Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
He had had four times as many troops, with the participation of every western European country.
He would have rejected all those deranged ideas that considered slavs as inferiors, and he would have sought the active participation of all anticommunist Russians and the Orthodox Church.
He needed to take Moscow, SP and avoid the transportation of industry to the Urals during the first summer or early autumn.
Cut the Volga at Stalingrad and take the oil field at Baku.
Return confiscated property to peasants and industrials.
On June 22, 1941 Adolf Hitler set into motion a chain of events , so breathtakingly massive in its scope of destruction, so far beyond the realm of human reckoning in its savagery, that it set a completely new standard for the destructive nature of humanity.
On that day, Hitler was quoted as saying, "..and now the world will hold it's breath" Over 3.8 million troops invaded the Soviet Union along a breathtaking span of over 1800 miles, from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Operation Barbarossa was the largest military invasion in recorded history. This titanic struggle involved the waging of war on an unprecedented scale. The combined might and fury of two diametrically opposed peoples committed to each other's destruction.
Millions of soldiers on both sides were slaughtered on countless battlefields, and an estimated 27 million civilians killed outright, starved to death, died of various war related causes. It was more than an invasion of unbelievable proportions. It was an apocalypse.
Operation Barbarossa was fought over the span of a gigantic continental land mass that literally swallowed entire armies in its vastness.
This desperate, titanic struggle ultimately decided the outcome of World War II.
The reasons why Operation Barbarossa failed.
Adolf Hitler made a series of profound mistakes both before the invasion as it was being planned beginning in December 1940 and after it began. The mistakes and missteps were to cost him the war and lead to near annihilation for Germany. I will summarize some of the primary mistakes below.
Mistakes made before the invasion:
*When considering various strategies for the overall invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler decided on attacking over a vast continental front spanning over 1800 miles (2900 km) dividing his 3.8 million man invasion force into three major attack groups:
Army Group North. 29 combat divisions. Staging area: East Prussia. Mission: to attack the northern region of the Soviet Union and to make Leningrad it's strategic objective.
Army Group Center. 49 combat divisions. Staging and launch area : Eastern Poland. The largest of the three groups and the force with the most panzer armor divisions, Army Group Center was to drive towards Moscow, engage and destroy as many of the Red Army forces along the way and take Moscow before the winter. The German generals in the field believed this should be the top priority - the taking of Moscow.
Army Group South. 41 combat divisions. Staging area: Southern Poland and Romania. Strategic direction: the region of the Ukraine, Russia's economic heartland and just north of the Caucasus region where the Baku oil fields pumped much of Russia's oil.
By spreading the mass of over 3.8 million troops over a length of 1800 miles, and by dividing his overall aim into three very disparate strategic goals, and to simultaneously disperse and divide these combat groups into three very different strategic directions, Hitler managed to dilute and obscure the strategic initiative and momentum of this entire invasion force.
*The failure of German intelligence. Admiral Canaris, chief of German military intelligence, failed to obtain vital and pivotal information regarding the actual strategic military, overall military industrial, and political dispositions of the Soviet Union and Hitler, along with the senior German general staff, failed to follow up this supreme blunder of intelligence gathering.
Aside from basic intelligence of the immediate Soviet defensive formations along the Polish border, primarily, aside from pre knowledge of the location of Soviet airfields within German fighter range, and a broad brushstroke idea of the major Soviet army regional districts that were assigned beyond this defensive line, they really had no idea what they were facing in terms of the big strategic picture. None.
What were the estimated enemy defensive force concentrations that could be brought to bear against them after the initial attack began?
What was the actual military strength of the Soviet Union? Just how many divisions did they have the capability of throwing against the Germans? How many potential reserve divisions/armies did they have beyond the first invasion line of penetration? What was the actual real world capability of the Soviet Union to mobilize it's millions of citizens into newly formed armies? How fast could Stalin have them put together, train them, and put them into the field? What potential impact would this have on the invasion?
What was the average Russian like? How did he feel about his country? How did he feel about Stalin? What was the actual Russian peasant like? What was his life like? How did he react to hardship and deprivations? Was he tough? Was he stoic and accepting of his fate? of death? Would he take orders without question? Did he bend to higher authority easily?
How ruthless could Russian leadership be? How ruthless could they be towards their own people? What was the nature of Stalin's purges from 1936 to 1938? How many were executed? imprisoned? tortured? What reaction did this have on the masses? on the military?
What kind of actual fighting effectiveness did the Soviet army have? What was the level of their training? What kinds of equipment and weaponry did they have? How effective was it? How effective were they using their equipment and weapons? Which weapons were obsolete? Which weren't? What kind of new weapons research, design, innovations, and actual new weapon production, especially tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, and aircraft? What was rolling off their assembly lines? How did these new weapons potentially stack up against our own? What was their military communications like? What was their command and control systems like? How effective was it? Could their command and control be manipulated? What kind of senior leadership did the military have? How did they feel about Stalin? Was there any vulnerabilities that could be exploited?
