A limited Barbarossa 1941

Will the government of the USSR accept this German peace treaty?

  • Yes before October 1941

    Votes: 5 8.2%
  • Yes after the the Ukraine falls

    Votes: 11 18.0%
  • Yes once the attack on Moscow begins

    Votes: 4 6.6%
  • No

    Votes: 38 62.3%
  • Other

    Votes: 3 4.9%

  • Total voters
    61
Hitler wanted Lebensraum ('living space') but to do that he does not need Moscow. The area on the Western Russia and Ukraine would do it.

So let us say that everything happens the same as the OTL except that when Hitler here launches Barbarossa he claims it is to enforce the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Hitler repeatably offers a peace treaty that offers in exchange for much of Western Russia, the communist and Stalin regime survive, they can keep the Eastern area. As time gets on particularly once the Ukraine falls, too many in Russia and Germany, Stalin would appear to be offering nothing more then he has already lost to make peace and save his regime.

Will the government of the USSR accept this German peace treaty?
 
Stalin wouldn't surrender if the Germans took Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. He planned to fight until the Soviets won or until he died.
 

Anchises

Banned
If the Germans stop at the line Odessa-Kiev-Minsk-Riga a peace might be possible.

Even if the Soviets don't accept the peace right away, the next few counteroffensives will be a disaster.

I don't know if the Germans have the ressources to pull this off but I think it is not ASB that Stalin agrees to let the Germans keep their gains and to continue with the ressource delieveries.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
Might work to take a few big chunks at a time, offer peace, and then keep taking away bites of Stalin's country. Assuming butterflies don't somehow result in a more competent red army, they have until mid-late 1943 to convince Stalin he's not going to get his way.

Wouldn't stick more than about 10 years or so, but it would possibly wo
 
Stalin wouldn't surrender if the Germans took Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. He planned to fight until the Soviets won or until he died.

But there were times when he seemed to lose his nerve and not just in the first few days of barbarossa. I think peace might've been possible at least as late as July 1942, when nazi advances deep into the USSR worried him greatly.
 
So is it true or not that Stalin retreated to his dacha and nobody was allowed to speak to him for quite some time, while the Wehrmacht was advancing? I can positively imagine him whining "How could Adolf do this to me?!" - He shouldn't have made a treaty with someone who already broke several ones. He was a sucker, to say the least.
 
So is it true or not that Stalin retreated to his dacha and nobody was allowed to speak to him for quite some time, while the Wehrmacht was advancing? I can positively imagine him whining "How could Adolf do this to me?!" - He shouldn't have made a treaty with someone who already broke several ones. He was a sucker, to say the least.

Well, how was he supposed to know the French and British would collapse so quickly and easily in 1940? It seemed reasonable to suppose there would be a long war in the west enabling Stalin to take advantage of German preoccupation there. Or at least avoid the fate of others on the continent.
 
Stalin wouldn't surrender if the Germans took Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. He planned to fight until the Soviets won or until he died.

Now that we've had some access to the archives held in East Germany and the Former Soviet Union, it appears that Stalin was desperately seeking peace in 1941.

Now maybe Stalin was thinking "I'll do what Lenin did, cut my losses, then come back stronger to take back what the Germans have torn from us". But if Hitler wanted B-L v2, he could have gotten it (and Stalin would have counted himself lucky).

Now maybe there's round 2 in a few years as the Western Allies bribe Stalin into coming back into the war. Maybe there's round 2 in a decade or two. Or maybe the Soviet Union just loses Belarus and Ukraine permanently.

So is it true or not that Stalin retreated to his dacha and nobody was allowed to speak to him for quite some time, while the Wehrmacht was advancing?

This is a myth. Stalin was working feverishly with his team to try to stop the Germans by hook or by crook. We know this because we have the paperwork and multiple witnesses.

(Question, where does the myth of Stalin's breakdown come from? Was it Khrushchev?)

