* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stalingrad
Forget D-Day, Hitler knew he'd lost at this point. No oil, no Blitz. As far as I can tell he kept hanging on because he believed (correctly) that the US and USSR would soon be enemies, and believed (incorrectly) that he could cut a side deal to join one side against the other.
Also, I'm not aware that Nazi Germany every seriously tried to ally with the Allies. They definitely did not have any interest with allying with the USSR, at least outside of divying up Poland between them.
I don't have any strong evidence for this hypothesis; it's just the only one I've yet run across that (a) assumes Hitler to be rational*, but would still (b) explain how Hitler wound up in the bunker‡, when he'd already noted in his diary that Stalingrad meant his war plans (which had required not only Caucasian but also Iranian oil) were FUBAR.
It's certainly true that at the war's end, Nazi commanders were doing whatever they could to manage to surrender on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip side of things and not on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim side.
If Hitler had been thinking the US and USSR were both interested in using the resources of the 3rd Reich against the other, he would have been correct: where he would've been wrong is in thinking he could cut a wholesale deal when they both wound up picking up most of what they wanted at retail.
* although after seeing Musk/TWTR play out, I'm a lot more open to the normally ludicrous idea that the top Nazis were a group of occult-addled meth-heads than I would've been 5 years ago...
cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech#Details
‡ I had assumed Downfall (2004) had been based on an autobiography I'd read because the events depicted meshed so closely (despite my initial scepticism as to the reliability of my source), but oddly I find no mention of that book on either en. or de.wikipedia...
> Operation Sunrise (sometimes called the Berne incident) was a series of World War II secret negotiations from February to May 1945 between representatives of Nazi Germany and the United States to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy.[1] Most of the meetings took place in the vicinity of Bern, Switzerland, and the lead negotiators were Waffen-SS General Karl Wolff and American OSS agent Allen Dulles.
From what I can tell, this was done totally on the initiave of local commanders, not Hitler.
> As far as I can tell he kept hanging on because he believed (correctly) that the US and USSR would soon be enemies, and believed (incorrectly) that he could cut a side deal to join one side against the other.
is total fan fiction.
Yeah, you've convinced me that seems most likely. Forgive me for grasping at straws in an attempt to find a world where it was not necessarily true that a relatively small number of irrational people where able to inspire such devotion in an industrialised country that they were able to:
(a) get a convicted criminal into high office (1933)
(b) destroy democracy from within (1933)
(c) start a war of conquest (1939)
(d) discover they weren't going to win (1943), then
(e) double down, for another 640k of confirmed german military deaths
(roughly 1/3 total, so 50% of military losses they'd incurred before [d]?
I'd guess the civilian war deaths would skew much higher than earlier)
all while remaining in domestic control up until losing Berlin (1945)
An old jew dies and appears before G*d. "Nu," he says, "I have a joke for you". "So tell it already," says G*d. The old man proceeds to tell a story of Babyn Yar. "And? that was supposed to be funny?" asks G*d. "Oy, for what did I think I could tell it properly?" sighs the old man, "I guess you had to have been there."