The Great Patriotic War: 1939-1943

In the Baltic countries the local people also started heavy resistance which Helped the Germans attacking and continue fast pace towards Leningrad.

 

In the Army Group South they were the last to receive men and vehicles from the Balkans and prepare themselves for the invasion. Also I think the most T-34´s of all Soviet armies were placed South, and that is why Rundstedt failed to keep up with the rest of the Army Groups and that led to the Guderian´s turn south and the stoppage of Barbarossa until the flank was cleaned.

 

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. Military units like the Waffen SS Estonian Legion did not come until later in the war. I think the Western Front suffered most because it faced two panzer armies whereas the Southwestern Front faced only one and had more units. The Soviets anticipated a German attack on the Ukraine because it was the region most associated with lebensraum and German "colonization" in the east.

 

First Battle of Smolensk: August 1941



After the outbreak of the German-Soviet war on June 22, 1941, the Wehrmacht (German military) progressed 310 miles (500 kilometers) into Soviet territory in a mere eighteen days. Army Group Center, under the command of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, had succeeded in destroying the Soviet armies in the Belarussian SSR but had yet to occupy the city of Smolensk, a major objective in Russia just 220 miles southwest of Moscow. General Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe would attack Smolensk from the south, while General Hermann Hoth’s Panzergruppe would launch an assault from the north.

In the meantime, Joseph Stalin had replaced Soviet Marshal Semyon Timoshenko as chair of the Soviet high command and sent him to oversee a counteroffensive along the Western Front meant to blunt the German advance. In addition to the 13th Army already on the front, Timoshenko also had five additional reserve armies under his control. Across the board, however, Soviet counterattacks failed to stop the Germans; Hoth’s owned armored divisions captured Polotsk and Vitebsk, while Guderian’s panzers sped past Mogilev on their way to Yelnya, a town southeast of Smolensk that Guderian considered strategically important. The Soviet 21st Army under General Fyodor Kuznetsov struck along Guderian’s southern flank, seeking to cut off his armored spearhead from General Maximilian von Weichs’ 2nd Army, still trying to catch up with Guderian. German troops under Guderian managed to resist the Soviet onslaught until they were reinforced by reserve units; despite early gains, the Germans had reclaimed and consolidated their positions by August. Meanwhile, Hoth’s panzers easily beat back the Soviet 19th Army under General Ivan Konev in and around the Vitebsk area.

Disorganized and inexperienced, it is no surprise that the reserve armies thrust into Timoshenko’s offensive failed to produce lasting gains. In fact, the German leadership and many postwar historians did not even initially believe it was a coordinated attack. The Red Army, however, did manage to prevent the complete encirclement of Smolensk, enabling around 20,000 troops to escape eastward. In August, Marshal Georgy Zhukov led additional Soviet reserve armies to encircle Guderian’s exposed forces at Yelnya and then move on to recapture Roslavl. By early September, von Bock ordered the “planned withdrawal” of the German salient around Yelnya, which was retaken by the Red Army on September 8. From August 30 to September 8, the Germans lost 31,853 casualties. Soviet propaganda would make a big noise about the first German reversal of Operation Barbarossa, but the retreat had more to do with the inability of Guderian’s troops to fight defensive operations indefinitely when their intention was deep penetration.

The Soviet counter-offensives managed to slow the German advance on Moscow. In this, they were also aided by Fuhrer Directive 33, a July 1941 order direct from Hitler directing the Wehrmacht to focus on encircling Kiev, diminishing the importance of Moscow as an objective. Guderian and Hoth, the two panzer commanders, resisted this order and largely ignored it, but the tension in the German leadership between mopping up already encircled armies versus pressing their advantage further contributed to a decline in the dizzying successes of Operation Barbarossa’s first stage. Moreover, the losses incurred by the German forces – in material, manpower, and precious tanks and trucks – played a decisive part in the German defeat in the battle to take Moscow.

Glantz, David M. Colossus Reborn: The Red Army at War, 1941-1943. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005.

Glantz, David M. Barbarossa Derailed: The Battle for Smolensk 10 July – 10 September 1941. Solihull, England: Helion & Company, 2010.

Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

 

War Crimes: The “Clean Wehrmacht” & “Clean Waffen-SS” Myths​

In Western popular culture, the European theater of World War II is typically identified with the U.S.-British forces that liberated Western Europe from 1944 to 1945. The German-Soviet conflict, however, was by far the largest theater of the war, as well as one of the most intense, bloody, and brutal. It was the culmination of Nazi ideology and its deep hostility toward “Judeo-Bolshevism,” as well as a more traditional German nationalist vision of expansionism: “Drang nach Osten” – the desire to expand eastward. In 1940, the German government first started developing “Generalplan Ost” – the “master plan for the East” – that called for the violent subjugation and ethnic cleansing of native Slavic populations so that ethnic Germans could re-settle the land and “Germanize” it. Believers in a special German destiny particularly coveted the vast, lush farmlands of the Ukraine as a source of grain. Importantly, though, German yearning for colonizing Eastern Europe had less to due with a pragmatic concern over overpopulation or a desire for resources so much as with a cultural sense that Germans were racially superior to Slavs and that displacing inferior subhuman populations was merely natural selection in action. Rather than a fringe philosophy adhered to only by Hitler and his inner circle, many Germans shared this cocktail of racial hatred, jingoistic imperialism, and national exceptionalism, from the upper echelons of important institutions (including the military) to ordinary citizens (including soldiers).

