...well, they did really!
Even the British historians are starting to admit the fact that the Russians did close to 80% of the work in terms of fighting AND numbers lost.
The interesting thing is that if Hitler hadn't have listened to Göring when he promised to supply the troops by air (along with many of his other insane decisions), the Germans would have overrrun Moscow and the oilfields in the southeast, and could have then gone on to crush the rest of Russia.
Think about it, it took nearly a year for the d-day landed allied troops to get to the German border (how long did it take the Wehrmacht to take France?), the German troops were massively outnumbered in both troops and tanks, and had no supplies whatsoever, and no air support.
It even took the Russians 3 weeks to secure Berlin when they had 16 million fully equipped troops against 1 million "troops" that comprised of a handful of Wehrmacht, old men, and Hitler Youth kids! The Russian tanks outnumbered the German's by something like 30 to 1.
Even the traditional US "cannon fodder" policy would have failed against a resupplied 3rd Reich (as in sacrificing 3 Sherman tanks to take out 1 tiger).
Hitler wasted millions (I would guess at 80%) of his best troops in Russia, mostly starved and frozen to death.
If Hitler was a little less arrogant he could have done a lot more damage. All he had to do (as regards the Russian campaign) was read Napoleons campaign diaries, he also got bogged down in Russia with mud, snow, and crappy supply lines.
I have a really good documentary which details the problems and errors Hitler made in Russia. I can put it on my server if anyone is interested in downloading it (just ask), it's about 400 megs I think, but extremely interesting.
War always comes down to supply lines, it's always overlooked by history, but without food, fuel, and ammo, any army is doomed to failure.
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