Cartoon Demands the government take over of businesses to do war crimes
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (85)
sorted by:
I'm sure Stalin was up to something, but blitzing all the way to Moscow isn't the kind of plan you just make up in a few months.
It can be. Barbarossa has always been a head scratcher for professional and amateur historians alike. By all accounts Germany was outmanned and out gunned going into the offensive. The traditional, and pretty unsatisfactory, explanation is that Hitler was a madman bent on world domination. Suvelov's proposal of a desperate preemptive strike makes a lot more sense. As to why Germany made it as far as they did; if the Soviets were posturing for offence, striking first gave Germany a chance. An army preparing for invasion is organized completely different from one preparing for defense; most of Soviet war materiel was at the front line and once they lost that they were at a severe disadvantage for some time.
It should also be noted that the blood enemies of the national socialists were the communists, and the people behind the communists held power in Soviet Russia, people who had tried multiple communist revolutions in Weimar Germany before the NSDAP took power. The Germans probably knew they'd have no peace in their lifetime so long as Soviet Russia remained. I also wonder if the Germans knew what the Soviets were doing to the ethnically White Russians, like in the Holodomor.
Both explanations lack satisfaction. Germany was hellbent on decapitating the USSR and seizing every useable raw material, which they badly needed. Otherwise, invading Russia is pure folly, whether the Soviets planned to eventually invade or not. That's very different from destroying supplies at the border.
Without getting into the why and how of Barbarossa, this is a pretty bad take. If the USSR was going to invade, the ideal time to respond would have been when the USSR was "almost but not quite ready" to invade. That's the gist of Suvelov's idea. You don't just turn on an invasion, you have to prepare; if your opponent beats you to the punch, you've taken two steps backwards. Decapitating the USSR was required for the success of Barbarossa; that's how modern mechanized wars are fought. Germany failed.
I don't think you read the full meaning of my comment. Germany invaded in large part to capture Russia's resources to fuel their global war effort. The element of defense may or may not have existed, but the element of opportunism certainly existed.
Generally, yes. But 70 years of technological advancement later, we are witnessing the complete opposite of mechanized high tempo warfare in Ukraine.
Hence why Germany had the Russian invasion in mind before '41.