Comments by "Not Today" (@nottoday3817) on "The Myth and Reality of Joseph Stalin’s Order No. 227 “Not a Step Back!”" video.
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@Brandon Parrish
I think you get something wrong about Stalin and the whole 'purge' devastating the army myth.
Why is it a myth? Well, let me ask you something: There were no purges in the French and British armies. However, how did France got captured in a month? How did France and Britain lose Norway? Mind you, France and Britain were both colonial empires with resources far beyond what USSR could have dreamed of and they were in full declared war with Germany. And Germany alone, not Germany and 6 others.
Now that we set the context, I want to adress 2 incorrect points that you made.
1. No, the purges in the Red Army were not as detrimental as one could make them look like. Especially for the Great Patriotic War. (For winter war, there might be something else, but the disaster there was mostly due to political prowess and comissars which were gradually discarded afterwards) On the contrary, many of the geneals that made a difference in the Patriotic War became known after the purges. (like Zhukov reached important positions after smashing the Japanese armies in the East using combined armed tactics and forcing them into a more permanent cease-fire)
2. Neither Stalin, nor the Soviet generals were ignoring the German threat. However, they really did not want it to happen. As TIK pointed out in this video, Operation Barbarossa was done in the perfect moment. Many soviet units were deployed in the Baltics, Poland and Bessarabia(nowadays Rep Moldova) to 'pacify' the new lands. There were also contracts with Germany which were supposed to deliever guns for a new soviet battlecruiser as well as a new cruiser( Lutzow, Cannot remember if it was Deutchland-class- like graff spee- or Hipper-class) USSR was also selling much needed oil to the Germans. Furthermore, and the most important aspect, Germany was still engaged with UK and opening a second front would have been suicidal for Germany(which indeed was). This being said, all rational arguments pointed out that Germany would not attack in 1941. And given the state of the Red Army(in retraining, getting new equipment to replace the Abysmall one etc.) no one wanted to provoke the germans either. However, the German hate for slavs was well known to the Soviets and they were expecting a war with Germany sooner than later.
If there was anything that might have taken the Soviets by surprise, that might have been the huge number of allies Germany had. They had Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and Finland as official allies. They had Croatian and Spanish battalions as well as troops from captured lands, like Czechoslovakia, Austria Netherlands etc.
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Errm, wut are you talking about?
Ok, let's take things easy. Soviet re-education camps were meant for political prisoners and they were used outside of the war.
With prisoners of war, there would be little such things as it would have been impossible to do that logistically. Prisoners of War were sent to Siberia in labour camps. But they had nothing to do with 're-education'.
As for old Gunta, old man's tales should always be taken with a pinch of salt. First of all, he is a german, and good ol TIK channel has a few videos where he rips through german accounts of the war, especially Meinstein. Now for the more particular case, 'machined down thousands of unarmed men' charging at him seems pretty made up. I mean the best tank ace of WW2, cannot say he killed a thousand people, let alone thousands of them. And all unarmed. Of course, being a german those few thousand men could have been mostly civilians or PoWs getting executed. Or it could have been a false memory, a story you heard so many times, over and over again, that you start to believe it's true. The best example I could give is 'If Germany and Napoleon hadn't attacked Russia in Winter...' I heard this countless times. And this is literally, I keep hearing this for years and I lost count of it.
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