Why didn't the Germans plan to knock Russia out of the war first? What was behind the decision to go west first and then east?
>>16878243Maybe so they could knock out France via Paris and thus reach the coast. This would ammow them to grind it out in the east and eventually settle it.
>>16878243Because Russia is huge and France isnt. It would theoretically have taken then much longer in Russia, with much more effort and resources, with a much slower campaign, and with questionable outcome even if an objective was captured.The size of Russia also hurt the Russians. The Germans believed poor infrastrcture and the sheer size would make mobilization long and tedious, where as France could mobilize within a couple of days.Thus if you go for the east, you will immediately have to deal with a French offensive, if you going west, you can expect several weeks before a Russian offensive.The eastern front was the one thing Imperial Germany actually did right in ww1. It was exactly how you're supposed to Russia. Dont be baited or drawn into the interior by sending huge armies across the vast emptiness chasing objectives 1500km apart and be erroded by Russian resistance and the logistical nightmare. Stay close to your own base of operation and instead use your tactical superiority to defeat a Russian army whenever it appears to grind down the state. Conquring Russia cannot be achieved by an outside force, it must be achieved from within. Make them fight each others. This is what most historians agree Hitler did wrong. He should have liberated the ground that Wehrmacht could cover. He should have set up independent states and armed the population. He should have tried to ignite a second civil war. It may not have won him the war but it would have been extremely tedious for the Soviet union to recapture their own territory.
>>16878243Key French war resources are in Flanders, the country's population and industry is also heavily concentrated around Paris so taking it would significantly compromise its ability to continue fighting.Russia has resources everywhere and the only industrial region in the immediate German reach was the relatively industrialised Warsaw-Lodz-Kielce area. Donbas was out of reach, Kiev and surroundings were out of reach, Petersburg and Moscow were out of reach. The importance of the Polish part is also not that huge, Central powers took it by late 1915 but it didn't significantly deteriorate Russian combat capability in the next following year.
>>16878243Russia was way further into its mobilization process, so the plan was to repeat the Franco-Prussian war with knocking them out before they could react.
>>16878243>Burger educationFrance and England declared war on Germany, Germans had no choice in the matter
>>16878243They were hoping they could storm across Northern France and cause a collapse in morale by taking Paris quickly, forcing an early French capitulation. Russia is Xbox hueg and infamously difficult to invade so they didn't want to target it first.
>>16879892AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Would the nazis have conquered russia if the u.s. had not gotten involved in ww2?
>>16879915probably not. again there's a whole lot of russia there and the japanese wanted to give the americans a bloody nose for them to stop interfering in eastasian affairs.>>16878243because the germans simply wanted to reconquer alsace lorraine and bring the low countries back into the german sphere before doing anything with russia
>>16879929>the germans simply wanted to reconquer alsace lorraineThey already owned Alsace-Lorraine at the outset of WWI numbnuts.
>>16879940Ah fuck thought this was a WW2 thread. Carry on then.
>>16879943You should probably look at the map OP posted since it has fucking Austria Hungary in it lmao
>>16879946So what? Those countries exist today too retard.
Because they linked up with the USSR and were on good terms with them, so they felt their eastern flank was fairly secure. If they sent the wehrmacht off to invade the USSR there was a good chance that the French would bumrush them
>multiple retards in this thread think OP is talking about WW2 despite the map showing WW1 bordersthis board is really just a bunch of schizos and larping underagefags
Because they thought to knock them out of the war would require marching all the way to Moscow. They didn’t anticipate the Russians would collapse from within the way they didBy comparison as brutal as trench warfare was in the west. Geographically it was always thought that “just one more good push” and you could break through the lines and overrun the entente powers Btw there were just some brilliant movies from the entente the Germans did not forsee, the whole “digging a tunnel under the German trenches and blowing them up with massive planted explosion charges” British scheme was insanely effective and the German lines never recovered>The British artillery fire lifted half an hour before dawn and as they waited in the silence for the offensive to begin, some of the troops reportedly heard a nightingale singing. Starting from 3:10 a.m. on 7 June, the mines at Messines were fired within the space of 20 seconds.[24] The joint explosion ranks among the largest non-nuclear explosions, surpassing the mines on the first day of the Somme fired 11 months before. The sound of the blast was considered the loudest man-made noise in history. Reports suggested that the sound was heard in London and Dublin; at the Lille University geology department, the shock wave was mistaken for an earthquake. Some witnesses described "pillars of fire", although many also conceded that the scene was indescribable.>Suddenly at dawn, as a signal for all of our guns to open fire, there rose out of the dark ridge of Messines and "Whitesheet" and that ill-famed Hill 60, enormous volumes of scarlet flame [...] throwing up high towers of earth and smoke all lighted by the flame, spilling over into fountains of fierce colour, so that many of our soldiers waiting for the assault were thrown to the ground. The German troops were stunned, dazed and horror-stricken if they were not killed outright. Many of them lay dead in the great craters opened by the mines.>—Philip Gibbs
>>16880658No they don't. Austria was destroyed in revenge for Hitler in the 1947 Austrian Nuking Campaign and Hungary stepped on a lego in 1995 and died. Learn some history dumbass.
