Posts made by KurtGodel7

@CWO:

A couple of comments on the original article:

“Although It is obvious that The first operational A-bomb was dropped by the U.S. on Hiroshima, the U.S. found it desirable to imply that the Germans were far from being close to having an atomic weapon at the end of the war in 1945. Recently revealed information shows that this was not true and helps to explain why the Reich ordered the fighting to continue even into the streets of Berlin when it seemed obvious to everyone there simply was no hope.  Its not a stretch to say that the top-secret project was actually only weeks away from completion, and even a casual study of Hitler shows he would not have hesitated to use it.”

The three links posted in that part of the article don’t work, so I couldn’t check the sources, but I wonder abour the statement that “its not a stretch to say that the top-secret project [to have an atomic weapon at the end of the war in 1945] was actually only weeks away from completion.”  As far as I know, Germany never even got as far as having an operational nuclear reactor, let alone manufacturing enough fissionable material for an atomic bomb.  The U.S. devoted massive resources to its Manhattan Project (whereas Germany did not), and even then it took America about two-and-a-half years to get from the first operational reactor to the first operational atomic bomb.

“For example, the battleship Bismark was sunk by a torpedo dropped by a biplane left over from WW I.”

The Bismarck had its rudder damaged by a Swordfish biplane.  The damaged rudder delivered the Bismarck to the British fleet, but it didn’t sink the Bismarck.  It took gunfire from the British battleships KGV and Rodney and some torpedoes from the British cruiser Dorsetshire to sink her…and even today, there is some dispute about whether it was battle damage or scuttling which ultimately finished her off. The Swordfish, by the way, was designed in the 1930s; it was not a WWI leftover.

You are right about the Swordfish. As you correctly pointed out, even though it was a biplane, the British did not put it into production until 1936.

Like you, I was unable to check the links about the German nuclear program which had originally been cited. But after some digging I was able to find this. If the claims cited in the article are correct (which is far from certain), Germany was very close to developing a nuclear device. (I.e., something a lot less powerful than the nuclear bombs the U.S. used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but a lot more powerful than a conventional weapon.) A full-fledged nuclear bomb would have required a far greater amount of industrial capacity than Germany was in a position to allocate.

This being said, HortenFlyingWing wrote, in his original post, “don’t mind mis-spellings, and some errors here and there.” As IL pointed out, it’s been ten years since this thread has last been active. So that means that Horten and his friend have had plenty of time to correct those errors and come up with a better article! :) I liked the original article, but I’d like an error-free article even more.

@HortenFlyingWing:

A very nice guy once emailed me a while back, seeing my name in achtungpanzer.com’s guest book.  I used the name “HortenFlyingWing” and he asked me to proofread an article about it. (remainder snipped)

Very good post–and definitely worthy of a bump. I encourage anyone who hasn’t yet read the first post in this thread to go ahead and do so! Definitely bump-worthy. (It’s been a few days since the last time someone posted in this thread.)

@crusaderiv:

In May, 1939, Gamelin undertook with general Kasprycki (Minister of the military affairs of Poland) on 3 protocols.
If Germany attacks Poland:

1. France will begin an air action.
2. 3 days after the general mobilization, France will start an offensive with limited objectives.
3. As soon as the German effort will sink in Poland, France will start an offensive action main part of his forces.

Gamelin make this promises without to consult French goverment!

It is true the agreement was initially negotiated between Gamelin and his Polish counterpart. But that agreement was later ratified by both governments.

The idea that Gamelin came up with those promises on his own seems a little far-fetched. Daladier served as the Minister of Defense under France’s Popular Front government. One would expect someone with that background to be particularly aware of the doings of France’s military.

Anything relating to France’s foreign policy (especially with respect to Germany) was of first importance to him. Gamelin was left in his position and was given overall command of France’s defense in 1940. It is not normal for generals to make foreign policy or diplomatic promises on their own. When they do, they are typically relieved of command–which Gamelin was not. The idea that Gamelin was solely responsible for the promises France had made to Poland smells a lot like something put forward by Daladier or his supporters, after the fact, to explain why France had not honored its promise to Poland of an invasion of Germany.

The French government knew very well that they were not ready to make war. They tried to make the peace with Hiltler but after the Anschluss, Czechoslovakia, Rhineland and numerous peace meetings.
The English and French goverment faced the evidence that Hitler wanted to make war.
War was inevitable. The big mistake of the French and English goverment was to overestimate the German strengths in September, 1939.

It is a common misperception that Daladier was personally interested in negotiating peace with Hitler. He was not; and only attended the Munich Conference in 1938 because Chamberlain pressured him into doing so. In 1938, Daladier told the British, “Today, it is the turn of Czechoslovakia. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of Poland and Romania. When Germany has obtained the oil and wheat it needs, she will turn on the West.”

Daladier’s words were a clear case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hitler had nothing to gain by a war against Britain and France. Realizing this, he offered Britain and France a peace treaty after the fall of Poland. Both nations refused. After France fell, Hitler began looking into the possibility of a peace treaty with Britain. He was rebuffed. As a result, he found himself in exactly the kind of war Germany did not need: a long, grinding war in which Great Britain could take full advantage of its significant industrial potential, the resources of its colonies, and the aircraft manufacturing capacity of the United States.

Daladier was correct to note that Germany lacked wheat and oil. Hitler hoped to find both things in the East. His long-range goal was a successful war against the Soviet Union. The oil of Caucasus and the wheat of the Ukraine would considerably strengthen Germany; victory over the Soviet Union would secure Germany’s eastern front and would free the world from communism, and the Soviet Union had plenty of space in which Germans could settle.

However, Hitler faced opposition to this planned war from various democracies. In 1935, France and Czechoslovakia each signed a defensive alliance with the Soviet Union. From 1938 - the spring of 1941, Hitler’s policy towards the nations of Eastern Europe was to annex whichever nations had adopted anti-German or pro-Soviet foreign policies (such as Czechoslovakia) while leaving alone those nations which did not have anti-German foreign policies. This policy was intended to prepare the groundwork for his invasion of the Soviet Union.

Like other French leaders from 1918 - 1940, Daladier believed in keeping Germany as weak as possible. Neither French leaders nor the leaders of other Western democracies had any kind of clear plan for a counterweight to Soviet expansionism. Hitler very much wanted to be that counterweight, but at every turn France’s actions served to turn his attention westward. After WWI, France gave large slices of German territory to Czechoslovakia and Poland–thereby creating a serious source of tension between those two nations and Germany. Then in 1939, France exacerbated that tension by promising the Polish that France would launch a full  invasion of Germany if Germany attacked Poland. That promise was the foundation for Poland’s (deeply misguided) foreign policy in 1939.

Perhaps Hitler would have failed to win his war against the Soviet Union even without the efforts of France, Britain, and the United States to undercut Germany and support the Soviets. But there is no obvious reason why the Western democracies should have sided with the Soviet Union instead of with Germany in the war between those two nations. Hitler had wanted an alliance with Britain; and had hoped the United States would remain neutral and isolationist.

French foreign policy ultimately succeeded in its goal of a weak Germany. In 1945, Germany was prostrate. Its women and children were raped and murdered in what historian Antony Beevor described as “the worst mass rape in human history.” The horror and brutality of Soviet communism had spread west into the heart of Europe. At that point, only the United States had the military strength to prevent the Red Army from overrunning the rest of Germany, conquering France, and reaching the Atlantic.

Unexpectedly, the U.S. did, in fact, provide a deterrent to Soviet expansionism. I use the word “unexpectedly” because as of 1940, the American political spectrum was divided into conservative Republican isolationists and pro-communist interventionists such as FDR. Few politicians from either political party had advocated interventionism against communism. But in 1948, a new breed of American politicians got elected to Congress–politicians who believed in the idea of interventionism against communism. That fortuitous development was one of two factors which saved France from the consequences of having successfully destroyed what (up to that point) had been the sole deterrent to Soviet expansionism: the armed might of Germany.

The other development which may have saved France from the consequences of its own foreign policy was the death of Stalin in the early '50s. In the late '40s and early '50s, the Soviets had much stronger conventional forces in Europe than did the Western democracies. Truman recognized this, and knew that if the Soviets invaded, the Americans would be pushed west. He planned to use tactical nuclear strikes on the invading Soviet forces–a plan which did not please the Germans; among whom those nuclear bombs would fall! However, the United States did not have very many nuclear bombs, and Stalin was confident of his nation’s ability to shoot down nuclear bombers. (As an aside, Germany would have been the U.S.'s main ally in such a war; because France was too pro-communist to be relied upon.)

Those who believe Stalin had been planning WWIII state that he allowed the Korean War to be launched as a test of American military readiness. This was a test the U.S. failed to pass–which made Stalin confident in his preparations to move forward with a larger European conflict. However, Stalin died (or was murdered) before having the opportunity to launch this war. His successors proved more cautious.

@Herr:

There’s an interview with Hartmann at http://www.acesofww2.com/germany/aces/Hartmann.htm

That site also has a lot of information on other World War II flying aces.

That was a great read. Thanks for posting it!

