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As for the luftwaffe developments.. who knows.. the Germans had developed a jet fighter (Me262) that could have made a big difference in slowing/stopping the allied invasion.. but hitler insisted that it be a bomber instead of a fighter and thus delayed its deployment until it was "WAY" too late.
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Just to clear this one up, it's a myth that Hitler's insistance the Me262 be used as a bomber being the cause of its delay. It was in fact Willi Messerschmitt who suggested to Hitler (among others) that the 262 could be a bomber, and that was because it was designed to be a multi-role aircraft from the outset. You have to look at the entire situation in the German arms industry at that time to understand the reasons behind this:
The Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (bf) factory where Messerschmitt was employed, had supplied aircraft to several Balkan countries and done collaborative development work with them too (principally Romania) against the wishes of Erhard Milch (the German Secretary of State for Aircraft). Thus Messerschmitt and bf were not popular with the Nazis and Messerschmitt himself was officially reprimanded by the Nazis for this. Couple that with the fact that several of Messerschmitt's early designs for the German aviation industry had crashed and killed several important figures and you have at least some of the reasons for Messerschmitt's unpopularity. In fact he had been offered a professorship at Danzig as a way to get rid of him and told in no uncertain terms that he should take it, as bf would never get a government contract.
When the RLM (German Air Ministry) issued the specifications for a new fighter aircraft to replace the Heinkel 59 biplane fighter, Messerschmitt and bf were in fact not sent a copy of the requirement at first, but since Messerschmitt insisted on getting a shot at it, Milch allowed bf to enter the contest, in his arrogance, Milch was convinced that Messerschmitt could only design gliders and had no experience of designing high speed aircraft. Milch was therefore happy to see the designer be the author of his own demise. Unfortunately Milch (like a lot of Nazis) was too busy playing favourites to notice that bf had just produced the bf108 Taifun four seater touring aircraft which was a masterpiece of sleek design.
When the four aircraft in the fighter contest showed up for the fly offs, Messerschmitt and bf turned up with the bf109, Heinkel with the He112, Arado with the Ar-80 and Focke-Wulf with the Fw-159. Of these, only the He112 offered any serious competition to the bf109, but it suffered from handling problems, was not optimised for mass production and had an overly complex cooling system, and so following testing of this and the bf109 in the Spanish civil war, Messerschmitt's bf109 proved the ultimate winner and eventually saw over 30,000 produced.
Against this background, Heinkel and Messerschmitt were stern rivals in the race to produce the first operational jet combat aircraft. Heinkel took first honours with the He178, the first ever jet aircraft to fly (August 27 1939), and in fact Heinkel had a prototype jet combat aircraft very similar to the Me262 in the air before the 262's first flight (the He280, first flown April 2 1941 - two weeks later, the prototype Me262 took to the air with a propeller engine installed in the nose to test its aerodynamic handling).
But, having turned things around with the bf109, Messerschmitt was now adept at playing the Nazi's own personaily culture games (notably with Hermann Goering and Ernst Udet), and he was better at this than Enrst Heinkel, who had overstretched the Heinkel company by getting a controlling interest in engine manufacture as well as airframes. Thus the promising He280 was dropped and the Nazis went with the Me262.
Now, here is the important part. Because Willi Messerschmitt knew that in Nazi Germany, winning contracts was as much about who you knew, as what you knew, he had touted the Me262 as capable of handling all three major combat roles, fighter, bomber and reconnaissance. Thus he knew that whichever camp held favour, his aircraft would still be a valid choice. In a personal audience with Hitler, Messerschmitt had said as much too, and Hitler is in fact on record as having cautioned that the aircraft should primarily be a fighter.
Later in the war, when Hitler was very much in decline health-wise (not to mention addicted to drugs), he was prone to rant about aircraft being used as bombers for reprisals, and this is where the myth of the Hitler insistence on the Me262 being a bomber stems from. But the simple truth is that it was largely problems with the Me262 Junkers Jumo 004 engines which delayed the programme.
The Jumo 004 was an axial flow engine (where the air is compressed through many stages before it reaches combustion, thus providing more thrust). British and American jet engines were of the far simpler centrifugal flow type, where no such compressor stages are utilised, thus they produce less thrust, but are also far less sophisticated and therefore more easily manufactured and less prone to go wrong (as the Jumo 004 did, a lot).
So, delays in engine manufacture and difficulties in finding skilled labour at both the bf factory and the Junkers factory to make the airframes and engines, plus the fact that the main Me262 production line was severely damaged by the USAAF, forcing the dispersal of Me262 production were the real causes of its delays. Willi Messerschmitt did some time in prison after the war for using forced labour at his factories incidentally.
The Me262 story is almost a microcosm of most of the other 'Nazi Wonder Weapons' stories, with personal fueds, greed and over-reaching technology being as much to blame as anything else, for their delayed introduction. And as cool as these things were, I think we can all be glad that this was the case. You can blame Hitler for a lot of things, but the Me262's delay aint one of them.
Chock