He showed Shitler the data that the Eastern Front is unwinnable and he got ignored.

>>18711296
Didn't Paulus also say that they couldn't win in Russia, got ignored by Halder and after the war was painted by Halder as the retard?

>Germany and the USSR ended up in an informal alliance during the 1920s--both states were defeated outcasts and Moscow had no interest in seeing the Germans pay reparations to the capitalist Western powers. The Rappallo Agreement, signed in 1923, permitted the German army to conduct military exercises and test weapons on Soviet soil, safely out of sight of the Entente. This arrangement went on until the Nazi takeover and was ended in 1934--the Nazi regime and the Soviet one made for strange bedfellows, and in any case Hitler now planned to openly rearm and flout the British and French, so there was no longer a reason to do it in secret.[8]

>>18711296
>and he got ignored.
He didnt get ignored.
His plane *crashed* on his way home from that very briefing when he told Hitler that the war was mathematically unwinable.

File: europe19251201.png (79 KB, 600x350)

79 KB PNG

>>18712437
i wonder how they got those troops there when Germany had no geographical contiguity with the USSR

>>18712448
just sail them to Leningrad? It's not like the allies would or could be stopping ships in the Baltic to search them for illegal German troop transports

>>18711296
What was Germany’s options there post Barbarossa, reaching a favorable peace settlement after bleeding the Soviets enough? If Stalingrad had not been the defeat that it was (Not splitting group South in two), could this have been accomplished?

>>18712471
Case Blue needed two axis of advance in order to work; one to capture the oilfield and one to defend the flanks.
If you remove the rearguard axis from the campaign, then the Soviets only need to mount one offenensive on Rostov, and the ENTIRE army group is trapped in the caucasus, and will become completely immobile and eventuallt implode from lack of logistics and supplies.

Two axis of advance was also necessary because while it was important for Germany to capture the oilfields of Maikop and Grozny, it was just as important for Germany to prevent Soviet oil from Baku, which would be achieved if they could capture the Volga river (the 'highway' from south to north). Stalingrad as a city wasnt strategically important. The fact that it was on the Volga was why it was strategically important.

As to your main question: No, after the failure of Barbarossa they were at a point-of-no-return. They just didnt know it yet. Case Blue was a bad option but it was the best option out of all other bad options. They couldnt win a long war against the Soviets and they couldnt advance as deep as they needed to, and with American entry it pretty much sealed the deal

>>18711296
The funniest part about the planning of Barbarossa is that the OKW completely dismissed the logistics of the whole operation and the few who were warning them about all the issues(like Paulus and Edouard Wagner) were just ignored, Halder was an idiot

File: ernst udet.png (126 KB, 328x421)

126 KB PNG

>try to figure out how to supply entire army with just a few planes
>ack yourself

>>18712554
Logistics was never ignored wtf are you talking about retard.

The main problem with Barbarossa was how severely they underestimated red army size, and that's what Paulus criticized. They thought the red army would only be 140 division, it turned out to be over 300, and spread across three echelons. This was something they had never planned or prepared for, they thought the red army would be destroyed in the opening blow and that the rest would be an easy capture with the state imploding shortly after.

Logistics was never ignored, they just didnt think they would be up against a fighting resistance the entire way.

>>18712561
>logistics weren't ignored
>we'll just punch them in the chin and knock them out clean and quick

>>18712557
This guy's story really reads like some sensitive young man, he just wanted to play with his planes, got demoralized by the production problems, was manipulated by Goring and Milch and then killed himself over it while coping with booze and drugs

>>18712561
The invasion of the Balkans in the spring took away two vital months of warm weather so they didn't start OB until mid-June and didn't have enough time before the winter came.

>>18712587
I thought the plan was always slated for June, 15th being the earliest date

>>18712583
The one guy in the luftwaffe who advocated for strategic bombers died in a plane crash before the war

>>18712587
my understanding is they needed to have that flank covered to prevent an Allied landing in Greece. the basic plan was sound but it underestimated the size of the Soviet army as well as the size of the USSR itself.

>>18712604
>my understanding is they needed to have that flank covered to prevent an Allied landing in Greece.
I mean look what happened in WW1, the Entente marched from Salonika all the way up to Hungary and Austria, in this scenario the Allies threatened Romania from Greece

>>18712604
The Wehrmacht had not encountered any serious resistance in any of their campaigns up to May 1941. Every opponent they faced basically just rolled over and didn't try to fight.

>>18712587
didn't they also need to make sure the roads were dry first? the USSR didn't have that many paved roads, most of them were dirt tracks and would be muddy pits in springtime.