Just to add to what I’d written previously: if anyone is interested in learning more about the New World Order map, I suggest this thread. Unfortunately, the picture only shows you the approximate center of the map; so you don’t get to see that Finland is included as its own nation with several separate territories to start with, and the opportunity to acquire a significant number of additional, neutral territories from Sweden and Norway. You also don’t get to see the (extensive) theater in North Africa, the Mediterranean, or the Middle East. (The Colonial French exist as their own nation; separate from that of France. That way when Paris falls, the Colonial French can continue collecting income and contributing to the Allied war effort.) The map also doesn’t give you the chance to see all of Turkey (with its important industrial complexes), the portion of the Soviet Union near Moscow and east of Moscow, or the eastern United States and eastern Canada. That map does, however, give you the chance to see the Romanian navy (all one transport of it!); the competing German and Soviet fleets in the Baltic, and the overall scale of the map. France, for example, is divided into 14 territories.

The discussion in the above-linked thread is a good introduction to the strategies associated with it.

I don’t know if your question includes custom map variants. But if it does, I’d like to weigh in in favor of New World Order; a custom map playable through TripleA. Lots of people use it because it’s so well-designed. Its focus is on Europe; and the European conflict is explored in a lot of detail. New World Order is to Anniversary Edition what Anniversary Edition is to Classic.

My favorite hero is Erich Hartmann. From Wikipedia:

Erich Alfred Hartmann . . . was a German World War II fighter pilot and is the highest-scoring fighter ace in the history of aerial warfare. He claimed 352 aerial victories (of which 345 were won against the Soviet Air Force, and 260 of which were fighters) in 1,404 combat missions. . . . During the course of his career, Hartmann was forced to crash-land his damaged fighter 14 times. This was due to damage received from parts of enemy aircraft he had just shot down or mechanical failure. Hartmann was never shot down or forced to land due to fire from enemy aircraft.[1] . . .

Hartmann shot down two enemy aircraft before his fighter was hit by debris and he was forced to make an emergency landing. He then, in accordance with Luftwaffe regulations, attempted to recover the precision board clock. As he was doing so, Soviet ground troops approached. Realising that capture was unavoidable, he faked internal injuries. Hartmann’s acting so convinced the Soviets that they put him on a stretcher and placed him on a truck. . . .

Hartmann patiently waited for the right moment to escape, then, using the distraction of the Stukas attack, he attacked the single guard. Hartmann jumped out of the back of the truck and ran into a large field of giant sunflowers. Evading the pursuing soldiers, Hartmann hid and waited for nightfall. In the dark, Hartmann followed a Russian patrol heading west to the front. As he approached the German position, he was challenged by a sentry who fired a shot which passed through his trousers.[17] . . .

At the end of the war, Erich Hartmann disobeyed General Hans Seidemann’s order to Hartmann and Hermann Graf to fly to the British sector to avoid capture by Soviet forces. Hartmann later explained:

I must say that during the war I never disobeyed an order, but when General Seidemann ordered Graf and
me to fly to the British sector and surrender to avoid the Russians, with the rest of the wing to surrender to
the Soviets. I could not leave my men. That would have been bad leadership.[38]

Hartmann’s last kill occurred over Brno, Czechoslovakia, on 8 May, the last day of the war in Europe. . . .

As Gruppenkommandeur of I./JG 52, Hartmann chose to surrender his unit to members of the US 90th Infantry Division.[40]

After his capture, the U.S. Army handed Hartmann, his pilots, and ground crew over to the Soviet Union on 24 May, where he was imprisoned in accordance with the Yalta Agreements, which stated that airmen and soldiers fighting Soviet forces had to surrender directly to them.

Initially, the Russians tried to convince Erich to cooperate with them. He was asked to spy on fellow officers and become a stukatch, or “stool pigeon”. He refused and was given 10 days’ solitary confinement in a four-by-nine-by-six-foot chamber. He slept on a concrete floor and was given only bread and water. On another occasion, the Soviets threatened to kidnap and murder his wife (the death of his son was kept from Hartmann). During similar interrogations about his knowledge of the Me 262, Hartmann was struck by a Soviet officer using a cane, prompting Hartmann to slam his chair down on the head of the Russian, knocking him out. Expecting to be shot, Erich was transferred back to the small bunker.[42]

Hartmann, not ashamed of his war service, opted to go on hunger strike and starve rather than fold to “Soviet will”, as he called it.[43] The Russians allowed the hunger strike to go on for four days before force-feeding him. More subtle efforts by the Soviet authorities to convert Hartmann to communism also failed. He was offered a post in the Luftstreitkräfte der Nationalen Volksarmee (East German Air Force), which he refused. . . .

Hartmann . . . was falsely charged with war crimes, specifically the deliberate shooting of 780 Soviet civilians in the village of Briansk, attacking a “bread factory” on 23 May 1943, and destroying 345 “expensive” Soviet aircraft.[44] He refused to confess to these charges and conducted his own defence, which was a waste of time, according to the judge.[44] Sentenced to 25 years of hard labour, Hartmann refused to work. He was eventually put into solitary confinement, which enraged his fellow prisoners. They began a revolt, overpowered the guards, and freed him. . . .

In 1955, Hartmann’s mother wrote to the new West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to whom she appealed to secure his freedom. A trade agreement between West Germany and the Soviet Union was reached, and Hartmann was released along with 16,000 German military personnel. After spending ten and a half years in Soviet POW camps, he was among the last batch of prisoners to be turned over. Returning to West Germany, he was reunited with his wife Ursula, to whom he had written every day of the war.[46]

In January 1997, the Russian government, as a legal successor to the Soviet Union, exonerated Hartmann by admitting that his conviction for war crimes was unlawful.[2]

When he returned to West Germany, Hartmann reentered military service in the Bundeswehr and became an officer in the West German Air Force (Bundesluftwaffe), where he commanded West Germany’s first all-jet unit, Jagdgeschwader 71 “Richthofen”, which was equipped initially with Canadair Sabres and later with Lockheed F-104 Starfighters. . . .

Hartmann considered the F-104 a fundamentally flawed and unsafe aircraft and strongly opposed its adoption by the Bundesluftwaffe. Although events subsequently validated his low opinion of the aircraft (282 crashes and 115 German pilots killed on the F-104 in non-combat missions, along with allegations of bribes culminating in the Lockheed scandal), Hartmann’s outspoken criticism proved unpopular with his superiors. General Werner Panitzki, successor to General Josef Kammhuber as Inspekteur der Luftwaffe, said, “Erich is a good pilot, but not a good officer.” Hartmann was forced into early retirement in 1970.[48]

During his long imprisonment, Hartmann’s son, Erich-Peter, was born in 1945 and died as a three-year-old in 1948, without his father ever having seen him. (Hartmann later had a daughter, Ursula Isabel, born on 23 February 1957).[49] . . .

It is often said that [Hartmann] was more proud of the fact that he had never lost a wingman in combat than he was about his rate of kills.

Hartmann’s 352 aerial victories are particularly impressive considering that the top non-German ace of all time, Ilmari Juutilainen of Finland, had 94 victories. The Allied fighter pilot with the most victories was Ivan Kozhedub of the Soviet Union with 62 victories. The most victorious American pilot of all time was Richard Bong with 40 victories.

Unfortunately, the quoted Wikipedia article does not explain why Hartmann’s son died at the age of three. One possible reason for his death may be the malnutrition imposed by the Morgenthau Plan.

Conditions in Germany reached their lowest point in 1947. Living conditions were considered worse in 1947 than in 1945 or 1946. At an average ration of 1040 calories a day, malnutrition was at its worst stage in post-war Germany. Herbert Hoover asserted that this amount of rations was hardly more than the amount which caused thousands in the Nazi concentration camps to die from starvation.[53] . . .

In early October 1945 the UK government privately acknowledged in a cabinet meeting that, German civilian adult death rates had risen to four times the pre-war levels and death rates amongst the German children had risen by 10 times the pre-war levels.[61] In early 1946 U.S. President Harry S. Truman finally bowed to pressure from Senators, Congress and public to allow foreign relief organization to enter Germany in order to review the food situation. In mid-1946 non-German relief organizations were finally permitted to help starving German children.[60]

As a baby and a toddler during this period of postwar starvation, Hartmann’s son would have been especially vulnerable to death from hunger and hunger-related causes.

@Pvt.Ryan:

I chose other. I’m all for the War between United Nations Space Command and the Covenent Military. WHAT! you didnt say it had to be real. Also I think Patton was a good general but as a person i dont like him. Were talking about war so comfortably but in reality its hell. Im no soldier but trust me its not pretty. War with the Russians would have been a catastrophy. Russia had people in the insaide already. Stalin new about the A Bomb when Roosevelt told him. Also look at Russia! Its big and cold. Not like tiny islands in the Pacific or state sized countries in Europe. Also those russians were hard core. They lost it all. There homes, there family, there lives. They had nothing to lose. We decided to share the power. If one nation is all powerful they make enemies. If we COULD have conquered the Soviets then everyone would have ganged up on us. They wouldnt like us using the A Bomb on those poor Russians who already lost it all. Then we have WWIV and we make a nuclear winter. But there’s obiously something else at work in this world other than superpowers. If Germany was ment to collapse then the Soviets were ment to collapse as well. And thats an encouraging thought  :-)

People have the tendency to assume that things always turn out well in the end; or that things happen for a reason. Generally–and especially when applied to human history–that assumption is based on our own need to believe in something reassuring, rather than empirical evidence.

