The advice to attack an enemy’s weak points goes back at least to Sun Tzu in the fifth century B.C., Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), but it is extraordinarily difficult for human beings to follow:
Attacking Russia head-on was wrong to begin with, because it guaranteed the greatest resistance, not the least. A direct attack also forces an enemy back on his reserves and supplies, while it constantly lengthens the supply and reinforcement lines of the attacker. The better strategy is to separate the enemy from his supplies and reserves. That is why an attack on the flank is more likely to be successful.
Nevertheless Hitler could still have won if he had struck at the Soviet Union’s weakness, instead of its strength.
His most disastrous error was to go into the Soviet Union as a conqueror instead of a liberator. The Soviet people had suffered enormously at the hands of the Communist autocracy for two decades. Millions died when the Reds forced people off their land to create collective farms. Millions more were obliged to move great distances and work long hours under terrible conditions in factories and construction projects. The secret police punished any resistance with death or transportation to horrible prison gulags in Siberia. In the gruesome purges of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had systematically killed all leaders and all military officers who, in his paranoid mind, posed the slightest threat to his dictatorship. Life for the ordinary Russian was drab, full of exhausting work, and dangerous. At the same time, the Soviet Union was an empire ruling over a collection of subjugated peoples who were violently opposed to rule from the Kremlin.
Vast numbers of these people would have risen in rebellion if Hitler’s legions had entered with the promise of freedom and elimination of Soviet oppression. Had Hitler done this, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.
Such a policy would not have given Hitler his Lebensraum immediately. But once the Soviet Union had been shattered, he could have put into effect anything he wanted to with the pieces that remained.
Hitler followed precisely the opposite course of action.
For that matter, why invade anyone? Use the war effort to become an even greater economic power; buy up your neighbors.
That’s a pretty big “what if”. Official NSDAP policy was that “slavs” were useless subhumans. This held even when the Reich and the USSR were Best Friends Forever.
The Ukrainians *did* greet the Reich as liberators, but the Reich wanted no part of that; core National Socialist policy forbade it. Even if Hitler saw an advantage in playing the liberator card, he couldn’t change a core policy without losing face. As far as I can remember Hitler never backed off any previous policy, even when it was shown to be counterproductive. As an example, his “no retreat” order, which severely limited the army’s ability to maneuver in the field.
You’d have to go all the way back to when Hitler and Hess were in prison after the putsch, and Hess was transcribing Hitler’s commentary and speeches into Mein Kampf. After that was printed, Hitler’s path was set.
As others have said, Hitler’s nature would not have allowed that.
He might even have got the Soviet Union into the Axis. Stalin and Molotov were okay with it, as long as Soviet “spheres of influence” were respected.
In a sense, I don’t even think Hitler attacked Soviet Union for Lebensraum, like some of his lunatic co-religionaries. I essentially see Hitler as a gambler suffering from incontrollable addiction, evolving to suicidal tendencies.
About one million Soviet citizens in some manner did volunteer to fight for the Germans. Twenty percent of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad was composed of Soviet citizens in some capacity. Even after “German” surrender, some individuals continued to fight for two months afterwards. More than likely those “German” Soviet volunteers.
They knew what was going to happen to them when caught.
This is overblown. Due to Stalin’s industrial relocations and scorched earth policy it would have been impossible to improve the local’s quality of life short-term. All of the major industry and the related workers were gone. All of the major agricultural equipment was gone. This inevitably led to poor economic conditions and reductions in agricultural output that Germany was in no position to make up.
That is the excuse of all socialist and dirigiste governments. Now check how fast Germany grew after being destroyed in WW2.
Germany sustained her wartime economy by looting the countries it invaded.
If Germany had entered Russia as a liberator, Germans in Germany would have starved. Hitler had no choice once he started other then to exterminate foreign civilian populations that would compete with Germans for food.
Romantic nonsense.
“Vast numbers of these people would have risen in rebellion if Hitler’s legions had entered with the promise of freedom and elimination of Soviet oppression.”
People never rise up, they will pick the stronger side. They will rise if they are led and there is an organization. They are utterly passive and self interested and will HIDE from danger if not.
A warlike and tribal people such as the Arabs can and do rise quickly but they are organized socially FOR WAR for thousands of years.
How many of the 1 million [!] Soviet Citizens that joined Germany were POWs or in occupied territory, that is they stayed alive longer than in a POW camp and for a time improved their material conditions?
Read Stalin’s order 227 and you’ll see why they fought WHEN the entire Communist party organization went to the front lines – the Commissars were front line leaders – it was a combination of dynamic leadership from the front at every level the Commissars and party members leading and fighting AND fear of the Communists that turned it around.
Belief in the people including and especially the long peace atrophied manhood Americans is utter romantic nonsense. The people are POTENTIAL.
It’s organization and leadership that move them, the people are almost an inert mass of chemicals without the catalyst of organization and leadership.
There must be dynamic and energetic leadership at every level and there must be organization.
Daniel, a very perceptive comment. Since the 19th Century, Western Europe was no longer self-sufficient in food. Hitler thought that he absolutely had to have Ukraine’s wheat. But the Ukraine of 1940 was not the agricultural breadbasket it had been in earlier times and which in recent decades it once again became. In fact, under Stalin it was an agricultural disaster. OKW may have been equally mistaken, but German farmers should have been able to turn it around quickly. So the question is, did Hitler think of Ukrainians as part of the volk?