The Great Patriotic War: 1939-1943

Yes, it is for educational use. Looking back, you two are even clamoring for me to provide names and pages and yet I post something that is literally straight from the book, so now your tactic is to claim copyright infringement. You're more interested in getting me banned than having a "debate," which is evidenced from your behavior throughout this thread.

Yes, my intention is to educate. I am explicitly writing using research from cited works to give a better understanding of the German-Soviet war and to assault popular misconceptions about that war.

I welcome debate as long as it is in good faith and respectful set out by the guidelines I posted. I am only ignoring you two because you both repeatedly violated the guidelines. You only came into this thread after posted something attacking the "Clean Wehrmacht," not asking questions but with serious and offensive accusations and claims that I am not obligated to dignify. Believe it or not, I do not want to engage with people who accuse me of (a) being an apologist for Stalin or the USSR or (b) deny the well-documented fact that the Germans fought a "war of extermination" against the Slavic Soviets.

Back to the ignore list you go. Life is too short for people like you who have nothing better to do than post low-effort garbage in a thread full of actual content that it takes me time to research and write. Bye!

 

No. You used quote marks every paragraph. That implies that the first paragraph is a quote the second is your work the third a quote and so on. You also used single quote very strangely, for instance I see 3 in the first paragraph or reply 72. Note that I'm not an academic and don't claim to be. I'll put wrong word or letters down occasionally most of the time it doesn't interfere with understanding which is the case here. Your use of quotes on the other hand is extremely confusing. A better way actually would have been to enclose the word quote in square brackets to start the quote and enclose /quote in square brackets to end it. Makes if very clear that way. The fact that I used "your" rather than "you're" has no logical connection to my ability to understand copyright law but that doesn't matter since I gave you the sites were you can check it out yourself and see. The first site is quite easy to use you just have to answer a half dozen or so question yes or no and it will tell you.

Again one would think for an academic getting names properly would matter but you still haven't gotten mine right and I notices at least one that was off in your list of "questionable" authors. The fact that you don't want to engage in a reasoned discussion on a discussion board and get upset at some very mild criticism make me also wonder what sort of institution you are at. That certainly not consistent with any of the educational institutions I'm familiar with.

 

No, you didn't. You still haven't. So you fail punctuation too. As LWD points out, each of your paragraphs starts with an opening quotation mark, but each paragraph fails to close with one, until the final paragraph in the third post. Which is highly peculiar for someone claiming to be a 35-year old academic.

 

Research? You shouldn't make me laugh so much. You haven't done any research, provided no original thought, no insights, and no introspection. All you have done is copy-paste large swathes of unwanted text (texts, by the way, that I very much doubt if you have adequately read, much less understood), and when people try to engage you, you dismiss them out of hand. Remember it was you that first brought up banning people...

 

Not in the context of copyright law. Look at the references.

We asked you to support your arguments with sources. This last set of post were simply copying and pasting someone else's work. It is interesting and worth discussing but you are interested in discussing it.

Nope. We can't get you banned by the way. You can get yourself banned. Your name calling and copyright violations may even do so. The moderators are pretty good about people who figure out they are doing something wrong and fix it though so you still have a reasonable chance to hang around here for a while.

In the general sense of educate that may well be your intent. However if you look at the two links I posted about copyright law you will see educational use has a clearly and narrowly defined meaning in that context.

After you had violated them yourself. In any case posting guidelines are defined by Otto and interpreted by him and the moderators.

Look around the board a bit, check out some of the threads on that topic and you will see that neither of are proponents of the "clean Wehrmacht" Indeed there are a couple of threads that going some detail about war crimes and crimes against humanity enacted by the Heer (The Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine come out looking pretty clean although they two committed such crimes and they are documented on threads here).

Really? Care to produce some? Like I said the quote function works quite well. Perhaps we have different definions of offensive I certainly don't consider myself an apologist for Nazi Germany and consider that offensive. Doesn't stop me from participating a debate though. I'd rather prove my opponents wrong than grant them a victory by default.

Well some of your comments certainly make the former a possibility and neither of us has denied the latter.

You are really something ... just not sure what.

 

Those guidelines you added via blatant vandalism of your own previous post, after the thread had moved on beyond that page? Those Guidelines? Requiring some strange adherence to obey your lordship in all matters? You whom are too old to quote properly?

 

You need to go back to kindergarten Slim...Just because you put quotation marks around the quote and cite the author and work is no protection. Fair use is either fair use or it is not, it does not matter if you cite your source.