Hitler and many key German officials believed that the regular person living in the Soviet Union hated communism and, in the non-Russian states, subordination to Moscow. The idea that such people would welcome German conquest as a form of liberation is, at best, delusional and, at worst, a piece of apologia; the German military was generally uninterested in collaborating with local nationalists – unless it was to instigate massacres against local Jews or Roma. Across the Baltic region, for example, German officials created local right-wing paramilitary groups into ad hoc “security forces” – in essence, death squads organized by the German occupation to round up “undesirables.” In subsequent media coverage, the German government framed such pogroms as the spontaneous, long-desired expression of public resentment suppressed only by the heavy-handed Soviet regime. In reality, task forces belonging to the Schutzstaffel (SS), Heinrich Himmler’s paramilitary organization, followed on the heels of the German armed forces, overseeing the mass murder of intellectuals, Jews, Roma, partisans, and communists. These Einsatzgruppen committed one of the most infamous atrocities of the entire war, the Babi Yar massacre near Kiev, Ukraine, in September 1941. Over 33,000 Jews died over two days, led into a ravine and shot by German troops alongside Ukrainian collaborators. Jews, however, were not the only victims; the Germans would also slaughter communists, Soviet prisoners of war, and Ukrainian nationalists hostile to the German occupation in the ravine as time went on.

While the crimes against humanity committed by the SS task forces are undisputed, there is sometimes a distinction made between SS units committed to carrying out genocide and the relatively “clean” German military, whose sole interest was in fighting an apolitical war. Most scholars scholars now widely debunk the myth of a “Clean Wehrmacht.” It emerged following World War II as many leading German generals, such as Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian, released memoirs that depicted themselves as professional officers who succeeded despite Hitler’s intervention in military affairs (not because of it) and who were not political. Yet, such generals would at the very least be aware of how Hitler himself perceived the conflict; the Nazi party machine had churned out propaganda against the “Jewish Bolshevik regime” since the 1930s. Manstein himself in a 1941 order referred to the “life-and-death struggle against the Bolshevik system” and declares that the “Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all.” In September 1941, over 2,000 German troops – under Manstein’s command – killed around 14,300 people in Simferopol, a major city on the Crimean Peninsula. Most of the victims were Jews. Guderian, in even more absurd cases of denial, pleaded ignorance of state-sanctioned murder under the German occupation until 1943, complaining that “military authorities were powerless” to stop the policies. Rather than working to undermine Hitler, Guderian had no objections to receiving gifts of property or enviable positions from the German dictator, and after the failed July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, Guderian participated in the trials meant to purge conspirators from the military and, in official communiques, denounced the plot as treason. Rather than the models of integrity and honor they present themselves as, generals like Manstein and Guderian (as well as the even more famous Erwin Rommel, although he did not command troops on the Eastern Front) eagerly courted Hitler’s favor in the form of promotions and commands. These general themselves were part of a political machination on their part to align themselves with the blitzkrieg theories crafted by Guderian in contrast to the stodgy old guard that Hitler resented most.

 

Memoirs of German generals are also typically evasive about the “Commissar Order,” a dictate issued by the German high command in June 1941 before Operation Barbarossa. It mandated the summary execution of any Soviet commissars or political officers captured in the coming war, with such vague terms as the murder of anyone “thoroughly bolshevized.” This was entirely consistent with how Hitler had described the German-Soviet conflict as an ideological war to his commanders. He also preemptively pardoned any soldiers who broke international law in carrying out the order. Although some officers would deny enforcing the order, historians agree that every German general prescribed it. The German high command also issued special orders for the handling of Soviet prisoners of war, stating that they should be treated more harshly because of their connections with “Bolshevism.” This was a direct order from the very top of the German military sanctioning the abuse of Soviet POWs on an ideological and racial basis. As a result, 57 percent of all Soviet POWs died in captivity. Those not shot out of hand perished under inhuman conditions in forced labor or concentration camps.

It was not memoirs alone that fashioned rehabilitated conceptions of Manstein, Guderian and other Wehrmacht officers who had cooperated with the Hitler regime. In the Cold War era, as the Soviet Union went from enemy-of-my-enemy back to just an enemy of capitalist Western nations, these German officers became valued for their firsthand experience fighting a war against Moscow. Also, with Germany divided, they could also advise on troop training, battle plans, and the formation of the West German Bundeswehr (defense force), the forerunner of the modern German military. According to German records studied by Alaric Searle, former generals – in concert with civilian governments – forged NATO-affiliated West German army through the deliberate minimalization of the Wehrmacht’s complicity in war crimes. Former German Chief of Staff Franz Halder worked with other officers, through his position as a U.S. Army military history consultant, to paint a consistent picture of a neutral, honorable army.

There has even been, to an extent, a rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS, the military component of the SS. The Waffen-SS was not part of the regular army and was explicitly designed by Heinrich Himmler to be the embodiment of Nazi superiority, with early members hand-selected by Himmler for their accordance with “good Nordic” traits. Waffen-SS personnel made up a third of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. During the war, Waffen-SS units carried out multiple war crimes, the most well-known of which was the December 1944 Malmedy massacre, where an element of the First SS Panzer Division murdered 84 U.S. prisoners of war. Hitler and Himmler had even intended the Waffen-SS to become an underground terrorist organization to continue resistance to Allied and Soviet occupation. Following the Nuremburg trials, the Waffen-SS became a criminal organization; the idea of a rehabilitated Waffen-SS seemed risible.