The Soviet Union was the most evil regime in human history. Period. It survived WWII not because it was more moral than Germany, but because it was bigger, stronger, and had more powerful allies. The tarantula sometimes eats the bird. The bad guy sometimes wins. The Soviet victory in WWII was one of those times.

You mentioned your personal dislike of General Patton. My own opinion of him was exactly the opposite. Despite his hard exterior and rough and tumble ways, he was a man of basic decency. A moral human, when confronted with a monstrosity like the Soviet Union, ought to react much as Patton did. If someone doesn’t, it suggests there’s something missing. Maybe that something is simple information–for example about how the Soviet government actually acted.

I handled hundreds of signals to all parts of the Soviet Union which were couched in the following form:
“To N.K.V.D., Frunze. You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal.–Yezhov.”

And in due course the reply would come back:

“In reply to yours of such-and-such date, the following enemies of the Soviet people have been shot.”

----Former Soviet Spy-Chief Vladimir Petrov

The above describes the reign of terror unleashed within the Soviet Union itself for the sole purpose of keeping its citizens in-line. During the latter stages of WWII that terror spread westward into the very heart of Europe. FDR was fine with that, and Churchill convinced himself that on some level he could trust Stalin. These attitudes were either the result of moral failure or willful self-deception. The below quote gives a brief taste of what happened when the Red Terror spread into Germany.

Antony Beevor describes [the Soviet invasion of Germany] as the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history”, and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[17] According to Natalya Gesse, “the Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty.”[18] Soviet[19] and Jewish[20] women were raped also.

Also,

The Red Army’s violence against the local German population during the occupation of eastern Germany often led to incidents like that in Demmin, a small city conquered by the Soviets in the spring of 1945. Despite its surrender, nearly 900 civilians committed suicide, fueled by instances of pillaging, rape, and executions.[citation needed]

Any Soviet victory cannot be described as “good.” Nor can the Soviet Union legitimately be described as “the lesser of two evils” in relation to any other nation whatever.

The American Communist Party took its orders from Moscow. The Soviets realized that the United States was too strong to conquer from the outside, and so sought to promote revolution from the inside. But they also knew the United States was internally much stronger than czarist Russia had been. For the hoped-for revolution to take place, the existing social order first had to be destroyed or severely weakened. That meant the following:

• Destroying the American family by promoting divorce, radical feminism, and the end of traditional marriage.
• Destroying traditional morality
• Destroying religion
• Destroying race and the existence of race through immigration and through changing attitudes about miscegenation
• Destroying patriotism

The American Communist movement was particularly powerful in the '60s. Some of the ideas they attempted (with various success) to insert into the public consciousness included the following:

• Radical feminism and female hate of men
• The idea that criminals are heroes and social revolutionaries for opposing the existing (evil) social order
• The idea that the white race is bad; and that whites should hate their own race

To varying degrees these ideas influenced mainstream American culture and American law. For example, many in the mainstream adopted a watered-down version of the communists’ view of criminals. Criminals were now portrayed as victims (of poverty, racism, and social injustice) rather than victimizers and a source of social injustice. Anti-crime laws were weakened, the culture became far more tolerant of crime, and (expectedly) the crime rate became much higher in the '60s than it had been in the '50s. Those who were raped and murdered as a result of this crime spree were a distant echo of the hate, rape, and mass murder the Red Army had perpetrated as it moved westward into Germany.

There is only one appropriate response to the evil of Soviet communism. One must oppose it completely, totally, ruthlessly, and wholeheartedly. There is no moral distinction between the leaders of the communist movement and a man who has broken into your house for the sole purpose of raping and murdering your family. None. The attitudes you have toward that man must also be applied to the communist movement. Any other mindset is far too mild.

@13thguardsriflediv:

Something revisionism this way come…

Socalled German food shortages before the war are a complete fabrication. In fact, food was available in more than enough quantities, especially during the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Though not in the same quantities as in the USA or Britain, still more than enough for a rich diet (The dictators, Stalins Russia and Hitlers Germany - Richard Overy).

The claim that food shortages before the war are a mere fabrication is simply false. Germany was and is a food deficit nation, even more so than most other nations of Western or Central Europe. As Adam Tooze explored in his book, that means that for Germany to adequately feed its own people, it needed both the absence of an Allied food blockade, and the presence of enough foreign exchange to purchase food imports. Due to the large payments required by the Versailles Treaty, Germany’s foreign exchange situation was worsened. It also did not help when Britain, France, and later the U.S. closed their borders to German exports, thereby depriving Germany of a much-needed source of foreign exchange. The below quote is from Adam Tooze’s book, which is among the most authoritative available WRT German economic and food questions.

World War I had forced the question of food back onto the agenda of European politics. The British and French blockade, though it failed to produce outright famine, did succeed in producing an epidemic of chronic malnutrition in Germany and Austria that was widely blamed for killing at least 600,000 people. Depression and mass unemployment brought a return of serious deprivation. And even in good times, at the bottom of the social scale, chronic malnutrition was widespread in Germany as it was in every other European society in the early twentieth century. One way or another, virtually everyone alive in Germany in the 1930s had an acute personal experience of prolonged and insatiable hunger.

The Wages of Destruction, p 168.

It is also worth noting that the German food situation during WWII was very bleak, even when the Nazi-Soviet Pact allowed Germany to import food from the Soviet Union.

As we have discussed, the ‘bread basket of the Ukraine’ played a key role in all the various military-economic assessments of the Barbarossa campaign prepared over the winter of 1940-41. For Hitler, it was the key priority, to be achieved prior to any other military consideration, the importance of which was only reinforced by the alarming decline in the German grain stocks. By December 1940 the entire military and political leadership of the Third Reich was convinced that this was the last year in which they could approach the food question with any confidence. Nor was this simply a German problem. All of the Western European territories which had fallen under German domination in 1940 had substantial net grain deficits.

The Wages of Destruction, 477.

@13thguardsriflediv:

What happened after the war has also been blown out of proportion by certain groups.

The German view, as expressed by their government, is that the Morgenthau Plan was of no significance for the occupation policy toward Germany but that Nazi propaganda on the subject had a lasting effect and that it is still used for propaganda purposes by extremist groups.

The consensus view is not always the correct view. That’s especially true when there are strong political considerations which push against fully examining the Morgenthau Plan or the role it had in postwar Germany.

It is true that FDR publicly disavowed the Morgenthau Plan. But FDR’s public statements did not always reflect his actual policy. FDR got elected into office in the first place with promises to cut taxes and the size of government. Obviously those promises bore no relation at all to what he actually did. Morgenthau denialists have the bad habit of taking FDR and Truman at their word, which is not something you should do with any politician.

The question of whether the Morgenthau Plan would be implemented was settled when Truman implemented JSC 1067 in May of 1945. While that wasn’t as destructive a plan as Harry Dexter White or Morgenthau had originally envisioned, it nevertheless resulted in widespread starvation. Below is a quote from the Hoover Report, written in 1947, and excerpted from the Truman Library:

In some areas famine edema (actual starvation) is appearing in the children. . . . Famine edema is showing in thousands of cases, said to be 10,000 in Hamburg alone. The increased death toll among the aged is appalling.

From page 9 of the report:

[Dr. Sebrell] reports that the nutritional condition in [Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, and Britain] is nearly pre-war normal, while the special German groups I mentioned are not only far below the other groups but disastrously so.

The Morgenthau Plan was formulated. Much of that plan made it into JSC 1067, which was the guiding principle of U.S. occupation policy for several years. Both FDR and Truman approved JSC 1067, and FDR successfully persuaded the other Allies to adopt similar measures.

The Moregenthau Plan was not morally equivalent to the Holocaust. The latter was one of several measures the Nazis took in response to the Allied food blockade during WWII. Lacking the food with which to feed everyone, they decided to starve or otherwise exterminate those groups they liked the least, or which were least necessary for the war effort. As an example of the latter, skilled Polish workers received higher food rations than unskilled workers. It was expected that millions of unskilled Polish workers would starve to death due to Germany’s overall lack of food. Conversely, the Morgenthau Plan was not prompted by some external food blockade. Its sole purpose was to punish and kill Germans during the postwar era. Herbert Hoover estimated that the long-term effect of that plan would have been the extermination of about 25 million Germans.

@The:

@Gargantua:

Most of the crimes…  (there were technical terms for the charges but I don’t have them handy)

“Waging agressive war”  
“Waging war in enemy uniforms”
“Using corporate slave labour”
“Killing innocent civilians + torture”

Were also committed by the allies, and some were even occurring during the trial.  No Soviet or western brass ever saw a courtroom.

Hence - where there is no universal statute of everyone being equal before the law.  Then there is no law.

It would have been better to forgoe the trials (Due to the way they were run) and let street justice prevail.  The same thuggery applied.

I agree

The soviets had their own concentration camp see:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag:
-No trial

The Western Allies bombed many cities including the infamous bombing of dresden see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II:

• no trial

The bombing of Dresden was one of the many occasions (including hamburg and Pforzheim)managed to achieve the “firestorm” which meant that the German fire fighters would be unable to control the flames. This was the same tactic that the Germans attempted to do during the Blitz but when the attacked london for 76 nights in a row but it was on the 29th of december (Help needed) that they attacked london and attempted to create a “firestorm” that the British firefighters would be unable to control

Good post!