>>18712604
they must have thought the distances were similar to those in France where it was just 250 miles from the German border to Paris

>>18712604
all German strategy was done with a purpose, they did not just randomly invade countries for the sake of it. occupying France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway would cover their western flank from Allied invasion and invading Greece would cover their southern flank.

>>18712614
>they did not just randomly invade countries for the sake of it.
What about Luxembourg?

>>18712580
Underestimating Red Army stength doesnt equal ignoring logistics you dumb fuck. Why are you making your own conclusions that completely contradict everything historians say? Just shut the fuck up and never post again. You're clearly just spreading disinformation for reasons I do not know.

>>18712614
>occupying France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway would cover their western flank from Allied invasion and invading Greece would cover their southern flank

Additionally the resources of those countries could be looted to supply the German war machine. As compared to WW1 where the Central Powers' limited resource base began to strangle them by 1916, Germany controlled much of the European continent by 1941 and had access to most of the essential resources for waging war.

File: 91QdDeRg54L.jpg (746 KB, 1703x2560)

746 KB JPG

>>18712587
No this is a myth.
It couldnt start any earlier because of the weather.
The ground was still soft and muddy even in May, and rivers were flooded.

This should honestly be common knowledge today, but the Balkan myth still persist for some reason. You can literally ask google these days but booomer myths still survives. I dont know why.
Literally every historian who has written on Barbarossa all say the same thing: The spring thaw made it impossible to cross rivers, the wet ground made provisional airfields unuseable. The muddy roads made advance difficult.
Also, the wehrmcht was still requisitioning vital equiptment such as trucks from occupied territory, mostly France. They simply werent ready until June, Balkan or no Balkan.

This is also the exact same reason why the (even larger) Bagration offensive in 1944 in the same area was also laucnhed around the same time as Barbarossa. It's the same reason Napoleons invsaion around the same area was launched around the time as Babrarossa.
In Russia, weather dictates everything.

>name is death
>dies

>>18712608
Yes, this is correct. Ignore the boomers on this board parroting 1950s myths that refuses to die despite overhwelming research and publications on the topic.
These idiots watch bullshit hollywood documentaries on ww2 instead of reading books, and bullshit hollywood documentaries are breeding ground for boomer myths because none are made by historians.

>>18712632
the version i always heard when i was a kid was Barbarossa was planned for the spring but that the Yugoslavian king walked back on his alliance with Hitler, so he had a chimpout and decided to fuck their shit up, a result of which he wasted two months and the Wehrmacht consequently couldn't reach Moscow before winter came.

>>18712471
Don't declare war on the USA, convince Japan to attack Russia - or even better, declare war on Britain but not the USA and dare Roosevelt to do anything about it - and the strategy of defensive attrition the Germans settled on after Kursk OTL becomes much more achievable. There were many crucial sectors like chemicals were most prewar Soviet capacity was captured during Barbarossa and Lend-Lease really was of strategic significance, this would be a smaller scale and more subject to interdiction at sea if the US is still at peace into 1943 or 4. And that would make it possible the Red Army was smaller, more poorly equipped, with less munitions capacity and mobility while the Axis forces in the East could be greater in number by a substantial margin

>>18712627
The "looting economy" was unsustainable because you can only loot as much.
NS-Germany only managed to escape 1917-esque famine because they confiscated food from occupied east instead, making those people starve as a result, but even in 1944, Germany was beginning to ration basic food such as wheat.

Imperial Germany was still a ten-times stronger force than NS-Germany, and while NS-Germany did occupy most of the continent, the continent isnt that very resource rich at all, and NS-Germany was cut off from world trade just as much as Imperial Germany was, and were bleeding resources as a result.
NS-Germany only bypassed blockades more because they had massive trade deals with the USSR that were signed together with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that allowd them to import millions of tons of food, oil, rubber and industrial metals.

>>18712642
well see that's what i mean. that was this boomer cartoon version of WW2. obviously the invasion of the Balkans was planned out and necessary to prevent an Allied landing in Greece and invasion up through the Balkans. another one was acting like the Wehrmacht were invincible super soldiers when in fact their successes in 39-41 were due to none of the countries they invaded really trying too hard to fight back. thus stuff like the boomer French surrender monkeys meme.

we'll have to wait until the 2040s before Britain declassifies all of their state archives on WW2 so there is still more stuff yet to be found out that will revise historians' existing assumptions

>>18712650
Germany was not being bombed in WW1, its core territory got out of the war totally unscratched.

>>18712642
Yes and its bullshit. It's a boomer myth being parroted because reasons I dont know why. Even on this board. It's frustrating because ww2 is extremely overstudied by historians, and you're literally one google search away from finding out the real facts.
Any historian who has written on Barbarossa says weather and lack of preprations compelled Barbarossa to be launched in later June.

