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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:I don't want to turn this into a "hitler would have won if he had just.." thread, but what do you think of the following: This buys Hitler at most, three weeks starting the invasion around June 1st. The invasion of Yugoslavia ends in late April and if Hitler tells Mussolini to shove it the Wehrmacht could have been redeployed to its start areas for Barbarossa by the initial start date of May 15, and as a bonus he hasn't become afraid of losing fallschirmjagers and they're not torn to shreds from Crete. However the spring rapastitusia peaks on May 5th and doesn't really subside to a point where the river Bug is crossable until late May/early June. quote:Barbarossa is planned as a TWO year operation so troops are issued winter equipment and dig in once winter arrives. Which would more likely as not have been after or at least inside Moscow. Stalin then has more industry, resources and manpower available to rebuild the Red Army during the winter with the added bonus of not losing a shitload of troops to the Rzhev meatgrinder. e: oh I misread this one but three weeks is not going to see Hitler owning Moscow for more than a few days. Napoleon took it and was still thrown out of Russia. Army Group Center after fighting the IIRC 3 separate rings of defense for the city would have been in no position to hold it in the middle of winter. quote:Hitler puts off the Russian genocide till the Soviet Union is dealt with, he actively spreads the word he is here to free the Russian people from communism. He no longer has to "guard the rear" or use troops to massacre the population, god knows how many "freed" Russians join him. As the mil history thread says, then he's basically black gay hitler. The rear still needs to be guarded because the red army is running hundreds if not thousands of partisan groups behind the lines with whatever supplies they can get to them. Hiwis were never really trusted to do much more than basic labor until German manpower issues came up and Hitler hated the idea of arming the ROA. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Feb 9, 2014 |
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Feb 9, 2014 02:26
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Which would have been shipped with the rest of the equipment that was planned in the two year assault..
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Feb 9, 2014 02:41
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:Which would have been shipped with the rest of the equipment that was planned in the two year assault.. I'm not sure you get why this is a problem, there simply weren't enough intact railways in Russia to move the necessary fuel and food let alone extra coats.
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Feb 9, 2014 02:44
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Black gay hitler stuff Interesting, thanks! Do you know if there was much support from "joe commie" for Hitler? Stalin seems to have been greatly feared by the populace.
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Feb 9, 2014 02:45
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DerLeo posted:I'm not sure you get why this is a problem, there simply weren't enough intact railways in Russia to move the necessary fuel and food let alone extra coats. I know it's a problem, I'm replying in kind to an over simplistic " no can do winter, forgot to bring coat" reply.
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Feb 9, 2014 02:46
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:I know it's a problem, I'm replying in kind to an over simplistic " no can do winter, forgot to bring coat" reply. Well realistically there's no way they could keep up the breakneck pace required to be in Moscow by winter without stretching their supply lines to the kind of degree they did. Even if they stockpiled for a "two year operation", they still have all their pre-war stockpiles stuck on the German side of the pre-Barbarossa borders and would need to move them deep into the Soviet Union, while still moving up the supplies immediately necessary to keep the soldiers fighting.
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Feb 9, 2014 03:00
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As to the accelerated timeline, in the postwar period some British historians tried to redeem their disastrous intervention in Greece by arguing that the supposed delay it caused to Operation Barbarossa was decisive. I believe that's actually where that legend comes from originally. In actuality review of weather conditions in European Russia and the state of German logistics in the late spring/early summer of 1941 shows that they really couldn't have jumped off much earlier than June 22 regardless of what they were doing in the Balkans. It's also worth pointing out that Italy sent a motorized corps to participate in Barbarossa, and then they expanded that to the full 8th Army with 235,000 men by late 1942. If Hitler told Mussolini to get stuffed in 1941, he's not going to have access to those soldiers. Admittedly many of them were of dubious quality against the Soviets, but using them as flank guards freed up higher-quality German troops for heavier lifting. And some of the Italian formations like their mountain corps were actually pretty good. Nor is it clear that declining to go into Greece would redound to Germany's advantage in any significant way. The Germans would still be in Yugoslavia, because the invasion of Yugoslavia was a German show and launched in response to the British-backed coup d'etat of 27 March 1941. There simply isn't a plausible scenario where the Germans don't respond to that with a full-scale invasion. The subsequent invasion of Greece was the next logical step, to support the Italians and also deny the British an ally in the Mediterranean. If the Germans had declined to invade Greece, they still would have had to commit some forces simply to screen occupied Yugoslavia from Greek/British forces to the South. Who knows how much more difficult their anti-partisan campaigning in Yugoslavia would have been if Britain had a direct overland line of supply via Greece. It's hard to game out what the long term effect would have been on the war but it wouldn't have been 100% to Germany's benefit. Chupe Raho Aurat