He shouldn't have made a treaty with someone who already broke several ones.

The Soviet Union was in a really bad diplomatic position when the British started appeasing Germany. The initiative after the Anglo-German naval agreement was firmly in the hands of Britain and Germany - anyone else in Europe had to tiptoe carefully, knowing that Hitler was a ticking time bomb, but unable to act in a way that would upset Britain. The real fear for the German targets is that if they placed a foot wrong Britain would either not intervene while Germany dismembered them or would be a participant with Germany in stamping them down. (For countries that got on with Britain like France, the former was the dominant fear and the latter fear was almost zero, for the distrusted Soviets, there was a very strong fear that Britain and Germany would gang up on them even while the Battle of Britain was raging.)

And keep in mind that Stalin made repeated attempts to seek an anti-German alliance with Britain and France - for understandable reasons, these were all rebuffed. But always in a way that seemed to hint that maaaaybe cooperation was possible. After years of this, it appears that Stalin decided that the Brits especially were playing rope-a-dope with him. Which considering that at the time Britain was helping Germany expand its fleet, selling Germany arms and helping Germany dismember Czechoslovakia, it was not unreasonable to conclude that the British were trying to keep the Soviets diplomatically isolated until they were ready to jump on the Soviets with their German allies.

(And it's worth noting that while Hitler broke a bunch of treaties in the run up to WW2, the British were also breaking treaties. Hitler would never have gotten to the point that he did if the British hadn't treated the Versailles treaty as toilet paper.)

So when an opportunity presented itself to split Germany from friendship with Britain, Stalin jumped on it and did his very best to out-bid the British in seducing Hitler, even as he was frantically preparing from the almost-certain-but-hopefully-avoidable Soviet-German clash.

Now, with hindsight we can say that Britain didn't have an actual anti-Soviet masterplan in the 1930s. Rather Britain was busy throwing people under the bus to buy time for her own re-armament because they thought Nazi Germany in the late 30s was stronger than she really was. On the other hand, the British would also have been very happy to see the Nazis wipe out the Soviet Union if they crippled themselves doing so. Stalin was being paranoid, but no more paranoid than the British were being about him and there was some element of real danger there.

In other words, Stalin seems to have taken a calculated risk and lost badly... But he did manage to avoid the worst-case scenario. In the end Britain would be his ally, not his enemy and it was the Nazis, not himself, that ended up diplomatically isolated and ganged up on.

EDIT: And while I am speaking about the Soviet perspective here, don't think that I'm saying that the British were being irrational or evil - the British, just like Stalin, were trying to make the best moves with the limited and often contradictory information they had at the time. They had good reasons to distrust the Soviet Union, just as the Soviet Union had good reasons to distrust them. And in 1938, if you had to choose between Hitler, a man who might be a mass-murdering tyrant, and Stalin, a man who definitely was a mass-murdering tyrant. Well, I can find some measure of forgiveness for the British people of the times who thought that being friends with Hitler was a good idea. And before that, in 1935, who could argue with making reasonable accommodations to Germany when the alternative was thousands of innocent young men dying for a treaty that would be a dead letter in 20 years anyway?

fasquardon
 
Last edited:
If Hitler gets Brest-Litovsk or some variant, Stalin has a real problem. Some of the most valuable real estate for food, coal, hydroelectric etc has slipped away. Sure he gets to rebuild his military without interference, but there will be no LL/supplies from the UK or USA. Everything from machine tools to trucks won't be arriving, so now he has to spread out his diminished industrial capacity even thinner. OTL, even forgetting items the USSR could not produce in adequate quantity or quality, LL allowed factories to produce tanks instead of trucks/jeeps/locomotives/RR rolling stock. Choices will have to be made to produce this or that, not produce this and get that from LL.

