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Stuart_Armstrong comments on The lessons of a world without Hitler - Less Wrong
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Hitler may seem particularly crazy (in the sense of being irrational rather than amoral or immoral according to our values). But consider:
Hindsight bias
By default we ignore the crazy levels of all the other leaders. I don't think he was markedly more irrational than Stalin or Churchill, though he may have cultivated such a image for both diplomatic and propaganda benefits.
Speaking of which, halo effect. Hitler may be particularly vulnerable to this not just because of the atrocities that many of us instantly invoke before our eyes when hearing his name but because of his style of public speaking. People today often completely forget that the angry shouting man was a carefully crafted public persona. The man studied tapes of his own speeches and had others analyse them to identify ways to improve!
Hitler went to war with France and GB with no realistic prospect of winning. That's the major irrationality; close second was his cruelty to the subject nationalities in the USSR that turned them back to Stalin. Churchill did nothing on this scale (perhaps staying in the war alone was irrational; but he did have an empire to back him up, and plausible hope the USA would join in). Stalin... internally did a lot of stupid things, and trusted Hitler, but didn't commit massive external errors, and was often very prudent.
But Hitler just started war after war until one of them went badly for him.
No realistic prospect? I disagree. When Hitler invaded France in 1941, the potency of blitzkrieg had been demonstrated. The Germans knew that they could pull off a Schlieffen Plan end-run much more quickly than they could in 1914.
Of course the French and British thought differently, but I don't think there's any evidence that the German general staff thought that a conflict with France was a sure loss as of 1941. If you'd been talking about the Remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, I'd have agreed with you.
You need to read Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War.
BTW How is trusting Hitler not a "massive external error"?
Because each month spent "trusting Hitler" was a month spent by Marshal Timoshenko to ensure learning of some more soldiers to actually shoot. The problems were that bad...
Now, putting the airplanes in positions more suitable for attacking Germany than defending from it (so they were quickly destroyed on the 21 June) was a big mistake from the Soviet side.
UK was a naval empire; that meant that a very long standoff between Germany and UK was possible; checking that France was not ready to an invasion through Belgium was possible. So there were reasons to believe that crushing France would work, and neither UK nor Germany had any reason to be sure about the loss in the standoff.
As for USSR, well, his blitz attack worked exceptionally well. Germany didn't have material advantage on the 20th June; it did on the 22nd June. Also it had a well-trained army. Actually, a regime with fascist ideology with less stress on nationalism to the point of extermination (like in Italy) had a chance to win the war against USSR with such a tactics...