posted:Which would have been shipped with the rest of the equipment that was planned in the two year assault.. First, as others have been pointing out, the Germans didn't have unlimited transport capacity. Their troops lacked cold weather equipment in the winter of '41-'42 not because the equipment had been forgotten or something, but because they couldn't spare any room on their trains and trucks to get it to the front. During and after the autumn operational pause they deliberately chose to skimp on winter gear to make room for supplies necessary to continue the offensive, in the hopes of defeating Russia before the worst of the winter weather set in. More winter gear means less fuel, ammunition, and weaponry. Second, planning for the invasion of the USSR was very much predicated on the expectation that it could be completed in a single campaigning season--that the USSR would collapse in a matter of weeks or months. The Germans understood that the industrial capacity and population of the Soviet Union put them at a disadvantage over time. There was also the matter of Great Britain, which remained defiant in the west and a potential threat to the periphery of Axis Europe, as well as the increasing American commitments on behalf of Britain that indicated war with the USA was not far off. They went ahead with the invasion because they firmly believed they would defeat the Soviets long before those factors could come into play. If they had commenced planning with more realistic expectations, it's entirely possible the Germans would have balked at invading in the first place. Finally, with regard to the idea of the Germans playing nice in the occupied territories, some Germans advocated that position. The nominal administrative chief of the occupied Soviet territories, Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg, argued in favor of finding common cause with the local population against the Soviet government, in the hopes of drawing their support or at least their acquiescence to the occupation. His directives were ignored and actively flouted by his subordinates, most importantly SS personnel and the Reichskommissar for Ukraine, Erich Koch. When Rosenberg complained to Hitler and other high-up Nazis about Koch and the SS undermining his authority, they threw their weight behind the genocide and left Rosenberg isolated and powerless in his own supposed domain.
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Feb 9, 2014 03:23
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EvanSchenck posted:
Yeah, the underlying ideology of the Nazi party meant that making nice with the Russians was not a viable tactic when it came to racial purity. Hitler and his cabinet hated the Slavs as much as they hated the Jews. To side with them and have them fight the Soviets was not something they were willing to resort to, specially when their hubris was so high and their ideas of Russia were that they were going to get rolled on.
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Feb 9, 2014 03:51
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One problem I've always had with the "Hitler conquers Moscow" scenarios is how Moscow is just assumed captured because the Germans have more tanks around. Wouldn't it be extremely difficult and time consuming to capture a huge city like that? Stalingrad was never fully occupied over 6 months of fighting, and it was a smaller city. Is there any reason to consider Moscow to be an "easier" city to fight in?
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Feb 9, 2014 04:44
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EvanSchenck posted:Alfred stuff Just finished reading up on Alfie, it really does seem he was alone in his belief the Russians could be convinced to "help out" sounds like his ideas went down like a cup of cold sick. Didn't like the gays Didn't like the Christians I'm glad he's dead.
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Feb 9, 2014 04:51
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Raskolnikov38 posted:As the mil history thread says, then he's basically black gay hitler. As an aside, I think that one of the core issues with the whole "lets put off the genocide until later"-thing is that the Nazis were up until 1944 or so incredibly concerned with public opinion. The Holocaust kicked off during the war since there was a strong consensus in the Wannsee krew that all things that would be unpalatable (or even stuff that would raise unpleasant questions) to the average German should get done using the war situation as a cover. For the same reason, Germany didn't really go into a war economy at the start of the war.
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Feb 9, 2014 08:32
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We treated the topic as to why the war in the east was inseparable from the holocaust extensively. Just look back a few pages. The war had to be won in 8-10 weeks or else.
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Feb 9, 2014 10:16
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:One problem I've always had with the "Hitler conquers Moscow" scenarios is how Moscow is just assumed captured because the Germans have more tanks around. Wouldn't it be extremely difficult and time consuming to capture a huge city like that? Stalingrad was never fully occupied over 6 months of fighting, and it was a smaller city. Is there any reason to consider Moscow to be an "easier" city to fight in? The terrain around and the layout of Moscow made it somewhat more likely that it could be enveloped and invested, compared to Stalingrad continuing to receive reinforcements for months over the Volga. I think.
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Feb 9, 2014 10:43
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:. I would not be surprised if German propaganda machine told eastern europe how they're going to be saved from communism on a daily basis; "join us," etc... That same propaganda machine would also need to start working on German troops, letting them know that slavs are equals, not untermench. You can't have two different messages or USSR populace is going to figure out its bullshit when word spreads, they surrender and get treated like garbage. It would have been harder for the nazis to utilize the Wehrmacht against the populace after the war with no dehumanization.