While I expect there would still be partisans operating in the Nazi territory, absent significant support from the USSR they will gradually wind down. Absent active fighting the Germans will be able to rebuild and regauge the Soviet rail system in their territory, and provide better roads in places as well as better airfields, maintenance and supply depots etc. Fortifications will be built along the new border. There will be plenty of slave labor for much of the grunt work. Every day of "pece" in the new territories means that if/when there is round two in the east the Germans are going to be much better off.

As an aside,I expect the Finns to get back much if not all of what they lost as part of this deal.

None of this means Stalin won't cut this sort of deal, if he sees this as the only way to buy time until the USSR recharges and takes it back, that's the same calculus that allowed the original Brest-Litovsk.
 

Anchises

Banned
Now that we've had some access to the archives held in East Germany and the Former Soviet Union, it appears that Stalin was desperately seeking peace in 1941.

Now maybe Stalin was thinking "I'll do what Lenin did, cut my losses, then come back stronger to take back what the Germans have torn from us". But if Hitler wanted B-L v2, he could have gotten it (and Stalin would have counted himself lucky).

Now maybe there's round 2 in a few years as the Western Allies bribe Stalin into coming back into the war. Maybe there's round 2 in a decade or two. Or maybe the Soviet Union just loses Belarus and Ukraine permanently.

This is what I personally find so scary about slightly "smarter" Nazi scenarios. I think the deterministic look of: "yeah no with that economy they were doomed to fail" misses some important truths.

The Nazis of 1940 were awfully close to reaching their goals. If someone smarter (but just as evil obviously) takes the lead after the Fall of France, we might see a hellish world.

No Battle of Britain, no Afrikakorps and a "Barbarossa raid" could easily create a scenario where the Nazis win a temporary peace for a few years. If they manage to get enough time to digest their Blitzkrieg victories, neither the Soviets nor GB will be able to beat them in a military confrontation.

If Hitler gets Brest-Litovsk or some variant, Stalin has a real problem. Some of the most valuable real estate for food, coal, hydroelectric etc has slipped away. Sure he gets to rebuild his military without interference, but there will be no LL/supplies from the UK or USA. Everything from machine tools to trucks won't be arriving, so now he has to spread out his diminished industrial capacity even thinner. OTL, even forgetting items the USSR could not produce in adequate quantity or quality, LL allowed factories to produce tanks instead of trucks/jeeps/locomotives/RR rolling stock. Choices will have to be made to produce this or that, not produce this and get that from LL.

While I expect there would still be partisans operating in the Nazi territory, absent significant support from the USSR they will gradually wind down. Absent active fighting the Germans will be able to rebuild and regauge the Soviet rail system in their territory, and provide better roads in places as well as better airfields, maintenance and supply depots etc. Fortifications will be built along the new border. There will be plenty of slave labor for much of the grunt work. Every day of "pece" in the new territories means that if/when there is round two in the east the Germans are going to be much better off.

As an aside,I expect the Finns to get back much if not all of what they lost as part of this deal.

None of this means Stalin won't cut this sort of deal, if he sees this as the only way to buy time until the USSR recharges and takes it back, that's the same calculus that allowed the original Brest-Litovsk.

This is pretty much my view. Chances are that if a military confrontation happens in the next 5-10 years, that the Nazis would reach Moscow.

I think the Nazis were not as "economically inept" as this forum often supposes. With world market access, new real estate and no Battle of the Atlantic, the Wehrmacht (+auxiliary forces) is going to be fearsome. While the Red Army would be much weaker than OTL.
 
Last edited:
Do you have a source for that?

I am going off of Chris Bellamy's "Absolute War", which I've just finished reading. He references his primary sources in the back of the book and I could check them for you.

I do recommend reading it yourself though. The author really likes comparisons with the Iraq wars, but besides that it is a very solid and up to date overview of the Eastern Front with what we now know from the Soviet and East German archives.