I supposed few people on this board has ever touched an actual book on this topic.
My recommendation is to read Glantz or Beevor. They're easy to read and understand.

>>18712651
The French didn't fight back because they couldn't survive the loss of another million or so able bodied men. It is now widely agreed that their resistance to the death in WW1 was heroic but foolish and tons of men died for nothing.

>>18712655
>we'll have to wait until the 2040s before Britain declassifies all of their state archives on WW2 so there is still more stuff yet to be found out that will revise historians' existing assumptions
Namely we'll find out that Christopher Lee was full of shit and didn't really participate in secret MI5 missions, but he knew he'd be dead by the time the details on those missions are released so he didn't have to care.

>>18712658
the only worse thing are Civil War memes pushed by Lost Causers and sometimes still repeated

>>18712659
You fucking moron, you really think the French surrendered because they simply didnt want casualties?
They surrendered because they were overwhelmed.
Once the wehrmacht broke through at Sedan, and they didnt capitalize on the overextionsion is was game-over. They simply couldnt catch up, especially when the highways were flooded with refugees.

>>18712663
"lost cause" sounds more like a interpretation than a fact.
But I wont argue this, as a European I dont know that much about American history.

>>18712655
a lot of those boomer memes from the 50s came about during the early stages of WW2 scholarship when it had been only a decade since the war and many state and military documents were still secret and not available to researchers. also we of course had no access to any Soviet archives until the 90s.

>>18712659
Also the other anon is kinda correct.
The German success in 1939-1940 was mainly because the allies were both unprepared and kinda half-assing the war.
The Germans should not had been able to pull off the Norwegian invasion or Case Yellow. Both were suicide on paper and yet they worked, and not all of that is owed due to "superior Wehrmacht tactics", but more to allied negligence.
Case Yellow should realistically have ended in complete disaster for Germany. The plan basically required all the stars to be aligned to work. Nothing could go wrong in an operation where virtually everything could go wrong. Had the French deployed a few more divisions at Sedan, had the traffic jammed (which it often does), had the French scouted the Ardenne just once, had the allies actually acted on captured Wehrmacht plans, had Belgium not forfeit their military alliance with France etc, then Case Yellow would have ended in disaster and a likely end to ww2 already in 1940.

Likewise Barbarossa was a shot in the dark and should have failed. It didnt succeed because of Wehrmacht superiority, but due to cosmic factors of the USSR. The Soviets were literally spoonfed information on exactly where and when and how the Wehrmacht would attack, and they didnt act on this information. It was a catastrophic failure of the wehrmacht to hide its strategic planning and preparation and it should have costed them the war, but it didnt.


Once the allies stopped half-assing their war effort, the war turned very quickly for the axis.

>>18712670
On a similar note, Arthur Schlesinger published the first-ever biography of FDR in 1955. Since it had only been a decade, most of the key figures from his administration were available to be interviewed and the events were still fresh in memory. On the downside many documents about the war were then still classified so his research was a bit limited.

>>18712677
again i'm reminded a bit of the Civil War when after Shiloh, Union army intelligence intercepted a telegram from Beauregard saying he only had 35,000 men with him (whereas Halleck's army group was close to 100,000 men). this was published in a New York newspaper but nothing came of it except for Lee to tell Beauregard he'd better change his cipher.

>>18712670
Yep, and unironically William Shirer bears a lot of responsibility for this because of his best-seller.
Shirers book is interesting because he actually witnessed key events during the war (for example he was present during the French surrender) but Shirer only had the information that was available at the time.
Likewise Churchill contributed to a lot of ww2 myths with his own best-seller novles on the war, where he deliberately distorted facts to make himself look good (he was still running for office in 1950s) and because most of British archieves were still clasified.
Churchill contributed to the myths that Chamberlain was just a poor naive idiot and the world would have been a much better place if everyone had just listened to mr Churchill to begin with (instead of actual historians who has basically pinpointed how Chamberlain cleverly outmanouvered Hitler with the Munich agreement), and that Rommel was a godtier general which is why the 8th Army was struggling to much in Egypt (instead of actual historians who points out what a disaster Rommels).

>>18712677
>Likewise Barbarossa was a shot in the dark and should have failed. It didnt succeed because of Wehrmacht superiority, but due to cosmic factors of the USSR. The Soviets were literally spoonfed information on exactly where and when and how the Wehrmacht would attack, and they didnt act on this information. It was a catastrophic failure of the wehrmacht to hide its strategic planning and preparation and it should have costed them the war, but it didnt.

The massive German military buildup on the eastern border was not exactly hard to hide but somehow Stalin to the bitter end refused to believe it.

