"Was Hitler right to invade Russia in 1941?" Topic

"It is commonly believed that the invasion of Russia was one of Hitler's greatest strategic blunders. Up to that point the German war machine had conquered and subjugated all her enemies (except for Britain), while at the same time Russia had been providing her with much needed resources such as oil and wheat. England's position was deteriorating quickly and the United States was still neutral. The invasion of Russia cut off those precious supplies, and even though the Russians took unprecedented losses the Germans ultimately failed to take Moscow and suffered heavily in the winter that followed. While this event is usually judged by the results, it must be remembered how close the Russians came to collapsing, and had Hitler concentrated on taking Moscow instead of switching the axis of advance during the campaign, the Germans would have likely won the war. The invasion of Russia in 1941 offered Hitler the best chance of winning World War 2.

To understand why Hitler invaded Russia it is necessary to go back to the spring of 1941 and look at the general situation in Europe. After lightning campaigns against his enemies, Hitler controlled Western Europe, Central Europe, Scandinavia and most of Eastern Europe. A further campaign against the Balkans during the spring secured his southern flank. After witnessing its continental allies fall one by one, England was fighting for mere survival, never mind taking the fight to the enemy. This left Germany with only two major threats, the United States and the Soviet Union. The former was neutral and wanted nothing to do with what it saw as a purely European conflict, but the latter was just across the border and fielded the biggest army in the world.

Thus it is obvious that Russia was not only the greatest threat to Nazi Germany, but also the last major obstacle to German domination of Europe. It is likely that the only reason Stalin never attacked Germany was because of the pathetic state of the Red Army at the time. Despite this logic, some historians have alleged that Stalin was bent on attacking Germany during the summer of 1941 and insists this is why so much of the Red Army was massed near the border during the time of the German invasion. Either way, given certain strategic, economic and ideological considerations, there is little doubt that war between the two powers was inevitable.

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Armand

To understand why Hitler invaded Russia it is necessary to go back to the spring of 1941 and look at the general situation in Europe.

Really? It's necessary to go back a lot further than that. This horse has fallen at the first fence.

LOL…yes…well said deephorse!

Yes, the decision to assault the USSR was in fact probably taken no later than about 1923. Hitler had written Mein Kampf by then, so unless he thought this wheeze up only while writing it, he'd already decided by then that there needed to be a military confrontation with the Communist state.

In Germany in November 1932, Nazism got 11 million votes and Communism 6 million. The former's vote share was declining, the latter increasing. That was a very substantial anti-Nazi minority whose hopes of Communist rescue needed to be dashed.

We've done this subject before, but my own guess is that had he done Barbarossa properly, he could indeed have taken Moscow, deposed Stalin, mopped up the rest in the spring, and left a rump Communist state east of the Urals too poor to pose any further threat.

The USA was constructively invincible in 1941 so he absolutely should not have declared war on America. No treaty with Japan obliged him to do so, as it was Japan that had attacked the USA. He gained nothing by being at war with the USA other than a freer hand for the U-boats. If he had focused on defeating Russia by 1942, he wouldn't have needed any such freer hand.

If Germany had gone after USSR with the Poles in 1939-40, they probably win. Those darn Poles would not play ball, however. 1941 was too late, close but no cigar.

Agree with general thread – mistake to take Russia on the way they did; another thought was a Mediterranean strategy would have allowed a southern approach

And given how the Red Army did in the first stages of Barbarossa, a Russian attack in 1941 would have been a gift

Yes, the decision to assault the USSR was in fact probably taken no later than about 1923.

Yes, but the question is about the TIMING, or so I read it. Was the spring/summer of 41 the best time to invade the USSR, especially given that Britain was still hanging on, since it meant diverting most of the Luftwaffe to the Eastern front?

Yes! Invading Russia was perfect!

No better way to lose the war for the general benefit of the world.

Declaring on the US was simply the icing on his Self Defeat Strudel.

TVAG

Thanks!

Armand

Would the capture of Moscow in 1941 have made a tangible difference in the Soviets willingness to keep on fighting? My impression is that it wouldn't. Weather and time were the Russian's allies.

Hitler was an egocentric madman driven by crazy race theories and an inflated ego. He dismissed any general that did not kiss his butt. He was a disaster in the making. And yes, the Russians made him pay to the benefit of us all.

Look at the main transport routes of Russia during that period. Moscow is the central transport hub of the entire USSR. The main transport in the USSR is rail and river. The number of highways in the eastern part of the country was scanty.

