I’m watching Ken Burns’ “The War” and it got me to wondering about how the Germans were able to stand up for so long against the collective power of England, the Soviet Union (or was it Russia then?), and the United States, not to mention smaller countries such as Norway and Poland. It seems to me that the population of Germany could not have come close to matching the population of the countries in the Allied forces in battle, plus having men to man the already occupied countries and the concentration camps, etc. How were they able to provide manpower for all of the battles they were fighting?
Internal lines of communication, just like Japan.
Interior lines-Germany was much closer to the fighting-France was next door, Poland next door. Russia (in the end of 1941) was a huge distance from Berlin (over 800 miles), but there were direct rail links. And the answer was , no Germany did NOT cover all fronts well-they were constantly shifting units around to plug the holes. Germany was a nation of 80 million, which was fighting the UK, Russia, and the USA-with a combined population of over 400 million. All of which meant that defeat was inevitable-just a matter of time. Hitler knew this-which makes his conduct after 1941 pretty weird-his only chance at conquering Russia was lost in December 1941-had he realized this and made peace, he might have survived.
It wasn’t Germany alone - they were also drawing men from Romania, Bulgaria, etc… plus forcing captured Poles, Czechs and others to fight.
Until 1944 the other fronts were pretty much sideshows. The original Afrika Korps was only two or three divisions (although the number of troops in Tunisia was ramped up significantly after Operation Torch, a classic example of reinforcing failure). The Italian campaign tied up maybe 20 German divisions? The occupation forces weren’t particularly large either. Between August 1941 and August 1944 Germany was fighting ‘one and several little bits’ front war.
The vast majority of the German Army fought and died in the East. And the fact remains they lost.
First, Germany had more people than it than might be supposed. 63 million in Germany, plus another 6 million in Austria, 14 million in Czechoslovakia and 30 million in Poland many of whom were ethnic Germans (maybe 10 million total). The Germans had allies through most of the war. And a lot of other countries provided troops to the Germans, including the Spanish, Dutch, and Norwegians.
Second, as it took over more territories, the men of these occupied countries were used for labor freeing up the Germans to put more soldiers in the field. Slave labor and the like might not have been as productive, but it still counted in the tally. The occupied territories and concentration camps generally added rather than took away from the total combat strength.
Third, the Germans tended to not face all their enemies at once. In '39 they took on the Poles, in '40 the French. By the time they attacked the USSR they had added something like 200 million people in allied and conquered peoples. By the time the US was involved maybe another 50 odd million Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Baltics had been added to the empire. So in sheer manpower the European Axis was roughly equal to the Allies for most of the war. And it was only in mid '44 that the West front was opened back up.
The Germans made use of manpower wherever they could get it. Any manpower drain from occupying countries and concentration camps has to be seen in the light of the offset of millions of slave laborers they provided the Germans. The Germans got a good deal of traction in getting voluntary recruits from occupied or non-belligerent countries by using the angle of their war with the USSR being a crusade against Bolshevism, numerous SS formations were formed from every country they had occupied; France, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, etc as well as neutrals, Spain provided enough volunteers to form an entire division, the 250th Blue Division.
They also made extensive use of former Soviet personnel and prisoners, both as Hiwis (Hilfswillige or “voluntary assistant”, but take the ‘voluntary’ with a huge grain of salt) and osttruppen. It’s a blog, but this seems to cover it quite well.
There’s also a lengthy article on Russian Volunteers in the German Wehrmacht in WWII here.
It should be noted that at a tactical level, neither side really “covered” the entire front. Here is a paper by the US army describing German defensive measures on the eastern front during the first half of the war. They used strongpoints spaced out along the front from which they could fend off the Soviets and sally out for counter attacks.
Also worth noting that they struck first, and kept the initiative for a while. Their enemies had to react to them, so they didn’t have to cover every contingency. Once they lost the advantage of surprise and the initiative, they frankly didn’t cover all fronts effectively, and lost the war.
Here is the answer.
63 million would still be a very large population for a European country today; IIRC it’s about 17 million larger now, although population growth has ceased. Having said that, the U.S. at the time had less than 140 million; certainly more twice Germany’s population but with the drawback of being so far away.
