Comments by "John Burns" (@johnburns4017) on "Did the Russian Winter beat the Germans? And more... TIK Q&A 2" video.
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Reading Prof Adam Tooze in Wages of Destruction, Tooze gives the misgivings of the German generals of the invasion. All were negative.
Page 457:
"Halder noted in his diary: Barbarossa: purpose not clear, We do not hurt the English. Our economic base is not significantly improved."
At the top of page 459 Tooze emphasises that Hitler misinterpreted Backe's comments about the Ukraine grain. A region that had little surplus and had a substantial population increase from WW1.
Page 459: "On 22 January 1941 Thomas had informed his boss, Keitel, that he was planning to submit a report urging caution with regard to the military-economic benefits of the invasion. Now he reversed directions. As it became clear that Hitler was justifying Barbarossa first and foremost as a campaign of economic conquest, Thomas began systematically working towards the Fuehrer."
Thomas was head of the OKW economic planning staff. He modified his reports from negative to positive, presenting the Ukraine as an economic breadbasket. Thomas was an insider and it is assumed he had heard of the misinterpreted Backe's comments to Hitler.
Page 459: "The OKW now claimed that in the first thrust the Wehrmacht would be able to seize control of at least 70% of the Soviet Union's industrial potential."
Page 460: "As late as the Spring of 1941, the Foreign Ministry was still opposing the coming war, preferring to continue the alliance with the Soviet Union against the British Empire." "If the shock of the initial assault does not destroy Stalin's regime, it was evident in February 1941 that the Third Reich would find itself facing a strategic disaster."
Page 452: "the Germans had already conscripted virtually all their prime manpower. By contrast, the Red Army could call up millions of reservists."
Why did Germany invade the USSR in a rushed ill-conceived plan?
Page 431: "the strongest arguments for rushing to conquer the Soviet Union in 1941 were precisely the growing shortage of grain and the need to knock Britain out of the war before it could pose a serious air threat."
"Meanwhile, the rest of the German military-industrialised complex began to gird itself for the aerial confrontation with Britain and America."
Germany rushed to invade the Soviet Union, with an ill-equipped army with no reserves in anticipation of a massive air war with Britain and the USA, hoping they could win the Soviet war within weeks.
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Hitler had considered the Germans had failed in Summer of 1941, way before any snow came....
"Hitler succumbed to doubt even before his generals. As early as the end of July he began to consider the possibility that the Red Army might not be destroyed in 1941. On his instruction, Wehrmacht high command issued a strategic directive openly acknowledging this possibility. Indeed, Hitler's moment of strategic realism appears to have gone further than this. When Goebbels visited the Hauptquartier in Rastenburg on 18 August 1941, he was shocked to find his Fuehrer talking of a negotiated peace with Stalin. For Hitler, furthermore, the possibility of a stalemate in the East had immediate operational implications. Ever since the first staff studies of Barbarossa, Hitler and the Wehrmacht high command had assumed that, if the initial assault failed to destroy the Red Army, strategic economic considerations would take priority. If Germany was to face a long war on two fronts it was essential to secure full control of the grain and raw materials of the Ukraine, as well as complete command of the Baltic, without which Germany could not guarantee its deliveries of iron ore from Scandinavia."
- Wages of Destruction by Prof Adam Tooze.
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