As soon as the Germans take Moscow (Leningrad will automatically fall as well), the Soviet army splits into two weakly interacting groups, experiencing severe supply problems (oil is only in the Caucasus, factories remain mainly in the Urals). The Germans intended to stop their advance on the Arkhangelsk – Astrakhan line (to cut the USSR from the White Sea to the Caspian Sea along the river lines).
There is a high likelihood of a Japanese attack on the Soviet Far East and the USSR gets a war on two fronts with very limited resources.
In this case, the possibility of receiving any help from the allies is cut off, especially after the Nazis send their armies to the Caucasus (for oil) – which will surely happen.
In general, there is a high probability that the war in the USSR will proceed approximately the same way as the war in China was going on during this period. It is possible to conclude a separate peace and direct land contact between Germany and Japan.

And this is a map of the population density of the USSR (70s). During the 40s, the eastern regions of the country were even less populated. In 1941, in the occupied territories remained 73 million. Soviet citizens (out of 197 million. The total number of pre-war). That is, a third of the country's population has already been excluded from the country's defensive capabilities.

In 1941, Hitler virtually destroyed the pre-war army of the USSR. But during the period while she was dying in battles, the Soviet leadership managed to create a new army from reservists, managed to evacuate most of the industry to the East. It was these opportunities that were not taken into account by the German command and, ultimately, led to the defeat of Germany.
The Barbarossa plan succeeded. But it was not enough researched plan. The Nazis overestimated themselves and underestimated the USSR.

Well i studied few "what if" theories and in all of them i came to conclusion that at the end history would be the same. Germany couldnt defeat Soviets under any circumstances

I guess that's why you shouldn't get in to a land war in Asia…

Perun Gromovnik, a very controversial statement. It would be more accurate to say that Germany could not win in a protracted war.
But she was only a few steps away from victory in 1941.

Could Germany have done any better by waiting until '42, by which time (presumably) Britain would have been forced to make peace by the U-boat campaign? (And assuming Hitler would refrain from declaring war on the USA, at least until Britain caved in.)

I think Cuprum makes a very valid point. The Russians have made great use of the shear physical size of their country during invasions, but that size would be a double edged sword if the Wehrmacht had either taken Moscow or got close enough to foul up the rail network hub there.

Given that so much of the war revolved around personalities, particularly in the east, there's an open a question as to what would have happened if Stalin's nerve had failed? I've read at least one article suggesting had he fled Moscow, control would have might well have dissolved quite quickly. Don't know enough about the internal politics and structure of Soviet government to comment. Though with the German army not so far away I can't imagine it was entirely stable.

Another question would be if the Soviet Union was on it knees by 1941 would Japan have looked east rather than west across the Pacific? Though I still think even a remnant Soviet military in the east would have given the Japanese army a run for their money based on Khalkhin Gol.

Interesting questions…

Armand

Short Version: Barbarossa in 1941 was a gamble. Given Hitler's ambitions, given where Germany was in the spring of 1941 and given the German belief that the outcome of the war would need to be decided in a one season campaign of annihilation, I don't think Hitler had a better option.

A beat Britain first scenario would have meant putting off attacking the Soviets for a year at least. German intelligence underestimated the military resources Stalin had available, but Germany did know that Soviet military power was growing. Also a delay in attacking would give the Soviets more time to consolidate on the advanced positions they had gained in 1939 and 1940.

In my opinion, the key miscalculation of the Nazis is that they did not take into account the possibility of evacuating the Soviet military industry from the western regions of the USSR to the east, and, no less surprising, the ability to establish effective mass production at a new location in the shortest possible time. Nearly sixteen million Soviet civilians and over 1,500 large factories were moved to areas in the middle or eastern part of the country by the end of 1941. This is actually an unprecedented fact. If this had not happened, the USSR would simply have remained virtually unarmed in the face of the enemy. And no supplies from the allies could radically change the situation, given the resource "capacity" of the Eastern Front.

I don't think Japan had nearly as much to gain by attacking the USSR as it did by attacking British, French and Dutch colonies. (Malayan rubber and Indonesian oil especially.)

I don't think that Hitler necessarily viewed Barbarossa as a gamble when planning it. There is a famous quote attributed to him, which in paraphrase effectively said – "We will kick in the front door and the entire rotten edifice will collapse."