Just to add to what you’ve written, Dresden was bombed in waves. From Wikipedia:
“It had been decided that the raid would be a double strike, in which a second wave of bombers would attack three hours after the first, just as the rescue teams were trying to put out the fires.[42]”
The objective of the above was to draw firefighters and other rescue workers into Dresden with an initial attack, then to kill them off with a follow-up attack. The Dresden bombing resulted in eight times as many deaths as did the September 11th terrorist attacks, and about half as many deaths as the U.S. experienced as a result of the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately, Dresden was far from being the most significant war crime committed by the Allies during the WWII era. From a different article:

A significant percentage of this death toll, however, occurred when evacuation columns [of German civilians] encountered units of the Red Army. Civilians were run over by tanks, shot, or otherwise murdered. Women and young girls were raped and left to die (as is explored firsthand in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Prussian Nights).[48][49][50] In addition, fighter bombers of the Soviet air force penetrated far behind the front lines and often attacked columns of evacuees.[48][49] . . .

The Red Army’s violence against the local German population during the occupation of eastern Germany often led to incidents like that in Demmin, a small city conquered by the Soviets in the spring of 1945. Despite its surrender, nearly 900 civilians committed suicide, fueled by instances of pillaging, rape, and executions.[citation needed]
Although mass executions of civilians by the Red Army were seldom publicly reported, there is a known incident in Treuenbrietzen, where at least 88 male inhabitants were rounded up and shot on May 1, 1945. The incident took place after a victory celebration at which numerous girls from Treuenbrietzen were raped and a Red Army lieutenant-colonel was shot by an unknown assailant. Some sources claim as many as 1,000 civilians may have been executed during the incident.[notes 1][51][52]

Also there is this:

Antony Beevor describes [the Soviet invasion of Germany] as the “greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history”, and has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[17] According to Natalya Gesse, “the Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty.”[18] Soviet [19] and Jewish [20] women were raped also. . . .

According to Anthony Beevor revenge played very little role in the frequent rapes; according to him the main reason for the rapes was the Soviet troops’ feeling of entitlement to all types of booty, including women. Beevor exemplifies this with his discovery that Soviet troops also raped Russian and Polish girls and women that were liberated from Nazi concentration camps.[36]

Unfortunately, American policy toward Germany from 1941 - 1948 was altogether too similar to the Soviets’ policy. On the one hand, American soldiers were generally far more civilized and humane than their Soviet counterparts. There was no widespread rape-murder in the American zone as there had been in the Soviet zone. On the other hand, the postwar occupation formulated under the FDR administration, and carried out by the Truman administration, resulted in the deliberate starvation and murder of millions of German civilians.

Germany was closed to relief shipments until December 1945. The given reasons were that they might tend to negate the policy of restricting the German standard of living. CARE package shipments to individuals remained prohibited until 5 June 1946. U.S. troops and their families were also under orders to destroy their own excess food rather than letting German families have access to it.
In 1945 the German Red Cross was dissolved,[57][58] and the International Red Cross and other international relief agencies were kept from helping ethnic Germans through strict controls on supplies and on travel.[59] The few agencies permitted to operate within Germany, such as the indigenous Caritas Verband, were not allowed to use imported supplies. When the Vatican attempted to transmit food supplies from Chile to German infants[60] the U.S. State Department forbade it.[60]
In early October 1945 the UK government privately acknowledged in a cabinet meeting that, German civilian adult death rates had risen to four times the pre-war levels and death rates amongst the German children had risen by 10 times the pre-war levels.[61] In early 1946 U.S. President Harry S. Truman finally bowed to pressure from Senators, Congress and public to allow foreign relief organization to enter Germany in order to review the food situation. In mid-1946 non-German relief organizations were finally permitted to help starving German children.[60] . . .

By February 28, 1947 it was estimated that 4,160,000 German former prisoners of war, by General Dwight D. Eisenhower relabeled as Disarmed Enemy Forces in order to negate the Geneva Convention, were used as forced labor by the various Allied countries to work in camps outside Germany: 3,000,000 in Russia, 750,000 in France, 400,000 in Britain and 10,000 in Belgium. [4] Meanwhile in Germany large parts of the population were starving [5] at a time when according to a study done by former U.S. President Herbert Hoover the nutritional condition in countries that in Western Europe was nearly pre-war normal. . . . William Clayton reported to Washington that “millions of people are slowly starving.”[70] . . .

Reports such as this by former U.S. President Herbert Hoover, dated March 1947, also argued for a change of policy, among other things through speaking frankly of the expected consequences.

. . . There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a “pastoral state”.
It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it. This would approximately reduce
Germany to the density of the population of France.[76]

Also from the article,

On March 20, 1945 President Roosevelt was warned that the JCS 1067 was not workable: it would let the Germans “stew in their own juice”. Roosevelt’s response was “Let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!” Asked if he wanted the German people to starve, he replied, “Why not?”[44]

It is worth noting that General Patton strongly opposed the Truman administration’s genocidal postwar policies.

Patton was relieved of duty after openly revolting against the punitive occupation directive JCS 1067.[55] His view of the war was that with Hitler gone, the German army could be rebuilt into an ally in a potential war against the Russians, whom Patton notoriously despised and considered a greater menace than the Germans. During this period, he wrote that the Allied victory would be in vain if it led to a tyrant worse than Hitler and an army of “Mongolian savages” controlling half of Europe. . . .

In addition, Patton was highly critical of the victorious Allies use of German forced labor. He commented in his diary “I’m also opposed to sending PW’s to work as slaves in foreign lands (in particular, to France) where many will be starved to death.” He also noted “It is amusing to recall that we fought the revolution in defence of the rights of man and the civil war to abolish slavery and have now gone back on both principles.”[56]

WWII and the immediate postwar era represented the time during which American political leadership was most similar to that of the Soviet Union–both from an ideological and a moral perspective. But things began changing in the postwar era. The U.S. abandoned the genocidal directive JSC 1067 in the summer of 1947, and in 1948 it adopted the Marshall Plan. The humane spirit of the Marshall Plan represented a radical departure from the Yalta Conference of February 1945. That conference represented direct American and British cooperation with Soviet mass murder: citizens of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia who had taken refuge in Germany were to be handed over to their respective governments, regardless of their consent. In addition, the Western democracies were also to hand over the vast majority of their German POWs to the Soviets. Finally, Germany was to lose 25% of its prewar territory, with ethnic Germans in East Prussia, West Prussia, and the Sudetenland forcibly expelled/ethnically cleansed from those lands.

@Gargantua:

Nuremburg was a sham.

Don’t pay any attention to it, or give it any creedence.  Any legal historian will tell you that.  It’s bollocks.

That said, Albert Speer did what he had to do to survive. You can’t blame him for that.

Call him a liar or not,  but it’s totally reasonable to believe, that 2 civilians who lived near a nazi death camp, may have heard about it, but that Albert Speer - living amongst the Nazi inner circle - never heard about it because everyone around him who knew probably didn’t want to say anything for fear or otherwise.

As for good or bad, moral or immoral, it’s impossible to say.  Cannabils eat people, in their socities this is moral, normal, and acceptable.  But to us it’s the lowest form of savage immoral exsistence.  It terms of Legal,  Albert Speer didn’t break any laws - international or otherwise as far as anyone can tell (Again Nuremburg was a total sham).

So with nothing good to say - save the cities which didn’t get burned, and nothing bad to say - save he was part of the inner nazi regime lol.

The conclusion is he was neither.  He was just there.

You raise an excellent point about the Nuremberg Trials. From Wikipedia:

Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. “(Chief U.S. prosecutor) Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[49]

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremburg_trials#Criticism

Also, while listening to NPR, I head that the rules of evidence gathering as specified in the Geneva Conventions had been set aside by those conducting the Nuremberg Trials. That point was also made in the above-referenced Wikipedia article.

The trials were conducted under their own rules of evidence; the tu quoque defense was removed; and some claim the entire spirit of the assembly was “victor’s justice”. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal permitted the use of normally inadmissible “evidence”. Article 19 specified that “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence… and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value”. Article 21 of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT) Charter stipulated:
“The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United [Allied] Nations, including acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and the records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United [Allied] Nations”

One of the reasons those rules for evidence gathering were created in the first place was to prevent false or fabricated evidence from being inserted into the proceedings. The Allied governments conducting the trials had a strong vested interest in making the Nazis look as bad as possible, both to make their own military victory look more glorious, and to distract attention from the Allied war crimes then being committed. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_plan#Food_policy and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes#1944.E2.80.931945_2 for descriptions of some of those Allied war crimes.) The Wikipedia article goes on to state how the Allied governments may have used the elimination of evidence gathering rules to insert false evidence:

Luise, the wife of Alfred Jodl, attached herself to her husband’s defence team. Subsequently interviewed by Gitta Sereny, researching her biography of Albert Speer, Luise alleged that in many instances the Allied prosecution made charges against Jodl based on documents that they refused to share with the defense. Jodl nevertheless proved some of the charges made against him were untrue, such as the charge that he helped Hitler gain control of Germany in 1933. He was in one instance aided by a GI clerk who chose to give Luise a document showing that the execution of a group of British commandos in Norway had been legitimate. The GI warned Luise that if she didn’t copy it immediately she would never see it again; “… it was being ‘filed’.”[63]

The most serious charge laid against the Nazis was the Holocaust. However, the Holocaust and the mass starvation the Nazis inflicted in Poland and former territories of the Soviet Union were performed because WWII Germany did not have the food to feed the people within its borders. The Anglo-American food blockade had accomplished its intended task. The Allies and their food policies had ensured that millions or tens of millions of people within German-held territories would die. The Nazis chose to allocate scarce calories to those they liked the most, while exterminating or starving those they liked the least.  Adam Tooze’s book is primarily about the German economy prior to and during WWII; as well as the relationship between economics and diplomatic and military policy. Within that context he provides information about the food crisis Germany experienced during WWII, as well as the Nazis’ response.