If you are so familiar with US Law, then you would know that a word limit or "what I posted was several pages from a single chapter, but not the entire chapter." is irrelevant.

Well, let's see...
purposes of criticism - That's right out, since you have posted only copied material...Which also puts they Kibosh on purposes of comment - since, you refuse to defend any quotes you post.

purposes of news reporting - Gone..None of this is news.

Purposes of education - Last I looked this was not a classroom, and given the nature and quality of your posts, I highly doubt that you are an educator. Nix this one too.

Purposes of scholarship or research - Nothing scholarly so far, and given the intolerance for discussion and ignoring those who question you...Bye bye research.

Kinda only leaves Profit...Continuously promoting his weblog, and I suspect he is that Youtube clown that who's videos he like to link to. Anyone serious on the subject and author would...You know...Link to videos about the subject and author.


He certainly would not link to videos of a Youtube clown...Unless he was said Youtube clown.

 

And herein lies the crux of the matter for me. After 8 years on this message board as a rather active member, I do not feel that I (nor you) should have to put up with this kind of lackadaisical accusation by some wet-behind-the-ears wannabe academic with a yearning for a soapbox, and no real desire to engage with members (as demonstrated in this and other threads started by him, and his lack of participation beyond those threads he himself starts). I found the accusation offensive in the extreme.

 

You are talking about two different things: properly citing work and copyright law. Properly citing work is done by properly putting quotation marks around cited work (to ensure you are not claiming it is your own, which I have done), listing the author and work, and providing page numbers, which I have done.

"Fair use" law is indeed something I am familiar with because in higher ed we often use excerpts from books, articles, newspaper articles, and so on. I am an educator, and if a mod wants to see my university profile or me to provide my university e-mail address, we can go through all that. The point is I know what constitutes educational "fair use," and even though this is not a classroom, my stated intention here has to been chronicle the Eastern Front using the work of historians and to attack popular misconceptions of the German-Soviet war. Ergo, educational.

Untrue. "Amount" is one of the criteria used in determining fair use. If you copied and pasted an entire book, it would be hard to justify that as "fair use." However, if you only copy those pages relevant to the subject (in my case, Waffen-SS revisionism in Western pop culture) then you avoid the problem.

Treating me in bad faith, insults... Well, WordPress is free and Tumblr is free, so I'm not making a profit off any of this. This is all about a labor of love, because I am so interested in the Eastern Front, which I would think people on a WWII discussion forums would understand.

It's funny because that Jonathan House YouTube video you posted is the exact same lecture I posted on the second page of this thread, before the TIK video that cites Glantz and House. I would not cite TIK's videos if they themselves were not based on the work of Glantz and House (who he cites repeatedly). I am not TIK, and by your own logic, if I had a YouTube account to shill, wouldn't that also be in my sig?

 

Sorry Slim...Every student has a Uni email, I had one back in the early 90s.

Sorry again, Slim...But, you are not educating anyone, you are intolerant of criticism, and are unwilling to discuss the subject matter with anyone critical of your line of thinking...Oh, Snap! You are the perfect teacher!

I've read all the responses here, and you have given me no reason to treat you in good faith. You have insulted and ignored two well-respected members of this board who were critical of your work and ideas. That is acts of a child not an adult.

Has nothing to do with them being free, Slim. Google making money with wordpress, making money with Tumblr, or making money with Youtube.

Note the word I have highlighted...Discussion. Discussion, Slim, that is what we are here for. Not word diarrhea quote spamming.

Are you incapable of citing the material yourself? And, how many times do you need to quote what is essentially the same material?

 

Hence why I mentioned my university profile which states that I am a PhD student. The email could be used to verify that I am the person who I say I am.

Incorrect, I am more than willing to engage with people who treat me in good faith and want to have a serious and civil discussion. But I don't have time for people who start from a place of bad faith and assume I have ulterior motives because I say things you don't agree with. Go back and look at IWD's and green slime's behavior and see if any reasonable person would want to engage with how they acted. Even though I have put them on ignore they continue to post in this thread just to provoke a reaction.

Being an adult doesn't mean putting up with abuse, which is what they hurled at me from the jump, accusing me of diminishing Soviet atrocities, having a rose-tinted image of the Soviet Union and Red Army, etc. They did not come in asking respectfully or kindly for clarifications. Their attitude was hostile and rather than engage in a long flame war with them, I put them on ignore. Having a long, pointless argument with lots more insults would be the childish thing, whereas ignoring them and getting on with my day was the mature thing.