If Hitler gets Brest-Litovsk or some variant, Stalin has a real problem. Some of the most valuable real estate for food, coal, hydroelectric etc has slipped away. Sure he gets to rebuild his military without interference, but there will be no LL/supplies from the UK or USA. Everything from machine tools to trucks won't be arriving, so now he has to spread out his diminished industrial capacity even thinner. OTL, even forgetting items the USSR could not produce in adequate quantity or quality, LL allowed factories to produce tanks instead of trucks/jeeps/locomotives/RR rolling stock. Choices will have to be made to produce this or that, not produce this and get that from LL.

Yeah, there's a real risk for Britain and America that if Hitler stages a smash-and-grab on Stalin, Stalin will then be too weak to escape being a client ally of Hitler.

However, Stalin still has a good chance in a re-match. Much of Barbarossa's success was that the Wehrmacht caught the Red Army at the absolute worst point as they were both expanding and reforming after the experiences of the Winter War. The Red Army was due to finish its reforms in 1942 (which is about the point that they started fighting on the same level as the Wehrmacht in OTL).

After the Nazis win in Russia, what will they do with their army? Do they stay mobilized, hurting their economy and planning for a near-term round 2? Do they demobilize to improve their economy in the hopes that round 2 is far enough off that they will benefit more from the additional civilian and war material produced? When do they upgrade their equipment?

If Stalin can find the right moment for his revenge, things could go very bad for the Germans, just as they would go bad for him if the again pick the perfect moment to attack towards Moscow.

This is what I personally find so scary about slightly "smarter" Nazi scenarios. I think the deterministic look of: "yeah no with that economy they were doomed to fail" misses some important truths.

The Nazis of 1940 were awfully close to reaching their goals. If someone smarter (but just as evil obviously) takes the lead after the Fall of France, we might see a hellish world.

No Battle of Britain, no Afrikakorps and a "Barbarossa raid" could easily create a scenario where the Nazis win a temporary peace for a few years. If they manage to get enough time to digest their Blitzkrieg victories, neither the Soviets nor GB will be able to beat them in a military confrontation.

Before I'd read Absolute War I would have been the first to disagree with you here.

But ya. The truth is Germany did have a path to winning WW2.

fasquardon
 
Last edited:
I am going of Chris Bellamy's "Absolute War", which I've just finished reading. He references his primary sources in the back of the book and I could check them for you.

I do recommend reading it yourself though. The author really likes comparisons with the Iraq wars, but besides that it is a very solid and up to date overview of the Eastern Front with what we now know from the Soviet and East German archives.

That would be a great help, thanks, I tried to have a look through it there but it's restricted. I can see the references but I can't see what they, well, refer to. Its not just the Pavel Sudoplatov account again is it?
 
Yeah, there's a real risk for Britain and America that if Hitler stages a smash-and-grab on Stalin, Stalin will then be too weak to escape being a client ally of Hitler.

Under these circumstances, do you think Hitler could have pressured Stalin into supplying Japan with oil, and possibly heading off the Pearl Harbor attacks? Assuming peace is achieved before December, and there is some way to transport oil from the Caucus out to wherever the Japanese would pick it up (I don't know if that capability existed at the time).

A limited peace from the smash and grab as you call it may allow Nazi Germany to hang on until 1946, when the Schoonebeck (sp?) field was discovered too, changing their energy situation pretty dramatically without having to go down into Iran or anywhere else.
 
If Hitler gets Brest-Litovsk or some variant, Stalin has a real problem. Some of the most valuable real estate for food, coal, hydroelectric etc has slipped away. Sure he gets to rebuild his military without interference, but there will be no LL/supplies from the UK or USA. Everything from machine tools to trucks won't be arriving, so now he has to spread out his diminished industrial capacity even thinner. OTL, even forgetting items the USSR could not produce in adequate quantity or quality, LL allowed factories to produce tanks instead of trucks/jeeps/locomotives/RR rolling stock. Choices will have to be made to produce this or that, not produce this and get that from LL.