Obviously, Albert Speer had to have been aware of the immense food shortfall Germany faced from 1940 onwards. He was also doubtless aware of the measures being taken to address that shortfall. Those measures included transporting food out of Poland and into Germany, even though Poland was a food deficit nation. The problem was that Germany was a food deficit nation as well. Both nations required net food imports to avoid starvation. Other nations in Western and Central Europe–such as France and the Low Countries–also ran at food deficits. Another measure included the reduction of Jewish caloric consumption to zero, or (in some cases) very close to zero. The Nazis believed that if millions in German-held territory had to die anyway due to the lack of food, better those deaths be Jews than Gentiles. While that thinking demonstrates a deplorable degree of anti-Semitism, it cannot possibly have come as a surprise to the Allied leaders who chose to use food as a weapon in the first place. Did FDR and Churchill honestly think Hitler would respond to their food blockade by feeding Poles and Jews while letting millions of Germans starve to death?

The Allied governments were primarily responsible for the millions of civilian deaths that occurred in Germany, both because of their policy of using starvation as a weapon against civilians in German-occupied territory, and because of their prohibition on mass Jewish immigration to Allied nations and colonies. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939 .) Had the Nuremberg Trials been conducted by a trusted neutral government with no vested interest in any particular outcome, Albert Speer would have been able to use the above facts to defend himself. But because the Allied governments had chosen to conduct a show trial at Nuremberg, Speer was better off doing what he did.

Part 2 of 2

The questions we need ask ourselves are these:

1. Should Germany have annexed Czechoslovakia in 1938?

2. Should Germany have invaded Poland in 1939?

3. Should Germany have invaded the Soviet Union in 1941?

4. In answer to the first question, Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia was part of its larger policy toward Eastern Europe. Nations which adopted an anti-German, pro-Soviet foreign policy–such as Czechoslovakia–would be punished. Nations which did the opposite would be rewarded. Nations which remained neutral in Germany’s favor would be left alone. By the spring of 1941, that policy had resulted in a situation in which nearly all the governments of Eastern Europe were either neutral or pro-German. That situation was much better, from the German perspective, than things had been in the mid-'30s. At that time the mood in Eastern Europe was decidedly anti-German, as governments anticipated that the Soviet Union and the Western democracies would unite in crushing Germany.

Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia also gave it access to more manpower, raw materials, and industrial capacity: the very things it needed to compete in a long war, or even a short one. On the other hand, Imperious Leader correctly pointed out that the annexation was very damaging to Chamberlain’s administration and to the credibility of his pro-German, anti-Soviet foreign policy. (A policy which Chamberlain’s enemies labeled “appeasement.”) The damage to British prestige largely explains why, by 1939, Britain had become far more anti-German than anti-Soviet. That represented a very serious diplomatic setback for Germany. The question is whether institutional and political forces in Britain would have forced a worsening of relations with Germany anyway. Might a gifted orator such as Churchill have eventually come into power even without Munich? Germany paid a very heavy diplomatic price in the short-term for taking all Czechoslovakia. But there’s at least a chance it might have had to pay that price anyway in the long run without having received more than just the Sudetenland in return.

2. Should Germany have invaded Poland in 1939? In 1939, combined British and French military spending had exceeded Germany’s. Germany had reached the limit of the military spending it could afford. Britain and France had not. If war between Germany and Britain and France was inevitable, it was better (from the German perspective) for that war to occur in 1939 as opposed to later. The defensive alliance between France and the Soviet Union may also have played an important role in Hitler’s thought process. While the Soviet Union would not go to war to save France–defensive alliance or no defensive alliance–there was a very real chance–almost a certainty–that France would go to war to save the Soviet Union if Germany invaded. That alliance–plus the guarantees Britain and France had given to Poland–meant that Hitler could not strike out in any direction without going to war at very least against France. If, however, Hitler had remained within the confines the Allies had created for Germany after WWI (plus Czechoslovakia), Germany would have been extremely vulnerable to Soviet invasion after Stalin’s militarization and industrialization effort had been completed. As noted, the major Western democracies would have remained neutral in the Soviet Union’s favor, with many of their leaders preferring to join the Soviet side.

The war in 1939–and the conquest of France in 1940–opened up options for Germany. Now it could focus its army on its eastern front without having to worry about the French Army to the west. French industrial capacity, manpower, and natural resources also strengthened Germany, though not by as much as had been hoped. On the downside, British and American industrial capacity was now turned toward the destruction of Germany from the air. That fact severely constricted Germany’s future options, and forced it to choose between either acquiring a roughly equal amount of industrial capacity and labor, or else watch its cities and its people perish in flames.

3. Should Germany have invaded the Soviet Union in 1941? There were a lot of reasons why an invasion seemed to make sense. During the Spanish Civil War, German and Soviet aircraft competed with each other as the fascists fought the communists. Observers from both Germany and the Soviet Union paid close attention to how their nations’ military hardware performed. In 1936, Soviet aircraft were at least as good as their German counterparts. But then in 1937, the Germans introduced new, significantly improved aircraft–aircraft which could go 100 MPH (160 km/hour) faster than had their predecessors. The Soviet Union responded with a massive effort to engineer its own radically improved aircraft designs. But by the spring of 1941, those new Soviet aircraft designs either had not yet been put into production, or else existed in very limited numbers. This meant that the Soviet Air Force was almost entirely obsolete; but that it would remain obsolete for only a limited period of time.

Another factor was that Stalin had purged the Red Army’s officer corps in the late '30s. I have heard it said that his reason for doing so was to eliminate the gentlemanly traditions of the old Russian Army, and to make his new army more thuggish. If that was his goal he certainly succeeded, as shown by the rape and mass murder perpetrated by the Red Army’s soldiers during and after WWII. But whatever Stalin’s motives for the purge may have been, it left the Red Army temporarily weakened. That weakness was exacerbated by its transition to a new doctrine. During the spring of '41, it was halfway between doctrines as it were, and in a position to adequately execute neither. The very poor performance of the Red Army during its invasion of Finland resulted from these sources of temporary weakness.

However, the limitations of Germany’s supply lines–which I mentioned in my earlier post–meant that Germany could only hope to conquer the western portion of the Soviet Union during the summer and fall of '41. German military planners had recognized this prior to the start of Barbarossa, but had hoped that the main strength of the Red Army would be enveloped and captured in the western territories Germany conquered. Prior to the start of the operation, German military planners had reckoned on a total Red Army strength of 200 divisions. They were off by a factor of three: by the end of the fall of '41, the Red Army consisted of a staggering 600 divisions! In contrast, the German Army was 150 divisions strong in the spring of '41–though a German division was somewhat larger than a Soviet.

Had the invasion of the Soviet Union gone as planned, Germany would have grabbed off large stretches of Ukrainian farmland (necessary to prevent starvation from the Allied food blockade), as well as the oil, manpower, and industrial capacity it required to counter the Anglo-American bombing effort. German military planners had underestimated the sheer size and strength of the Red Army, as well as the extent of the industrial capacity the Soviet Union could bring to bear on the war effort. The Soviet habit of moving whole factories eastward, away from the German invasion, meant the rewards were far fewer than expected. (As did the Soviets’ scorched earth policy.)

Imperious Leader is absolutely correct about the qualitative advantage the German Army had over the Red Army. But the Red Army made up for that with sheer numbers, and by the improvements in tactics, weaponry, and execution it had made since its Winter War against Finland. The Red Army of '43 or '44 was far more effective, on a man-for-man basis, than the Red Army had been in '40 or '41. While the German Army still had a significant qualitative advantage over the Red Army even in '43, that advantage was no longer enough to prevent sheer Soviet numbers from dictating the outcomes of battles.

Over 80% of German military deaths during WWII were caused by the Soviet military. The Nazi-Soviet war was the one place where the core of Germany’s military strength slipped away. It’s easy to say in hindsight that Hitler should not have done that. One reason hindsight is so easy is because we have information–especially information about the sheer scale of Soviet strength–unavailable to the German military planners of '40 and '41. If the Germans had known how many men the Red Army would be able to recruit during '41 and '42, and how many tanks, planes, and artillery pieces the Soviets would build, they almost certainly not have launched the invasion when they did.

The problem Hitler faced in the fall of 1940 was that Germany had to conquer something if it was to compete against the Anglo-American bombing effort directed against German cities, or prevent the famine the British food blockade would otherwise impose. One option that had been discussed would have been to use Libya as a base for a thrust into Egypt, and thence Syria and Persia. After Egypt fell, Hitler could also have turned part of his army south, into the heart of Africa. Persian oil would have taken the place of the Caucasus oil Hitler had hoped to gain from the Soviet Union.