In 1951, however, several key Waffen-SS officers founded the HIAG, a special interest group wholly devoted to promoting a revisionist history that claimed Waffen-SS personnel were “soldiers like any other.” Paul Hausser, who commanded the SS Division Das Reich during the war (which massacred 642 French civilians in June 1944), was one of the foremost leaders of the HIAG, and like Halder, worked with the U.S. Army historical division. Under Hausser’s direction (and with his access to historical records), the HIAG published newsletters and books that framed the Waffen-SS as innocent of Nazi atrocities, even though SS personnel often transferred between branches (and thus served as concentration camp guards or in mobile killing units). Instead, the Waffen-SS came to be recast as a multinational force of elite European soldiers that had fought against the communist menace. This image was identical to that cultivated by the SS in Nazi Germany, but with the internationalist nature of the Waffen-SS highlighted to compare it to modern NATO forces. The idea of such a force opposed to communism ran parallel to NATO, but in the case of the Waffen-SS, revisionists had to diminish the explicit connection from the Nazi era between the Jews and international communism.

The “clean Wehrmacht” and (to a degree) the “clean Waffen-SS” myths have promulgated thanks to a broad popular interest in military history coupled with a dearth of rigorous academic works in this field. For various reasons, academic historians have steered away from military history as fodder for the masses, and so the discipline is dominated (at least up until recently) by journalists, members of the military, or amateur historians. Some (but by no means all) of these writers have taken the memoirs and diaries of German officers without a critical eye, contributing to the spread of a romantic view of German involvement in the war. In a seminal work of historiography, The Myth of the Eastern Front, the historians Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies not only document the process by which revisionist history became increasingly mainstream, but also note how tabletop wargaming in the 1970s and the advent of the Internet and an explosion of World War II message forums brought the lies and deceptions surrounding the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS to a broader audience.

Today, many contemporary video games also portray not just Wehrmacht units but Waffen-SS units, although devoid of any reference to war crimes. The multiplayer first-person shooter, Day of Infamy, was released in March 2017 and is set in the Western European theater of World War II. In addition to U.S. and British units, the player can play as a soldier from several historical German units, including the 29Infantry Division (responsible for massacring 300 Polish prisoners of war in 1939), the 1st SS Panzer Division “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler” (responsible for the aforementioned Malmedy massacre and several other atrocities on the Eastern Front), and the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division “Götz von Berlichingen” (which committed several war crimes on the Western Front in 1944-1945). In the grand strategy game Hearts of Iron IV, released in 2016 and focused on World War II, players playing as Germany can appoint Heinrich Himmler as a “political advisor,” unlocking the recruitment of foreign volunteers by the Waffen-SS from occupied-territories. A trope from the “Clean Wehrmacht” myth – that Wehrmacht officers viewed the Waffen-SS as a rival organization – is incorporated into the game, with either the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS attempting takeovers if the player favors one side too much. Naturally, Wehrmacht officers did prefer that their units be supplied and relieved before Waffen-SS ones, but the game itself does not distinguish between this sort of competition and the (false) ideological hostility “Clean Wehrmacht” romantics claim between the political Waffen-SS and the apolitical, duty-driven Wehrmacht. In subtle ways, these games normalize the treatment of units guilty of war crimes as fundamentally “soldiers like any other,” in the words of Hausser himself. Players of these games may not identify as Nazis, fascists, or apologists for German war crimes in World War II, but they are undeniably participating in a byproduct of the ideational isolation of the German armed forces from the crimes against humanity committed in the name of Nazi principles and leadership.

Searle, Alaric. Wehrmacht Generals, West German Society, and the Debate on Rearmament: 1949-1959. Westport: Praeger, 2003.

Shepherd, Ben. “The Clean Wehrmacht, The War Of Extermination, And Beyond.” The Historical Journal, vol. 52, no. 02, 2009, p. 455.

Smelser, Ronald, and Edward J. Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008.

Wette, Wolfram. The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

 

On of both sides it was the goal to destroy the intellictual enemy side. During 1939 Poland it was the USSR that gave the Polish names of priests, teachers and the local leaders to the Germans to kill. Then there is operaation underkeel 1945. And the jewish doctor's plot 1949 ca. If you leave these unnoticed you cannot understand the whole racial war. Holocaust existed but so did these.

 

I do believe that the German side and their struggle in WW2 has been romanticized by movies, bias memoirs, video games, and other sources. Yes the Germans were at the heart of the atrocities in WW2, and the Waffen-SS was pretty much as bad as we've wrapped it up to be, if not worse. There were "bad" soldiers in the Wehrmacht, absolutely, but nobody seems to remember (I'm talking mainstream media, every day people) how bad the Russians were, what about the Katyn Massacre and the March to Berlin that saw the Rape and Murder of Hundreds of Thousands. Then there were the occasional undocumented Allied executions of German officers and POW's by Americans, Brits, and others that was considered acceptable. Nobody was "Good" completely, and as much as we love to think WW2 was a fight to destroy evil, it was really more a fight for survival, political gain, territorial and natural resource securing by all involved. Russia most definitely wasn't fighting for the benefit of mankind, and the U.S was certainly being anything but the Arsenal of Democracy when it interned Thousands of Japanese American citizens wrongfully or when it choose to firebomb Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention Britains horrible treatment of it's colonies (India especially). Long story short, there is no good side in war, it's who's left after the dust clears, and when you fight, you fight like your life depends on it, so in the moment, that can lead to some pretty dirty shots that are momentarily justified for the sake of winning. On the flip side, there were plenty of genuinely good soldiers in all of those nations I mentioned, and it's important to remember that, or else we risk stereotyping a whole people as being racist and murderers, when really a small majority actively participated or approved of such acts.

 

I'm sorely lacking a more 'nuanced' description of Soviet and Red Army activity leading up to Barbarossa in this thread.

The terror inflicted upon the civil populations of the occupied Baltic states and Eastern Poland, for example. More than 130,000 people were deported from their Baltic homes in 1940-1941. Modern estimates suggest 320,000 Poles were deported in this timeframe (over the PoW situation). The same deportations occurred in Bessarabia (approx. 200,000). Not all of these people survived life in the gulags either.

