1941
Five facts stood out as the year passed:
- Britain gained the upper hand on the fringes of Germany’s sphere of influence, taking over Italian East Africa, suppressing pro-Axis governments in Persia and Iraq and nearly defeating Italian positions in Libya. This was partially compensated by Germany’s takeover of Greece and Rommel’s deployment. As a result the possibilities of integrating the colonial empires of Germany’s vassals and of connecting with Japan through South Asia were blocked.
- America’s imminent entry into the war became obvious.
- Japan’s leadership increasingly favored an attack against the Western powers.
- Germany and Japan were drawn closer into an offensive alliance against both Britain and America. For Hitler this was directed against the West, not the Soviet Union; he still thought the Wehrmacht could defeat the latter alone. But against the West, for years a German-Italian-Japanese alliance was seen in both Germany and Britain as the only thing that could pose any threat to the Royal Navy. It was the possibility of Japanese-American rapprochement that worried Hitler. Hitler pledged to reciprocate a Japanese declaration of war and kept true to this in December.

-The assumptions over which Barbarossa was launched were proven wrong. The Red Army was not vanquished west of the Dniepr-Dvina line: despite massive, triumphant encirclements there was still an ever-growing number of divisions on the other side of the frontline. Those defeats did not unseat Stalin from power. Key figures like Fromm, director of the army’s armaments effort, Thomas and Todt now pondered on a political solution to the war and Todt even discussed this possibility with Hitler in November.
And finally, the Heer was defeated at the gates of Moscow. The Red Army went on a theater-wide counteroffensive over the winter. For a moment it even threatened to encircle Army Group Center, but that could not be done due to an insufficient concentration of force. (Tooze blames this on Stalin’s mistake, but given the Red Army’s lack of armor at the moment he had a reason for doing wider attacks). The frontline panic was contained and by spring 1942 the Wehrmacht was still lodged deep inside the Soviet Union.
Yet this shock reverberated into a system-wide crisis starting on late 1941. Over the course of 1942 the Reich had to defeat crises in finance, food, manpower, coal and steel, and it is in this context that Alber Speer becomes Minister. Finance, food and manpower will be reviewed separately, and then Speer’s tenure and the strategic situation in 1942.