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Feb 9, 2014 12:39
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Kemper Boyd posted:As an aside, I think that one of the core issues with the whole "lets put off the genocide until later"-thing is that the Nazis were up until 1944 or so incredibly concerned with public opinion. The Holocaust kicked off during the war since there was a strong consensus in the Wannsee krew that all things that would be unpalatable (or even stuff that would raise unpleasant questions) to the average German should get done using the war situation as a cover. For the same reason, Germany didn't really go into a war economy at the start of the war.
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Feb 10, 2014 11:11
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ThePriceJustWentUp posted:So how did they think they would keep public opinion after the war if they won? That doesn't make sense. Because post-fact, everything can be obsfuscated and explained.
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Feb 10, 2014 11:55
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Kemper Boyd posted:Because post-fact, everything can be obsfuscated and explained. Plus, once it's over and done with people tend to be more accepting, and large numbers of people will have been complicit with it.
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Feb 10, 2014 16:23
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"Where did the Jews go? They were evacuated to Siberia STOP ASKING QUESTIONS"
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Feb 10, 2014 16:40
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What were the resources of the SU like on the Barbarossa front (for want of a term) Assuming my goofy little thought was correct and the "liberated" Russians joined up could they have defeated the resources of the "Moscow" part of the SU? Or like a video game did the enemy get harder the closer you got to the boss? Is their any real world knowledge on the potential of a rolling victory? Hitler takes section A A and Hitler take B A and B and Hitler take C Yada yada yada?
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Feb 11, 2014 06:51
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:What were the resources of the SU like on the Barbarossa front (for want of a term) You should try not to think of real life things in video game terms. For one, the Nazis are not rearming any Soviet soldiers and sending them back to fight their own country, because that's a clusterfuck. Who is going to lead them? Who is going to supply them? What weapons are they even going to use? How will the Germans manage them at all? There's a million problems here. I don't understand your section metaphor. I think you may be thinking in RTS terms where resources just spill out of land and immediately enter a national stockpile, but that isn't how logistics work.
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Feb 11, 2014 08:21
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:What were the resources of the SU like on the Barbarossa front (for want of a term) This isn't even wrong. It's just... have you read anything about Nazi Germany whatsoever?
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Feb 11, 2014 08:43
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:What were the resources of the SU like on the Barbarossa front (for want of a term)
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Feb 11, 2014 09:23
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Well, it's a bit simplistic, but in a basic sense it's pretty much what the nazis actually did. Areas they occupied, from Poland to France to Ukraine, were scraped clean of money, food, rare metals, guns, trucks, tanks and anything that could be remotely useful for the war effort. Parts of the population was either recruited as "volunteer workers" (in the west) or used as slave labour (in the east). Many were also recruited into the SS. Hell, towards the end of the war they even had an all-russian SS division. However, this takes time. It's not like you just roll into an area and get a bunch of resource points that you can immediately use - especially when both you and your enemy is conducting active warfare in the area in question. Sure, the Germans were looting anything that wasn't nailed down and shipping it back to the Reich, but a bunch of confiscated art and dismantled factory parts stuck on the road to Berlin won't help you win the battle of Kursk. Also, what? Chupe Raho Aurat posted:Assuming my goofy little thought was correct and the "liberated" Russians joined up could they have defeated the resources of the "Moscow" part of the SU? Or like a video game did the enemy get harder the closer you got to the boss?
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Feb 11, 2014 09:26
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For the love of god, I was using over simplistic terms to try and explain something I didn't understand.. In a thread called "ask me about Nazi Germany" I was asking, were the troops/equipment on the "Barbarossa border" good enough to potentially fight the SU equipment held more in the center. Jesus, some of you guy really have your heads up your asses when it comes to people asking dumb questions in a thread (once again) called " Ask me about Nazi Germany) - if you really just want a thread where you discuss what you already know loving name it that. *thanks ghost I'll take a look at it! it's helpful to have someone point me in a good direction instead of expecting me to hunt through the hundreds of books written.
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Feb 11, 2014 10:29
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:Assuming my goofy little thought was correct and the "liberated" Russians joined up could they have defeated the resources of the "Moscow" part of the SU? You're assuming the everyday Soviet citizen hated Stalin and Soviet Communism with a passion and would gladly take up arms against their own people to fight it. What do you base this assumption on?
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Feb 11, 2014 12:19
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Whisperers-Private-Stalins-Russia/dp/0312428030 This book makes a pretty compelling case that the average soviet citizen didn't really enjoy living a life of fear and suspicion under Stalin.