Furthermore, there is very strong indication that the Soviets and Nazis were co-operating in repressing Polish people in the period 1939-1941, frequently exchanging information, and co-ordinating actions (see 'Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940; Truth, Justice and Memory,' by George Sanford).

In the light of Soviet occupation and repression, it doesn't take a great stretch of imagination to see how segments of the populations in the Baltic states would try to seize the opportunity to kick the fleeing Red Army in the shins.

 

These arguments amount to "whatabout-ism," which is ironically the very tactic the Soviet Union used against the U.S. in the Cold War. Whenever the U.S. or its allies would criticize the USSR, Soviet diplomats would respond by saying, "What about the blacks being lynched in your country" or something similar.

The difference between Soviet atrocities (like the Katyn massacre or the NKVD shootings of political prisoners) and the German atrocities is that Soviet atrocities have not been subject to a campaign of historical revisionism in the West in the same way that German war crimes have; there is no myth, for example, of a "clean Red Army" that did not rape countless German women during and after the advance on Berlin, that did not shoot its own men for retreating, etc.

Take, for example, the 2013 video game Company of Heroes 2, which totally embraces the narrative prevalent in the West -- that the cruel and sadistic Soviet leaders sent their men in human waves right into machine guns -- which itself aligns with the romantic view of the German side that the Red Army only won because of superior numbers and material. Whereas the U.S. and British forces facing the Germans in the European Theater is generally viewed as a noble sacrifice by "bands of brothers," the Eastern Front is invariably betrayed as anything but noble. At best, the Eastern Front is solely portrayed as "bad meets evil;" at worst, it is portrayed as "good German soldiers fighting evil communism but undermined by the Nazi leadership." This is a total perjury, as it is well-documented how deeply committed all institutions in Germany -- especially the military -- were to Hitler and his vision of the war as a "war of extermination."

Most people in former Soviet states do in fact see the sacrifices of the Red Army and regular citizens during the Eastern Front in a positive and, yes, romantic light. I am not arguing that Red Army romanticism is good and Wehrmacht/Waffen-SS romanticism is bad. I prefer fact over sentimentality. But if the Western narrative were true -- that Soviets were simply cruel and heartless -- it makes no sense that, especially in the post-Soviet era, that there would still be such widespread positive views of the men who led the war against Germany -- even of the dictator Stalin! If you read people who have actually studied the Soviet perspective of the war -- such as Catherine Merridale's Ivan's War -- veterans actually said they were appreciative of commissars, the actions taken to prevent retreating, etc., as bizarre as that sounds. Undoubtedly, this is due to Soviet propaganda, but it is also important to remember that, from the Soviet side, the German-Soviet war was not just a struggle against fascism, but an existential conflict to prevent their annihilation. The Germans provided no shortage of reasons for Soviets to fight with desperation, be it in their racist rhetoric or the various war crimes they committed that did absolutely nothing to win "hearts and minds" in the USSR.

I will not deny that there is Red Army romanticism in the former Soviet states; in fact, I think the comedy film "The Death of Stalin" was banned in many of them because the dominant view is still that of Stalin as war hero than brutal dictator. I know that denial of Katyn exists in some Soviet apologia circles. I don't subscribe to this view and although I think there is important historical context around events like the purges and the revenge rapes inflicted on women in the Axis countries, they are indefensible and unquestionably deplorable.

I am not arguing for a romantic view of the Red Army or any army involved in WWII, but I am arguing that we should regard the "clean Wehrmacht" myth and the "Waffen-SS were soldiers like any other" as the utter fabrications they are. Moreover, the Eastern Front was not just a theater of war where atrocities took place; my point is that the German invasion, from planning to execution, was conceived as an ideological, racial war. The fact that so many Soviets died -- either as abused prisoners, as victims shot out of hand for being Jewish, "Bolshevized," or "just because" since soldiers were preemptively pardoned, as collective punishment for the killing of German soldiers, deliberately starved like in Leningrad, and so on and on and on -- is a testament to the reality of how murderous the German approach to the conquest of the East. Also, unlike the Soviets or any Allied countries, with Germany you can literally point to a "master plan" that called for the ethnic cleansing of Slavic peoples and the settlement of German colonies. Although there is no shortage of "Germany could have beat the USSR if..." speculative fiction out there, very rarely do they discuss what would have been the inevitable conclusion: the organized mass murder of Slavic people with methods and on a scale comparable to the Holocaust, to get rid of "subhumans" so that "superior" Germans could take their lands and property. The mass murder of intellectuals and military officers, such as Katyn, was undeniably illegal, immoral, and motivated for political reasons; German atrocities, from Babi Yar down to the routine execution of Soviet political officers, however, was at the very core of what the German invasion of the Soviet Union was about. It is criminal to divorce crimes against humanity from the German side of the war, and yet that is what is done a lot in Western popular culture, from books to video games to documentaries.

By the way, I did in fact write about Stalin's purges of the armed forces, but since they started in 1937 and this subthread is dedicated to 1939-1943, I didn't cross-post it here: The Great Purge of the Soviet Armed Forces: 1937-1941

 

Stalin had to change his policy a lot the man that tried to destroy the church gave the priests open hands, to win The war he referred to Mother Russia instead of communism, he gave the army ranks and other political moves like staying at his Dacha as the Germans were close to the city. Talk about a man who turned his coat to win the war. Kph

 

Not really. If you are talking about the reactions of Polish and Baltic peoples to the Soviets then the prior actions of the Soviets is of significant import. With regards to the Poles their actions in the inter war years with regards to the Soviets should also be considered.

