Most assessments of Operation Barbarossa typically revolve around which strategic decisions made in the progress of the campaign could have led to a German victory over the Soviet Union. This emphasis on decisions is a byproduct of memoirs of German generals, especially Heinz Guderian, who claimed that Moscow would have fallen had Hitler not redirected elements of Army Group Center south to mop up trapped Soviet forces in and around Kiev. With Kiev captured, Leningrad under siege, and Moscow as the political center taken, the Soviets would have capitulated before the weather turned against the blitzkrieg – or so the reasoning goes. There are two problems with this perspective: first, while Army Group Center did make such rapid progress that it came within striking distance of Moscow early on during Barbarossa, Army Group South did not replicate such swift and deep penetration. The Red Army in the Ukraine became encircled, as it did all across the theater of operations, but the sheer number of units deployed in the region meant that the Wehrmacht had to choose between taking Kiev or Moscow quickly, and Hitler – believing the economic significance of the Ukraine more important than the political importance of Moscow – chose Kiev. Indeed, the losses incurred – militarily, industrially, agriculturally – by the Soviets in the Ukraine were devastating to their war effort; entire fronts had to be reconstructed from scratch. Also, if the Germans had chosen to discriminate between Russians and Ukrainians (the latter historically the victim of the former’s subjugation), they could have richly exploited anti-communist, anti-Russian sentiment to gain valuable allies and support. Instead, the German forces rarely discriminated according to nationality; they were motivated not so much by pragmatism but a cultural entitlement to enslaving the “inferior” Slavs.

The second problem with the view that taking Moscow in 1941 would have meant another quick triumph for Germany is that history demonstrates otherwise. Napoleon did precisely that during his 1812 campaign; just as then, the adversary in Moscow simply kept retreating, drawing the invader farther in, stretching them thinner and thinner, making a quagmire of their logistics. Had Moscow fallen, the political capital would have moved to Kuybyshev (now Samara) or Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). Stalin allegedly stayed in Moscow in the run-up to Operation Typhoon, so some have advanced the idea that his capture would have quickly ended the war. This is unlikely; while Stalin was the dictator at the head of a one-party state, he was not the “supreme leader” or prophet figure that Hitler had constituted himself as in Nazi Germany. If Stalin was captured or killed, power would have simply passed to some clique or the other on the Politburo and Central Committee, with one from the cast – Beria, Molotov, etc. – emerging as the victor. More than likely, actual decision-making would remain in the hands of the actual military commanders, such as Zhukov (who very well could have seized power as well), who would have continued fighting the war as normal. In the meantime, the Wehrmacht would have had to garrison a ruined city with a hostile population, while also having to protect exposed flanks after moving so deep at one central location. Historically, the Wehrmacht had a hard-enough time keeping its vehicles fueled and units supplied over such a vast country as the Soviet Union, and those units were best suited for mobile warfare, not for going on the defensive.

Perhaps the question should be asked whether Operation Barbarossa could have succeeded at all. The width and depth of the Soviet Union was known to the Germans, as was its climate and terrain. German planners knew well in advance that fueling and servicing the highly motorized Wehrmacht in an area the size of the Soviet Union was next to impossible, and that inevitably German tanks and motorized units would have to stop while infantry, artillery, anti-air, anti-tank, and other support units caught up. The Soviet railways were not compatible with German trains. Finally, the fact the Germans invaded in the summer rather than the spring meant that, even if the Germans had tried to take Moscow before the onset of the muddy season, their timing would be close at best. All these factors were plain from the start, and yet the German leadership — from Hitler to his leading generals — were incredibly optimistic that victory was certain.

German optimism before the invasion was rooted in truth and fantasy. It was true that the Red Army in 1941 was, generally speaking, badly trained and poorly led. The Winter War against Finland had illustrated that. It was also true that the Great Purges of the 1930s had decimated the civil administration and senior officer corps across the Soviet Union, weakening all elements of the Soviet state, but especially its armed forces. Finally, the Soviet regime was at its historically most unpopular, especially in the Ukraine and the Baltic regions, where domestic nationalist movements were crushed and repression carried out against the local populations. After the invasion began, Stalin and his allies in the Red Army high command made things even worse by insisting on constantly going to the offensive at every opportunity. This did have the effect of forcing advancing German units to suddenly go on the defensive, often without support, but it came at an immensely high toll in terms of lost manpower and equipment. For every successful counteroffensive there were many more failures, battles suppressed in the Soviet consciousness and only now being learned about in the West: Brody, Dubno, Raseinai, the botched amphibious invasion of the Crimea, et al. Had the Red Army fallen back to strong defensive positions, such as across the Dnieper River or the lakes in the Baltics, the Red Army could have stood a better chance at halting the advances of Barbarossa in its early stages. Of course, not only was this not the case, but the Red Army was not at all in a condition for war in 1941, as it was still in the midst of post-Winter War reforms and suffering NKVD purges. In so many different ways, the Soviet Union and the Red Army were extremely vulnerable to a war in 1941, as the losses actually incurred show.

Yet the German leadership also underestimated the Soviet Union and the Red Army for ideological and racial reasons as well. Fascist or at least very conservative, these men felt that communism was an inherently inferior ideology that depended purely on coercion, or that it even represented a mental disorder. They had also come of age in a culture that had long advocated expansionism eastward into Slavic lands, an artifact of the Baltic Crusades and the Teutonic Knights. Germans of the period were socialized, especially once the Nazis assumed power, to view Slavs as subhuman, just as Jews, Roma, and other groups were dehumanized. The German military and SS death squads actively terrorized the population, because so many felt into the broad categories that constituted “enemies to the German folk” — which by definition excluded non-Germans. Thus, even though the Ukrainians and the Baltic people were ripe for collaboration with anti-Soviet invaders, the racial policies of Nazi Germany meant that this was not even a question. The outcome of Germany’s special destiny had to be German supremacy over Europe. The victories of 1939 through 1940 led Hitler and his generals to think this was not only possible, but inevitable. Since Slavs were even more inferior next to Germans than the French and the English, who were essentially already out of the war, the idea that the Nazi-Soviet war would be a leisurely stroll down the promenade blossomed. The early successes of Operation Barbarossa even made this idea seem justified. Gradually, however, despite the best efforts of Stalin and his allies to do otherwise, momentum switched over the Red Army by December. At that point, the logistical problems associated with area, terrain, and climate only spiraled, even if it was still some time before the Red Army was able to fully reverse the course of the German assault.

To a large extent, the German leadership pursued the Nazi-Soviet war despite their obvious disadvantages because they were blinded by their prejudices and pride in their record since 1939. However, many German generals wanted to put distance between themselves and Nazi ideology after the war, and so their “theories” around Operation Barbarossa tended to revolve around geography, logistics, and the “central” question of Moscow. Hitler became the convenient scapegoat, even though his decision to focus on Kiev over Moscow is one of his most defensible of the Eastern Front. In truth, Barbarossa was doomed for the beginning, if not for logistical reasons, then because the racial arrogance of the Wehrmacht meant that it was even making bitter enemies out of ready friends at a time when it needed every advantage it could get.

Sources

Bellamy, Chris. 2007. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Fritz, Stephen. 2015. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press.

Glantz, David. 2011. Operation Barbarossa: Hitler’s Invasion of Russia. Stroud, UK: The History Press.

Glantz, David and Jonathan House. 1995. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.