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Feb 11, 2014 13:03
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Comrade Koba posted:You're assuming the everyday Soviet citizen hated Stalin and Soviet Communism with a passion and would gladly take up arms against their own people to fight it. What do you base this assumption on? He probably mistakes Belorussians and Ukrainians for Russians. The example that the Wehrmacht gave to the soviet soldier and the civillians what they're in for made anything else but resistance to the death a non existing option. But yes, the Germans were often welcomed with open arms in the Ukraine, but they lost their support relatively fast by killing surrendering soldiers, pows and civilians in large numbers. Word travels fast. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 13:40 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 13:21
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:I was asking, were the troops/equipment on the "Barbarossa border" good enough to potentially fight the SU equipment held more in the center. The German Army destroyed something on the order of 300 Soviet divisions between Jun to Sep-1941. What they did not expect was that the Red Army could enlist another 300 divisions (and another and another ...) to take the place of those. To use a silly videogame analogy, the Soviet half of the map was Big Game Hunters while the Germans were still playing with regular mineral patches - it didn't matter that the Germans could and did destroy everything between the border and up to about three-quarters of the way to Moscow, the Soviets could just keep cranking out more men and equipment to replace them.
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Feb 11, 2014 13:43
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Also, what eventually stopped the Germans (after they had obliterated the Red Army of 1941 several times over) wasn't that the Soviets had more and harder troops "in the center", it was a combination of several factors. The German's overextending their logistics, Zhukov's veterans arriving from Siberia, the relocated arms factories coming online and cranking out guns and tanks (which were superior to what the Germans had at the time), the Soviets raising a mindboggling amount of new units from scratch and - most importantly - Soviet commanders rediscovering their balls and starting to mount an effective (instead of suicidal) resistance. It is important to remember when discussing alt-history that the real-life Operation Barbarossa was really as close to the perfect scenario as the nazis would get. The Soviets had done basically everything in their power to sabotage themselves prior to the invasion, and basically every major decision they made in the opening weeks led to disaster. Had the Soviet leadership been just marginally less incompetent/unlucky, the Germans would have stalled much, much sooner.
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Feb 11, 2014 14:58
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:For the love of god, I was using over simplistic terms to try and explain something I didn't understand.. In a thread called "ask me about Nazi Germany" I'm not trying to belittle you, it's legitimately difficult to answer your question because you're using self-admitted over-simplistic terms to describe complicated scenarios. It's almost unrecognizable as real life. The biggest problem you have is assuming that captured Soviets are going to fight for Germany to a man, or even a reasonable proportion. Stalin and communism was not so hated that these men would give up the relative safety of captivity (Before being starved as sub-humans) for a chance to die for Hitler. Not that the Germans even wanted them! I blew through a few reasons why not, but I'll say again that trying to run a foreign military is a clusterfuck. The Soviets aren't going to speak German, and they aren't trained to act within the German army. Forgetting the hideous supply situation of the Pre-Barbarossa Red Army, they have Soviet made weapons and ammunition that the Germans don't have stocks from. Trying to supply them with captured ammunition would be a waste of resources that would be better spent on actually useful formations. The Red Army was so ineffective in Summer 1941 I can't even imagine it operating under German command with personnel from a thousand surrendered units. The other problem is that you are pitting areas against other areas, which doesn't apply to the real world. Assuming that your Soviet traitors are even useful, why would a unit made in the Ukraine help in the fight against Moscow? Front-line forces do not combine as they take territory into an ultra-dense sphere to conquer Moscow, they actually spread out cover the new area that they occupy. If a final fight occured where the Nazis literally surrounded Moscow and had 50% of the Soviet army on their side, and the Soviets had stuffed 3 million soldiers in Moscow proper, they would all get bombed to poo poo because it's really easy to kill dense armies without taking your own casualties.
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Feb 11, 2014 17:59
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Chupe Raho Aurat posted:What were the resources of the SU like on the Barbarossa front (for want of a term) Well, the important part to remember is that Hitler was fighting a war of extermination of those very populations that you propose would join him, and in fact there were conflicts between the groups that wanted to start starving them to death immediately and those who were like 'hold on, we need workers'. The Nazis attempted to compromise by working starving people to death. The other thing to remember is that resources don't work like a video game. Just as an example, when Hitler seized Western Europe, Germany now had to supply Western Europe's oil, coal, and food needs. Germany already wasn't doing super well on oil, importing 1.5 million tons from Romania and making 4 - 6.5 million tons of synthetic fuel. France's pre-war oil consumption was 5.4 million tons! France had to make do with 8% of its pre-war supply, with resulting damage to its economy. Similarly, many countries in Europe had imported coal from Britain, which was no longer particularly inclined to send coal to Nazi-occupied countries. Even worse, coal production in France (Europe's third largest producer) fell 18 percent as coal miners and their families felt the food shortages sweeping Europe. (Coal also affected steel production). Basically what I'm saying is that Hitler's occupation of France collapsed its economy, so the process is not simply additive, even when you're not trying to starve everybody to death. For more details about this, check Tooze's "The Wages of Destruction".