That is simply not accurate. Indeed the Soviets initially blamed the Germans for Katyn. You'll also see a group that promulgate the "clean Reed Army" myth which you deny.

When one looks at the Red army losses it's hard to refute such a view (except for the "cruel and sadistic" part which is a matter of view point).

What's romantic about that?

I'd say the prevalent view is that the US and British forces also had superior numbers and material they were just more careful about how they expended their troops. Perhaps the "noble sacrifice" part might be due to the fact that in the west troops weren't expected to fight to the last where it was less optional in the East

That looks to me like a pretty accurate assessment. The Soviets are often give a bit of pass on their part in starting the war as well.

Is it? Care to document how some of the non military institutions were so committed?

Indeed why should they not. It's not the sacrifices that made the Soviets evil it was the excesses.

"simply" no but the Soviet leadership was clearly "cruel and heartless" by most reasonable definitions of the terms.

Which former Soviet states were these? I seam to recall hearing of a lot of Soviet memorials particularly those to Stalin being pulled down in the former Warsaw Pact and former Western Soviet nations. If the fact that you don't ascribe to the myth of the non involvement of the Soviets in Katyn is enough to exclude it from mention then the fact that most of us here don't ascribe to the German myths you keep bringing up as standards to in the west means they can be dropped as well does it not?

Take a look around the forum and get back to me if you find anyone who promotes these myths who hasn't already been soundly refuted.

Well there were some allied post war plans that were fairly drastic and the Soviets were pretty good at keeping there's under wraps. You won't find many of the German settlements that used to be scattered over Eastern Europe around today though will you.

And those Soviet crimes you mention were core to the Soviet regimes existence.

 

I don't like line-by-line Internet debates, so I'll just try to tackle the substantial points:

Stalin: Yes, he certainly demonstrated a history of pragmatism over ideology, which is what separated him most from Trotsky. His opposition to the Polish-Soviet war, his "socialism in one country" doctrine, the embracing of patriotism rather than communism as the theme of the Great Patriotic War, etc. I'm not really sure what that has to do with the problem in Western popular culture of there being a romantic view of German actions in the Nazi-Soviet war.

The fact that Stalin and the old Soviet regime are still regarded positively; you can easily use Google to find polls and surveys where people rank Stalin as a great leader and are nostalgic for the Soviet era. Stalin's statue still stands in his hometown of Gori in Georgia. Yes, in some countries like the Ukraine there is strong anti-communism present today, but this has to be understood in the larger historical context of Russian domination over that region (conversely Belarus remains firmly in the Russian sphere of influence) and the deep ties between far-right Ukrainian political parties today and groups that collaborated with the Nazis during the German occupation. As to why anyone in the former USSR would have positive opinions, I think this is for the same reason people are generally nostalgic for the past, and the mere fact that the USSR was one of two superpowers for the latter half of the 20th century. Also, the patriotism surrounding the Great Patriotic War. Again, this has nothing really to do with the original post about the romanticism prevalent in the West when it comes to de-politicizing the Nazi-Soviet war (at least from the German perspective).

As to the suggestion that the Soviet Union somehow provoked the German invasion, this itself is a canard used by German generals in their memoirs to mitigate the war. We know now that this simply isn't true, and in a earlier post I talked about the widely debunked "Icebreaker" thesis. The USSR was incredibly humbled by the Winter War and it is ludicrous to think Stalin was about to take on Nazi Germany, the most successful war machine in history, any time soon. Stalin had gambled that Hitler would have his hands full with Britain and France for a lot longer than what happened in reality.

I don't think "cruel and sadistic" is a matter of viewpoint; anyway I think most people would agree that the systemic, deliberate politics of extermination practiced by Germany were worse than the desperate "ends justify the means" tactics adopted by the Soviets. The first is genocide and the latter is ruthlessness. At the very least, life for Slavic people were better under the USSR than Nazi Germany if no other reason that it was an explicit policy of Germany to treat Slavs as subhuman, to displace them and replace them with Germans! Life under a dictatorship is preferable to life under a dictatorship actively trying to kill and replace you.

Massacres were not essential to the nature of the Soviet state, as demonstrated by Khrushchev rebuking Stalin and his methods in his "secret speech;" the Soviet Union continued on for many decades after many victims of Stalinist repression were rehabilitated. The killing of political prisoners was not unique to the Soviet regime; however, what made Nazi Germany unique is that it wholesale embraced the industrialization of mass murder and racial war as its purpose for existence. That is what I mean when I say that genocide and war crimes are at the core of Nazi Germany and its approach to the Eastern Front.

I'm not attacking anyone on this forum; this is a phenomenon that exists generally in Western popular culture and has been written about in the books I sourced.

As to the myth that the USSR only won because of a numerical superiority, I would strongly suggest you watch this lecture by Jonathan House at the Dole Institute of Politics about the "three alibis" used to by romancers to portray Germany more positively on the Eastern Front:

There's this video as well:

 

You have completely misunderstood the concept "whatabout-ism." That or you are just being obtuse. You are posting long monologues on the Soviet army, yet you elect to ignore the impact of Soviet misdeeds in the interim of 1939-1941, which is highly relevant to how they were perceived by the nationals of the afflicted Baltic states, and how many of them initially reacted to the invasion. If you had been more balanced in your outlook, you would at least have acknowledged this, instead of sweeping it under the floor, and trying to paint all of these states as in infected with Nazi collaborators.

I think you'll find people here in this forum do not take kindly to myth-making.

Shrug. History is not a video game. Video games do not create history. In a capitalist society, games need to sell. The creators of games and other forms of entertainment do not care one ioata about historical accuracy. Perhaps you should write critical articles about the movie "Dead Snow," "Iron Sky," and the like?

