Which, as noted, is something the Soviets learned from. Hitler never did.
What this has to do with the war and German treatment of Slavic people they had decided were untermensch I don’t get.
Nonsense, of course they had to massively assault the city. The Battle for Berlin was the Götterdämmerung of Nazism. The cost of taking the city was the major reason Eisenhower wasn’t in favor of trying to take it. Regarding “lack of finesse” I’d point out that the Soviets took the time to encircle the city before reducing it, something that for example the Germans singularly failed to even try to do at Stalingrad.
Actually, it was higher. Regardless, I don’t see how communist crimes excuse Nazi ones.
Yeah, the problem with that is its hard to grant sovereignty to people that you are planning to commit genocide on.
Hmmm…Zhukov came in fourth in our 2010 Greatest Military Leaders Elimination Game ;). Rather too high in my opinion, but still I wouldn’t dismiss him. However wasteful of lives he may have been, he showed a deft hand at times ( Khalkin-Gol )and his record certainly was impressive enough.
Fair enough. By “take over the government” I meant not only the formal arrangements, but the fact that the military establishment was, pre-war, content to sit back and allow “double patriot” - type fanatics assasinate any political figures in the formal government who stood in the way of miliary expansion.
The result being that, during the war, whatever the armed services wanted, they tended to get - the establishment being fully cowed.
Of course that left all the more room for an absurd degree of inter-service rivalry …
It’s a matter of timing. The Nazis would have been smarter (albeit just as evil) if they had waited until the war was done before starting the genocide. They should have proclaimed their enemy was Stalin and the communist regime. Call for an uprising and create anti-Soviet military units to fight the Red Army. Save German troops while encouraging the people in the USSR to kill each other.
Then when the war is won, the Nazis could have used their collaborators to kill off the remnants of the pro-Soviet side. And when that was done, the Nazis could have finally revealed their true colors and turned on their puppet regime and eliminated that.
Keegan’s failure to fulfill an elementary citational obligation reflects to his own disadvantage, not mine. The book I am now reading, a bio of a WW2 US Admiral, is 606 pages long, including 81 pages of notes (but not including bibliography and index).Does Keegan even have any notes? I am wondering if he and his editors decided that his reputation was so exalted that he need not bother with them at all.
I have done lot of googling on this matter in the last few days, and Stalin was the only in-English, clear-cut primary source reference I could find for the flooding issue aside from the chat room contributor mentioned in my last post who cited Guderian. Here is what Stalin said on the radio, in person: (Cite):
Stalin :“The Russian people will always be grateful to the Greeks for delaying the German army long enough for winter to set in, thereby giving us the precious time we needed to prepare. (underline added) We will never forget”
If anyone was in an authoritative position to assign credit it was Stalin, who furthermore would not have been inclined to credit anyone except Soviets for a Soviet victory on Soviet soil unless the credit was blindingly, obviously due. On the other hand, Stalin’s surprising generosity is undercut by information which I will relate a few paragraphs below.
There is a primary source available, dated 1951 under Franz Halder’s written signature, but it is in German. It is available here:
It is behind a paywall, but there is a free 7-day introductory period. Maybe a SDMB member who knows German will be interested enough to see what light is shed on the issue of river flood levels near the western USSR border in May and June 1941.
Ha ha- I was pitted once before. My feelings didn’t get too hurt, but by all means go for it. I will might have a looksie at OP, but I can’t promise to deign reply.
I stand by what I said.
Bullshit. Try telling that to any Germans and Japanese who are old enough to remember their cities being blasted into rubble. Their own homes being blasted into rubble. There were 10s of millions of such people during the war. Also, I doubt there has ever been a commander of any service who did not yearn for a 10-1 unitary (i.e. men, guns, tanks, planes, bows and arrows etc etc) advantage of any kind.
It may be that the Balkan operation delayed Barbarossa until June 22 long before the 4/30 end of the campaign:
Hopefully the last paragraph is not an interpolation by the modern transcriber. If it is in the original it constitutes acceptable though rebuttable (by primary source evidence) that the weather did not cause Barbarossa to be delayed until 6/22 because 6/22 was selected long before the delaying weather transpired.
