Was Hitler right to attack the USSR in 1941?

Stalin ruled Russia for 20 years. Hitler murdered 11-17 million people in 6 years.

 

Most of the Soviet citizens that Stalin murdered were killed before the start of WWII
not during his entire 20 year reign.

this is from the timeline in the article whose internet address is listed above

By 1937, the social upheaval caused by the "revolution from above" has resulted in the deaths of up to 14.5 million Soviet peasants.

All told, about one million are executed, in what will come to be known as 'The Great Terror', 'The Great Purge', or the 'Yezhovshina' (after the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov). At least 9.5 million more are deported, exiled or imprisoned in work camps, with many of the estimated five million sent to the Gulag never returning alive. Other estimates place the number of deported at 28 million, including 18 million sent to the Gulag. Most of these did not come out alive.

1937 - On 30 July the NKVD issues Order No. 00447 setting out the "means of punishment of those to be repressed, and the number of those subject to repression." The operation is to begin on 5 August and be completed in four months.
"All kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements to be repressed are to be divided into two categories," the order states.

"a) The first category are the most hostile of the enumerated elements. They are subject to immediate arrest, and after their cases have been considered by a three-person tribunal (troika) they are TO BE SHOT.

"b) In the second category are the other less active though also hostile elements. They are subject to arrest and imprisonment in a camp for 8 to 10 years, and the most evil and socially dangerous of these, to incarceration for the same period in prison, as determined by the three-person tribunal."
The order then lists the numbers of individuals from regions around the Soviet Union to be "subject to repression." 75,950 are to be executed and 203,000 exiled.

At the same time, the purge of the Red Army begins. The purge results in the execution, imprisonment or dismissal of 36,671 officers, including about half of the 706 officers with the rank of brigade commander or higher. Three of the army's five marshals and 15 of its 16 top commanders are executed.

On 7 November, during a toast to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution, Stalin states that every enemy of the state will be destroyed. "Even if he was an old Bolshevik, we will destroy all his kin, his family," he says.
"We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts - yes, his thoughts - threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!"



by no means am it saying that Hitler was somehow "better" or less of a murderous lunitic than Stalin but evidence and historical facts will show that they both are equally evil mass murdering lunatics who exploited and killed their own citizens on a massive scale.

 

If Hitler won, we would be staring at many more Holocausts. There was no way 11-17 million deaths were enough to eliminate all the superfluous undesirables in the former USSR, or make room for German colonists for the thousand year Reich. Those comparisons between Hitler and Stalin usually degenerate quickly into some mumble jumbo about why the Allies should never have helped Russia. If that's not what you intend to say, I apologize before hand. I just have no patience for that kind of inane talk. The whole damned war happened because America refused to take its responsibilities, economically in Wall Street, internationally in Europe and Asia, allowing Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to occupy a power vacuum that by logic should have been occupied by the most powerful state in the system.

Stalin got away with half of Europe because no one except the Soviets were ready to beat the Wehrmacht. Now who's fault was that? I think I have offended more than my fair share of people today, so allow me to retire to my corner and wait for the pelting to start.

 

I have some reservations about the "responsability" of the US:
1) the argument is with hindsight
2)it is an argument from a "US as the policeman of the world" POV
3) I don't think that it would have been financially possible for the US to occupuy the powervacuum:even now,the US will not longer be able (financially and militarily ) to play the policeman in Afghanistan and Iraq .

 

Triple C

I was in no way commenting on whether the US should have helped Russia or about any of the alliances, strategies or military aspects of the war in my post quoting the number of people murdered by these two megalomaniac, narcissistic, lunatic mass murdering leaders.

No need to apologize for thinking I was commenting on the reason the US aided the Soviet Union.

my comment was my reply to this statement below.

"Stalin was somewhere between Hitler and Roosevelt. Not a nice man, but not a ravening monster either"

I am not critisizing this comment or judging it either. If the poster feels this way who am I to say they are wrong for having this viewpoint? I was just responding with my own viewpoint based on some numerical facts and statistics.

