club foot. He's disabled. He can't fight in the first World War. He's very frustrated by that. He's in a deep despair about the state of Germany in the first part of the early 1920s. He's looking for a political messiah, a sort of quasi-religious messiah, thinks it's Hitler, then discovers that Hitler is not open to any ideas at all about any deviation, but then sees the light. Hitler recognizes that this guy is someone that he wants on his side, and so then goes to him, makes a real special effort.

You make it seem so clear, but all the while to the rest of the world, to Chamberlain, to France, to Britain, to the rest of the world, he's saying he doesn't want that. He's making agreements. Everything you just mentioned, you just went through it so quickly. But those are agreements that were made that he's not going to do that. And he does it over and over. He violates the Treaty of Versailles. He violates every single treaty. But he still is doing the meetings. So maybe can you go through it, the lead up to the war, 1939, September 1st, what are the different agreements? What is the signaling he's doing? And what is he doing secretly in terms of building up the military force? Yes. So part of the Treaty of Versailles, is you're allowed very, very limited armed forces. There's restrictions on naval expansion. There's restrictions on the size of the army. There's restrictions on the weapons you can use. You're not allowed an air force. But he starts doing this all clandestinely. There are people in, Krupp has got, for example, which is in the Ruhr, a big armaments manufacturer. They are producing tanks elsewhere, and parts elsewhere in, say the Netherlands, for example, and then shipping them back into Germany. They're doing Panzer training exercises actually in the Soviet Union at this time. There's all sorts of things going on. The Luftwaffe has been announced to the world in 1935, but it's obviously been in the process of developing long before that. The Messerschmitt 109, a single engine fighter plane, for example, is created in 1934. So they're doing all these things against it.

It's also hard to put yourself in the mind of those leaders now that we have nuclear weapons. So nuclear weapons have created this kind of cloak of a kind of safety from mutually shared destruction that you think surely you will not do a million or 2 million soldier army invading another land, right? Just full-on gigantic hot war. But at that time, that's the real possibility. You remember World War I, you remember all of that. So okay, there's a mad guy with a mustache. He's making statements that this land belongs to Germany anyway, because it's mostly German-populated, and like you said, Treaty of Versailles wasn't really fair, and you can start justifying all kinds of things for yourself.

Well, nobody's ready for war. No, and you always want more than you've got at any time, even when you're winning.

So can you tell the story of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939? So they make an agreement, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and that leads us, just like you were mentioning, in a matter of days, how compact everything is. It's just really, really fascinating how crooked- It's a beautiful summer in Europe, summer of 1939. It's one of these glorious summers that sort of never rains. It's just sunshine, sunny day after sunny day. It's like that sort of golden summer of 1914 as well, where sky always seems to be blue, fluffy, white clouds, everyone sort of, you know, but this sort of the storm clouds of war, to use that cliche, are kind of brewing.

Who was Churchill, and how did Churchill come to power at this moment? Well, Churchill is this absolutely towering figure in British politics. He's first minister in the naughties of the 20th century and the first years of the 20th century. First of the liberals, then of the conservatives. He's a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. He's a towering figure, but he's been in the wilderness because he's out of favor with the Stanley Baldwin government. He's out of favor with Chamberlain, but he is this towering figure, and he has been very outspoken as a backbencher, which basically means you're not a minister, you're not in the cabinet, you're just an ordinary member of parliament. But obviously you are an ordinary member of parliament, but you're also an ordinary member of parliament who has had ministries of state and who is this towering figure. So he's listened to in a way that other backbenchers aren't.

In 1939, what was the state of the militaries? What were the most powerful militaries on the world's stage at that time? Well, in terms of naval power, Britain, as we've already discussed, and the United States. France has a pretty large navy. Japan has a pretty large navy. Italy has a pretty large navy, but Italy's navy is, by far and away, the most modern aspect of its three services, air, land, and sea, but it doesn't have any aircraft carriers and it doesn't have any radar. So they've got modern battleships and battle cruisers, but without key modern bits of technology.

So in that sense, you could think of World War II as a battle of factories? Yes.

I love it. So like I said, we could probably talk for many hours at each of these topics, but let's look at some of the battles and maybe you can tell me which jumps out at you. I want to talk to you about the Western Front and definitely talk about Normandy. So there's the Battle of Midway in 1942, which is a naval battle. There's Eastern Front Stalingrad, probably the deadliest battle in human history. Then there's the Battle of Kursk, which is a tank battle, the largest tank battle in history, probably the largest battle period in history, 6,000 tanks, 2 million troops, 4,000 aircraft. And then that takes us also to the Battle of the Bulge in Normandy, the Italian Campaign that you talk a lot about. So what do you think is interesting to try to extract some wisdom before we get to Normandy? Do you find, as a historian, the Battle of Kursk or the Battle of Stalingrad more interesting? Stalingrad is often seen as the turning point. Well, yeah, I think so. It's really interesting. So they get through in 1941, Barbarossa doesn't happen as the Germans hope it will. The whole point is to completely destroy the Red Army in three months and that just doesn't happen. And I think you can argue and argue convincingly that by, let's say, beginning of December 1941, Germany is just not going to win, it just can't. And let me tell you what I mean by that. So if you take an arbitrary date, let's say the 15th of June 1941, Germany at that moment has one enemy, which is Great Britain, albeit Great Britain plus Dominion Empire. Fast-forward six months to let's say the 16th of December, it's got three enemies. It's got Great Britain, Dominion Empire, USSR, and the USA. It is just not going to win. For all the talks of wonder weapons and all the rest, it's just not going to, it has lost that battle.

When we were talking about the operational side, the material loss of a battle is also extremely important to the big picture of the war. And we often don't talk about that because, of course, with war, the thing to focus on is the human drama of it- Yes.

Yes. One of the great battles in World War II on the Western Front is Normandy. I have to talk to you about Normandy,

Let's go to the very end, the Battle of Berlin, Hitler sitting in his bunker, his suicide, Germany surrender. You actually said that Downfall, the movie, was a very accurate representation. I think it is, really, except that Goebbels took cyanide, didn't shoot himself.