7 Comments

One possibility is the Germans taking the oilfields at Baku in Azerbaijan. Either capturing or destroying them would have been a double knockout blow to USSR and the British resupply. The USSR would have lost its supply of oil and the British would have lost their way into Soviet territory. That area also had an Iranian railway that the allies used to send supplies to the Soviets. By sea the u-boats were savaging allied convoys heading for Murmansk.

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One other factor made German victory unlikely.

The Russians were able to endure hardship that no western European was willing to endure.

Compare how the Russians fought (and suffered) at Leningrad, Stalingrad and Sevastopol.

No German military force (or German city) put up a similar defense.

Compare the battles of Berlin or Konigsberg. Russians would have fought far harder than did the defenders of those two cities.

The Nazis really did not understand total war (in spite of their willingness to inflict horrendous suffering on others).

Stalin's regime was willing to do anything to survive.

And they had the Russian people (mostly) behind them.

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Yes, but that was because the Russian people realized what the Germans had in mind for them and decided that if they had to be oppressed, terrorized and murdered, they’d rather keep it all in the family.

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Goebbels certainly tried to instill in Germans the same fear of the Russians that the Russians felt for Germans (eg Nemmersdorf ).

But even knowing what was coming, Germans fled or surrendered.

Don't want to argue degrees; that war was terrible.

Interesting aside.

I believe that the Russians remember the German horrors more than the Germans remember Berlin.

My German relatives (other than my mother who is 93), regard the Russians with some equanimity.

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The Great Patriotic War for the Motherland is Russia’s epic myth. V. Putin has certainly exploited it. And now that the generations that experienced it have largely passed away, it has only gained in mythic prominence. The attitude of Russians who actually had to fight that war would, I believe, have been more equivocal.

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I’ve wondered what would have happened if Hitler had turned on Japan and decisively backed the US after Pearl Harbor. The German sympathizers in the US would have provided a serious lobby at least for nonintervention. Likewise, Ukraine and the Caucasus were ripe for liberation, maybe large sections of Belorussia and Russia too. But as you note, this would have all required Hitler and the Nazis to not be Hitler and the Nazis. And not just philosophically, but in their general contempt for reality. I can’t see any military strategy that could have overcome these weaknesses.

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That’s my conclusion also. If you wargame the Eastern Front, you can come up with a German victory. But wargaming disregards ideology. And the Nazi-Soviet War was an ideological conflict.

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