They also were a very effective fighting force, as military historian Max Hastings points out man for man the Germans were the best in the war. Strategically they had problems- they didn’t grasp the importance of the Mediterranean until it was too late, they stationed several hundred thousand troops in Norway in case of an Allied invasion (which Churchill was always pushing for but was talked out of by his military people), there was virtually no co operation with its Japanese partners. Besides being monstrously evil, the Final Solution also hurt the German war effort by eliminating huge numbers of potential soldiers and workers and tying up railroads in transporting them. Hitler proved to be too stubborn in not retreating to strategically sound positions on the eastern front and was slow to react to the normandy landings, thinking they were a feint.
Some nations as the United States had very small militaries to begin with (120,000 in 1940, about the size of Portugal). Others such as France and Russia were large but poorly led and ill equipped- Russia had time and space to recover, France didn’t
They were not able to cover so many fronts. Fighting on so many fronts is what lost the war.
What would have happened had they not attacked the Soviet Union? That has always seemed to me an act of insanity. It probably was, quite literally.
I think that part of the issue is that looking at it like it was steady, hard fighting from 1939-1945 is probably misleading. The Germans were still on the offensive and had the Allies stunned and kind of reeling until sometime around the beginning of 1943, when the tide started to turn, with success in N. Africa, and at Stalingrad.
The Allies didn’t really get rolling on the offensive until mid-1943, with the aftermath of the Battle of Kursk in the East, and the Invasion of Sicily in the West.
However, the nail wasn’t in the coffin until mid-1944, with D-Day in the West and Operation Bagration in the East, both of which put the Germans on a permanent downhill slide that they never recovered from.
In my opinion, the Germans weren’t ever really standing up to the combined might of the Allies- they just caught us off guard for a couple of years, and then once the Allies got their feet, we crushed the Germans utterly.
The German army was bleeding HARD-from the invasion of Russia on. By November 1941 (4 months after the invasion started), they had over 500,000 casualties-over 250,000 dead. They averaged over 60,000 killed per month on the eastern front-Germany could not take such casualties. Even drafting every 18 year old (and extending the draft age to 55) there were simply not enough German males to replace these casualties. Russia was too big and too strong…and while the Russians could lose three men to every German, they could replace those men-Germany could not. Or take weapons-the Germans only produced about 1300 Tiger tanks-whilst the Russians produced almost 90,000 T-34 tanks. So frankly, the defeat of Germany was never in doubt the only question was, how fast.
This is only possible with Hitler out of the equation. Taking land to the east was the entire point of the war for him.
Having said Bababrossa seems like a bad idea, it remains that Hitler almost pulled it off. He stalled in the winter of 1941, but recovered somewhat in 1942 and might have made it happen had he not redirected the thrust towards Moscow south to beef up the effort to take the Caucasus oilfields.
But without getting too bogged down into the “what ifs” there, is it true that Stalin had been so stunned by the initial successes of Barbarossa that he sent an emissary (Pavel Sudpavlov?) to Bulgaria work out some sort of truce or armistice with Hitler? If Stalin had taken the USSR out of the war (even for a short while), certianly things would have turned out very differently.
The other thing to remember is that prior to the invasion of the USSR, Stalin and Hitller were semi-formally allied.
Caveat: that figure for T-34s includes many produced after the war. While I’m having trouble finding definitive figures, “only” 57,000 were produced by the end of 1945 – and note that the war ended in the spring of 1945.
That number is reiterated here, along with the important qualifier:
T-34s were produced into the 1950s, including as late as 1958 in Czechoslovakia. Those additional production figures add to its legend, but were no help in defeating Hitler.
Taking Moscow wasn’t going to take the USSR out of the war. A renewed attack towards Moscow was also the expected German move for the summer '42 offensive rather than a drive towards the Caucasus; Soviet defenses facing Army Group Center were stronger than those facing Army Group South in summer '42. That Germany was only able to support an offensive on one sector of the front in summer '42 is telling of how badly both Barbarossa and the Soviet winter counteroffensive had bleed them. Army Groups North and Center sat on the defensive in 1942.
Not really. There was no alliance, there was only a non-aggression pact which Hitler had no intention of honoring and Stalin was using for breathing space to prepare for the eventual war.