OK, but Google didn't post what I posted here on the WWII forums. Of the three sites you mentioned, only YouTube allows users to monetize their content, and I don't have a YouTube account.

Again, I am here for discussion if that discussion is done respectfully and kindly without assuming bad faith on my part. From the beginning, IWD, Green Slime and now you have jumped into this thread by attacking me, insulting me, and accusing me of having an ulterior motive. You'll notice that I was getting alone fine with JJ and Kal before the three of you showed up.

I do list my sources in every post. It's a matter of the reader picking up the book, using the index to find the associated pages, and reading it for themselves if they want to. If people want to ask me respectfully for a page number, I will provide it, but so far that hasn't happened yet.

I list my sources according to what I am posting about, so if I cite Glantz and House about Leningrad and then again talking about the Battle for Moscow, I am sourcing my material with each new post I write, which is what academics are trained to do.

 

Also, as to why I generally hate line-by-line posts (I'm making an exception now) and Internet arguments:

https://news.avclub.com/why-you-cannot-win-an-argument-on-the-internet-accordi-1798255937

Arguing Is Pointless

I'm fine with discussion that comes from a good place but if you come in here assuming bad faith on my part and attacking me, no thanks.

 

Seriously???? You really should have checked out some of the threads here first. People here are actually pretty good about figuring out well reasoned fact based debates. Sometimes there are core beliefs at stake but most of the discussion here end up with it pretty clear who won and who lost. Although I probably shouldn't state it that way. One of the biggest wins as far as I'm concerned is when someone proves something I thought was true to be wrong. That's happened a fair number of times here and I've returned the favor. My experience is that the people who shy away from debates are those that don't have a good grasp of the material or logic. Ah well...So far you are doing a very good job of convincing me ... that your a lost cause.

 

Except you immediately assumed bad faith on two long time members of this board...

“The aim of this thread is to debunk both pro-USSR and pro-German myths that surround the Eastern Front, in order to give Western audiences access to the more objective truth about this very important theater of WWII.”​

-Comrade General in ‘Myths of the Eastern Front” https://www.ww2f.com/threads/myths-of-the-eastern-front.55079/




Back to my original foray on this thread:

Kai-Petri commented: “In the Baltic countries the local people also started heavy resistance which Helped the Germans attacking and continue fast pace towards Leningrad.”

Non-biased Comrade General then states:

“I don't know about Baltic resistance but there was deep collaboration with the Nazis throughout the Baltic countries. All of them to varying degrees set up security branches responsible for rounding up and killing Jews and Roma. A Latvian unit, the Sonderkommando Arajs, was particularly notorious for killing around 26,000 Jews.”​

Insinuating there wasn’t any Baltic resistance (he, a self-proclaimed authority, doesn’t know of any resistance), but he does know of the “deep collaboration” with the Nazis throughout the Baltic countries.” You offered no explanation as to why this would be so. Nor any references.

When you claim to be unbiased, yet in your very first post select a source that describes the Red Army purges in a manner belittling or minimizing the description of their effects (the post only mentions by name those that survive, and the numbers of people that are reinstated); this completely ignores the tragedy, the human aspect. Later you use this as a demonstration of your unbiased approach Nazi Germany vs Soviet Stalinism.

But wait:
Post 10 in the thread talks dismissively about Finnish war crimes, but you have not made any utterances, not a single mention of Soviet aggression at all against the Baltic states. Not a single whimper of the intimidation in 1939, nor even the take overs in 1940... nor the repression over the next 12 months. And this is you being an academic, all fair and balanced?!?

So quick to accuse Finland:

"Finland was especially rebuked during WWII for the inhumane conditions faced by Soviet POWs and how many died."​

Comrade General makes no mention of the fact that Finland made serious corrective measures prior to the "rebuke," so when it actually became an international issue, it was no longer an issue…

Reading your description of the Winter War, it appears that the blame for the war should be equally portioned out to both parties, alluding to "a border dispute" and yet you completely fail to mention the false flag operation by the USSR.

Comrade General also expounds upon the Battle of Smolensk. He concludes the post with a bibliography of three books by Glantz. It is not certain if the referred texts are paraphrased, or quoted at all. Only numbers mentioned in this post are Soviet successes: “20,000 troops escape eastward,” and “Germans lost 31,853 casualties.” No other numbers stated to put these in context, not even the size of the forces involved. All balanced and reasonable, surely? Stellar work by an academic. Or not.

