Well, of course that contributed too.
But in terms of technology, they were way ahead of us. They were launching V2 rockets from Berlin to London by 1943, and a dozen years later (1955) the US could still not get a rocket off the ground, let alone hit a target 1000 miles away. Even today there are only a small handful of countires that have a missle as advanced as the V2.
Their tanks were far superior to ours, as they travelled more than twice the speed, and were also larger and had more powerful guns. Their planes flew faster. Their submarines were superior as well. They had things like those over-the-shoulder rockets that we did not develop until 20-30 years later.
When the war was over, there was a mad scramble between the US & USSR to steal all the Nazi scientists. All the top physicists of the first half of the 20th century came from Germany. Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, Von Braun, etc.
Regardless of their superior technology, the Nazis were simply outnumbered. As they made enemies with more and more countries, their supplies were cut off. It was not the US & Britain alone that did this. It was a concentrated effort of dozens of countries around the world. Don't think for a minute that the same thing could not happen to us today if we piss off enough countries.
BTW, on this subject, ever read about Operation Paperclip?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated Nazi scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip.
When the Allies entered Germany in 1945 their scientific intelligence experts were astounded by the sheer scope of the German technical and scientific accomplishments.
Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years the U.S. pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents in Germany. John Gimbel comes to the conclusion, in his book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, that the "intellectual reparations" taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to $10 Billion, equivalent to around $100 Billion 2006.
The program of acquiring German scientists and technicians for the U.S. was not only founded in profit interests, however; an equally strong motivator was the desire to deny the expertise of German scientists to the Soviet Union. The case for finding and holding Nobel laurate Werner Heisengerg was summed up thus "…he was worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans. Heisenberg was in charge of the German secret atomic bomb program code-named "Virus House". Had he fallen into Russian hands, he would have proven invaluable to them."
Of particular interest to the U.S. were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats would have disqualified them from officially obtaining visas.
Another aim of the operation was capturing German equipment before the Soviets came in. Where that was not possible, the US Army destroyed some of the equipment to prevent its capture by the advancing Red Army. For example, a prototype Horton Ho-229 jet-powered, flying wing fighter/bomber was captured by the Americans and sent to the Northrop Corporation for evaluation, while several more partial Ho-229 airframes were destroyed.
The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico; Fort Bliss, Texas; and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missle and ballistic missle technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program.
Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified.
Separate from Paperclip was an even more secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos). Another American project (TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography.
The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946.