My comment was merely to show some of the numerical statistical facts to show how I arrived at my opinion that Hitler and Stalin were both mass murderers and that there is no way that I can say that either of these leaders was worse or better than the other based solely upon the number of people they murdered within their respective countries.

also Triple C I do not think you have offended anyone especially not me. I have no problem with people voicing their opinions or thoughts and view points (a basic right here in the USA) it is only when someone responds with a personal attack on the poster or critisizes someone's post or opinion that causes offense and you do not make personal attacks on posters so you have no need to fear offending anyone.

we are all entitled to our opinions without recourse, insult or accusation that you are right or wrong to have your own opinion.

How can my, yours or anyone's opinion be right or wrong when it is just an opinion based on our own thoughts, knowledge and background?

 

nachtjager61,

There have been numerous discussions on this forum comparing Hitler to Stalin.

Two main differences always pop up between them when comparing their executions.

1. Stalin killed his own people (local matter) while Hitler killed everyone else's (global matter)

2. Stalin killed so many out of paranoia and his vision of a perfect Soviet State. These deaths had nothing to do with sex, race, religion, ethnicity etc.

Hitler killed for a different reason, a hatred for a people with the sole purpose of exterminating a race(s).

Hitler = Evil
Stalin = Brutal

Hitler was also responsible for the deaths of 20 million Russian civilians.

 

now I like that point of view....Local vs Global.....I never heard it put that way, Evil vs Brutal
good point

 

Okay back to the thoughts on Barbarosa and Hitler's timing for the invasion of Russia

I have a question about the efforts by the Soviets to improve their armor and aircraft and the timing of these imrovements.

when was the T-34 concieved? not it's actual introduction in the winter of 41, but when did it hit the drawing boards?

Was the T-34 concieved before or during the beginning of the invasion or had the Soviets only begun working on it well after Barbarosa was well under way?

This line of question also pertains to the development of the Soviet's aircraft types. Were the Soviets working on improving their aircraft types prior to Barbarosa as well or was the invasiona and it's success what forced them to rush aircraft and armor improvements and production?

The reason I ask is, if the Soviets were in fact already working on updating the quality of their armor and airplanes prior to and during the beginning of the invasion then if Hitler had waited until 42 or later to invade he would have been facing a much stronger (technically) enemy. If the Soviets would have had the T-34 by 1942, regardless of the 41 invasion, then Hitlers forces would have had a much more difficult time. The same applies to their aircraft as well.

If they Soviets were already improving their armor and airpower, or were planning on it, they would have had better, more improved tanks and planes by 1942 and Barbarosa might have been a huge failure if Hitler had waited any later than 1941.

this is why I have felt that the longer Hitler waited to invade the more difficult it would have been as it would have given the Soviets time to improve their armor, aircraft and officer corps

 

Local/Global: I do not think the Poles or Ukrainians (yes, Stalin was Ukrainian) is considered as "people of Stalin" In any case the difference is almost irrelevant.

Evil/brutal: I visited Auschwitz, seeing that you feel we have something particularly perverse about the Nazis. Stalin wanted to impose his rule, his leadership, nothing new. Hitler wanted to exterminate a race, well actually two, we always forget the Gypsies.

Maybe the IBM's punch cards should be more remembered than the "Cyclone B". Allowed to direct the Holocaust with an efficiency unthinkable. If these evil beasts had led that effort to more useful/decent things (like planning the logistics of Barbarossa) ...

Well, The nuclear fission of uranium was discovered by German physicists in 1938, the possibilities for a less evil or stupid seem endless.

 

The T-34 was originally conceived in 1937-1938(?) The Mig-3 too was fairly similar, however; around 900 or so existed when war with Germany broke out.

One major advantage that Stalin had over Western powers when confronting Germany was that he knew what Germany had. When signing the Ribbetrop-Molotov pact, Stalin knew of Germany's ultimate intensions towards Russia. He made sure there was a clause in their which allowed Soviet officers and engineers to inspect German hardware (tanks in particular) the last such inpection was a week or so before Barbarossa. In a tank factory (I forget where) the German engineers revealed their new tank, Panzer IV. They immediately noticed that the Russians were unimpressed leading them to believe that the Russians had something more deadly in the works.

There suspicions came true when the German units encountered the first sprinkles of the the new T-34's.

 

Stalin was actually Georgian

When speaking of "his people" it is meant in the Soviet Union.