The problem with all this is that the operation would have had to have been supplied from the Central Mediterranean. That, in turn, meant that Hitler would be placing heavy reliance on Italy’s military–and in particular its navy–to keep Britain from interfering with the Axis’ military transports. Anyone familiar with Italy’s record in WWII should realize why relying on the Italian military for anything would have been a very bad idea.

In the long run, Hitler could have built up a German presence in the Central Mediterranean. However, if Hitler lacked the industrial capacity to win an air and sea war against the British in the North Atlantic, would he have had the industrial capacity to win such a war against them in the Central Mediterranean?

Germany could have avoided such problems by using an overland route through Turkey instead. Turkey was neutral, but Turkish leaders could have been coerced into allowing the German Army through. Or, failing that, Turkey could have been conquered. The possession of Turkish and (subsequently) Persian territory would have allowed the later invasion of the Soviet Union to occur along a broader front.

The three things that kind of invasion would have gained for Germany would have been oil, a larger border with the Soviet Union, and more time during which to prepare for the invasion. However, that last factor would have been a mixed blessing, as the Soviets would also have had more time to prepare for the coming war. One or two additional years to prepare would have given the Soviets the chance to more fully recover from the officer purges, to fully implement their new army doctrine, to begin producing large numbers of their new, modern aircraft designs, and to make further progress down Stalin’s road of industrialization. A delay of a year or two would also have given the U.S. more time to expand its aircraft production. Germany’s military production would have expanded as well during this delay. But the lack of conquests from the Soviet Union would have meant that the production increase would have been smaller than the one historically observed. (Unless, of course, Germany had sent large numbers of Middle Easterners to German factories to do the work Soviet POWs would otherwise have done.)

Imperious Leader is absolutely correct to state that Germany’s military production was far stronger in relation to the Soviet Union’s in '43 and '44 than it had been in '41 and '42. But it needs to be pointed out that the Red Army would have experienced significant qualitative improvements between '41 and '43 even if Hitler had not invaded. That latter factor largely offsets the former. Delaying the invasion by a few years might not have helped Germany nearly as much as an analysis of industrial production figures alone might seem to suggest.

What if Germany hadn’t launched the invasion at all? In the long run, Britain and the U.S. would have simply outproduced Germany, and would have reduced its cities and its people to ash. Germany’s jets would have created a respite from the bombing, but sooner or later the Allies would have developed jets of their own. Once Stalin judged Germany’s strength had been sufficiently smashed by the Western democracies, the Red Army would have invaded.

Looking at the options Hitler had, I don’t see anything which would have prevented, with 100% certainty, a Soviet invasion and postwar Soviet occupation of Germany. Some of the options Hitler had were better than others, and he clearly made mistakes along the way. But even if he’d been mistake-free, there’s still a very solid chance Germany would have fallen to its far larger, stronger enemies.

Part 1 of 2

Thanks to everyone for their compliments! The things people wrote have inspired me to write another post along similar lines.

For hundreds of years, French foreign policy had been based on the idea of keeping Germany weak and divided. The Treaty of Versailles was consistent with that age-old policy. Large chunks of German territory were given to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and (in the case of the Rhineland) were put under French military occupation. Those territorial gifts also weakened Germany diplomatically, because Germany would naturally be at odds with some foreign nation that occupied German territory.

Poland and the Soviet Union went to war in 1919. No major Western democracy sent troops to help. By 1920 the Soviets were on the verge of achieving an outright victory, which would have allowed them to make Poland into the newest Soviet Socialist Republic. The Western democracies advised Poland to make the best peace treaty it could. Instead, Poland won a major victory outside Warsaw–a victory which allowed it to keep its freedom and independence.

The Western democracies were no more interested in stopping Soviet expansionism in the '30s or early '40s than they had been in the '20s. The treaty Britain and France signed with Poland in 1939 protected it against a German invasion but not a Soviet invasion. Moreover, that treaty misled the Poles into thinking France would launch a general offensive against Germany if Germany attacked. France was responsible for the fact that Poland occupied some of Germany’s territory in the first place. Its false promises to Poland’s leaders made them overconfident about their military options if Germany attacked. That overconfidence led Poland to reject the idea of pursuing a diplomatic option.

Allied diplomatic policy in 1939–and specifically that of France–was war-seeking. Had its goal been to prevent war and contain German expansionism, it would not have misled Polish leaders about its military intentions. Daladier, however, was firmly of the opinion that Hitler had to be stopped. France in general was distrustful of a strong Germany. Daladier firmly opposed the course of action Chamberlain had decided upon in 1938 at Munich. But the Soviet Union was not willing to go to war for Czechoslovakia, even though the two nations had signed a defensive alliance in 1935. Stalin regarded both Germany and the Western democracies as enemies, and hoped the two sides would bleed each other dry in a long war. With neither British nor Soviet support for the idea of Czechoslovakia holding onto its German territory, Daladier decided to unhappily go along with Chamberlain’s policy. But the mood was very different in 1939, and Poland became the opportunity to be the flashpoint for the war between France and Germany Daladier thought was necessary. Poland had to be misled and sacrificed for that war to occur, but that was evidently a price Daladier evidently was willing to pay.

It’s also worth paying attention to the actions of the communist parties in Western Europe. Prior to Hitler’s ascension to power, the leadership of the international communist party had believed that fascism was the penultimate step on the road that would ultimately lead a nation to communism. In the early '30s, German communists did not cooperate with other leftist groups in an anti-Hitler coalition government, but rather went their own way. After Hitler came to power, he placed the leadership of Germany’s communist party in concentration camps, improved the economy, improved wages and working conditions, strongly reduced the crime rate, and generally created a nation that was strongly unified, politically stable, and highly anti-communist. That result had to be very disappointing for a communist movement that had been hoping for instability, weakness, and subsequent communist revolution.

Communist leaders learned from that mistake and began formulating new policies instead. In 1936, the Popular Front government took power in France. Nearly 20% of that government’s seats came from the French Communist Party, with another 40% from the French Section of the Workers’ International. (The remaining 40% came from the Radical and Socialist Party–Daladier’s party.) (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Front_(France) .) Daladier had been Minister of War under the Popular Front, and became the prime minister of France in the post-Popular Front France of 1938. In terms of foreign policy, Dalaider picked up right where the Popular Front had left off. (Which is one of the reasons the Popular Front government made him Minister of War in the first place.) During the mid- and late '30s, the far left was promoting “anti-fascism.” If the far left had its way, the Western democracies would fight Germany while the Soviet Union stayed neutral. This foreign policy was intended to give Stalin the conflict between his two sets of enemies that he wanted. If that kind of foreign policy seemed to do a much better job of advancing Soviet interests and Soviet expansionism than of promoting France’s interests, it was because that policy had been formulated in Moscow. In this case, the goals of the French communist and other radical leftist movements dovetailed almost perfectly with France’s centuries-old strongly anti-German foreign policy–the kind of foreign policy favored by Daladier.

France was not the only nation in which political leaders regarded communism with fondness, and Nazism with fear and hate. In the U.S., FDR’s vice president, Henry Wallace, believed that "both the American and the Russian revolution were part of ‘the march to freedom of the past 150 years.’ " See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace#Vice_President . Wallace ran for President in 1948, and advocated friendly relations with the Soviet Union and an end to the Cold War. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace#The_1948_Presidential_election ). Also from that section,

Wallace was endorsed by the Communist Party (USA), and his subsequent refusal to publicly disavow any Communist support cost him the backing of many anti-Communist liberals and socialists, such as Norman Thomas. Christopher Andrew, a University of Cambridge historian working with evidence in the famed Mitrokhin Archive, has stated publicly[8][9] that he believed Wallace was a confirmed KGB agent, though evidence for this was never produced.[citation needed]

FDR’s views about the Soviet Union and communism seem to have been very similar to those of his vice president. The main difference was that FDR was more politically astute about avoiding potentially embarrassing public statements than Wallace had been. FDR did, however, gravitate to pro-Soviet propaganda whenever the opportunity arose to do so without paying a high political cost. The following propaganda poster is consistent with the pro-Soviet message his administration sent during WWII: http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc230/small/ More reading about FDR’s pro-communist leanings is available here: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol47no1/article02.html

One of the conditions FDR agreed to at Yalta was to hand over citizens of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia to their respective governments, regardless of their consent. He also agreed to hand over captured German military personnel to whichever nation against which they had done the most fighting, which in practice meant that most German servicemen would be turned over to the Soviets. The highest scoring fighter ace in human history, Erich Hartmann, was handed over to the Soviets as a result of this provision. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Hartmann#Prisoner_of_war . FDR’s willingness to hand over large numbers of refugees and captured German servicemen to the Soviet Union demonstrates that he was willing to cooperate with the Soviet Union in anything, up to and including Soviet mass murder.