Where was their heavy industry? How much industrial capacity did the Soviet Union have at its disposal? How soon could they mobilize and increase this productive capacity? How was it disposed to conversion to weapons production? Could they easily relocate this industry if it were under threat of our invasion forces? If not, would they hesitate to destroy it? Would they hesitate destroying the surrounding countryside to deprive our forces of food and shelter?
And the questions go on and on. Basic, imperative military intelligence questions that had to be answered before the invasion so that Hitler and the German Wehrmacht could prepare adequately for every contingency. But they didn't pose these questions, let alone pursue the answers - answers which could have adequately prepared the German invasion forces, answers which could have more accurately shaped and guided Hitler's strategic policy and goals for the invasion.
*While he was making the blunder of spreading his forces too thinly across a broad continental invasion front, Hitler also made the mistake of not preparing a well thought out Plan B in case his Plan A was not accomplished in the short time frame he planned - 3-4 months.
After the lightning invasions of blitzkrieg, and the immediate conquests of Poland, France, the low countries, Norway, etc., Hitler stunned the world into numbness and shock and gained complete dominance and control of the senior general high command.
After watching the Soviet military perform badly in their war with the Finns in 1939, Hitler felt only contempt for the Russians and their military ability and he would not budge from this assessment or from his assumption that if he could defeat nations like France and Poland, he could just as easily defeat a country as poorly defended as the Soviet Union. He felt he could break their will to fight and to overwhelm their defenses using his blitzkrieg tactics across this broad front and accomplish several strategic objectives simultaneously across this huge land expanse in the span of just a few short months. And he didn't pause to consider what would happen to his plan or to his men if that plan failed to work out in that brief period of time.
Without that Plan B, Hitler failed to put together a concrete contingency plan in advance of the campaign. Stockpiles of winter rations, of winter clothing, of cold weather lubricants for their engines, their weapons, etc were nearly non existent.
*Hitler failed to adequately assess the actual resolve of the people of the Soviet Union to fight back. He failed to understand the depth of their resiliency in the face of initial defeats and their will to carry on the fight no matter what. He failed to size up the Russians. He underestimated his opponent and shaped his entire strategic plan accordingly, and, by this profound miscalculation, he sealed the fate of tens of millions of human beings.
*Hitler failed to put Germany on a fully mobilized war economy status in order for the German nation to prepare for war, not only against the upcoming Soviets, but against its then present enemy, Great Britain and the anticipated clash with the United States in the near future. And he refused to put Germany in a war economy mode all the way up to the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 when he declared total war. This was a massive misstep on Hitler's part.
By failing to do this, he set up the conditions for industrial armaments production limitations and shortages of raw materials without clear priorities of the nations resources put into these shortages. The consequences of this decision were far reaching and helped decide the course of the war. Without a fully mobilized Germany, adequate numbers of invasion troops could not be mustered. Also, a large strategic reserve,including reserve armor divisions was not created to back up the invasion force and serve as replacements as casualties and equipment destruction increased.
* A failure to anticipate logistical problems, especially if the strategic direction changed.
* A failure to fully address the problem they would encounter trying to adjust the German rail system to the Soviet rail system. The Soviets used a completely different size rail track than the German rail system and this difference brought critical delays as the Germans tried to adequately feed, equip, supply, and maintain their invasion armies.
After the Invasion Began.
*As Operation Barbarossa began, Hitler made a command directive to all soldiers in the field to show no mercy to the both military and civilian combatants/non combatants. This was going to be a different war. By doing so, he threw away the Geneva Convention and all moral restraint and set into motion a chain of events of barbarity and cruelty which turned whole peoples against him and the German Army. He failed to recognize the tremendous military/political asset these newly conquered people could provide.
The peoples of the Ukraine initially embraced the conquering Germans as they swept over the border. The Ukrainians hated Stalin and the cruel purges he conducted against them killing millions of Ukrainians in man made famines the decade before. They wanted to fight Stalin and saw the Germans as their saviors. But as Hitler's directive began to take shape, they changed their attitudes toward the Germans and began to resist. Hitler even refused their proposals to join his invasion forces in order to fight Stalin and the Bolsheviks.
This failure by Hitler to treat these people well and enlist their support in fighting Stalin was a blunder of monumental proportions. The same failure happened in the Baltic states.
* Hitler kept all three strategic directions for all three Army Groups up in the air as to which group to give overall priority and focus to. He switched from one Army Group and focus to the next. And by doing so, he weakened and diluted the overall strategic thrust of the invasion and kept his senior generals of the OKW and the OKH high commands at an increasingly distressed state since they really didn't know what he wanted or where he wanted to put the focus.
*After the Battle of Smolensk on August 5th, 1941, Hitler finally decided to change the overall strategic direction from the initially dominant operation of Army Group Center in its drive to Moscow and switched focus and priority increasingly to Army Group South and its drive through the Ukraine and its resource rich bread basket, along with his eye on the oil fields of the Caucasus.