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Feb 11, 2014 19:03
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:You should try not to think of real life things in video game terms. For one, the Nazis are not rearming any Soviet soldiers and sending them back to fight their own country, because that's a clusterfuck. Who is going to lead them? Who is going to supply them? What weapons are they even going to use? How will the Germans manage them at all? There's a million problems here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Liberation_Army  Mr. Sunshine posted:
http://johnl.org/2009/08/27/stalin-vs-hitler/ But seriously, keep in mind that the Germans considered Slavs just a little above on the racial totem pole than Jews and Gypsies. Why would you ever recruit people that you consider inferior to fight with you? This isn't the middle ages (or early modern, whatever) where you can pay off the enemy mercenary company to fight for you instead.
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Feb 11, 2014 20:11
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Wikipedia posted:The only active combat the Russian Liberation Army undertook against the Red Army was by the Oder on 11 April 1945, done largely at the insistence of Himmler as a test of the army's reliability. After three days, the outnumbered first division had to retreat. The ROA was pretty much a joke.
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Feb 11, 2014 20:51
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I'll have you know company of heroes 2 uses them a lot
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Feb 11, 2014 21:35
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Ensign Expendable posted:But seriously, keep in mind that the Germans considered Slavs just a little above on the racial totem pole than Jews and Gypsies. Why would you ever recruit people that you consider inferior to fight with you? This isn't the middle ages (or early modern, whatever) where you can pay off the enemy mercenary company to fight for you instead. Don't think of the apparatus as a monolithic block as in "the Nazis". The Abwehr might have lost the political fight about the treatment of pows and general occupation politics in the planning, but their voices were still being heard. By July 1941 the SD was combing pow "camps" not only for jews and commissars, but also for ukrainian and belorussian nationals. The motivation for joining isn't so hard to make out if you heard what happened there. Anyway, these new recruits were used for "special duty", not taking a notable role in combat, but by killing civilians and later helping to keep the deathcamps running. As the war progressed and more manpower was needed, the excluding rules fell one by one. Contrary to urban legend, the leadership acted quite rational when it came to keeping the war running and ignored ideology when it had to. By 1943 they'd just take anyone willing to join the legions and declare them to be honorary aryans or being of a brother race. Look at how the people in the Ostlegionen looked like. I'm sure some people in the party shat their pants when they saw them.  Cossacks too. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Feb 11, 2014 |
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Feb 11, 2014 21:35
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maev posted:I'll have you know company of heroes 2 uses them a lot CoH2 is also awful. God I wish CoH1 still worked and wasn't a laggy piece of poo poo on steam servers.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:40
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Raskolnikov38 posted:CoH2 is also awful. It makes me sad to know that CoH1 is dead and there will probably never be an RTS as good. I guess to not make this a total derail, what, roughly, was Nazi policy on religions that were not Judaism? Did they favor any particular denominations? I know there was some non-Christian occult stuff espoused by some Nazis, but I'd imagine that even for Nazis it would be pretty fringe. Pornographic Memory fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 00:50
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Do you, like, imagine that the end-goal of Barbarossa was a battle mano-a-mano between Hitler and Mecha-Stalin in the Proletariat Doom Fortress in central Moscow? Well, I do now.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:59
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I'd be shocked if there's anybody reading this thread who hasn't seen this comic book, but I don't feel I can reference it without linking it because this is the next best thing to the mecha-Stalin vs Hitler duel, although it follows history a bit more closely. http://johnl.org/2009/08/27/stalin-vs-hitler/
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Feb 12, 2014 01:05
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Pornographic Memory posted:It makes me sad to know that CoH1 is dead and there will probably never be an RTS as good. Depends on what denomination you are interested in. For example Jehovah's Witnesses were on the list of open persecution due to their religious belief that they should not join the military or the party. This obviously did not go over well and they were persecuted, but could escape that persecution of they denounced their faith and joined the party. For the most part, the Nazi party wanted to shift people away from their religion to put the party above all else. This obviously was not easy, nor accomplished by the Nazi party, but it was one of their end game goals.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:10
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