Except, that is not what I was asking for from you; All I stated, was I was missing a more nuanced picture. When you brushed off Baltic resistance in the manner you did, it comes across as a typical Soviet description of the events, rather than an informed and measured description of why people acted the way they did.

And yet, that same movie wasn't banned in the Baltics, nor in Poland. Go figure.... Where exactly was it banned? It is pointless to discuss how people in "Soviet" states viewed Stalin, when it was the states subjugated in the period 1939-1941 under discussion; you made exactly zero mention of the Soviet repression in those states.

Those that deny the involvement of German armed forces in atrocities do not last very long on this forum, or they are very quickly enlightened.

And let's not just drag Western pop culture into the fray; there are neo-nazis everywhere. Even in Russia. To say nothing of Asia.

This what happens in a liberal society with freedom of speech. Any idiot can publish trash, and attempt to market it. Fundamentally, though, and herein lies the real difference; no real attempt to whitewash Nazi German behaviour is taken seriously by anyone with any real knowledge.

 

Having grownup in the West and spent some 40+ years in it as an adult I really haven't seen that as a major element in WWII history. Certainly among a few neo Nazis and other small uneducated groups it may be popular but especially on boards like this it isn't. When you then discount some of the Soviet romanticist because you don't believe their positions you similarly undermine you own.

Where specifically? You made the claim it's up to you to substantiate it if requested by the conventions of this and indeed most boards interested in real history. I've seen statements both ways in regards to Russia by the way. Certainly it doesn't hold true for the Balkans.

The question arrisees though how much of that is due to the current regime and how much the peoples preference?

Which was in larger part due to Soviet activities in the interwar years, was it not?

That sounds quite understandable for Russians. How about other former Soviet countries?

That and the sacrafices made by the soldiers of the Red Army certainly merits admiration.

Ah but it certainly does. Indeed it is two sides of the same coin in many respects. While what you title the "romanticism" or what may be more accurately ascribed to the German generals white washing their part in the war was considered by some a useful fiction during the cold war. How prevalent it was then is an open question whether it can be considered prevalent in the post cold war world where former Soviet sources have been looked at more extensively is even more questionable. On boards such as this it is pretty clearly a minority opinion if that.

I think you misunderstood my reference. The war wouldn't have started were it not for the deal between the Nazis and the Soviets to split Poland. That the Soviets "provoked" the invasion though is hardly a canard. Both the Soviets and the Nazis realized that long term they were not compatable and that war would result. It's fairly clear that Stalin was more than willing to snap up what Eastern European countries he could as long as the risk was low. From quotes I've seen he was hoping for a longer war between the West and Germany that would allow him to step in late and pick up some additional territory as well as eliminate Germany as a threat. Agreed he wasn't going to do that in 41 or even 42. Indeed even if France hadn't fallen I suspect he would have waited until at least 43 or 44.

Of course it is. While few would question that the German actions would qualify as such whether you consider the actions of the Soviet command as such is from this forum alone is clearly a matter of viewpoint. I would certainly consider many of the Soviet actions both prewar and war time as "cruel" if not "sadistic" Some wouldn't hesitate to use the latter term and some would disagree with either term.

Stalin seems to have viewed them as such, that the Soviet system later rejected them is an element in it's favor but doesn't excuse the earlier actions.

Find me a transcript and I'll take a look I don't tend to think much of vidoes as references. Lacking numerical superiority would the Soviets have won? I think that's a rather open question. I suspect not. Russia would have survived IMO but I suspect the Soviet system would have been trashed. One could take issue with the phrasing as well. The Soviets were on the winning side of a war that involved much of the world united against the Axis powers. I'd take issue with someone claiming the US won the war. Claiming the Soviets "won" is in some ways even more problematic ... taking the losses both in people and in resources they did makes the descriptive term "survived" more accurate than "won" in my book. That survival was due in large part to the size of the USSR and the ability to mobilize troops (including the willingness to do so) for the Red Army. That the Red army latter eclipsed the German army in terms of both logistics and operations and arguably strategy aided the victory of the allies but it was distance and numbers that insured the survival of the USSR.

 

I think we are treading on very thin ice when discussing "ends justifies the means;" this is precisely the reasoning behind the Hunger Plan, and the brutal oppression of Slavic territories, further, it is not that far diverged from perceived Soviet intentions with what is called the Holodomor.

One is racially motivated, and due to the Allies success, we have access to surviving documentation, the other, we can only infer, and have little to no access to relevant archives. The fact that starvation was denied even occurring for so long is not encouraging. We can assume in the Soviet case that the reason was primarily to generate foreign cash with the sale of produce on the international market. And that the state of affairs was therefore perhaps less intentional, and possibly more of a crime of incompetence and lethargic bureaucracy. "The ends justify the means..." whether financially or racially motivated is still morally corrupt.

 

Remarkably tiresome video.... Has he ever fought a war with an enemy that has a 2:1 ratio advantage across a front stretching from the Arctic to the Caspian (1942), I wonder... notably, the Germans also needed to combat extensive partisan activity from '42 forward. And the Soviets decide where they are placing their combat troops.... In other words, the video also suffers from being too simplistic. 2:1 is a massive advantage on a continental scale, because it amounts to vastly greater local ratio of superiority when and where the Soviets decide. In defence and offence.

Losses by the Wehrmacht were unsustainable, as they were losing front line troops, and the the total size he includes in his overall numbers includes even rear area troops, garrisons. In July 1941 one such unit, Sicherungs-Division 221, found itself responsible for securing an area of 35,000 square kilometers comprising 2,560 villages and 1,300,000 local inhabitants. That's unsustainable.