He then ordered German panzer divisions from AG Center to be diverted in their attack on Moscow and a portion to be sent to AG North in its attempt at encircling Leningrad and a portion to AG South to more effectively attack the Ukraine. This change of direction completely stalled AG Center's drive to Moscow by several crucial weeks and sealed the fate of their operation.
This complete shifting in mid stream altered the future course of events on the Eastern Front. He took out of sync the whole tempo and strategic initiative and momentum of the invasion and by doing so, dramatically increased the chances of failure in the end.
Overall, this is a brief summary of some of the major mistakes Hitler made in his conduct of the first phase of the invasion of the Soviet Union.
attacking the USSR was the beginning of the end invading Russia does not go well for many reasons. Britain and the other still free European countries really couldn't threaten Germany to much so Hitler goes and attacks the one who when in gear can bring about the end of his Reich.
*As Operation Barbarossa began, Hitler made a command directive to all soldiers in the field to show no mercy to the both military and civilian combatants/non combatants. This was going to be a different war. By doing so, he threw away the Geneva Convention and all moral restraint and set into motion a chain of events of barbarity and cruelty which turned whole peoples against him and the German Army. He failed to recognize the tremendous military/political asset these newly conquered people could provide.
He ( Hitler that is) didn't "fail to understand the military/political asset these newly conquered people could provide." He didn't want these people to exist - period; that was the whole idea behind that war - the replacement of original inhabitants of the land. You can only say that the idea itself of eliminating certain civilization/race of people - call it as you wish - was wrong and unattainable.
Quote:
This failure by Hitler to treat these people well and enlist their support in fighting Stalin was a blunder of monumental proportions. The same failure happened in the Baltic states.
As far as I know, it was not "the same failure" in Baltic states, so Balts were fighting both in Soviet Army and in German Army.
"Nazi racial attitudes to the Baltic people differed between Nazi authorities. In practice, racial policies were directed not against the majority of Balts but rather against the Jews. Large numbers of Jews were living in the major cities, notably in Vilnius, Kaunas and Riga"
"Some Latvians and Lithuanian conscripts collaborated actively in the killing of Jews, and the Nazis managed to provoke pogroms locally, especially in Lithuania.[62] Only about ten percent of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Jews survived the war. However, for the majority of Baltic people, German rule was less harsh than Soviet rule had been, and it was less brutal than German occupations elsewhere in eastern Europe"
"The short-term political objectives for Ostland differed from those for the Ukraine, the Caucasus or the Moscow regions. The Baltic lands, which were to be joined together with Belarus (to serve as a spacious hinterland of the coastal areas), would be organised as one Germanizedprotectorate prior to union with Germany itself in the near future. Rosenberg said that these lands had a fundamentally "European" character, resulting from 700 years of history under Swedish, Danish, and German rule, and should therefore provide Germany with "Lebensraum", an opinion shared by Hitler and other leading Nazis. The Belorussians, however, were considered by the scholars of the RMfdbO as "little and weak peasant people" dwelling in "folkish indifference", but also "the most harmless and because of this the least dangerous for us of all the peoples in the Eastern Space" and an ideal object of exploitation."
The Nazi racial attitutde towards the Baltic people may have been because of the time they spent under as stated the rule of what to them were Nordic Aryan types,the germans,swedes and danes. There were a lot of germans living in those countries. I had relatives who were germans who lived in Riga, had been there since the 13th or 14th century,they were my grandmother's kin. Fighting a two front war was stupid.Besides, Hitler obiviously forgot about Napoleon and his little vacation in Russia and the horrible russian winters. I think the whole thing was a mistake.
The reason it failed was the Germans failed to grasp the USSRs economic and military strength, The Soviets understood how to fight winter military campaigns and the USSR sucessful converted the war from Blitzkreig to a war of attrition which destroyed German units and armor. By 1943 it was German retreat.
Another item is Germany failed to build long range heavy bomber needed to attack Soviet arms factories beyond the Urals and river Volga. The Germans needed a plane like the B-29. A working Atomic Bomb would have helped as well. Soviet economic planning had lead to large metalurgical complexes , chemicl plants, highly centralized production of tanks and artillery, avaition works and petroleum refining. So you could detroy selective indutries with as few as a couple atomic attacks. Thus crippling the USSR and its Red Army.
If Germany would have been able to cut off the last ice free harbor of the USSR in Murmansk, they would have stopped the US supplies of weapons and equipment to the entire Russian troops.
But also would have set the stage for later US nuclear bombs on Berlin and the Ruhrgebiet.
If Germany would have been able to cut off the last ice free harbor of the USSR in Murmansk, they would have stopped the US supplies of weapons and equipment to the entire Russian troops.
It was the British who were supplying the USSR pre Dec 1941 not the USA. The Germans were stopped in Dec 1941 at Moscow when the Soviets counterattacked driving the Germans back with 40% of the tanks being British. That was when they lost the war. In 1942 Soviet industry manufactured more arms than the USA.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Operation Barbarossa : A Doomed Misadventure