 

First I would say there was a wide gulf between Hitler and Roosevelt, so there was plenty of room for Stalin to find a comfortable place to sit. As one final distinction between the two dictators is that with Stalin if you accepted his world view, you could survive in his empire. For Hitler if you were not Aryan, you had no right to exist.

T-34

There were a little shy of 1,000 T-34 and KV-1 tanks in service at the time of the German invasion. As with any country with the capacity to build their own weapons, new developments are always in the works, either as improvements in existing designs or completely new systems. Further as with any country that could at this time of the march of armies about the world would induce you to look to your own defences.

 

As I have said before, I am increasingly irritated by Stalin versus Hitler threads, because of the P. Buchanan types. There was a misunderstanding awhile back, when I was mistaken for a communist sympathizer. Stalin was a tyrant and very, very bad man; but Hitler was a mad sociopath. There's no negotiating or reasoning with him. Stalin was somewhat better as he could be approached to as a rational human being, motivated by national and self-interest. Hitler was erratic, and ultimately driven by his gigantic hatreds.

The problem with the supposition that a later German attack with greater build-up is, as others have point out, time is a double-edged sword. It favors the defender in general, and the Soviets were on their way to building massive mechanized formations armed with modern weaponry and led by rehabilitated professional officers. The Nazis should never have messed with the Soviets, but the decision to attack in 1941 was either fortuitous, or a stroke of genius.

 

I have been doing some research in regards to the statements made that Stalin was never going too, not planning too or had not intended to attack Germany or expand communism into Europe.

here is a post by Sloniksp from the thread about Kesselring's opinion and evidence of a Soviet attack
Interesting but not surprising. Hitler and Goebels were masters at creating stories to further their own agendas. All others had no choice but to agree and follow...

Here is a post by LJAD.....Last point :there is NO evidence that Hitler attacked the SU in 1941,because he was thinking the SU would attack him in 1941

Here is a post from Belesar.....While I believe that Hitler believed that Russia wished to destroy Nazi Germany, that alone does not make the assumption a valid proof. Remember that Hitler had "proof" that Poland sent troops over the border on the night of August 31st 1939, generously supplied by Herr Goebbels and Himmler.
Looking at Soviet history dispassionately you would be hard pressed to find a Soviet Pre-emptive attack on a powerfull nation.

To counter these arguments or opinions of a Soviet attack on Germany I have done a bit of research and I have found a great article written by modern Russian authors, here is their story....from this website.....www.2worldwar2.com/russia.htm

I know that LJAD called these works "Ramblings" but I do not know how he came to this opinion. It seems that a lot of research into Soviet history and documentation has been done by these authors certainly more than any of us here on this forum. I don't think anyone on this forum has had the access to Soviet History kept behind the "Iron Curtain" nor has any of us done such extensive and exhaustive research into this area. So I don't know how valid "Ramblings" describes the work of these authors. However everyone is entitled to their own opinions and there is no right or wrong opinion. What motive would Rezun or "Suvorov" have as a Russian intelligence officer to do this research and publish these results which reveal the conclusions he came to if he did not feel they had merit?

The first factor was the great and laborious work of a few open-minded 2nd generation independent researchers like Viktor Suvorov and Mark Solonin, which applied analytic approaches to the vast scope of publicly available Russian wartime and post-war documentation and literature, detected thousands of small details of information that slipped over the years through the Soviet censorship, and processed these into coherent new insights which dramatically changed our perception of what happened, both before the German invasion (Suvorov's work), and after it started (Solonin's work).
First and foremost of these researchers was Vladimir Rezun (known by his pen name Viktor Suvorov), a Russian military intelligence officer who applied his deep knowledge of intelligence gathering and analysis methods, and of Russian military doctrines, to Russia's World War 2 military literature, with dramatic results. The second factor was the partial removal of the deep cover of censorship from Russian military and state archives for a period of just five years, between the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union in 1991 and the gradual recovery of conservative nationalism in the Russian government, marked, for example, by the rise to power of Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer. This gap of five years of relative openness was used by historians to access previously closed archives and reach documents which provide previously unavailable proofs that further support the claims of Suvorov and the other researchers. Since the mid-1990s, 'mainstream' western historiography increasingly accepts both the main claims and the main supporting facts and evidence of the pioneering work of researchers like Suvorov, and the "history as we know it" of Russia in World War 2 is being re-written.

