What's critical to understand is that the situation is that results in no LL. If the Wallies are out of the war then what you suggest won't be the case, but if they are in the German is still suffering from strategic bombing and other fronts and will lose eventually anyway. Can the Soviets purchase or not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_goldThat is a factor, but even without the bombings, where are the Nazis getting the money to import the raw materials that Germany doesn't have? They had to raid the Czech, French, and Benelux treasuries just to keep afloat OTL and by the mid-40s they've got no one left to rob.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gold
https://rwhiston.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/13/
They spent hundreds of millions of gold IOTL during the war and were unable to spend several hundred million more looted from occupied countries' banks, plus unknown amounts of silver, precious jewels, gold, currency, etc. from private citizens. If the aren't at war with the west they can get access to the foreign gold reserves of all the occupied countries and France had at least $2.5 Billion in gold in US banks that would be returned to France by the US and then probably accessed by Germany.
Even then the French, Belgians, and Dutch still have their empires that can be forced to ship raw materials to Europe, like Congo Rubber, DEI oil/nickel/rubber/etc., and whatever the French empire had to offer.
Of course; once the US enters the war as an active belligerent the Axis is doomed due to the vast heaps of material that will be dumped on Germany. There is simply no way Germany+Italy+Japan while facing economic warfare from the UK+US can defeat the USSR+UK+USA.So basically what you are arguing is that it is not the Soviets who need L-L but the Nazis who need, at the very least, the neutrality of both of the Anglo-Saxon powers?
Of course; once the US enters the war as an active belligerent the Axis is doomed due to the vast heaps of material that will be dumped on Germany. There is simply no way Germany+Italy+Japan while facing economic warfare from the UK+US can defeat the USSR+UK+USA.
The USSR does need LL or at very least the ability to purchase/import to avoid collapse, but in the long run the USA will win the war against Germany even if the USSR collapses. However if the USA and UK are out of the war Germany+Axis wins even with the USSR having access to all of OTL LL from both the UK and USA.
I am not convinced that the Soviets lose without the West. I would assume the chances of it go up but it is not a given.
There has been a lot of talk on a lot of threads of the margin of superiority required to actually conquer a country in a variety of scenarios and I am just not convinced that the Germans ever came close to having that margin over the Soviets. The Soviets I grant you only had the margin that they did, that allowed them to advance as quickly and as far as they did thanks to L-L but here the Soviets are fighting for survival ergo a win for them is survival.
In the meantime you might want to go and check up on how much of L-L the Soviets actually had to pay for as it was a far bigger proportion than the UK, which suggests that the Soviets do retain the capacity to support some trade without L-L and so are not completely bereft of supplies from abroad.
I grant you if the British and Americans decide to cut their noses off to spite their faces, then Hitler has a chance but it is only a chance.
While repayment of the interest-free loans was required after the end of the war under the act, in practice the U.S. did not expect to be repaid by the USSR after the war. The U.S. received $2M in reverse Lend-Lease from the USSR. This was mostly in the form of landing, servicing, and refueling of transport aircraft; some industrial machinery and rare minerals were sent to the U.S. The U.S. asked for $1.3B at the cessation of hostilities to settle the debt, but was only offered $170M by the USSR. The dispute remained unresolved until 1972, when the U.S. accepted an offer from the USSR to repay $722M linked to grain shipments from the U.S., with the remainder being written off. During the war the USSR provided an unknown number of shipments of rare minerals to the US Treasury as a form of cashless repayment of Lend-Lease. This was agreed before the signing of the first protocol on 1 October 1941 and extension of credit. Some of these shipments were intercepted by the Germans. In May 1942, HMS Edinburgh was sunk while carrying 4.5 tonnes of Soviet gold intended for the U.S. Treasury. This gold was salvaged in 1981 and 1986.[47][page needed] In June 1942, SS Port Nicholson was sunk en route from Halifax, Canada to New York, allegedly with Soviet platinum, gold, and industrial diamonds aboard.[48][dubious – discuss] However, none of this cargo has been salvaged, and no documentation of it has been produced.
No, the Soviets didn't have to pay for anything past their first purchases in 1941;
That is largely a Nazi-esque fantasy. The fact that the Soviets retained the vast majority of their land and population gives them plenty of room to rebuild even if by some magic the Nazis are able to hold onto the 1942 frontlines and force a peace there.Regardless of how convinced you are about Soviet defeat, by which I mean the Axis retains a final border well into the 1941 borders of the USSR by the end and the Soviet government is pretty much left with a husk of a nation,
One unsourced, contradictory blog post? I mean they claim they had 2800 tons on hand in 1941, barely spent any of it during the war, then after the war after confiscations/looting/reparations from occupied Europe they had 2500 tons?
Even then the French, Belgians, and Dutch still have their empires that can be forced to ship raw materials to Europe, like Congo Rubber, DEI oil/nickel/rubber/etc., and whatever the French empire had to offer.
In totally inadequate quantities.Also Germany IOTL was buying up things from neutrals until 1944 when things were cut off by Allied success.
All that money, and trade valuables, and such you describe? Acquired by basically gutting those occupied territories. Nazi economic policies prioritized short-term wholesale acquisition and exploitation while totally disregarding long-term sustainability, it was in essence a raider economy. As a direct result, the economic potential of occupied Europe was only a fraction of what it might otherwise have been and only declined as occupation continued. Both Adam Tooze and Richard Overy detail these facts at length in their respective books.Having occupied Europe be able to import/export and supplement the German economy would be huge, because by 1938 all of the areas occupied by the Germans plus Germany and her Allies equaled a greater GDP than the USA.