WWII Documentaries: Germany lost WWII because it couldn't secure fuel for its war machine.

Duh !!!!

They were constantly short of resources to keep the economy and war machine going in both world wars. It became especially telling later in the war as attrition set in though.

The whole lot of them were on amphetamines too.

Umm… everyone knows this. Germany invaded Russia because they needed the oil fields of Baku. in the Robert Harris alternative history novel Fatherland, Germany wins the war by capturing Baku.

Similarly, Japan could only conquer the Pacific Rim if it had Indonesia’s oil reserves. The John Slattery character in Mad Men even makes a comment about the Pacific war being over oil.

Likewise, the only reason anyone cared about Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese was because the Domino Theory posited that Vietnam going communist would lead to a revolution in Indonesia. The Vietnam War was about Indonesia. As the Americans were already propping up the anticommunist government in Jakarta successfully, the Vietnam War was entirely unnecessary.

There are arguments that the Germans were militarily more disciplined than the Americans, but the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Allies and their access to critical war material (oil and all) guaranteed the Germans would lose.

The tide of the war turned in 1943 with the fall of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk. Germany fought a defensive and then losing war thereafter.

The history of Iran is connected to this. The British pushed the then shah (father of last one) out, because he was pro-German, and they feared the Germans would gain access to Iranian oil.

The Desert aspect of the war is sometimes downplayed, but if the British had not held on, the Germans might have gained control over the Suez Canal.

Hitler invaded the Soviet Union for “living space” as Hitler described repeatedly which included resources and to wipe out “Jewish Bolshevism”. Eastern Europeans, Slavs etc were to be the new slave labor class in the great German Reich.

…and the only way Hitler could do that was with oil to power his tanks which he did not have. The only way Japan could rule a Pacific Rim Empire was with oil to power their ships. What were they going to do with the oil, splash and play in it? The oil was a necessary means to an end. Nothing could be done without oil.

After genocide, the most chilling aspect of the Nazi regime was the extensive use of slave labor eagerly agreed to by German businesses, like IG Farben (precursor to today"s BASF and Bayer).

At Monowitz, the synthetic rubber factory located near Auschwitz employing slave labor, managers were constantly being urged to beat their workers to make them work harder and be more productive.

Sounds like a Republican/Elon Musk fantasy camp to me.

All industrialized economies used forced labor to some degree.

In addition to forced labor at the concentration camps, young adults in occupied countries were conscripted to work in German factories. I remember descriptions of a camp with Ukrainian women somewhere near a residential neighborhood. Residents would close their windows when the women started screaming. One of the reasons French men retreated to the "maquis" was to evade new conscription for laborers to be deported to Germany.

Slave laborers worked on ammunition and armaments. Supposedly some Allied plane was struck by a missile that did not explode. A note in the missile gave apologies, they had been forced to make the missile, but they did not add the explosive elements. I can remember something, maybe in a Martin Cruz Smith novel, about a German officer complaining about being failed by factory workers. Someone is exasperated with the officer, that those were slaves who failed to make good ammunition for the people who had enslaved them.