Could the Germans have Won the WWI?

 

1.  The Germans would not have paid reparations if not 'defeated'.  The colonies were lost already, so that would be nothing but formal acceptance of the fact.  Alsace-Lorraine, problematical.

 

2.  With a defeated Italy and vast eastern territories to draw on for much longer, I don't see that Germany would be 'strangled' by as early as 1919.  The British were already balking at the cost in lives by 1918.  Germany could start to limit their losses by practicing a 'scortched earth' retreat policy in the occupied territories in the west.  Let the west 'liberate' Picardy, Belgium and even Alsace-Lorraine, but at a much higher cost than the Germans suffer as the Germans are not automatically counterattacking to retake their trenches after they're lost.  The Austrians only have one front left to fight on (Balkans) and the Germans can afford to reinforce them.  I just don't see France and Britain imposing their will on Germany in that scenario.

 

I've not assumed that the French and British would remain inactive on the western front.  The British would have presumably gone ahead with their historical offensive, the French presumably would have launched their planned offensive in 1916 if not, as you say, 'distracted' by the German Verdun offensive.  However, the Germans were capable, at that point in the war, of holding off the French and British in the west while maintaining an offensive in the east.  There is no reason to believe that a French offensive in 1916 in this scenario would have been any more successful than the Somme Offensive was historically.  If anything perhaps even less so.  Furthermore, if the Germans had been willing to give up some ground, rather than 'automatically' counterattacking to retake their trenches when captured by the Allies, they might have managed to increase the margin of losses between themselves and the Allies.  That is the strategic alternative I'm proposing.  There's nothing in it really that wasn't thought of or proposed by someone at the time.  It is simply that different choices were made.  The German refusal to give up any ground until 1917 was based on the view that it was necessary to capture Paris and knock out France in order to 'win' the war.  So the Germans did eventually do something along the lines of what I'm suggesting, in 1917, with the withdrawal to the 'Hindenburg Line'.  They just wasted a year in the futile attritional battle of Verdun before doing it. 

Al-Jassas

 

How about one or two more Falklands ?