Russian invation of Germany

The revisionists appear to want to paint a picture of Germany invading Russia as a pre-emptive strike. I guess that would make it better.

Does anyone know of any evidence that would corroborate that the Russian army was massing near the frontier with Germany for a July invasion when the Germans invaded in June? Would the unit information of captured Russians be available? The Germans were out-classed by the Russian armor, but I have never heard of any numbers that would indicate that a major thrust was being prepared. I have also never heard that the number of Russian soldiers found on the frontier would indicate that there was any kind of massing of men or material in progress.

What say you?

 

This is an area of history that is of interest to me and the volume of anecdotal evidence suggests a reasonable possiblity that it is indeed true. My sources so far have included war diaries from German soldiers and written references from a few Russian historians.

 

I do think that the fact that there will be war between the two was obvious.

No actual papers exist on Red Army plans , I think, but there must have been huge forces close to border because the Germans started with destroying some 2,000+ planes in the first two days alone. Also big numbers of Red Army troops were caught POW´s during the first couple weeks. Whether they were there to "scare" the Germans not to attack we´ll never know.

Stalin himself was not ready I think because the re-armament and forming of new troops ( panzer troops ) was still totally in its beginning phase if I recall correctly.

One must rember though the Red Army tactics which was that in case someone attacks you the maneuvres are pushed to the attackers side and that´s is why the forces were ordered to push the Germans back in Germany. By the time the German forces were some 100-200 kilometers behind the lines so it was total folishness and the troops were lost.

 

No other information from anyone on this subject, I am suprised.

 

As Kai Petri says, the official Soviet defensive Strategy was : any attack had to be met by a very strong counterstrike, and therefore, the bulk of the fight would take place on enemy territory.

This could prove that the numerous Soviet units close to the border were not an invasion army.

I also think that Stalin was well aware, especialy after the Winter War,that the red army was not in a very good shape. The red army was also undergoing massive changes in planes and armored vehicules, which was scheduled to take several months.

I doubt Stalin had planed an attack in july 1941 under such conditions.

 

Oh yes, now I remember.

At least in several books it is mentioned that a train was found early in Barbarossa and its cargo was maps of Germany for military use.

Don´t know if there´s any pictures or such of this but anyway it is mentioned in several books.

Does not mean they were about to attack but at least they were prepared.

 

In an earlier discussion on the merits and consequences of attacking Kiev Kai posted a link to Burnt Offerings chapter 7 . This site has a very in-depth look at the manpower and geography of Operation Barbarosa. The estimate is that about 3 million soldiers faced each other accross the length of the Russian frontier. This was about 90% of the German forces and less than half of the Russian manpower. The Russians were not armed with the latest armor or planes, but the process of switching to the newer equipment was beginning.

The way that this site discusses the strength of the Russian armies does not seem to be a cncentration of forces for an attack. It is a huge number of men though and to me personally seems too many for just homeland security. I know that is wrong since the Germans waltzed right through them, but if Mexico had the equivelent number of men along the border with the United States for the size of that border I think I would be nervous.

There is one thing about the maps that I am not sure of. When the maps are called maps of Germany what does that mean? Were they maps of what Germany was before it expaned into Poland and Austria? This would be very offensive in nature. Were they maps of the Germany that was just accross the shared frontier between Russia and Germany in what had been and what is now Poland and the Balkan countries?

 

I am under the impression this has been discussed here before, as the Suvorov's Icebreaker theory, from the book of the same name. This postulates a preemtive attack by the SU, but several authors have disregarded this, Glantz incuded.

I for myself do not see much reason to consider an attack by the SU, considering the general unpreparedness, the bad performance in the Finnish war, the Polish 39 operation not being exactly a stellar exercise, etc. However some people on other forums go to great lengths and high emotion to defend this, I can't imagine why.

 

I got started on this subject by someone talking about Surorov's books. Then someone remarked that they were backed by one of the revisionist historical publishing outfits and the originator pulled it off the board. I was just curious about any factual context.

From the little I have seen about the losses and equipment taken by the Germans durig Barbarossa it would have been a long time before the Russians would have felt comfortable taking the offensive. They were just starting to convert over to more modern equipment and that takes some time. The trainload of maps question still intrigues me.

 

Suvorov or not the situation must have seemed very different in 1939, 1940 and then 1941 considering the Red Army approach to the German situation.

