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Was invading the Soviet Union a stupid idea? - Barbarossa without Hindsight

Stafford said:
the Nazis wouldn't have been Nazis, so the point is academic.
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Basically, they were still on par with imperial Germany as ruled by the Kaiser. Democracy was a dirty word for them. What a German told me once, thank God we lost!
 
ChuckDyke said:
Basically, they were still on par with imperial Germany as ruled by the Kaiser. Democracy was a dirty word for them. What a German told me once, thank God we lost!
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I dunno about that, WWI-era Germany was racist no doubt, but that was more the norm than the exception for most countries in those days.
Going full genocide on another race/s is a whole other level.

If you mean they weren't democratic well, a Monachy is just an Autocracy by another name.
 
Again, read the book. It is all there. Suvorov's arguments are very solid.
In the summer of 41 Russian army was as ready as it could ever be to start an offensive.

I agree that if not this stupid Nazi ideology Hitler would have had a lot of help. In the beginning of the war Russians welcomed Germans in their villages as everyone was tired of communism. It turned sour very quickly. Hitler did not even trust Russian who wanted to fight Stalin. He never used Pavlov's army because of that.

But, at the end what actually sealed the fate of Third Reich was not the war on the Eastern front. It was Pearl Harbor and the US joining the Allied powers. Japan had a choice - to attack the USSR in the far East or to attack the US. They made the wrong decision and that pretty much predetermined the outcome of the war.
 
Just for fun: when was the last time anyone invaded Russia and won?

It was the Germans in the First World War. So maybe not as big a stretch of the imagination for them to think they might do it again a couple of decades later.
 
Germany could certainly have beaten the Soviet Union if playing their cards better.
Militarily by not commiting to the final push to moscow but rather that taking the winter to rest and refit for a finishing blow in 42 would have saved the wehrmacht from the worst effects of the soviet counteroffensive. With far more units keeping its technical staff alive rather than wasting it as infantry the wehrmacht would have been significantly sronger in 42 than it was irl.
That alone might have been enough to collapse the Soviet union in 42. And if it doesnt Germany could still gring the Soviet union down in WW1 style as long as it doesnt take catastrophic defeats.

Politically simply acting as liberators fromm the soviets in the east and delaying the exterminations until the war is over would have made it much easier for them. Far fewer partisans and large numbers of willing supporters to fight the soviets would have made a longterm victory quite possible.

As for the Soviet union attacking in summer 41 that would be the fastest way to a soviet defeat. It would have resulted in a Tannenberg on a massive scale. Basically the only way germany could have actually destroyed the Red army in a battle close to the borders. It would also be questionable if the allies would support the Soviets in such a case.
 
Stafford said:
WWI-era Germany was racist no doubt,
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The First Reich was Charlemagne, once that collapsed with the treaty of Verdun in 843 it was the ambition of every ruler to restore it. Go to the 19th century Otto Von Bismarck united the German States (2nd Reich), was defeated during the Great War, Hitler came along with the Third Reich. That's why have the opinion they were much the same.
Hapless said:
Just for fun: when was the last time anyone invaded Russia and won?
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The Mongols 1223 -1480 was their rule.
 
Stafford said:
@Larsen I don't think anyone is arguing with the fact that Stalin coveted other peoples land, in fact he was watching with interest at developments between Germany and the western democracies to see what the response would be to the Austrian Anschluss, the Munich Agreement and further annexation of Czechoslovakia, etc. When the response was timid at best, he welcomed the Molotov-Ribbontrop pact in order to - in theory - keep Germany on-side while they divided eastern europe between them knowing that Britain and France wouldn't do anything about it.

In the long run, Stalin almost certainly intended to take over the entirety of Europe if given the chance, the Iron Curtain and puppeting every state in his sphere of influence post-WWII is evidence enough of that, but in 1941, let alone 1939, he knew his forces were nowhere near ready to carry those plans out.

===

As for the topic at hand, Germany could well have beaten the Soviet Union in 1941 had they played their cards correctly. If not for the idiotic 'master race' ideology the Nazis espoused, they would have found willing and eager populations in eastern europe to enlist in helping carry the war to Moscow, Ukrainians absolutely hated the Russians for their policies which caused famines throughout the 1920s and 30s, the Baltic states and Finland also had no love for the Soviets after attaining their freedom post WWI, even the Poles, despite their differences with the Germans, may well have welcomed the chance to get revenge at a hated neighboring bully, or just simple opportunism.

Of course, without the whole racial purity thing, the Nazis wouldn't have been Nazis, so the point is academic.

The other obvious points have already been mentioned, starting the campaign earlier, not dividing up the army groups in an attempt to grab more objectives than could realistically be managed. Conquering Leningrad instead of just besieging it, thus tying down German forces in the area for years, etc etc.
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If Hitler wants to win, he offers soviet citizens property ownership, half the land is yours, half the land is for Germans. USSR collapses about 45 minutes later.
 
I think most of historical outcomes are much more knife-edge than we usually think. Alexander the Great could have lost a battle. Hitler could have defeated the Soviet Union. No matter what happens, we tend to look back in hindsight and try to convince ourselves why things had to happen in the way they did. We cherrypick the facts that support what happened.