A massive wall post debunks the long debunked-Myth of a clean Wehrmacht. Apparently, this is supposed to be news to us. Much ado is made of German “Jewish Bolshevik” propaganda. Hasn’t yet discussed any Soviet propaganda of the same period. They probably didn’t have any… Probably. Without references.

Another massive post goes on to discuss the commissar order at length, HIAG, and contemporary video games. Bibliography posted, but it is not clear which author is responsible for which original research, or if it is the poster’s own research, or if he paraphrasing, or not.

Then suddenly, I’m posting “whataboutism,” because I should’ve commented earlier in the thread....

A PhD-student?

 

Any one, singular oversight, would be easily forgivable. That is, except when taken in context; the deliberate omission of unfavourable information, the way certain information is highlighted, repeatedly only admitting what must be admitted; these patterns are easily recognisable, and there really can be only one conclusion to reach.

But even this would not preclude discussion. But to accuse, to attempt to silence, to threaten, to grandstand, and cajole? Seriously? The audacity, the arrogance, displayed by Comrade General is mind-boggling.

 

One also wonders how someone who isn't willing to defend their position on a topic expects to get a phd. I guess picking a position for ones dissertation that is known to agree with those of the board might work. Not at a good school but who knows where he's going to school (giving him the benefit of the doubt). Accusing the professors of not being fair when they ask questions and bring up points doesn't sound to me like it will work.

 

First Battle of Kiev: September 1941

From the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa, there existed a lack of clarity over whether Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, or the Ukraine, a key agricultural and industrial center, should be of a higher priority. General Franz Halder, chief of the Army General Staff and Barbarossa’s head planner, argued that Moscow should be the more important objective, as he believed the Soviets would commit their remaining reserves into a showdown over Moscow, thus giving an opportunity for the Germans to win the decisive victory their “lightning war” needed to bring the Soviet campaign to a quick end. Hitler, however, claimed that the Soviet Union could not possibly hope to fight a war of attrition without Ukraine’s economic resources; once deprived of those, Stalin would have no choice but to surrender. Fedor von Bock and Gerd von Rundstedt, the field marshals commanding Army Groups Center and South respectively, agreed with Halder. The Fuhrer, however, was supreme in all of Germany; he could not be overruled. Working with General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff for the Wehrmacht high command, Halder even sought to deceive Hitler by feeding him reports exaggerating the Soviet forces near Moscow while minimizing enemy forces elsewhere. Unfortunately for the generals, Hitler interpreted this to mean that other areas were ripe for the taking, and he considered to regard Moscow as a tertiary target.

On August 22, Halder took one last gamble in the hopes of changing Hitler’s mind. He invited Heinz Guderian, the brash and outspoken commander of Second Panzer Group, to attend a meeting attended by Hitler and several senior Wehrmacht officers. Hitler was considering splitting up Guderian’s panzer group, which was attached to Army Group Center, and sending it south to help finish off Soviet forces in the Ukraine. Guderian protested, but once it was apparent Hitler would not budge, he solicited Hitler’s permission not to split up his panzer group, but to send all of it south. Hitler agreed to this, and upon hearing the news, Halder felt certain that Hitler had bribed Guderian (not an uncommon practice during the Third Reich). Halder asked Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, then the supreme commander of the German army, to resign with him in protest. Brauchitsch refused, and unwilling to take the jump alone, Halder resigned himself to the reality that taking Moscow would have to wait.

Even if Halder had gotten his way, it is doubtful capturing Moscow would have made a significant difference for the Germans. Firstly, the logistical nightmare predicted before Operation Barbarossa had come to reality, and Army Group Center barely had the supplies required to hold on to what territory it had, much less to make a successful push on Moscow. Despite having superior equipment and training than the Soviets, the Germans could not fight without sufficient munitions. Secondly, in poor supply and with an exposed southern flank, there are no assurances that the Germans would have overcome the heavy defenses the Soviets erected around Moscow. Also, comparatively, the Soviets were well-supplied thanks to railroad connections in neighboring Gorky (modern-day Nizhny Novgorod). The best the Germans could have hoped for would be to capture Joseph Stalin himself in the unlikely event that he did not evacuate before the city fell, and even then, the capture or death of the Soviet dictator would not guarantee a political disintegration. While Stalin had his cult of personality, he was not considered an infallible, Heaven-sent “messiah” in the same way Hitler was in Germany. In his absence, any of his ambitious inner circle members – security chief Lavrentiy Beria, foreign secretary Vyacheslav Molotov, or eventual successor Nikita Khrushchev – could have won in a power struggle to safeguard the continued existence of the USSR.

