As I have said before, Stalin would never go to war with Hitler unless Hitler started it. If you don't believe that you do not understand what type of man Stalin really was.
What type of man was Stalin really, then?
I said Germany would be in the Middle East in six months, not six weeks (and your quoting me even proves that). I think that is a very realistic estimate, it took Germany all of six weeks to take out all of France, I very seriously doubt that the smallish forces the UK had present in Egypt and it's other Middle Eastern possession could have stood up to say, 20 German divisions (which Hitler CERTAINLY had to spare, he had more than that to spare for a mid east adventure in real life, however because he planned on moving in to the USSR he did not use them.) Also remember the U.K. is not going to be able to send more troops over to its middle eastern possession due to fears of rapid German invasion.
Where is Germany going to stick 20 divisions in preparation for the attack. How is it going to supply them. The UK are just going to sit back and not stick any troops in the middle east in response to this German deployment? Your whole scenario relies on the Germans doing everything right, and the British doing absolutely nothing.
Hitler was set on invading the USSR from the very start; that was the entire essence of his foreign policy. Mein Kampf isn't about creating lebensraum in France; Hitler, the man who provided the dynamism for the German military to modernise and create a war economy in peacetime was the same man who set Germany on a course for war with the Bolsheviks. I'm afraid you can't have one without the other; he believed Germany was the bulwark of civilisation against the communist tide, so I'm afraid those countless divisions sitting in Germany aren't going to the middle east, they're going towards Moscow.
You greatly underestimate the ability of a country to push it's economic power to the very limits in order to arm. Look at North Korea, they have built themselves into a military and nuclear power despite the fact they simply don't have the money to do so, they did so by basically making serfs out of the population. Also look at the limits to which Stalin pushed the USSR during his 3 five year plans of industrialization. Again, you are greatly underestimating that capabilities of a country to push itself to the limit.
Germany isn't North Korea or the USSR. Hitler was greatly reliant on the middle and working classes for support, if they go through another 1929 situation, the conservative elites would have thrown him out onto the scrapheap. Countries with well developed middle classes don't like being turned into serfs.
A large standing army does not a military power make either, poorly trained conscripts I grant you don't need much in the way of imports, and neither does a population that's on the verge of starvation, but if you're going to be waging war on the great powers of the day I'd dare say the requirements are very different. I don't see how a nuclear program requires a vast amount of imports either; expertise and specialised materials can be gained from sympathetic allies or the black market.
The natural resource gains the Germans gained from conquest has also been overestimated by you. They needed oil badly, but if they weren't in active warfare the amount of oil they would need would be much lower, an army that is simply waiting to invade uses much less fuel than an army on the move.
On the eve of war, Germany imported 33% of her raw materials - is this not significant?
Germany was 100m RM in the red in her BoP by 1939, and this was
after the four year plan designed to bring about autarky; never mind the fact that the government was 40 billion RM in debt by 1939, and that unemployment figures were massaged greatly.
If these conditions occured today, in a modern economy, the word "basketcase" would be used to describe the economy, no?
