Actually Red Armys junior leadership seemed to be better in the early stages of Operation Barbarossa than it had been in Finland (no doubt bolstered by veterens of that conflict). It was at the senior levelm(brigade/regiment division and corps) where the failings were. And the strategic decision to try and defend every bit of territory played into the Germans hands.
Inexperience was something the US Army also suffered from in the NW Europe campaign of '44-45 due to the strange decision to keep most of the battle hardended divisions in Italy (although 3 were eventually transfered to South of France, the 3rd, 36th and 45th). This inexperience cost the US in battle (29 Division making a meal of it at Omaha comes to mind). The best illustration is perhaps the difference in the performance of the divisions who faced the initial German onslaught at the Bulge, they wilted, versus the performance of the battle tested Seventh Army in Nordwind.
I have no dog in this fight, but were those really the only options? Several nations surrendered without their people being annihilated, was the Nazi attitude different towards slavs?
Yes. Stated policy was to execute, enslave, or at least deport slavs from Western Russia. The land would then be claimed by Germans.
AS to why Hitler hated slavs so (they were only slightly better than Jews, in his opinion), I’m not sure if that’s known, other than they weren’t “Aryan” in looks or history.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the time was very much what we would call “culturally diverse”, and also what Hitler potentially perceived as “decadent”. However, the most significant non-German ethnic group in Vienna would have been Hungarian, and Hitler didn’t seem to have any particular grudge against them. I think, as with most things Hitlerian, it all traces back to hatred of the Jews, and the association of Slavs with Jews as “Asiatic outsiders” threatening the German race.
All that said, I’m not sure that the formal depopulation and resettlement plans fantasized by Hitler for Russia were nearly as important to Soviet resistance as the sheer brutality of the actual German occupation. There were sizeable numbers of Soviet citizens of various nationalities who were willing to accept the Germans as their liberators from Russian/Bolshevik rule at first. That soured quickly, and similar treatment of any country’s population indeed would probably have elicited the committed resistance AK84 suggests.
Hitler had a notoriously poor view of the US and its people. The way he (and many other Germans of the day) saw WWI wasn’t that the US’s entry helped secure Germany’s defeat, but instead that Germany was betrayed from within. This betrayal, which was claimed to have been Jews sparking internal unrest, supposedly prompted the armistice. This allowed Germans to believe that they weren’t beaten, but instead were backstabbed by internal foes that would need to be dealt with first.
Yes, yes it was. Or so I read, anyway. They treated us French as more or less equals, decadent and beaten maybe, but without much contempt. Similarly, while I wouldn’t say they treated Norwegians and Finns fairly, they did have a measure of respect for them. The Slavs, however, be they Polish or Russians, were deemed “lesser races” and suffered the most, be it in the POW camps, on the field of battle, or merely the citizenship under occupation. Civilian massacres by Nazis happened everywhere, but nowhere near as often as in Poland and Russia.
Of course, it didn’t help that the Eastern front was so bloody, and that Russian/Polish/Hungarian partisans were probably the most vicious insurgents the Germans faced, but even so, Nazi doctrine deemed them inferiors from the get go.
You need to remember that all that anyone had to go by was WWI. In it the Germans defated the Russian Empire, despite that front not being the one where the majority of its troops were committed, and the Soviet Union was much weaker than the Riussian empire had been (or appeared to be). It had been roughly handled by the Poles in 1920 and the Finns two years earlier. While the Germans had defeated France (the supposed military power in Europe) and the worlds most powerful nation UK had been chased out of Europe; TWICE. The US was at the time a pretty untested commodity, yes it had potential, but in WWI its military impact was little, it was only in July of 1918 that the American troops in France came under there own command at a time when the Allies had already turned the tide and they played a supporting role in the battles thereafter.
The german assessments were reasonable for the time.
Hitler’s long-term view was that war with America, probably allied with Great Britain, was inevitable sooner or later. That was why he judged it necessary to knock out the Soviet Union quickly and start seizing it’s natural resources.
I just want to say that I’m having so much reading this thread! WW2 is, to me, the single most interesting conflict in the history of mankind. There are so many little nooks and crannies involving multiple levels of depths in each that volumes could be written on almost any subject.
Well, he’d been contemplating war with the Soviet Union for years. It was in fact his second great objective: revenge on France, followed by winning lebensraum in the east against the Soviets. So it’s more proper to say that he desired and planned for war with the USSR all along, and viewed war with Britain and the US as unfortunate, f unavoidable, distractions.
They viewed Norwegians and Danes as fellow Aryans and seemed surprised and a bit upset at first that the feeling wasn’t mutual. Nazi leadership even went so far as to encourage good Aryan officers to romance local Norwegian girls, with the intent of making more babies for the Fatherland. This came under the Lebensborn program, for those who want to search for more information.
I’m not sure if they thought of the Finns as Aryans as well but they saw them as equals and allies in the fight against the Slavs and against Communism. As with their neighbors, the Finns didn’t return the sentiment, viewing alliance with Germany as a necessary evil to stop the Soviets. Once the Soviets were gone, the Nazis discovered just what the Finns really thought of them…