>>16880679>That the detonations were not simultaneous enhanced their effect on the German troops. Strange acoustic effects also added to the panic – German troops on Hill 60 thought that the Kruisstraat and Spanbroekmolen mines were under Messines village, which was well behind the front line, while some British troops thought that they were German counter-mines going off under the British support trenches. The combined explosion is considered to have killed more people than any other non-nuclear man-made explosion in history. The historian Simon Jones challenged the death toll of the mines using primary sources and suggested that the mine explosions killed hundreds of German troops and that the casualty-figure of 10,000 men killed was the 21-day casualty total ending on 10 June, 7,344 of whom were taken prisoner, recorded in Der Weltkrieg, the German official history, mistakenly taken by British writers to be the result of the mine explosions>Two days after the battle, the Gruppe Wijtschate commander General Maximilian von Laffert was sacked (He died of a heart attack eleven days later). The German official history, Der Weltkrieg (volume XII, 1939), placed the mines, which were unprecedented in size and number, second in a list of five reasons for the German defeat. In an after-action report, Laffert wrote that had the extent of the mine danger been suspected, a withdrawal from the front trench system to the Sonne Line, half-way between the first and second positions, would have been ordered before the attack, since the cost inflicted on the British by having to fight for the ridge justified its retention. In 1929, Hermann von Kuhl lamented the failure to overrule the 4th Army commanders on 30 April and prevent "one of the worst tragedies of the war"
>>16880686Along with the physical impact of killing so many German soldiers at once and destroying deeply entrenched and fortified lines completely. The psychological element of losing so much ground in such a short time, after spending years fighting and dying just to gain yards cannot be understated. Likewise with the Americans joining later, while they provided lots of fresh bodies and supplies. The psychological element was massive. Any realistic path to victory becomes harder and harder to argue to yourself if you’re in the German side. Hence the post war cope that they didn’t really lose they were stabbed in the back.Entente should have marched all the way to Berlin and let the Germans starve for a few more months so they wouldn’t have that delusion
>>16879892>Germans had no choice in the matterThe British were pretty explicit that an invasion of Belgium, by either France or Germany, would result in the British entering the war on the side that violates Belgium's neutrality. If France entered first, the British would have sided with the Germans. It was painfully clear Germany was going to attack neutral Belgium that the Belgium refused British and French soldiers onto their soil until the Germans crossed first.The Germans had every choice to simply not invade Belgium and scrap the Schlieffen Plan. The alternative was a grinding war in Alsace-Lorraine and a protracted conflict in the East.
>>16879892>Kraut education
>>16878243because they had bad strategists and decision makers. soldiers are generally stupid, and Germany was a de facto military dictatorship, but when they become overwhelmed by romantic feelings and mythology the fall is guaranteed. just imagine the mindset of the man who thinks a huge eagle on his head is not ridiculous.
>>16881194>The alternative was a grinding war in Alsace-Lorraine and a protracted conflict in the East.That's what happened anyway, in terms of slow and grinding
>>16882229>NPC pop history knowledge: the post
>>16878243Russia was known to be the slowest to mobilize. Fewest rails, worst citizen registry, most culture of telling the government man to fuck off, unless he is escorted.However, by accident, it was already partially mobilized for war games, so already had an army set up.
>>16882417stay mad chud
>>16878243Hitler thought that Stalin could be placated until after he defeated the British in the early years of the war until around November-December 1940, when he decided to commit to Barbarossa in earnest. Primarily this was through trying to get Stalin to join the Tripartite Pact and offering Central Asia as the Soviets area of influence, which Stalin refused as he wanted Eastern Europe which was what Hitler wanted as his own area of influence. This is from fifty year old scholarship so take it with a pinch of salt, but I just finished reading about the topic tangentially recently.
>>16879907>>16882190Where's the lie
>>16878243Hitler and Stalin had a peace treaty, idiot. Germany wanted to solve the western frontier first.Its insane of users of and history board nerds to ask such mundane well know questions
>>16882843The Germans declared war on France. It's not WWII, dumbass
>>16882839>>16882871Ok, these are actual bots
>>16882898No I'm just a retard that didn't look at OP's picture.
>>16882921>I'm just a retardThat's ok
>>16878528You are wrong. Tsarist Russia was a centralized state organized around St. Petersburg. Check out the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian lakes. Two Tsarist armies were beaten by a single German army and in the end: the Germans were able to take Riga really quickly. With more forces and some major naval support the Germans could have taken St. Petersburg and the Baltic states (where most of the Balto-German military leadership of the Russian army and navy had their estates) by spring 1915. The Baltic sea region was the actual heartland of Tsarist Russia.
>>16882955>really quicklyThree years is now quickly?
>Map clearly has Austria-Hungary's borders and Turkey (really the Ottomans but at a glance it could be confused for Turkey) aligned with Germany>That's just from the thumbnail and not even having to open the image>Multiple people thinking this thread is about WWIIHoly fuck this board is fucking retarded
>>16882986>Turkey (really the Ottomans but at a glance it could be confused for Turkey) Same thing, they didn't become a completely different country just because they abolished the monarchy.
>>16878243France invaded Germany in 1939. Germany could hardly just ignore the military occupation of German soil by French forces.80 some divisions btw.>>16878528Poles and Mongols both conquered Russia.
>>16882955Everything you said was wrong.Baltics was not the "heartland" of Tsarist Russia. The Ukraine regio was more developed and more prosperous. Belarus region was more populated. Moscow region was more industrialized.Riga was captured towards the end of the warWe know for a fact that capturing one city in Russia doesnt lead to capitulation, we have several wars to prove this. The Russians continue to fight against an invading army. You only end up chasing strategic objectives acrosss 1500km and it still amounts to nothing.
