Eastern front : won from the start ?

Just a couple of things...

In WW1 I think one of the main reasons that the Russian army was morally low was the Tsar´s ( Nicolas II ) poor leadership and wrong decisions.

Nicholas II of Russia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also I wonder didn´t Lenin have to try twice before the coup succeeded...?? It was not that easy for him either...

Vladimir Lenin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Actually Lenin was at the time in exile in Switzerland (Zürich) and he was carried all across Germany from South to North in a locked train wagon, to be taken to Helsinki, from where he finally arrived at St. Petersburg' Finlandia Station to shortly afterwards trigger the October Revolution.

Of course this had to be with at the very very least with the German military consent, not to say that he was a German agent out and out, but it had to be something in between.

Winning or losing, the Germans had no need for an enourmous resource leeching Russian Front, and injecting a notoriously effective agitator with a long career in the enemies rear looked like an excellent strategy to end the war there.

As is more than obvious the communist archives don't speak a word on this subject, go figure so I guess we'll never know the truth.

 

Hmmmm, interesting, here's my two penn'orth.

i) Germany experienced severe economic problems in the 1930's due to the vast increase in the size of the armaments economy. The rise in industrial output sucked into Germany the commodities necessary for industry - copper, rubber, iron ore, cotton, oil etc. As the rest of the world economy recovered, commodity prices increased. This was not balanced by the finished goods being exported at much higher prices than the raw materials since the main customer was the Wehrmacht.

ii) This led to several balance of payments crises, particularly in 1937. Autarky was an expedient to squeeze as much as possible out of the foreign exchange Germany did have.

iii) When Britain stayed in the war after Dunkirk the economic blockade imposed in 1939 remained.

iv) Germany had done deals with Balkan countries and the Soviet Union and exploited the windfall of captured stocks of raw materials in western Europe to keep the war economy going. These were wasting assets.

v) The USA began rearming in 1938 and in the autumn of 1940 began to back Britain's war effort. By the time of Barbarossa the USA was fighting an undeclared war in the Atlantic. Clearly US involvement would only increase so an invasion of Russia in 1941 offered the prospect of furnishing Germany with a 'USA-sized' hinterland in the east from which Germany could extract the foodstuffs and raw materials necessary to build a Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine sufficient to overcome the looming air-sea war in the west.

vi) The USSR was also devoting a huge economic effort to military preparations, had recovered much of the territory lost since 1914 and could not be expected to sit on the sidelines indefinitely. The USSR got at least as much out of the Nazi-Soviet Pact as Germany.

vii) Germany needed a quick win because its military capacity was based on weak economic foundations not capable of sustaining a war of attrition which British and US belligerence guaranteed.

viii) Delaying an invasion would not help since Soviet preparations would be more advanced, the threat in the west would be greater and the German economy would still be constrained by food, energy, raw material and manpower shortages without the boost of newly defeated industrial countries' stocks.

ix) If Germany couldn't force a decision in 1941 the deterioration in its strategic and economic position would be fatal since the eastern war was intended to liberate Germany from such constraints.

x) Barbarossa hit an iceberg when the Red Army survived the disasters on the frontier having inflicted severe losses on German army manpower and equipment. The Red Army went down fighting like the Polish Army causing longer delays, leading to the detachment of German mobile forces from the mass of marching infantry divisions by far more than had been anticipated, making German encirclements decidedly porous.

xi) What may look like German dithering and divided objectives can easily be seen as logical responses to the failure of the quick easy win expectation when the German army reached the 'Dvina-Dnieper line' to fnd that substantial Red Army forces had escaped and the regime hadn't collapsed.

xii) Army Group South's relative failure left a huge mass of the Red Army on AGC's southern flank. Ignoring it and going for Moscow instead of Kiev could have led to an even bigger winter defeat than the Battle of Moscow.

xiii) After the irreplaceble losses of 1941 Germany couldn't win in the east without Soviet help in 1942 in the form of unforced errors bigger than the ones of 1941. Thenceforth Germany had to make do with what it had. This sealed the fate of Poland's Jewish population, escalating the local massacres in the Soviet Union into genocide as Germany's leaders sought to feed the Wehrmacht in Russia without prejudice to domestic German food needs, as it adapted to the war of attrition that the failure of Barbarossa guaranteed. The Generalgouvernment was a poor substitute for the A-A Line.

 

One of the best posts in this forum in months. Certainly this man has done his homework or this is his professional specialty.

Here I don´t quite see the correlation, could you extend your explanation? Reeduction of local consumption to relaease further resources, perhaps?

Cheers!

 

Most kind Za, my thinking at the moment stems from the eye-opening I got from reading Tooze then looking at some of his sources - DRZW and 'Hitler's War in the East'; Muller & Ueberschar.

The last point does look a little out of place doesn't it. It was late and I was trying to add some context to the points I made about the economic constraints affecting German strategic choices after the sensation in France in 1940.

To my surprise I've found myself moving from 'moderate functionalist' to 'moderate intentionalist' in regard of nazi 'systematic' barbarity. I wanted to make some comment on the ramifications of the failure of Barbarossa to the course of the war outside the front line and how this led back to the economic constraints which determined the attack of 1941 and how these fitted into the nazi worldview of 'Judaeo-Bolshevik' conspiracy.

Removing 3 million Polish Jews from the food chain turned the Generalgouvernment into a food exporter. The non-Jewish Poles were next on the list but the harvest of 1943 was good enough to make this unnecessary. Far from being ideologically determined the murders in Poland were a pragmatic (!) response where ideology only caused the selection of Jews as the principal victims.

Being unemployed I have had a lot of time on my hands and have used it to resume my historical studies. Ill wind eh?

 

On Red Army operation on Poalnd 1939 from Zaloga´s Poland 1939:

Red Army lost 996 men and 2,383 wounded in the fighting. Tank casualties amounted to 42 combat losses and a further 429 mechanical breakdowns and other non-combat losses.

 

Not bad eh??


Wait, what happend to Squeeth?!?!