Speaking of Khrushchev, he served as the political commissar on the Southwestern Front, commanded by Stalin’s friend and ally Marshal Semyon Budyonny, a Civil War veteran and cavalry commander. Stalin ordered Budyonny to defend Kiev to the last and provided him with around 1.5 million men (approximately half of the strength of the entire Red Army in Europe). Although fully loyal to Stalin, Budyonny was not equal to the task of stopping the German advance. In late August, as First Panzer Group under General Ewald von Kleist attacked from the south, Guderian’s Second Panzer Group swooped down from the north toward Kiev. Budyonny refused to retreat despite the imminent encirclement of Kiev, and the requirement that any major decisions receive Stalin’s permission further slowed down an already inadequate response. Even if Budyonny had acknowledged that the position was hopeless, however, Stalin was deeply dedicated to preventing Kiev and the Ukrainian region from falling into German hands.

In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Stalin had done a U-turn, dropping the more moderate market-oriented New Economic Policy (NEP) previously adopted by the Soviet Union, and instead embarking on a program of rapid industrialization and forced collectivization. These policies, coupled with severe drought, led to the 1932-33 Soviet famine that led to the death of around seven million people, mostly in the Ukraine. (Several countries, including the Ukraine, consider the famine a deliberate act of genocide meant to crush Ukrainian nationalism, although there is no consensus among historians and this remains a subject of academic debate.) Given long-standing resentment within Ukraine toward the yoke of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, Stalin at the very least no doubt anticipated that the Germans winning the “hearts and minds” of the Ukrainians and turning them against the Soviet regime would require no great effort. Fortunately for Stalin, the harsh occupation of the Germans and their genocidal policies ensured any enthusiasm by Ukrainian nationalists was short-lived. Nazi officials initially embraced the creation of an independent Ukrainian state by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), but this was a ploy; after using the OUN to massacre ethnic Poles in west Ukraine, many OUN leaders were detained and killed.

On September 11, armored spearheads from Kleist’s First Panzer Group linked up with Guderian’s Second Panzer Group at Lubny, around 120 miles east of Kiev. They had created a pocket 120 miles deep and 300 miles long with five Soviet armies trapped within – roughly the size of Germany itself. Stalin replaced Budyonny with the more capable Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, but still did not permit any retreats until the evening of September 17 – far too late for a neat evacuation. Nevertheless, the time taken to complete the massive encirclement combined with tenacious, desperate Soviet resistance, some Soviet forces did escape. Budyonny, Timoshenko, and Khrushchev all made it out. General Mikhail Kirponos, however, who had shown uncharacteristic initiative for a Soviet commander early during Operation Barbarossa, was trapped and killed in action defending Kiev on September 20. Although German troops entered the city on September 19, it was not until September 25 when fighting finally ended.



The first Battle of Kiev remains the largest encirclement in history and was probably the greatest Soviet defeat of the entire German-Soviet war. Not only did Stalin’s insistence on a last stand at Kiev divert vital manpower and material from Moscow, but as Hitler anticipated, it paved the way for Army Group South to advance deep into Crimea and the industrial heartland of the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. The Soviets lost over 700,000 casualties while the German forces suffered around 45,000. Nevertheless, the poor infrastructure and persistent logistical problems further deflated German hopes of a fast and easy victory. Most importantly, Soviet soldiers – especially those encircled and with nothing to lose – made their German counterparts pay in blood for every mile they took. Instead of throwing down their weapons despite their hopeless situation, Soviet troops dug in deeper and fought more intensely. Such resolve would become pattern, repeated at Moscow, Stalingrad, and on countless other battlefields.

Sources

Fritz, Stephen. 2015. Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.

Megargee, Geoffrey. 2007. War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

 

If you consider the attack main points by Hitler he wanted first Ukraine, then Leningrad and then Moscow. What kinda warfare is this? Sending troops and tanks to these objects was quite insane as compared to holding onto one Goal instead . There were no reserves sent truly by Hitler and as by September Guderian demanded personally more tanks Hitler only had 200 new engines to give. Kiev then again was Stalin's failure as he refuses to withdraw the doomed forces. Kph

 

The only resistance I knew about were the Forest Brothers, who I knew operated in the Baltics ater the war. It actually wasn't until Kal Petri mentioned that they were active during WWII at the very start of Barbarossa that I learned they were active during this period. And you express skepticism about Baltic collaboration with the Nazis, yet the Forest Brothers themselves collaborated with the Nazis until the Nazis disarmed them once the Soviets were driven out (i.e. when they no longer served a purpose to the Nazis). They again became relevant after WWII with the US and its allies feeding them weapons.