>>18712691
>and because most of British archieves were still clasified

and some still are and will be until the centennial of the war in the 2040s. in particular details about MI5 missions such as the sabotage of the German heavy water plant in Norway.

>>18712691
the myths around Rommel were part of a deliberate US and British postwar effort to disconnect the Wehrmacht from Nazi atrocities and make it seem like they were not involved those, when of course they were

>>18712696
>The massive German military buildup on the eastern border was not exactly hard to hide
*easy to hide I mean

>>18712698
Yes, see, Christopher Lee was just a clerk at MI5 headquarters whose job was procuring supplies for the real agents to carry out their missions.

>>18712696
You can actually hide it.
Why do I say this?
Because the Soviets made an even larger build-up almost exactly around the same area for an invasion that virtually mirrored Babrarossa in scope and scale.
This was operation Bagration

So why did operation Bagration succeed? Because the Soviet military deception wasnt as incompetent as the Germans.
In fact, historians say that 'Maskirovka' was extremely sophisticated.
The Russians completely fooled German intelligence into thinking they were striking Romania, so the Wehrmacht deployed most of its divisions there, when the actual attack came in the center, and completely obliterated an entire German army-group in the opening assault.

It's the same myth with "blitzkreig". Historians today attribute the Soviets as being the ones who perspected "blitzkreig" with their 'Deep Operations' doctrine, being far more advanced and sophisticated, while the myth is still that the Soviets were just incompetent and just mindlessly threw men until the line broke.
The point is that it took the Soviets until 1942 to actually figure out Deep Operations because Tukhachevsky had been labeled a traitor, and Stalin had the brilliant idea of abolishing mechanized divisions during his purges, only to realise that Red Army divisions couldnt do shit against a handful of Finnish battalions throwing bottles for granades. In an alternative timeline, Stalin listens to Tukhachevsky, adopts Deep Operations already in 1939, doesnt ignore his intel, and Barbarossa fails in late July 1941.

>>18712705
After the war they encouraged the Wehrmacht generals to write their memoirs in exchange for which they would push a myth that they didn't participate in atrocities, only the SS/Gestapo did that stuff.

anyway, as he said the French commanders didn't try to fight too hard because they didn't want to repeat the tragic bloodshed of WW1

>>18712705
Yes, it had many reasons.
I just said Churchill contributed to a great many myths. The Rommel myth also functioned to hide British leaderships (Churchills) own incompetence which led to catastrophic defeats such as Gazala, in a campaign that should have been an easy deal since North Africa was a logistical nightmare for Germany.

But yes, the myth also served to disconnect the Wehrmacht (or at least elements of the Wehrmacht) from the regime.

>>18712650
Germany had an underdeveloped agricultural sector compared to the US and Britain and didn't use much mechanized farm equipment or chemical fertilizers. The main reason for the planned conquest of the east was to acquire more farmland.

>>18712705
Even worse was covering up the atrocities committed by their Eastern European allies, which in some cases were more gruesome than what the SS did, because Cold War politics dictated portraying those countries as hapless victims of Soviet expansionism. They did not want to bring up Hungary or Romania's active participation in deportation of Jews to Germany for instance.

>>18712724
This is a hot topic in Ukraine, since this time period was when Ukraine experienced the most brutalization from their Moscow overlords, while simultaniously most Ukranian nationalists fighting for a free Ukraine thus cooperated with the SS. Most massacres on civilians were done by Ukranian 'police units'.
So you have people like Bandera who are hailed as both a hero and villain.

>>18712724
The Wehrmacht arrested Horthy in late 1944, took him back to Germany as a prisoner, and he was replaced by the Arrow Cross, who then basically just slaughtered all the Jews of Budapest in one massive lynching spree. This shitshow was ended when the Soviets invaded Hungary in March 1945 and the Arrow Cross fled the country along with the German troops.

>>18712729
Kinda played out the same in Italy.
Mussolini enacted antisemitic laws but it was mostly just for show to appease Hitler (Mussolinis fascist party had a large number of jewish members and Mussolini never displayed any signs of antisemitism earlier).

Then when Germany took control of Italy in 1943 following their surrender, was when Italian jews were actuallly being hunted and rounded up.

>>18712729
Romania deported Jews so fast and aggressively that the Germans asked them to slow down as they couldn't handle all of the influx, but as the war started going against Berlin the Antonescu regime reduced and finally stopped deportations, but not before at least 50% of Romanian Jews had died in the Holocaust.

>>18712663
The Grant the Butcher meme chiefly pertaining to the Overland Campaign losses.

>>18712608
spring and fall would be mud season. in winter the roads froze and could be easily moved over.