The modern Russian military historiography is full of evidence that the Russian army was preparing since 1940 for a planned aggressive war against Germany.





Under Stalin's dictatorship, Russia's military, industrial, domestic, and diplomatic preparations for a second World War were of greater magnitude. Furthermore, in August 1939 Stalin was in a position in which he could prevent Hitler's invasion of Poland, the invasion that started World War 2, and he knew it well and said so. But at that decisive point in history, instead of preventing war, Stalin did the opposite. He cleared the way and provided guarantees for Hitler to invade, after he knew for sure that this will start a war not just in Poland but also in Western Europe, a war that the Communist ideology expected, planned and prepared for, and desired. Then, with Germany at war with Britain and France, Stalin's Russia moved to the 2nd phase of its long term preparations. Russia moved to a maximum effort war regime in which it enormously expanded its military force and military production rates, expanded its territory westwards, by force, which also gave it a long common border with Germany, and finally in 1941 began to mobilize millions and transferred its enormous attack-oriented forces to the German and Romanian borders, and prepared to enter the European war in a gigantic attack that would:

1. Immediately cut Germany's main source of oil in Ploesti, in southern Romania, just about 120 miles from the Russian border, in order to paralyze Hitler's armed forces for lack of oil (as eventually happened in 1944).
2. Defeat the exhausted Germany and its allies across the entire front from the Finland in the North to the Black Sea in the South - a mirror image of the German attack that eventually started in June 22, 1941.
3. Continue with the Communist "liberation" of the entire Europe, by advancing all the way first to Germany, then to France, and Spain, bringing all of Europe under the brutal totalitarian regime which the Russian people already "enjoyed" then, that made Russia one big prison with countless prisons in it.

Hitler's Germany managed to be the first to attack, by a narrow gap of a few weeks at most (Suvorov's conclusion, based on various evidence, is that Russia's Red Army was going to attack on July 6, 1941, so Hitler got ahead of them by exactly two weeks). The German attack forced the Red Army put its operational plans aside. It returned to those plans and implemented them three years later, except that since by then the situation was different, Communism occupied only Eastern Europe, not all of it.

The plan to invade Germany and conquer all of Europe in the name of Communism's expansionist ideology, is likely the greatest secret of World War 2 that remains officially Top Secret. The Communist Empire kept that secret for five decades, preferring to appear peaceful and militarily incapable, even dumb, than to appear as the aggressive expansionist "Evil Empire" that it always was. And modern Russia, nationalist but no longer Communist, understandably might never officially admit that either, although key evidence slipped out of their control.

Between August 1939 and June 1941, when Germany was at war in the West, Russia devoted all its resources to prepare for war with Germany. In that period the regular Russian army expanded from 2,000,000 soldiers to 5,500,000 soldiers, and many millions more were given military training in order to be called as ready reserves once the war starts. In fact, between Aug. 1939 and June 1941, the Russian army expanded and moved towards the western border from remote inland regions at such rate that the German intelligence simply could not keep track of it, and was therefore terribly wrong in its estimates of the size of the Russian force it was about to attack

All resources were put into mobile aggressive military measures and units (tanks, a million paratroopers !!, tactical attack aircraft, etc), not into defensive or 'static' measures ( land mines, fortifications, anti-aircraft units, long range bombers etc.). The entire doctrine of the Russian armed forces was aggressive. Defensive tactics were not taught at all and were considered defeatist in an army that by definition was intended to conquer all other countries.

Millions of maps of Germany and Romania were distributed in the Russian army. Maps of Russia were few.

In June 1941, shortly before the German invasion, Russia removed border fences and other obstacles along its western border, to enable rapid border crossing - of the the Russian army moving West, not in order to help the enemy cross into Russia. The entire NKVD border guards force evacuated the border and moved inland, replaced in their positions by regular army units.

