Quote:
Originally Posted by Sea Demon U-48
Interesting point, I think that Barbarossa is the way to go. If Germany conquered Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow they probably would have sent Ivan hiding hiding up in the Urals. Whether or not they would have surrendered at that point seems pretty doughtfull.
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I find German success in Barbarossa almost as difficult to believe as success in Operation Sealion. Barbarossa was based on a faulty assumption. That the Soviet Union would collapse in 6 months if struck hard enough. The Germans attacked on June 22nd. By mid-July it was already obvious that the assumption was incorrect. So in one sense, it is impossible for Barbarossa to succeed. No matter what changes are made to the plan, the Soviet Union will likely not simply collapse in 6 months.
The basic thesis for Barbarossa was that you could destroy the Red Army within 300-400 miles of the frontier and the way east would be open. The Germans thought they could, but their intelligence was faulty. It's greatest error lay in underestimating the Soviet ability to reconstitute shattered units and create new forces from scratch. The Red Army constantly fed in new divisions as fast as the Germans smashed existing ones and this was a principal cause of the German failure in 1941. The Germans could not afford to trade body for body with the Soviet Union. They never imagined that by the time of the German invasion, the Soviet Union had a pool of 14 million men (which Germany could not match) with at least basic military training.
The Germans might have had greater success if they had rescinded the infamous Commissar Order, and the destruction of non-Jewish Slavs. The German occupation policy appeared deliberately intended to alienate the local populace. This was nothing more than a license to loot, pillage and plunder at will, and not have to worry about any consequences later. The German Army leaders should have known or suspected that this type of policy would open a Pandora's Box and make it impossible to get the Soviet Union's alienated populations on their side.