Stalin had made the pact with Germany which gave free hands to deal with Eastern Poland, Baltic countries and Finland. At the same time Germany was facing a war in the west which was considered a "death trap" consuming all the German man power and armor there. Within a year or two Germany would fall like an apple from the tree to Stalin´s lap. To their surprise the Blitzkrieg ended the war in 6 weeks and all of a sudden the Red Army was facing a new kind of warfare which also required changes to their Red Army.

Anyway, before the May 1940 operations in the west Stalin must have had plans how to enter Central Europe because they for sure were expecting Germany to be in deep trouble with their warfare in the west, and at the suitable moment the Red Army would pierce through the weak German eastern lines and invaded Reich. This might take a year or two, and during this Stalin would feed Hitler supplies to continue war and thus the USSR would be ready when everybody else in Europe would be exhausted.

Considering how many communists there were in Germany in the early 1930´s I´d suppose it´d not be a big problem to create a communistic state instead of Reich when the Red Army had arrived say 1942-43. Probably had their member cards somewhere hidden. Or maybe Stalin would have them shot for some reason like he did to several top ranking Polish and Finnish communists in the late 1930´s.

 

Everyone believed that the Nazi socialism and communism were incompatible and that their agreement was nothing but a temporary expediant. Most people believe it was only a matter of time before they came to blows. The question was who would attack whom first.

My question about the Russians is this. If Stalin did not have any intention of invading Europe why did he have so many men in uniform? Was five to six million men the normal standing Russian Army? When were they mobilized?

 

One has to remember that western positions heavily crowded with red army units were not properly speaking along a German-Russian frontier, it was along the sharing line drawn by the Molotov-Ribbentrop deal.

It looks unsurprising to have a very strong military presence in territories you have just "conquered" and occupy whether its located into Baltic states or Poland.

However, I agree on the fact that heavy concentration of troops in the western salients like Lvov and Bialystok can only be explained by offensive afterthoughts, I guess Stalin knew that a war would eventualy burst between Germany and USSR.

But again, I doubt such a war had been planed for such short term as 1941 (not to speak about summer 1941).

1- as I said une previous post, Stalin had an illusion about the ability, for border district units, to stop enemy advance, and then counterstrike, at least untill end of 1940, strong army prensence in the border district was considered as both a defensive and offensive option.

2- the red army was being re-organised according to lessons taught by recent conflicts (Poland, Winter war, Khalinin Gol, observation of Geman blitzkrieg, Spain etc etc) it is easy to proove this by checking the weapon programs started just before Barbarossa and the very fast increase on ressources allowed to military expenses and development. But full scale production was yet to be started. I would find it strange to plan an offensive 6 or 18 months before being close to fully equiped and trained with modern weapons.

3- the fact that no significant reinforcements (both in manpower and hardware) were given to the Red Army units located near the demarcation line since march 1941 : at the begining of this month, a little less than 1.000.000 (between 600.000 and 800.000 I must say I don't remember exactly) were drafted from the reserve, at Zhukov's request : they were not sent at the border in preparation of an offensive, but well inside Soviet Union, in other words they were positionned as a reserve, not a assault army group (see Zhukov's memoirs)

4- the fact that a 1941 Soviet offensive would have been planed since at least one year, at a time when Stalin could expect Germany to be engaged into a long and costly war inthe west, against UK, France Belgium etc...It's hard to believe that after seeing France collapsing in a few weeks, Stalin would have maintained ageneral assault against Germany planned for summer 1941. This is another way to say the same thing as Kai Petri posted above.

5- As said, the Red Army was right in a state of changing many equipment, and I will add that, at the scale of the whole USSR, the border districts were not given a significative priority to be issued the new planes and tanks. (Yak1, Mig3, Lagg3, Il2(very few built at this time) T34 KV1 etc etc). We could expect the frontline units of a soviet offensive to be equiped with the best of mobile warfare, but it was simply not the case in june 1941.

One last thing : I apologize if I sound maybe a bit straightforward or affirmative, it's just that english is not my native langage and it's hard for me to express complicated things without slicing them into short (and maybe harsh looking) sentences. In no way I'm patronizing or pretending I know more on the subject than the other people posting here.