The majority of the Russian army and Air Force and enormous stockpiles of ammunition were concentrated along the border, not inland. Furthermore, the enormous piles of ammunition were plainly deployed in the fields and near the border region's train stations, exposed to the weather, not in weather-proof depots and bunkers, so they could not survive the autumn rains and the winter. This in itself has only one meaning, that Russia was going to invade Germany in the summer of 1941.
This enormous amount of ammunition was placed very close to its consumers, the artillery, armor, and infantry units, and was going to be consumed soon, in the planned Russian attack. Russia even placed many new large ammunition factories, built in 1939-1941, close to the border, not inland, where their output could be quickly shipped to the border, but where they were also very vulnerable in case of an invasion into Russia.

The Russian Air Force always used long range heavy bombers. In August 1939 Stalin ordered to abandon further procurement and development of heavy bombers and shift all resources to tactical ground attack aircraft, which are more suitable for an aggressive war, in which the plan is to conquer vast enemy territories in a fast war, not destroy its cities with bombers in a long war of attrition. This is exactly like what happened in the German Air Force, for the same reasons. Britain and the US developed long range bombers - but they did not intend to conquer enemy countries. Germany, and Russia, did. Also, the date of Stalin's decision, and other similar military procurement and mobilization decisions, matches that of his his main decision to star a war to conquer Germany and the rest of Europe, the decision in Aug. 19, 1939 that opened the door for Hitler to invade Poland and conveniently start that war for Stalin.

In June 1941, behind the Soviet armies on the border, in addition to the military police units that were supposed to block deserters there were also three full mobile armies of the NKVD, the Russian secret police, and of Communist party officials. Their role was to take full political control of the occupied countries and eliminate all resistance. Blocking deserters is useful for defense too, but such an enormous political-police force is useful only for a planned war of occupation

 

I am not convinced :at this moment,there is no solid proof that Stalin would attack Germany in 1941:
that there were plans:yes,by Timochenko and by Zhukow,but these plans are no proof that the SU would attack Germany .
about Suvurov :well,he has been debunked as a Baron von Munchhausen :a fantast,believing his own lies ;I have wasted 40 euro on his Icebreaker,where Ruzin is rambling that the SU had 1 MILLION paratroopers on june 1941
1) no proof for a Russian attack
2) such an attack would be unlikely and superfluous,because ,by remaining neutral,Stalin was preventing Germany of a)defeating Britain b)defending itself against Britain and the US .Germany was becoming weakened every day,why should Stalin risk an attack ?

 

@ LJAD
I now agree with you that there is a lot of potential BS to Suvorov's claims. I have now done some research into him and his writings and I see that a lot of historians discredit his research as Suvorov has not provided any real documentation or dated evidence to support his claims

Suvorov's assertions remain a matter of debate among historians. While most agree that Stalin made extensive preparations for an upcoming war and exploited the military conflict in Europe to his advantage, the assertions that Stalin planned to attack Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941, and that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike by Hitler, are generally discounted

It seems however that this topic of the SU's intent or no intent on attacking towards the west is still a very controversial topic. In my research into Suvorov I have uncovered noted historians that say there are some truths in things he has to say but certainly not all of his writings have merit.

Critics
Among the noted critics of Suvorov's work are Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky, American military historian David Glantz, and Russian military historians Makhmut Gareev, Lev Bezymensky and Dmitri Volkogonov. Many other western scholars, such as Teddy J. Uldricks, Derek Watson,Hugh Ragsdale, Roger Reese Stephen Blank, Robin Edmonds, agree that the major Suvorov's weakness is "that the author does not reveal his sources" (Ingmar Oldberg) Cynthia A. Roberts is even more categorical, claiming that Suvorov's writings are based on "virtually no evidentiary base"

there are some who are in the Middle of these claims that lean both towards the idea of an eventual attack by Stalin but certainly not in 1941 as Suvorov claims

Middle positions
In a 1987 article in the Historische Zeitschrift journal, the German historian Klaus Hildebrand argued that both Hitler and Stalin separately were planning to attack each other in 1941. In Hildebrand’s opinion, the news of Red Army concentrations near the border led to Hitler engaging in a Flucht nach vorn ("flight forward"-i.e. responding to a danger by charging on rather than retreating). Hildebrand wrote "Independently, the National Socialist program of conquest met the equally far-reaching war-aims program which Stalin had drawn up in 1940 at the latest. Hildebrand's views could be considered as a median viewpoint in the preventive war debate. A middle position seems to be taken by the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld. In an interview in the April 11, 2005 edition of the German news magazine FOCUS, which is the second largest weekly magazine in Germany, he said: "I doubt that Stalin wanted to attack as early as autumn 1941, as some writers argue. But I have no doubt that sooner or later, if Germany would have been entangled in a war with Great Britain and the U.S., he would have taken what he wanted".