Further, a significant portion of the replacements and convalescents were used to create new divisions instead of refilling the experienced divisions. Therefore, at a divisional level, the shortage of manpower was very real. Divisions themselves need supporting units. Yet when faced with a fight for existence, they then suck in their own supporting elements into the fighting; one way or another, the supporting elements get destroyed. Creating new divisions looks good on paper, and on a map, but is wasteful when you have units at half strength or worse still in the line.

We know that the German AFV production almost matched the number of vehicles lost June ´41-December ´41. We also know that most of these new vehicles (which to a large degree were better than the vehicles lost), were not sent to the panzer divisions fighting on the Eastern front, in that time period. Of the nearly 2,500 tanks and assault guns produced, only 886 were sent east. Thus, stating that the Germans produced more tanks in ´41 than the Soviets, is not really relevant to the actual fighting. The facts reveal the (over)confidence the German high command had their impending victory.

This is all irrelevant to the discussion; few here subscribe to these myths you suppose to combat. You could just as easily embark on a crusade against the myth of Wehrmacht mechanization; 80% of the German Army was horse-drawn.

 

OK, let me perfectly clear from the jump: I am not here to debate on behalf of Jonathan House, a professor emeritus of military history at the U.S. Army United States Army Command and General Staff College, who you happen to disagree with; I will let his qualifications for themselves. He and Glantz are widely recognized as experts on the Eastern Front who have studied the subject exhaustively, consulted the recently available Soviet material, and they have published their work in university presses -- unlike the books for mass audiences that are not subject to peer review.

I also don't need to disprove the myth that the German invasion was a pre-emptive war to defend Germany. Read up on Zhukov's memo that is considered the smoking gun of that theory; it was pure conjecture and not based on what the Red Army in 1941 could comprehensively achieve. What we know now about the Red Army and the reforms it was going through post-Winter War and up until Operation Barbarossa reveals that it was no condition to take on the hitherto undefeated Nazi military and win. This is pure apologia to whitewash the fact that the invasion was motivated for purely ideological and racial reasons (see lebensraum and Generalplan Ost). So the claim being made that people don't truck in myths on this site is being presented right now, right here.

Also, since someone is apparently too lazy to Google for themselves, here are just a sample of articles about positive opinions of Stalin and the USSR persisting today in the former Soviet Union:

Meet the Georgians Who Still Love Joseph Stalin (the Mass Murderer)
In Russia, nostalgia for Soviet Union and positive feelings about Stalin
Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup

This is the only time I am going to do your research for you; you cannot just express skepticism or doubt and use that as a citation of proof.

I am not a denier of the terrible things Stalin did. I wrote an entire post about his purges of the armed forces. I talked openly about the Katyn massacre, the raping of German women by Red Army soldiers, the NKVD mass killings of political prisoners during Barbarossa, etc. The purpose of this thread is to document the course of the Eastern Front, and since the German occupation from the start of Barbarossa was based around the Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht collaboration in murdering Jews, communists, Roma and others, I decided to do a post about, noting how this is often glossed over in Western pop culture.

And again, doubt all you like... Look at movies like Saving Private Ryan and video games like Call of Duty that portray the Western Front from the perspective of U.S. or British troops, portraying them as unequivocal heroes. Then look at movies like Enemy at the Gates or video games like Company of Heroes 2. Even when the Red Army is portrayed as the "good guys" it is emphasized how cruel, terrible, and stupid they are -- just as bumbling as might be shown in a German 1940s propaganda movie. Meanwhile, you can play Waffen-SS units -- units trained specifically to be hardcore Nazis and who often committed war crimes -- in several contemporary video games, where they are treated as just any other unit.

And to the accusation that I was dismissing Soviet repression in the Baltics... That's simply not true. There were many Baltic nationalists who wanted independence, just as there were Ukrainians and Cossacks who wanted that as well. But at no point was this even an issue during the German-Soviet war. The Germans did not liberate any of these countries and give them freedom; instead, it brutally used them, plundered them, and often massacred them in reprisal for partisan activity. Locals were recruited largely for two reasons: to participate in pogroms against the local Jews and communists and, later, to buttress Himmler's Waffen-SS vanity project. Please, go to Belarus, where Germany destroyed 209 out of 290 cities, 85% of the industry, and more than one million buildings, and tell them how much they hated Soviet rule; Soviet rule was better by comparison if only because the Soviet state, however authoritarian, wasn't actively trying to murder them.

For all the terrible things done in the name of communism, Stalinism, and Marxism-Leninism, none of those have as a central tenet the extermination, expulsion or enslavement of a people for the purpose of providing "living space" for another people. Enough said. (As for the Holomodor, historians widely agree that while Stalin's policies of industrialization, collectivization and dekulakization made the famine worse, it was not an intentional famine created for the purpose of ethnic cleansing.)

Anyway, on the subject of the huge cost of German brutality during the war:

The Siege of Leningrad: September-December 1941



According to plans for Operation Barbarossa, Army Group North under the command of Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb was meant to take Leningrad while also securing the Baltic states and protecting Army Group Center’s northern flank. By July, the army group had advanced around 270 miles (450 kilometers) into the Soviet Union, meeting stubborn but ultimately unsuccessful Soviet resistance. There was a huge opening in the Northwestern Front under General Fyodor Kuznetsov, and most of his divisions were understrength. The Soviet leadership soon realized that their priority would have to be the defense of Leningrad, both a key industrial center as well as the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution. Joseph Stalin appointed Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a political ally, as overall commander of the Northern and Northwestern fronts. Voroshilov at once made the fortification of Leningrad and shoring up Leningrad’s defenses his priority.

