Comments by "Seven Proxies" (@sevenproxies4255) on "Should Hitler have waited?" video.

  1. I'd say that the issue wasn't going to war too early. I think the bigger mistake was Hitler trying to bite off more than he could chew. If he started out with Poland and then consolidated his position there for a few years, he would probably have been more successful. Britain and France might've rattled their sabers but I doubt they would have made any serious commitment in trying to liberate Poland from German occupation. The success in Poland just seems to have made the Nazis overconfident.
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  2. mPky1: All lands conquered needs to be occupied for quite a long time afterwards. There's no real way around it, since you turn the population of a conquered land your enemy as soon as you declare and wage war on them in the first place. It's not like you can conquer a nation by not killing anyone or destroying someones property, so it's next to impossible to do it while maintaining popular support among the population of the enemy country. So there's always a period of "cracking heads and restoring order" after the enemy government and armed forces have been forced to surrender. Which is why I point out the problem with Hitler being overly ambitious and not respecting the necessary timeframe needed to pacify a newly conquered population. He believed that since they achieved a swift military victory in Poland, he should just keep going, dedicating most resources and manpower towards invading the next country on his hitlist. Not only did it leave newly conquered territories vulnerable to local insurgency, but the speed of his conquests also instilled a greater sense of alarm and urgency in other foreign enemies like France, Britain and Russia. The trick is to slowly conquering your neighbours while projecting a complete lack of ambition towards conquest to the people watching you. Basically: drop the frog in boiling water and it will jump out immediately. But drop the frog in cold water and then slowly increase the heat, and the frog will allow itself to be boiled alive without any intervention. Classic deception, all according to the principles of Sun Tzu.
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