there are some who do support a lot of Suvorov's claims as well

Supporters
While many Western researchers (two exceptions being Albert L. Weeks and R. C. Raack) ignored Suvorov's thesis, he has gathered some support among Russian professional historians, starting in the 1990s. Support for Suvorov's claim that Stalin had been preparing a strike against Hitler in 1941 began to emerge as some archive materials were declassified. Authors supporting the Stalin 1941 assault thesis are V.D.Danilov, V.A.Nevezhin, Constantine Pleshakov and B.V. Sokolov. As the latter has noted, the absence of documents with the precise date of the planned Soviet invasion can't be an argument in favor of the claim that this invasion was not planned at all. Although the USSR attacked Finland, no documents found to date which would indicate November 26, 1939 as the previously assumed date for beginning of the provocations or November 30 as the date of the planned Soviet assault.
However Edvard Radzinsky noted that Dmitri Volkogonov, in his own words "a lieutenant general and an eminent Russian military historian, [who] was the first person to be permitted to work in all the secret archives", found documents detailing plans in view of the situation in Europe in 1941. Radzinsky quotes Volkogonov as writing: "'No, Stalin was not planning an attack on Germany in 1941.'" But Radzinsky disagrees with that assessment. He further quotes Volkogonov: "'Nowhere is there a single word about a strike against the German forces. All the documents call for defensive measures to be taken.'" However Radzinsky considers the plans to be offensive in nature and the wording used to be not more than a cover, referring to the Winter War with Finland where "[...] 'defense' often signified 'attack.'"
Another document uncovered by Volkogonov and preserved in the Military-Memorial Center of the Soviet General Staff, was a draft of a plan for military strategy in case of war with Germany, drawn up by Georgy Zhukov, dated May 15, 1941, and signed by Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Nikolai Vatutin. He considers this to be a plan of a pre-emptive attack on Germany. The document stated:
"In view of the fact that Germany at present keeps its army fully mobilized with its rear services deployed, it has the capacity of deploying ahead of us and striking a sudden blow. To prevent this I consider it important not to leave the operational initiative to the German command in any circumstances, but to anticipate the enemy and attack the German army at the moment when it is in the process of deploying and before it has time to organize its front and the coordination of its various arms".


This pre-emptive strike would have been timed to coincide with the reorganization necessary to prepare the German forces for attack. The plan drafted by the Soviet command included a secret mobilization of the Soviet forces at the Western frontier in order to be able to surprise the Germans. The overall objective of the offensive operation was to cut Germany off from its allies, and especially Romania with its oil required for Germany to conduct the war. Radzinsky reinterprets the document as a plan for a pre-emptive strike, even in the absence of an imminent German attack. He disagrees with the assessment of Volkogonov, who did not consider it to be final proof of the Soviet intentions and did not believe that the document had even reached Stalin, as this copy had not been signed by Zhukov nor Stalin, although it was addressed to the Soviet leader and signed by both Vasilevsky and Vatutin. According to Radzinsky all that the missing signatures prove is that the copy found in the archives was a rough draft. He considers it more than likely that a final version has existed but was expunged from the archives to prevent it from ever becoming known. He further points out that several high ranking military officers, Zhukov, Timoshenko and Vasilievsky regularly visited Stalin in May 1941. He sees further evidence of Stalin's intentions in the fact that around the same time military units received a directive pointing out that: "'If a particular country is the first to attack, its war is considered an unjust one, whereas if a country is the victim of attack and merely defends itself, its war must be considered a just one. The conclusion drawn is that the Red army is supposed to wage only defensive war: this is to forget that any war waged by the Soviet Union will be a just one'"

One of views was expressed by Mikhail Meltyukhov in his study Stalin's Missed Chance. The author states that the idea for striking Germany arose long before May 1941, and was the very basis of Soviet military planning from 1940 to 1941. Providing additional support for this thesis is that no significant defense plans have been found. In his argument, Meltyukhov covers five different versions of the assault plan (“Considerations on the Strategical Deployment of Soviet Troops in Case of War with Germany and its Allies” (Russian original)), the first version of which was developed soon after the outbreak of World War II. The last version was to be completed by May 1, 1941. Even the deployment of troops was chosen in the South, which would have been more beneficial in case of a Soviet assault.