Whoever your cite is, I don’t see how it can get around this from the 1953 US Army study cited above:
“Another factor considered in calculating the delay was that all. units, in particular the armored and motorized infantry divisions, would have to be refitted after the Balkan campaigns. This rehabilitation, which was estimated to take a minimum of three weeks for the mobile Units, had to be performed within Germany in the vicinity of major repair shops and spare parts depots”.
It is too optimistic to accept that those vital armored and motorized units are all going to refit in the minimum three weeks and then get soundly positioned in only one week with Army Group South, at 500 miles the furthest distant of the three AG from Germany.
UK politics and sentiment have no bearing on how Marita affected Barbarossa.
Keegan asserted this? Someone missed an opportunity to correct what must be a mistake by some Wiki contributor.
This does nothing to support a revisionist position. Rather, When two people who are out to kill each other (Hitler and Stalin) agree on something (Marita delayed Barbarossa by weeks) then there is as much reason as not to believe there might be something to it.
This does nothing to support a revisionist position.
In the interests of transparency, I was able to locate an e-book by Bradley and Buell and it reveals that Wiki is misleading because B&B in fact straddle the fence:
(from link, emphasis added):
Page 96 “…Hitler might have used his influence to reach a peaceful solution (in Greece) and bring about the departure of the British. Had he done so the German army would have been spared a diversion from preparing for the attack on Russia.
Page 101 “…a late thaw caused flooding and wet conditions well into June. (FOOTNOTE#)116".
“Although no single segment of the Balkan campaign caused the Germans to delay Barbarossa, obviously the enitire campaign did force them to wait. On the other hand the Germans could have begun earlier had they thought it important. In the last analysis anticipation of blittzkreig sucess in Russia influenced German thinking more than the Balkan campaign.”
[/quote]
Does anyone notice what is footnoted? Unfortunately I was unable to locate the footnote section on the e-book.
I could not find anything on this via Google.
UK motives have no bearing on how Marita affected Barbarossa.
I could not find anything on this via Google.
The e-book for this Wiki cite does not include discussion of pre-attack weather.
It is reasonable to assume that Keegan is specifically referring to late flooding which occurred possibly as late as early June 1941. If so then he is mistaken to say that the weather determined the launch date because in reality the launch date was set long before late flood weather had actually transpired.
Secondary source information leads me to believe the weather would probably have postponed Barbarossa until after 5/15. How much after 5/15 is still unclear, and it is frustrating to be unable to locate primary source details in English.
I can’t see this realistically being possible; it was a core belief of Nazism going back to its roots. Hitler had been talking about lebensraum from the moment he emerged as the head of the Nazi party. It feels like the “had the Nazis not been Nazis” argument with the twist at the end of them having secretly been Nazis all along and just postponed acting that way until they won. Hitler spelled out very clearly the kind of war he intended on fighting in the East to his generals and issued the Commissar Order before Barbarossa began. The Einsatzgruppen followed right on the heels of the troops on June 22. And as I’ve always said of alternate histories where the Nazis aren’t the Nazis, if you remove the Nazis there is suddenly no reason for Germany to be invading the USSR.
They did these things as best they could, the “crusade against bolshevism” angle was used to good effect in recruiting foreign forces to sign up for the SS in places like the low countries and France, and the Spanish Blue Division was established with the understanding that it would only be employed on the Eastern front against the USSR. It should be noted though that Jewish Bolshevism was one of the Nazis favorite things to rant on about, from Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag on the invasion of the USSR:
Approximately 1 million Soviet POWs served in the German Army as Hiwis or in Osttruppen formations, albeit motivated more by the desire not to be starved to death than by anti-communist zeal.
And if it’s blasphemy, I’ll be joining you in the afterlife. I agree turning south to Kiev was the wisest course of action in 1941.
@colonial: I mean exactly what I said. I have nothing further to say to you outside of the pit, and will neither read nor respond to any of your tripe outside of it. Or possibly even in it if it remains of the same caliber.
I agree that the Nazi regime was going to kill the Slavs at some point. But Hitler was capable of taking short-term detours en route to his long-term goals. He did after all make a temporary alliance with Stalin in 1939 when it suited his current plans. If he had been convinced of the necessity, he could have decided on a program of pretending to be a liberator in 1941 and waiting until 1943 or so before showing his true colors.
I’m not sure Hitler had such complete and total control over all Nazis in Germany as this implies.
