'Preparedness'
The one thing everyone purports to know about the Second Russo-German War is that it found Germany unprepared – 'unvorbereitet', like a schoolboy facing a pop quiz after a holiday weekend. The German army, as the popular narrative has it, was equipped with outdated gear, underfunded, understrength, and not trained for the rigours of fighting in an Eastern European winter. In a rare show of unanimity, conservative and left-wing history writers largely agree on this, diverging only in whether the blame must be laid on decade-long misallocation of funds under a conservative regime eager to militarise the home front at the expense of a modern military, or at the feet of a centre-left coalition government hesitant to commit to a confrontation they were too eager to avoid until it was forced on them. The facts, as ever, are different.
Any serious comparative study of military spending must conclude – as all so far have – that even at the worst of its economic crisis, German military spending never fell below adequate. In most years, it was comparatively lavish, though having to support a large force, the individual soldier was less generously fed and clothed than his British counterpart and less well equipped than the poilu he faced across the border. The charge of having starved the military was always levied against any Social Democratic or Zentrum government by the right, but it was never close to justified. In 1941, the last year on anything like a peacetime footing, Germany's military budget was on par with France's in nominal terms.
The idea that German soldiers went to war with substandard and outdated equipment is less easy to comprehensively refute, but also not borne out by the numbers. It is true that German military planners underinvested in innovative technology in the late 1930s. This was largely a product of the Goltzian mindset, the political plan to maintain a military force based on a broad pool of conscripts and reservists that brought to bear the strength of the entire nation in a conflict. The emphasis lay on strategic depth, and this programme required more investment in a large arsenal of conventional weaponry than in the tools of ultramodern warfare. However, the problem has been overstated in the past.
Part of the problem was that Germany's replacement cycles were out of alignment with the Russian one. Much of the army's equipment had been designed and built in the lean years of the late 20s and early 30s, replacing the generation of weaponry that had come out of the war in 1908. The Russians meanwhile had their largest military buildup in the mid to late 1930s, producing equipment that was often several years ahead of their German counterparts by default. In the face of this development, German manufacturers and the Wehrtechnisches Amt turned out their own weapons and rushed them into production in the frantic years before 1944. These white-hot innovations are often credited with winning a war almost lost by cheeseparing parsimony and hidebound conservatism. In fact, neither narrative stands up to scrutiny.
The most important point to remember is that while the Russian military were equipped with more modern weapons than the German in 1944, it did not have very many of them. While it is true that the TAR was unmatched in firepower by anything the Germans could produce until well after the war, it was only ever available to first line units, and rarely in the intended establishment strength of one per squad. That was roughly the rate at which the Prussian army issued light machine guns. German armoured units were often stopped dead in their tracks when they encountered Svyatogor chars, but with a mere six regiments of these fearsome beasts in service in 1944, this happened far more rarely than legend suggests. Most of the Russian army still fought largely with the tools it had had in 1908, and once the Germans had chewed their way through the elite forces, this disparity increasingly told in their favour.
By contrast, the impact of Germany's innovation is widely overestimated, not least for self-serving reasons. Under the impression of the Greco-Turkish war, the army began a crash rearming programme in 1942 that involved commissioning many of the weapon systems today considered wartime innovations. The GKW 'Nashorn', often seen as the German answer to the Svyatogor, went to prototype six months before its purported adversary, but did not see widespread service until mid-1945. The same is true for many of the wagons and chars, planes and guns the German army paraded after the war: They were used at the kill, but came too late, at least in large numbers, to have turned the tide of the battle. German soldiers beat Russia largely with the bolt-action K35 and almost the same 10cm howitzer that their fathers had taken all the way to Kiev and St Petersburg. By the time they had enough turbine-jet fighters, Puma chars and self-propelled Sturmgeschütze, the war was close to won.