In Stalin's War of Extermination, Joachim Hoffmann makes extensive use of interrogations of Soviet prisoners of war, ranging in rank from general to private, conducted by their German captors during the war. The book is also based on open-source, unclassified literature and recently declassified materials. Based on this material, Hoffmann argues that the Soviet Union was making final preparations for its own attack when the Wehrmacht struck. He also remarks that Zhukov's plan of May 15, 1941 has long been known and analyzed. Colonel Valeri Danilov and Dr. Heinz Magenheimer examined this plan and other documents which might indicate Soviet preparations for an attack almost ten years ago in an Austrian military journal (Österreichische Militärische Zeitschrift, nos. 5 and 6, 1991; no. 1, 1993; and no. 1, 1994). Both researchers concluded that Zhukov's plan of May 15, 1941, reflected Stalin's May 5, 1941 speech heralding the birth of the new offensive Red Army.

Well everyone I guess the debate on whether the Soviet Union had any plans or intentions to attack Germany will be contested and debated for years to come. I really don't know what position to take at this time but I am glad I have done more research on the topic which has revealed some very interesting views on the topic
regards
LJS

 

double post

 

Was the Soviet Union at its weakest in 1941--yes
Was Germany in its best position to attack--yes
Was a german attack on the USSR the best choice for 1941--Sorry No

Germany had, in my opinion, a 1 in 3 chance of success in russia after a prolonged campaign. I do not believe the western allies would have given Hitler the time. Nor am I convinced that attacking russia was the best way to nuetralize Britain-USA.

Lets look at a German best case scenario for a Russia invasion.

1941: Germany invades, does everything right, gets a little luck, and captures Moscow and Leningrad. Soviet government moves to Stalingrad and continues the war.

!942: Germany sends AGN north to clear Murmansk/Archangel and stop allied lend lease from there. AGC/AGS are used to clear the Volga river line. Stalingrad is captured, the Caucasus are cut of from Soviet control and taken. Someone shoots Stalin as a traitor to the workers and prolotariat. New government forms east of the Urals. I did say this was best case scenario.

1943: German army pushes Russian armies to Ural mountains and sets up new frontier here. Fall 1943 Germany must now garrison and defend an area at least 6 times the size of the Reich in June 1941.

Does Johann come marching home now? I think not. The troops sent to russia are pretty much still there in 1944. They are not dying as fast, but they are still out of play in reguards to the west. Is the Anglo-American armies so stunned by the august magnificence of Hitler's success, that they simply sit back and make no moves at all?
The war in the west continues much as it historicly did. The German troops in the west are a little better off because of lower casualties, and loss of equipment in the east and perhaps a dozen veteran divisions can be transfered to the west. Is this enough to tip the balance of power in the west? Unlikely, harder for the allies to be sure, but by no means impossible.

 

your best case scenario is a very bad one (for the Germans)The only good one (and this is the one ,the Germans were preparing) is :the Red army on the border is defeated,and,at the end of august 1941,the SU is collapsing-or implosing and the Germans are advancing to the A-A line before december:the war is over . All other scenario's are a desaster for the Germans :if the war was not over in 1941,he could not be won in 1942,or 1943 .
If the war was over in 1941,the benefit was:no danger of Germany being starved ,as in WWI,enough food and raw materials ,the war industry could concentrate on UBoats and aircraft,and,without the 20 million men of the Red army,a British-USA victory,was very unlikely .
Of course,you could argue,that the possibility for the Germans to win in 1941 was illusory;but,there was no better alternative:the German situation in 1940-1941 was that desperate,that they had to gamble on a quick campaign .

 

The Nazis thought they were going to sign a separate peace with the West.
As I recall from "Stalingrad" Beevor, Stalin offered a deal after the start of Barbarossa. Hitler in his extraordinary wisdom, rejected any agreement.