As to evidence of Baltic collaboration generally, you can do research yourself on the Arajs Kommando I mentioned, the Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force, and of course the Omakaitse. The Einsatzgruppen arranged pogroms in Riga, Kaunas, and elsewhere with the help of locals, killing many Jews and Roma. The aforementioned Omakaitse participated in placing 400 to 1,000 Romani people and 6,000 Jews in concentration camps in Estonia and Russia: http://www.mnemosyne.ee/hc.ee/pdf/conclusions_en_1941-1944.pdf

You are simply fishing for a pro-Soviet bias that isn't there.

I've written on the Purges on my Tumblr blog; I did not cross-post it here because this subforum is limited to 1939-1940. I stated the facts as they are and did not change any of the statistics, which speak for themselves. If I didn't emote enough "tragedy" for your tastes, that's a personal opinion.

I've linked to my Tumblr post about the partition of Poland where I mention both the Katyn massacre and the pressure the Soviets applied to make them "request" annexation. Again, I chose not to post that here but it's on the Tumblr blog and I've linked to it in this thread. Plus, in my previous post I refer to the famine in the Ukraine when discussing the first battle of Kiev.

Oh, that's nice. But the point is they were still abusing POWs. Now who's making apologies for human rights abuses...

I mentioned elsewhere that part of the reason the Red Army did so poorly is they had no reason to fight, which acknowledges the plain truth that the war was purely about the Soviet Union forcibly bringing Finland out of the German sphere of influence. I also make no excuses for how poorly the Red Army did.

I am providing my sources as a courtesy. I am not going to provide specific page numbers as if I was writing a paper for a grade or for an academic journal. If you doubt the figures, go consult the works I cited and see for yourself. That's the entire point of me providing my references -- so people can see for themselves. If this was for an academic journal, yes, I would have to provide more detail, but in each of my posts I am paraphrasing authors and using their statistics.

But the real question is: if all three books are by Glantz, why do you think Glantz would have different figures in his different books...

Everything in those posts came from the Myth of the Eastern Front book by Smelser and Davies as well as the MacKenzie chapter I've quoted from. As to Judeo-Bolshevism as a pillar of Nazi propaganda, you don't need to check a book out; a simple Google search will provide you with plenty of links to reliable sources. Even though Wikipedia is not reliable itself, the article on Jewish Bolshevism has a well-sourced section on Nazi propaganda using the term.

Why would I talk about Soviet propaganda in a post about German revisionism in Western pop culture... Again, you're fishing for a pro-Soviet bias that doesn't exist.

Again, the references are posted as a courtesy. You demand that I replicate THEIR work complete with their footnotes, and then accuse me of copyright infringement when I post material straight from the work. If you don't take my word for it that the facts I am presenting are drawn from those works, go read the works yourself! The problem is you don't actually care about the accuracy of the work, you just want to be contrarian because you presume I have a pro-Soviet bias, or you yourself have a romantic view of the German military on the Eastern Front, or both.

This is the issue: not your timing, but how you have conducted yourself in this thread. I don't care what you post count is or what people think of you, I am not entitled to interact with you or afford you automatic respect, especially when you behave in a way that is unfriendly, hostile, and offensive, especially when you accuse me of denying or whitewashing Soviet atrocities. It simply isn't true and it goes beyond bad faith. Contrary to your claims, I am neither anti-discussion nor a Soviet apologist. You acted like a jerk. I don't expect you to stop acting like a jerk, but I do want everyone else who reads this to know that the reason I have you on ignore is because you're a jerk.

 

Considering the vastness of the Soviet Union and the inherent logistical problems they faced, securing multiple objectives at a rapid pace was the only way Germany could win the war. Yet this is exactly what the Wehrmacht excelled at. I don't think Moscow would have been the instant death punch it has been made out to be by some today; it would have taken an even more substantial overall advance compared to the already substantial ones the German achieved, to Moscow as well as the Donbass.

Absolutely right about Stalin. Plus naming Budyonny as overall commander was very stupid. He was loyal to Stalin but he was an archaic dragoon through-and-through.