 

That's a good idea, indeed the situation was fluctuating very much along time. However, I think we should move this discussion into the What-Ifs

Yes, according to theory the capitalist nations should dilacerate each other until the Socialist Motherland saw it ripe to intervene and liberate the workers. Theoretically this would occur in a context similar to WW1, but the German behaviour was rather unexpected, see the Anschlüss, the Polish campaigh, and then the French operations.

This consuming of forces was something that did not occur, so that part of the theory had to go back to the drawing board.

I disagree, the 'blitzkriegieva' was full fledged Red Army doctrine already in the thirties, see the Japanese incidents. It was called the Deep Operation. Of course it's application took a beating with the purges only coming back up to scratch in practice in Summer '43, but it was there already.

See above. It is interesting to see the march of the annexations before Barbarossa (Baltic States, post-Winter War, Bessarabia, Poland) but this has been (by them...) explained by border readjustments to the previous historical borders. Would they stop? Would they keep gnawing at other peoples borders? Another What-If.

I loved this '1942-43' date! The Mother of All What-Ifs Yes, I suppose there would have been a large number of discreeet executions, according to the established pattern.

 

That's all right, no need to apologise so profusely in advance. I'm no native speaker as well and people know that when I am blunt I really meam to be blunt

 

Good answers. I think they tend to build upon one another toward a similar conclusion. Still waiting to hear someone with an inside track on the trainload of maps.

 

Mainly I mean the Red Army tank politics. Before the Blitzkrieg in the west these tanks were meant for infantry protection ( after the purges it seems and lessons from the Spanish civil war )and once they noticed how powerful tanks in larger units were the ideology was changed and more of the "tank units only" were formed. This however was nowhere near completed in the summer of 1941.

Even in the beginning of Barbarossa the Red army did not use their powerful tanks in big numbers so Germans could destroy them one by one. And even then the Germans were getting locally beaten by these Soviet "monster" tanks!

 

If I may nitpick a bit, the Soviet doctrine did have room for close-support (NPP) tanks and cavalry (DPP) tanks, just like the Brits. See the T-26 and BT series dichotomy.

These were replaced by the T-34 and KV-1 families later. But things were not always so clear cut, as the 1941 tank battalion TOE was a mix of KV-1, T-34 and T-26, damn! When it dawned upon them that this did not work, the KV-1s were taken away and used to constitue Separate regiments for infantry support.

And no, I never heard of any German map trainload

 

It is true that combined arms, mechanized deep thrusts and defense in depht had been theorized within Red Army before the war (Tukhachevskii’s concept of the deep battle – btw he was executed at Stalin’s request in 1937).

The deep battle concept was adopted into the 1936 Soviet Field Regulations.

But this stayed very theorical, and the Red Army was clearly unable to put this kind of theories into practice at this time.

anyway, I'm not saying that USSR wasn't preparing for a war at this time (anyway who wasn't preparing war or already at war in 1941 ? lol).

@ Bigiceman :If you are interested and think it's a good argument, I will try to find more precise examples of Soviet deployments in the weeks before the war to show that they were not located at the border, as you could expect when building an invasion army.

about the maps or train, I've heard that USSR had early warnings of incoming Barbarossa through a German desertor and through red orchestra / Sorge or whatever, but I don't know much on this subject

 

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERsorge.htm

After the war Leopold Trepper met General Tominaga, Chief of Staff of the Japanese Army in Manchuria. During the meeting he asked Tominaga about Richard Sorge.

"Do you know anything about Richard Sorge? I asked him.

"Naturally. When the Sorge affair broke out I was Vice-Minister of Defence."

"In that case, why was Sorge sentenced to death at the end of 1941, and not executed until November 7, 1944.? Why didn't you propose that he be exchanged? Japan and the USSR were not at war" (The USSR officially declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945)

He cut me off energetically. "Three times we proposed to the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo that Sorge be exchanged for a Japanese prisoner. Three times we got the same answer: "The man called Richard Sorge is unknown to us."

 

Here are the factual info I promised : the deployment of armies from “east to west”, just before the German invasion : (General Staff Directive 13/05/1941)

· 25th Rifle Corps -> Dvina,
· 21st Army -> Gomel,
· 16th Army -> Ukraine, then Smolensk
· 19th Army -> Kiev area.
· 22nd Army -> Velikie Luki,

If you are not familiar with former USSR geographics, I’ll say that these armies were deployed more or less between the Dvina and the Dneper, way too much east than you could expect from a springboard to Germany or Germany occupied territories