Also -

Without taking anything whatsoever away from the stupendous achievement of moving so much industry on such short notice under such trying conditions, it is worthy of note that huge factory complexes like Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk (as I understand it) had purposely been built in the Ural region during the decade before the war.

B

donlowry wrote – "I don't think Japan had nearly as much to gain by attacking the USSR as it did by attacking British, French and Dutch colonies. (Malayan rubber and Indonesian oil especially.)"

US imposition of total embargoes upon oil and steel exports really left Japan few to no options. Japan had been utterly reliant upon the US for supplies of both commodities. Java was the nearest source of oil. Manchuria (Japanese Manchukuo (sp?)) had large deposits of iron and other industrial metals.

The US was well aware of its powerful hold upon the Japanese industrial economy. During informal pre-war high-level discussions with Great Britain, US representatives of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (i.e., the White House) stated that it could collapse the Japanese economy at any time it desired to do so.

B

For Germany, and indeed for the entire West, Russia did not look like a serious adversary. Suffice it to read the assessments of her ability to wage war immediately after Hitler's attack. From three months to six months – such a period was considered for the possibility of resistance. Especially after the rapid defeat of France.
There were reasons for this. Russia's participation in the First World War,defeat in the Soviet-Polish War of 1920 a difficult campaign with loud defeats against Finland in 1939. Hitler had reason to regard the USSR as a "colossus with feet of clay."

Japan twice tried to resolve issues with the USSR by force (battles at Lake Hassan and battles of Khalkhin Gol). I think that in the event of a significant weakening of the Soviet Far Eastern grouping (and after the defeat near Moscow, the Soviets would have been forced to continue the transfer of troops from the Far East to the European theater of military operations), they would completely try again. The conditions for this were the most favorable, and the desire to annex these territories has existed since the period of the Civil War in Russia, when the Japanese controlled the vast territory of Russia for several years.

You can also add another chronical weakness of the Luftwaffe: NO strategical bombers, they couldn't attack Russia's factories, so their tank /aircraft productions were virtually immune from enemy's attacks.
Naturally Germany didn't had the resources to build a fleet of heavy bombers, too short of aluminium(ironically URSS had been one of the principal fonts of bauxite before 1941.

I can completely see a situation in which, by mid-1942, Germany controls a line Archangel-Astrakhan, but with a fairly porous front line. It would be too long for either side to hold everywhere, so I'd envisage incursions into the German-held area by rump Russian forces and counter-incursions by German forces based on a network of Eurasian Fort Apache-type bases.

In effect, you might have ended up with something like Vietnam, where the border area up to a few hundred miles deep is like Vietnam, the Russian-held area across the river line is Cambodia, and the Russians are the VC being supplied by the USA.

I think Russia would, eventually, have won. As Cuprum notes, they had relocated much production to that area. They'd struggle for oil supplies, but there's unimaginable gas in western Siberia. Russians have always been exceptional practical engineers – think of NASA developing a ballpoint that worked in zero gravity while Russian cosmonauts simply used pencils. I'd bet on their inventing gas-to-liquids technology to provide tank fuel, or indeed inventing tank engines that just ran natively on natural gas.

It would have taken twenty years, like Afghanistan, but they'd have won in the end. Probably there'd have been a huge and completely unexpected tank offensive, or something, that retook Moscow in about 1960.

One less well known item is that, by 1943, German bomber units started being progressively withdrawn from the Eastern Front in order to re-train their pilots for fighter operations, particularly for homeland defense.

B

Probably there'd have been a huge and completely unexpected tank offensive, or something, that retook Moscow in about 1960.

Or a US nuke on Berlin in 1945. Do you really think that Nazi Germany could have survived until 1960?

Do you really think that Nazi Germany could have survived until 1960?

Sure, why not? Communist Russia lasted 70 years. Why couldn't Nazism last half as long? What would end it?

There was no reason for Germany to declare war on the USA, nor vice versa, so there would have been no USA – German war.

There'd have been a Cold War after the defeat of Japan and Russia, probably, but no nukes on Berlin. First, if Russia could steal atom bomb technology from the USA, Germany could have done so too. And second, nuke Germany and you have to replace Germany with something. That would have been the USSR, unless the USA wanted to take over the Wehrmacht's positions along the Archangel – Astrakhan line…

There is no way that Germany could win USSR, if there was any chance they would take it. Red army and partisans won battles even before Soviets started to use evacuated industrial potential.