One example of this is how many people are so obsessed about pointing out weaknesses and flaws in German tanks, as if that explains why the Germans lost. We all know Panthers had mechanical problems, that the overlapping roadwheels of the Tiger were difficult to service, and that the Tiger II used a lot of fuel. But what about the Soviet tanks? Did they all just run without a hitch, did they never break down, did they not use a lot of fuel? If the Germans had won, we would all think of course they won when their tanks were so much better, when Stalin had purged the generals, when the army was so untrained, etc. etc. There are so many reasons for why the Soviets inevitably lost. Yet they didn't.
 
Bulletpoint said:
I think most of historical outcomes are much more knife-edge than we usually think. Alexander the Great could have lost a battle. Hitler could have defeated the Soviet Union. No matter what happens, we tend to look back in hindsight and try to convince ourselves why things had to happen in the way they did. We cherrypick the facts that support what happened.

One example of this is how many people are so obsessed about pointing out weaknesses and flaws in German tanks, as if that explains why the Germans lost. We all know Panthers had mechanical problems, that the overlapping roadwheels of the Tiger were difficult to service, and that the Tiger II used a lot of fuel. But what about the Soviet tanks? Did they all just run without a hitch, did they never break down, did they not use a lot of fuel? If the Germans had won, we would all think of course they won when their tanks were so much better, when Stalin had purged the generals, when the army was so untrained, etc. etc. There are so many reasons for why the Soviets inevitably lost. Yet they didn't.
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To quote Comrade Stalin - "Quantity has a quality all its own". It's math, once the blitzkrieg momentum stops, then you have static attritional warfare, which is basically how Hitler fought the remainder of the war in between his limited offensive success in '42 and the loss at Kursk in '43, sheer numbers just overrun you. If Germany would have executed operational finesse as proposed by von Manstein and as executed by Balck at the Chir River battle, the Germans might have inflicted enough losses on the Red Army that they could have salvaged a negotiated end to the war. They might not have won, but they wouldn't have lost either.
 
Adjusted for accuracy. ;)

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Recently I've heard a point (reasonable IMO) that if Moscow surrendered in 1941 the war would become something like China-Japanese war in the Far East, when neither of two can win. US participation made german victory impossible by default, the question was only how many human lives should lose USA and USSR. The difference for the post-war world is that the USA could be the one pre-eminent superpower, with Soviet Union totally ruined.
 
nektoman said:
Recently I've heard a point (reasonable IMO) that if Moscow surrendered in 1941 the war would become something like China-Japanese war in the Far East, when neither of two can win. US participation made german victory impossible by default, the question was only how many human lives should lose USA and USSR. The difference for the post-war world is that the USA could be the one pre-eminent superpower, with Soviet Union totally ruined.
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It is hard / nearly impossible to envision the Germans subjugating the whole of Russia all the way to Siberia. Or even to the Urals. You could imagine the Germans capturing Moscow and the Russians just move back to the Urals, and if the Germans somehow capture the Urals the Russians just move back to Chelyabinsk or Omsk. Either way the Germans remain bogged down in Russia, Germany's industrial and manpower problems remain, and the only real difference is how many years and how many lives before the Soviet flag is raised over the smoldering ruins of Berlin.
 
jobu88 said:
It is hard / nearly impossible to envision the Germans subjugating the whole of Russia all the way to Siberia. Or even to the Urals. You could imagine the Germans capturing Moscow and the Russians just move back to the Urals, and if the Germans somehow capture the Urals the Russians just move back to Chelyabinsk or Omsk. Either way the Germans remain bogged down in Russia, Germany's industrial and manpower problems remain, and the only real difference is how many years and how many lives before the Soviet flag is raised over the smoldering ruins of Berlin.
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The problem for the Russians would have been that the vast majority of their manufacturing, food production, and infrastructure was based in the west of the country - losing all that would have had a catastrophic effect on their ability to prosecute the war. Yes they moved their heavy industries to the Urals when things got dicey and the production delays from that alone cost them huge amounts of manpower, the loss of vital transport and manufacturing links from the fall of Stalingrad and Moscow probably would have been the death knell - but again, only if the Germans had tapped into the manpower being offered to them by Ukraine and other eastern european countries and not doing silly things like diluting their forces.
 
jobu88 said:
It is hard / nearly impossible to envision the Germans subjugating the whole of Russia all the way to Siberia. Or even to the Urals. You could imagine the Germans capturing Moscow and the Russians just move back to the Urals, and if the Germans somehow capture the Urals the Russians just move back to Chelyabinsk or Omsk. Either way the Germans remain bogged down in Russia, Germany's industrial and manpower problems remain, and the only real difference is how many years and how many lives before the Soviet flag is raised over the smoldering ruins of Berlin.
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I think in this scenario it would be an american flag :)
 
1) Germany defeated the Russians in WW I while fighting a 2 front war. The Germans were tactically superior and could not have been impressed by the Russian performance.

2) Stalin saw this and started forced industrialization and collectivization so this could not happen again. His reforms were brutal and immoral, but effective.

3) The Germans coveted more land.

4) Stalin gutted the Red Army officer corps with purges leaving the Soviets vulnerable.

5) Hitler ideologically hated the communists. He wrote in Mein Kampf that they needed to be exterminated.

6) By a combination of the 5 points above.....the Germans have motive and would rather fight SOONER than LATER.

As it turns out, the Russians were far more capable than Hitler realized. But we are looking back at history in hindsight. Hitler was thinking of the Russia that Germany beat in WWI.
 
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