The key word there regarding the number is allegedly, while he can make the point that he is not an apologist, the sources he is relying to are coming from the ones that depended on the nazi propaganda of the day.
What it is clear to me is that when one says that “one million fought for Hitler”, it would seem to me that it should refer to people who actually took arms; as it is, the latest sites show that they are actually referring to support like transportation. That is harder to put on the column of “being in favor of Hitler” as it was more likely that many were forced to it. As the abuses of the Nazis (Hitler and henchmen thought that the population should become serfs to the Germans) became more apparent as time went on, most of those soldiers and support people became more unreliable to the Germans.
In the end, IIRC less than 100,000 soldiers of the Russian Liberation Army and others were sent to the western front to avoid contact with the population, it was needed to prevent soldiers from learning from the locals what the nazis were really doing to most of the population and social order.
The Germans have a word, “totsiegen.” It means roughly, “to win oneself to death.” That is what the German’s did with Barbarossa.
During the war Albert Spheer, who was one of the few who could say this to Hitler and live, said, “We must avoid winning every battle but the last one.” Hitler listened, but did not heed.
Invading the largest country in the world without conquering or signing a peace settlement with Great Britain was foolish. Declaring war on the United States after failing to take Moscow was catastrophic.
The Germans did lose the Battle of Britain. The British were destroying their war planes faster than they could build them and train aviators. After the Germans lost the air war they should - I don’t mean morally, but for their own good - have accepted a low level conflict with Great Britain, while continuing to ask for peace. Eventually the British would have voted Winston Churchill out of office, and signed a peace settlement.
By contrast consider what the Israelis did after the sixth day of their Six Day War in 1967. They probably could have occupied Cairo and Damascus, but they knew the occupation would have exhausted them, so they accepted a cease fire called by the United Nations.
I’ve never used the phrase “fought for Hitler,” Qin Shi Huangdi has brought up the million figure many a time in many a thread and implied or stated that they were motivated to do so by anti-Stalin or anti-communist reasons and referred to them as fighting for Hitler. Most of these million were former POWs, and were motivated by the desire to not starve to death as the Germans let 3.3 million of their compatriots in captivity do. The question of what percent served in non-combat vs. combat arms is to my mind not terribly meaningful; for example, one would hardly claim the soldiers who served in transportation companies, military police, line-of-communications troops and such in the US Army in WW2 weren’t soldiers or fighting for the US. At any rate, Ost battalions, who were not part of Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army, totaled a good deal more than 100,000. This cite says 176 battalions of 320,000 troops by mid 1943; there’s a roll here “List of German Ost Troops 25 March 1943” from the National Archives, Records of Headquarters, German Army High Command.
The Soviet Union had the world’s largest armed forces arrayed along its border with the Nazi empire, and they weren’t there to take in the sights. It’s clear that the USSR was in a strategic sense NOT surprised that the Nazis would attack; most of their armed forces was organized around that very assumption.
Germany’s initial success was due in large part to simply the fact that their army was tactically and operationally, a much better army. They deployed and used their assets wth more skill than the Soviets did.
Now, I though the context would show that we got here thanks to what Qin Shi Huangdi had said, I was still replying to his number and the most likely reason it could be reached, by adding the number of the support people to the number of actual soldiers.
One thing should also be noticed, thanks to the distrust of Hitler and his high command of the Russian defector soldiers, they usually had mostly support duties or the worst assignments.
The point I want to get to here is that the early mistake of Hitler of not using the show of support of the population that was there mostly on the non Russian territories of the USSR and at the beginning, was made worse because the Nazis were following the original plan, Russia was going to be part of the Lebensraum, anyone that was not a German was going to be pushed away or worse eventually, no wonder that by the time the war was turning bad for Germany most of the volunteer armies had the worse cases of defections or morale problems.
Eh. IMHO Germany’s initial success was at least as much due to two other factors:
[ul][li]Local “surprise.” Stalin’s commissars wouldn’t let local commanders take any action to get ready for the obviously-coming attack. Perhaps the easiest-to-understand examples of which are not permitting quick retreats to cause the weight of the attacks to fall on empty positions, and not allowing a last-minute pre-emptive bombardment (see Kursk, where the Soviets pounded German positions with massive artillery one hour before the supposedly-secret jump-off time of the German attack).[/li]
[li]Most of all, a poor defensive posture. Stalin had insisted on holding every inch of the territory seized from Poland, and the Soviet troops were deployed along the meandering frontier in a continuous line (the continuous line theory of defense stemmed from WWI). This meant the troops were spread much thinner to cover the frontier, were exposed far forward where they would be far from safety if the Germans penetrated the line and threatened to cut them off, and worst of all, ensured that the Germans would have complete local superiority at the schwerpunkt, the focal point of the attack.[/ul][/li]
He who defends everything defends nothing. It is an ironclad law of war. The attacker can (and will) mass his entire force opposite one point in the line; on a long line like the Soviet/Polish frontier, the line MUST be thinner and the offensive mass will overpower it.
The solution military planners came up with is to have tough local strongpoints within mutually-supporting distances (“hedgehogs”) and strong mobile reserves to plug whichever gaps the enemy tries to move through AND (and this is the key part) separately, to threaten to cut off the advancing column itself by hitting it in the flank with additional mobile forces.
Operating under a continuous-front strategy, the Soviets wouldn’t even try this. But even if they’d wanted to, poorly mobile and indifferently-led due to the purges, trapped far forward with insignificant reserves, the Soviet front-line troops had no chance of thwarting the German penetrations. Vast numbers of them would indeed be captured in the great encirclement battles that followed.
Russia’s War by Richard Overy : P.128 in my (Puffin) edition: “In total an estimated one million Russian soldiers ended up fighting against their country. Many did so out of desperation , as the only alternative to dying in the prisoner of war camps, or being sent to the Reich as forced labourers…This was hardly voluntary collaboration in any meaningful sense of the term…”