The nightmare scenario for Germany’s military planners was that in which Germany was encircled with anti-German diplomatic alliances over the short-term, and invaded by the Soviet Union in the long run. Western democracies would have remained neutral in the Soviet Union’s favor. Some of them–particularly France and Czechoslovakia, had defensive alliances with the Soviet Union and at least in the case of France had leaders who would have loved nothing more than to come in on the Soviet side. FDR would also have supported the Soviet Union to the maximum extent political circumstances allowed. Germany lacked the manpower, natural resources, and industrial strength necessary to win such a war, especially if it had remained confined to the borders it had in January of 1938.

The other question we need ask is whether Germany could have avoided war with the Western democracies. Daladier and FDR both wanted their respective nations to go to war with Germany; as did Winston Churchill. Their short-term failure to achieve the desired war was because of political constraints on their available actions. Hitler was responsible for the circumstances which led those political constraints to disappear, as well as those which led Churchill to replace Chamberlain in power. But might the political climates in France and the U.S. have slowly changed in favor of interventionism anyway? I have heard that isolationist U.S. newspapers were being bought up by those who favored interventionism. This suggests that institutional pressures–not just among political leaders, but also among those who were gaining control of the media–were being brought to bear to cause Allied policy to become gradually more interventionist. (And it was understood that the interventionism would be directed against Germany, rather than against the Soviet Union.)

The above is not to suggest that the Nazis’ military/foreign policy of the late '30s and early '40s was mistake-free. It was not. But the diplomatic options available to them were far narrower than many people realize.

The U.S. produced 2,000 military aircraft in 1939, and 19,000 in 1941. According to Adam Tooze, that dramatic increase in aircraft production was the result of decisions that had been made several years prior to 1941. The production increase may itself seem innocent enough, except that the other part of FDR’s foreign policy involved sending as much Lend Lease Aid as possible. American isolationists might stop FDR from getting a declaration of war unless the U.S. was attacked first. They would not stop him from turning American industrial strength against Germany, whether Germany attacked first or not.

@Battling:

Reliability issues aside, the Panther was the best designed medium tank of WW2.  Defensively ,tank design ie. armor thickness, slope reached a dead end with the Panther. Subsequent tanks, even in the Korea era, were only superior in their firepower.

You are right. And that’s why Germany’s E-Series tanks had the chance to make such a significant difference in the war. (If it had not been for the fact that Germany had run out of time.)

The E-50 and the E-75 would have been a lot like the Panther and the Tiger II, respectively. Except that the E-Series tanks would have had simplified designs to eliminate the reliability problems you mentioned, and to make them much easier to build and to maintain. In addition, the E-Series tanks would have had improvements to their armor in comparison with their Panther and Tiger II predecessors. It’s highly likely the E-Series tanks would also have been much more difficult to destroy from the air.

I voted for the Panther. They weren’t all that much more expensive to produce than Mark IVs (Germany’s main battle tank of the era), yet had combat power nearly comparable to that of Tiger Is. Panthers actually had better front armor than Tiger Is; though their side and rear armor was not as good. The planned Panther Aust F version would (among other improvements) have dramatically increased the Panther’s armor against air attacks.

Germany’s long-term plan was to replace all its old tank designs with its new, easily-produced, more powerful E-Series tanks. Panthers and Tiger Is would have been replaced by the E-50 tank; while the Tiger 2 would have been replaced by the E-75. Interestingly, the Germans were working on infrared lighting and sights for their tanks toward the end of the war.

@poloplayer15:

I’m new but have been reading the threads for a while and i choose “another Luftwaffe Fliegerkorps added to the theater” because it would have permitted the German air power to kill the UK convoys and take out Malta. It might of even taken out the USS Wasp or HMS Ark Royal on their missions to bring fighters to Malta which would have altered the course of the war.

After giving this some thought I chose the Luftwaffe option for similar reasons. As has been pointed out, the biggest problem the Axis had in North Africa in 1940 was supply. German planes could help solve that problem; both by sinking Allied ships bound for Malta (as you suggest), and by destroying Allied aircraft on Malta’s airfields. The more planes Germany was able to throw at Malta, the less of a thorn in the Axis’s side it would have become. As some pointed out earlier in this thread, those planes could also have been used to support German operations against the British in Egypt.

I ruled out the Italy-related options because of the overall ineffectiveness of Italy’s military and war effort. Giving Italy radar-equipped, modern ships or an aircraft carrier would have been useless except to the extent that Italy had the will, military preparedness, training, and military awareness necessary to use those weapons to dominate the Central Mediterranean. Given that Italy achieved so little in relation to the military resources it did have; giving it still more military resources seems rather pointless.

Before deciding which battle best represents the turning point, it’s important to look at the strategic situation faced by the Axis (and in particular by Germany), starting in early 1939.

It has been argued that Germany lost the war when it attacked Poland. However, various plans had been made or discussed in the mid-‘30s to get the Western democracies to join the Soviet Union in ganging up on Germany. Those plans fell through not because of any hesitation on the Western democracies’ part, but because Stalin regarded both Germany and the Western democracies as enemies. He wanted a long war between those two sides–a war that would bleed both sides dry. Then the Red Army would move in to pick up the pieces.

In 1939, the combined British/French military production exceeded Germany’s; with plans underway to further expand the former source of military production. Moreover, Britain and France could draw upon the extensive resources of their colonies, and could import weapons from the United States; while Germany could do neither. Even before German tanks crossed the Polish border, Germany was in a position of strategic weakness, and had been largely isolated diplomatically by Western leaders who (in most cases) strongly preferred Soviet communism to Nazism. The French prime minister of the time–Daladier–had participated in a coalition government with the French communist party. FDR liked, looked up to, and wanted to form a long-term alliance with Joseph Stalin. Had Germany not invaded Poland, various Western politicians would have sought other pretexts for war with it. Had they failed, it’s very possible the Soviet Union would have invaded once Stalin had become convinced that his invasion would succeed, and that the hoped-for war between the Western democracies and Germany would not occur. Everything that happened from August of 1939 onward represented an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by Germany to escape that position of strategic weakness, and to secure itself against the dual threat of the Western democracies and the Red Army.

In 1940, Germany produced 11,000 military aircraft, compared to 15,000 for Britain. The U.S. shipped large numbers of aircraft and aircraft engines to Britain. It had been agreed that, over the course of the next few years, the U.S. would expand its military aircraft production to a staggering 72,000 planes per year; with half being sent to Britain for use against Germany. Even though the U.S. was still technically at peace in 1940, its industrial strength was increasingly being brought to bear against Germany.

In 1940, Hitler did not have the industrial capacity or access to raw materials or labor he required to match the Anglo-American war effort being waged against Germany. One of the reasons for his invasion of the Soviet Union was to acquire these things; thereby allowing him to match the Western democracies’ aircraft production over the long haul. Victory over the Soviet Union would also secure Germany’s eastern front before any serious invasion of its western front could be launched.

However, Germany’s population in 1939 was 69 million; as compared to 169 million for the Soviets. That gave the Red Army a staggering advantage in manpower. Moreover, the Soviets’ military production exceeded that of Germany’s by a factor of between three and four for most major land categories in 1942. The Soviets also produced nearly twice as many military aircraft as Germany did that year. The overwhelming advantage the Soviets had in manpower, together with their equally overwhelming edge in military production, were why Germany could not hope to win a long war against the Soviets.

It is also worth noting that Britain had imposed a food blockade on Germany, which created a severe food shortage. German occupation policy in the Soviet Union was harsh because its lack of available food meant it had no choice but to starve many millions of people. There just wasn’t food to feed everyone. People in conquered Soviet territories were among the millions starved. That meant that the Germans could not be seen as liberators, but were rather cast in the role of hostile invaders who must be resisted at all costs.

In 1941, Japanese industrial capacity was only a tenth that of the U.S. The U.S. produced 48,000 military aircraft in 1942, compared to just 9,000 for Japan.

The phrase “turning point” implies that there was some time in the war before which the Axis had the advantage, and after which the Allies had the edge. At least from a strategic perspective, there was no turning point in WWII. Germany was at a significant disadvantage before the war began, and that disadvantage remained throughout the war’s duration. It experienced some remarkable tactical victories during that time; particularly its conquest of France and the western parts of the Soviet Union. But those tactical victories were never enough to create strategic parity with the Allies. Nor could Japan’s early victories in the Pacific offset the U.S.'s massive advantage in industrial capacity.

It could be pointed out that early in the war, the Axis had a brief window of tactical opportunity: a time for it to win victories before the overwhelming Allied strategic advantages could be fully brought to bear. On Germany’s western front, its string of such victories ended with the Battle of Britain. On its eastern front, they (mostly) ended with the battle of Moscow. And in the Pacific, Japan’s string of early victories ended at Midway.

It would have been very difficult or impossible for Germany to have launched a serious invasion of Britain. It lacked the transport capacity and surface fleet to do so. Moreover, with Britain producing more and better aircraft than Germany in 1940, Germany’s window of opportunity to invade was clearly very brief. While a successful invasion of Britain would have been extremely beneficial to the Axis war effort, British victory in that battle was never in much doubt.