In 1934-1936, there were many domestic crimes commited by Nazis against Jews in Germany. These were spur of the moment acts of thuggery, or some minor official abusing his governmental powers. These folks felt they were caring out Hitlers desires, even though they did not have explicit permission from the party leadership to do a specific deed. (I think it was Ian Kershaw who termed this mindset and method as “working towards Hitler”.) The party leadership didn’t care much about protecting the Jews, so they didn’t put a stop to it. The Army didn’t like this lawlessness, and managed to convince Hitler to purge Rohm and the SA (Hitler had other reasons to do this, as well.) But anywho, I believe that the Nazi Party “tent” had a crap ton of radicals pulling this way and that, with the party leadership having to react to events, just as often as it directed it’s members.
By '41, Hitler had a lot more political power (and the Army had less). Even so, the major players (Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, for example) had authority to do plenty of things on their own, without asking permission first. Georing had quite the portfolio, for example (thanks, wiki!): Minister-President of Prussia, President of the Reichstag, Reichsstatthalter of Prussia, Reichsminister of Aviation, and Reichminister of Forestry.
The plain fact is that the Nazis had no overall coherent or sensible plan for dealing with Eastern Europe. As with many other areas of Nazi-dom, they tended to react with ad-hockery and at cross-purposes, with various Nazi sub-groups working on different (and, sometimes, mutually contradictory) goals.
At its most simple, the Nazis had no less than three possible futures in mind for their Eastern conquests:
(1) Create a bunch of client states as ethnic enclaves under German imperial domination of course, but enjoying some degree of autonomy - or at least offer to create such states - and then, organize the ethnic nationalists as allies against the remaining communists. So, for example, the Nazis would arm the Ukranians (who had plenty of reasons to hate the communists), with the promise of a Nazi-ruled “free Ukraine”.
(2) Create what would amount to a “Greater Prussia”, only nore Nazi-like - a military aristocracy of Nazis ruling over vast estates worked by Slavic serfs. Cull the serfs to eliminate the unruly, the disobedient, and the intelligent.
(3) Cleanse the place of Slavs (either through outright murder or “ethnic cleansing” by forced resettlement) and move in free German settlers, making of the place a new, greater Germany.
The problem, of course, is that plan (1) isn’t really practical if your victims get wind of plans (2) or (3); plan (2) requires retaining Slavs while plan (3) requires eliminating Slavs; and plan (3) assumes that the Nazis would be able to produce from somewhere vast numbers of Germans.
A more centralized evil Nazi-type schemer would insitute plan (1) until they won the war, then introduce plan (2), and finally replace the victims altogether gradually with plan (3) as Germans became available. But the Nazis were organizationally incapable of such long-term planning.
Hypotheticals where the Nazis are nice and accomodating to the Ukranians, or other Slav minorities, are pointless. That isn’t what Nazis do. The entire point of invading the USSR was the Hunger Plan and the murder of the Slavic peoples.
Except for all the times the Nazis did do it. They made an alliance with Poland in 1938 in order to threaten Czechoslovakia. They made an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1939 to threaten Poland. They made an alliance with Bulgaria in 1941 to threaten Greece. When they invaded Czechoslovakia, they supported the Slovaks against the Czechs. When they invaded Yugoslavia, they supported the Croats against the Serbs.
Reaching the end of their logistical tether stopped the drive on Moscow; Army Group Center was going to have to take a breather regardless of whether its next mission was to turn south or continue forward. AG Center was already further advanced than AG South due to the tougher opposition facing AG South, and the result was that AG Center was leaving a longer and longer exposed left flank. Had they continued forward towards Moscow after the needed pause, the logistical problem would continue to grow, the length of the exposed left flank would continue to grow and with it the thinning of troop density protecting it, and it’s doubtful that losing Moscow would have dealt a fatal blow to the USSR if it could even be reached. The sheer size of the force encircled and destroyed speaks to the danger it would have posed to AG Center’s flank had it been ignored, from wiki:
Not even the Germans could afford to leave a force that large behind threatening their flank, not even in 1941. Turning south and advancing at an oblique angle also was easier on the logistical situation than continuing directly east.
A good read on the opposite interpretation though, that Moscow could have been taken and the war won is Hitler’s Panzer’s East by R.H.S. Stolfi.