Although German panzers penetrated deep into the Soviet rear, with elements of Panzergruppe 4 coming within 66 miles of Leningrad by July 13, a series of Soviet counterstrikes left some German divisions encircled while their supporting units caught up with them. None of these Soviet attacks succeeded in pushing back the enemy, but they did delay the German advance by critical weeks. Hitler responded by transferring Panzergruppe 3, under General Hermann Hoth, from Army Group Center to Army Group North and then gave Leeb orders to quickly encircle Leningrad and join with Finnish forces. The Germans did not anticipate that General Nikolai Vatutin, the newly appointed chief of staff of the Northwestern Front, had planned for an early August counteroffensive that broke German lines and contributed to yet another substantial delay of the Leningrad assault. Voroshilov, however, was unable to stop Leningrad from becoming surrounded by late August; Stalin replaced him with Marshal Georgy Zhukov in early September. Despite facing tougher obstacles than expected, the German high command claimed that “the iron ring around Leningrad has been closed.” This was the start of the infamous siege of Leningrad, which would kill more Soviets than the entire losses suffered by the United States and the United Kingdom in the entire war.

The German siege was so destructive because the city was completely surrounded by land; resupply was only possible by crossing Lake Ladoga or through air drops, neither of which were feasible with German air and naval superiority. German bombing and shelling, however, was incessant. Before his replacement, Voroshilov was planning to demolish the city rather than surrender it; Zhukov canceled these plans upon his appointment and issued orders against any retreat. By the end of September, he had achieved the “Miracle on the Neva,” not only defending the city but also inflicting 60,000 casualties on Army Group North. These came at an incredibly high cost: the Leningrad Front alone suffered over 100,000 casualties. The more the Soviets fought harder to hold on to what they had, the more intense combat became. There was also no doubt that Leningrad appeared ready to fall, and that its future looked bleak indeed.

On September 22, 1941, the German high command issued a directive stated that Hitler had ordered to erase Leningrad “from the face of the earth.” Hitler said: “I have no interest in the further existence of this large city after the defeat of Soviet Russia… We propose to blockade the city tightly and erase it from the earth by means of artillery fire and continuous bombardment from the air.” He was more interested in finishing off Moscow and Kiev, and even transferred Panzergruppe 4 to Army Group Center toward that end. Berlin encouraged Finland to advance on Leningrad from the north, but after restoring the Finnish-Soviet border pre-Winter War, the Finnish government showed little to no interest in sacrificing Finnish lives to bring the city under German control.

 

Between June 1941 and March 1943, most of the residents of Leningrad evacuated the city. The city had a population of around three million before the war, but had received a huge influx of refugees fleeing east after Operation Barbarossa began. In the spring and summer, those people still in Leningrad would be ferried across Lake Ladoga, or along the “The Road of Life” that ran between Lake Ladoga and Leningrad in the winter months. (The road today is part of a World Heritage Site.) Through these highly dangerous means, the Soviet armed forces kept the defenders of Leningrad supplied – if only barely. After almost thirty months of continuous besiegement, over one million Soviet citizens would have died from starvation, shock, exposure or from German bombing. A city of three million would be reduced to around 700,000. Due to the destruction of all the primary food warehouses, food was extremely scarce; by the winter of 1941-1942 there were already reports of cannibalism, as people turned on the corpses of their loved ones just to survive. More typically, however, people preyed on one another for their ration cards. It is important to remember that this was a deliberate policy of starvation employed by the German high command. At no point was the morality of such a high civilian death toll considered; this was a war of extermination.

Sources

Barber, John, and Andrei Rostislavovich Dzeniskevich. Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941-44. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.

Glantz, David M. The Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1944: 900 Days of Terror. London: Cassell Military Paperbacks, 2004.
Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

 

I wasn't questioning Jonathan House; I was expressing frustration with a mildly tiresome oversimplified video documentary you linked to by a youtuber TIK. If you read what you had written, then seen my post, you should have recognised that.

This narrative seems somewhat confused. If you clearly quoted who you were referring to, and where, it might not be quite so confusing. Or not, as the case may be.

Excuse me, but I've not asked you to do any "research" for me. Further, these stories are irrelevant; I can find anecdotal evidence for just the opposite; how fiercely Baltic and Polish people despise the Stalinist aggression perpetrated against their nations far more than the Nazis. What does that prove, other than people have differing opinions, when allowed?

Excuse me? Where is this glossed over? Seriously, it is known. Furthermore, it is a fairly common aspect fundamental of all cultures; how much wallowing in gory details do you want in order to satiate your holier-than-thou self in your throne room?

It's not doubted, it's your expression that is abrasive. Saving Private Ryan does little to portray soldiers as "unequivocal heroes;" they shoot surrendering Germans at the start. So clamber down off the high horse. Secondly, as the entire Wehrmacht was involved in committing atrocities, where would you like to draw the line? The Kriegsmarine?

Please, go to Poland, and discuss there the enormous benefits of Stalinism... I personally know many Poles, and other Baltic people that despise the Communists (rightly or wrongly) more than the German occupiers. Co-incidentally, Belarus is still in the clutches of a tyrant, still celebrates the October revolution, and I have been there.

It hardly matters what reason some remote despot has you starve for, while you are starving. Remarkably coincidental that Ukrainians suffered when there was such a need to break burgeoise Ukrainian Kulaks... The slogan of communists was 'Let's eradicate them as a social group!' - 'Истребим кулачество как класс!

Soviet's didn't have the urgency the Nazis suffered from; the 'Soviets' adopted a policy of Russification. A few more decades, and the Baltic states would've been utterly obliterated.