The Battle of Moscow was similar. Germany lacked access to much oil. Therefore, its supply lines could not primarily rely on trucks. Instead, it would use coal-powered locomotives to carry supplies most of the way to where they were needed, and horses to transport them the rest of the way. The need for rail significantly slowed the German advance, so that Soviet rail lines could be converted to the German gauge, and so that the rails could be repaired or replaced. Germany had enough oil and military trucks to provide some motorized supply for its troops; and that helped speed the invasion of the Soviet Union. But by the Battle of Moscow, its fragile supply lines had been stretched to the limit. Its soldiers lacked the food, medical supplies, ammunition, and winter uniforms they required. Germany’s failure at the Battle of Moscow was a function of the strategic weakness it had experienced even before the war began. That battle also reflected the Soviets’ enormous manpower reserves and overall military strength.

One of my favorites is the E-75 Standardpanzer. Germany’s Entwicklung series was intended to have been a replacement for its existing tank designs. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entwicklung_series . The Entwicklung series tanks were intended to be simpler, easier-to-produce, more mechanically reliable versions of the tanks they replaced. The series ranged from the E-5 (5 - 10 ton light tanks and armored reconnaissance vehicles) to the E-100 (a 100 ton successor to the Maus).

The E-75 was the intended successor to the Tiger 2 (a.k.a. the King Tiger). The E-75 was significantly better armed and better armored than the Soviets’ IS-2. However, the E-series tanks were still in the prototype phase when the war ended.

@Gargantua:

The question is then,  learning from WWII, is the science of Eugenics WRONG/BAD Science?  Or is the science legitimate, but leads to VERY slippery slopes…  What are your thoughts and experiences?  And lessons learned from your WWII readings…

You’ve raised an interesting topic for discussion. Prior to WWII, the promotion of eugenic programs was considered legitimate and relatively mainstream. Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University, was a proponent of eugenics, as were a number of other leading Americans. Before I go any further, I should clarify that by “eugenics” I am not referring to comparisons between different races; but rather to the desire to see the best people within each given race have the most kids. Exactly which traits are most important is, of course, subjective and open to debate.

The arguments made in favor of eugenics were simple and straightforward: we owed it to future generations to give them the best possible inherited traits we reasonably could. As you hinted at in your post, inherited differences are roughly as important for humans as they are for dogs. If we care about dogs’ inherited traits (as shown through dog breeding) it was felt that we should care about the inherited traits of humans even more.

However, viewpoints changed during and after WWII. This was not because of any new scientific evidence that had been brought to light. On the contrary, the subsequent discovery of genes, and studies which show their importance, have made the scientific underpinnings of eugenics stronger than ever. Science has conclusively shown that differences between people are strongly driven by genetic differences, and are not (as is sometimes falsely claimed) merely the result of differences in environment.

Viewpoints about eugenics changed not because of new scientific evidence, but rather because of the wartime and postwar anti-Nazi propaganda effort. The Nazis believed in many things: hard work, a strong military, self-sacrifice for one’s nation, the preservation of their own race, eugenics, anti-Semitism, etc. After the war, some of those beliefs became socially unacceptable, while others remained mainstream. Eugenics happened to fall into the former category.

Possibly that’s because of opposition to the concept from the Nazis’ enemies. Karl Marx believed that differences between people were due wholly to the environment; and that belief found its way into the communist movement. Under Stalin, Soviet scientists who believed in Mendelian inheritance (the mainstream scientific view) were persecuted, and were either shot or sent to gulags. At least to a certain extent, the communist “environment-only” belief has permeated into Western cultures, especially when the subject of discussion is humans. However, there is no scientific support for that communist belief.

As for the large numbers of people who died under Nazi occupation: most of those deaths were the result of the Anglo-American food blockade of Germany, and of the resulting starvation. Occupied Poland is a good case in point. Like most places within 2000 km of Berlin, Poland was a food deficit nation. Early in the German occupation, food was sent from Germany to Poland to help avert outright starvation. However, Hitler’s attempt to get Britain to sign a peace treaty failed, and the war dragged on. Germany’s food reserves ran dangerously low; causing it to have to reevaluate its food policy. To avoid starvation in Germany itself, residents of German-occupied territories would receive less food in the future than they had in the past. Polish Jews were especially hard-hit by these changes: the plan had been to reduce their caloric consumption to zero; which would have meant three million fewer mouths to feed. The next-lowest priority was unskilled Polish workers not directly engaged in helping the war effort. It was expected that millions of people in this category would starve. They avoided starvation, at least for a time, only because the harvest was surprisingly good. Ukrainians received higher priority; and skilled Polish workers had higher priority still. At the top were the Germans occupying Poland: their food rations were almost normal.

If the U.S. was hit by similar famine conditions, I would expect that American citizens would receive a higher ration priority than would the residents of (for example) U.S.-occupied Iraq or Afghanistan. I would also expect those with large amounts of money or good political connections would receive far more food than those who lacked these things. American distribution of scare food resources would likely be about as unequal as the Germans’ had been; except that the inequalities would be based on citizenship and economic status; rather than on ethnicity and contribution to the war effort. More generally, it would be very rare for a nation experiencing famine conditions to distribute food equally to everyone. The fact that Germany used a different basis for that unequal distribution than the U.S. would have does not mean that eugenics is either an intrinsically evil perspective, or that it represents some sort of slippery slope.

@Funcioneta:

USA entered at war just because Japan attacked them, pure and simple. And Japan attacked USA because Japan needed the Dutch East Indies resources (for their war against China and because Japan only had oild reserves to some months), and they couldn’t take that for safe with yankees in the rear (Philippines). Then, Hitler was enough stupid to DOW USA, but he didn’t need do so (the treaty with Tokyo was if any Axis power was attacked, but this time the attacker was in fact an Axis power)

I always wondered what if Philippines and the former Spanish colonies in the Pacific were independent or Spanish by that time (Cuban war 1898 not happened or Spain won it - probably due alien tech support or something  :mrgreen: ). Probably USA would not enter to WWII, because Japan would ignore any Spanish / independent Philippines fleet or simply stomp them without much effort and USA would not care a bit about Franco’s Pacific holdings … Japan could even try Spain join the Axis and use Philippines as allied base to attack India, DEI and Australia

Any case, USA not entering in the war would probably mean or Axis victory or soviet armies in Paris, Madrid and Beijing … a more difficult Cold War

You seem knowledgeable about WWII; and I’d like to add to your post.

In 1940, Germany produced 10,000 military aircraft, and Britain produced 15,000. The U.S. sent large numbers of aircraft and aircraft engines to Britain. Together, British and American military planners had agreed that in several years’ time, the U.S. would produce over 70,000 military aircraft per year; with half that production being sent to Britain for use against Germany. In addition to all those U.S.-produced military aircraft, Germany also had to worry about the large quantities of other Lend-Lease aid the U.S. provided Britain and, later, the Soviet Union.

As you correctly pointed out, Germany was under no treaty obligation to declare war on the United States. But Hitler reasoned that the most threatening aspect of the U.S.–its industrial might–was being turned against Germany anyway. A declaration of war would allow him to wage a full-scale submarine war against American shipping at a time when the U.S. Navy was occupied in the Pacific. Germany would sink the ships carrying tanks and artillery before they reached the Soviet Union.

Hitler’s long-range plan for the war was to achieve a large-scale victory over the Soviet Union in 1942. Access to Soviet manpower, industrial capacity, and raw materials would allow Germany to keep pace with Britain and the U.S. in the air war. Victory over the Soviet Union would also go a long way towards securing Germany from land invasion, by eliminating its eastern front. While the German Army won a number of victories in the summer of 1942, and gained access to important food supplies and raw materials, the full-scale victory for which Hitler had hoped did not occur. The problem was the sheer size of the Red Army (which outnumbered its German counterpart nearly 4:1 in the fall of '41), and the fact that the Soviets outproduced Germany by 3:1 or more in most major land categories during 1942. Germany had largely solved the latter problem by 1944, but by then it was too late.

Shortly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the U.S. imposed an oil embargo on Japan. Allegedly this was in response to Japan’s aggression in China. However, that latest round of aggression had begun in 1937; so the American response seemed a bit slow in the coming. That oil embargo, in combination with the U.S.'s plans to double the strength of its Pacific fleet and move that fleet’s center of operations from California to Hawaii, served to turn Japan’s focus away from potential conflicts with the Soviet Union. While Japan lacked the logistical capacity to be an immediate threat to conquer a large percentage of the Soviet Union’s population or industrial capacity; it could have taken Vladivostock; and generally denied the Soviets access to the Pacific. The desire to take pressure off the Soviets was one of several factors which led FDR to seek a war with Japan.

Prior to the war, the U.S. had cracked the code Japanese diplomatic code. As such, the U.S. government knew more about the goings-on in Tokyo than did the Japanese ambassador to the U.S.! Specifically, FDR’s administration knew, in November of 1941, that if the U.S. asked for moderate concessions to have the oil embargo lifted, Japan would accept them. But if the U.S. asked for something far-reaching, Japan would go to war within a matter of weeks. Knowing this, FDR’s administration asked for very, very significant concessions from Japan indeed.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Stalin shipped 100 divisions west–away from his eastern front and toward the German front. He knew that Japan would be too occupied with its war against the U.S. to launch a very powerful attack from Manchuria; so those 100 divisions were no longer needed in the east. Those 100 divisions arrived in the dead of winter, and had a devastating effect on Germany’s war effort. Germany had initially used only 100 divisions to invade the Soviet Union; so for the Soviets to have 100 extra divisions at such a key time proved critical.