While I expect there would still be partisans operating in the Nazi territory, absent significant support from the USSR they will gradually wind down. Absent active fighting the Germans will be able to rebuild and regauge the Soviet rail system in their territory, and provide better roads in places as well as better airfields, maintenance and supply depots etc. Fortifications will be built along the new border. There will be plenty of slave labor for much of the grunt work. Every day of "pece" in the new territories means that if/when there is round two in the east the Germans are going to be much better off.

As an aside,I expect the Finns to get back much if not all of what they lost as part of this deal.

None of this means Stalin won't cut this sort of deal, if he sees this as the only way to buy time until the USSR recharges and takes it back, that's the same calculus that allowed the original Brest-Litovsk.

maybe they are inspired with Vichy France arrangement and invade to impose the same terms on USSR? so they could occupy the Baltics, Belarus, and perhaps only as far as Odessa in the south? holding territories further east until military equipment is turned over? (beyond what was captured and destroyed during initial stages)

clear the Baltic and Black Seas of any Soviet warships (sunk or ceded to KM)

not sure if the first 4 or 5 months of Barbarossa would force the Soviets to accept a deal like that? maybe they need to capture Leningrad too?
 
Under these circumstances, do you think Hitler could have pressured Stalin into supplying Japan with oil, and possibly heading off the Pearl Harbor attacks? Assuming peace is achieved before December, and there is some way to transport oil from the Caucus out to wherever the Japanese would pick it up (I don't know if that capability existed at the time).

I saw a talk, I believe it was by David Glantz, which spent some time sketching out just how much the Germans were pushing Japan to go to war with the US. According to the speaker (who may have been David Glantz) the Japanese were holding out since they were worried about starting a war with the US with the dangerous Soviet Union at their backs. The Germans were like "no, no, look, we've almost reached Moscow, you don't need to worry", so when the German army reached the Moscow suburbs, that was when the Japanese gave the OK to enact Pearl Harbour. Ironically bringing the US into the war the day after the Soviets began the offensive that would drive the Germans back from Moscow.

If this is correct, Hitler neutering Stalin like this would encourage Japan to attack. We may even see an earlier Japanese attack on the US, if the Soviet-German peace is signed earlier.

not sure if the first 4 or 5 months of Barbarossa would force the Soviets to accept a deal like that? maybe they need to capture Leningrad too?

According to Chris Bellamy, Stalin was willing to accept worse terms.

fasquardon
 

Md139115

Banned
The big thing we are all forgetting is that neither Hitler nor any other Nazi would ever offer this deal. It would weaken the USSR, but not kill it. There would still be a possibility that someone could use revanchism to rise to power and mobilize the population for the sole goal of trying for round two... sound familiar? To get this scenario, either the Nazis are not in charge, Hitler has totally taken leave of his senses, or the USSR is in such a total state of internal upheaval that this deal is the mortal blow that would make Russia stay down for decades to come.
 

Deleted member 1487

I saw a talk, I believe it was by David Glantz, which spent some time sketching out just how much the Germans were pushing Japan to go to war with the US. According to the speaker (who may have been David Glantz) the Japanese were holding out since they were worried about starting a war with the US with the dangerous Soviet Union at their backs. The Germans were like "no, no, look, we've almost reached Moscow, you don't need to worry", so when the German army reached the Moscow suburbs, that was when the Japanese gave the OK to enact Pearl Harbour. Ironically bringing the US into the war the day after the Soviets began the offensive that would drive the Germans back from Moscow.

If this is correct, Hitler neutering Stalin like this would encourage Japan to attack. We may even see an earlier Japanese attack on the US, if the Soviet-German peace is signed earlier.
It's not. Germany was trying to get the Japanese to attack the USSR and Britain, not the US. The Japanese asked the Germans what they would do if Japan attacked the US at one point (IIRC in April 1941 or so), but there wasn't pressure on Japan from Hitler to attack the US. Besides the Japanese never needed or wanted German permission for anything, they just asked if Hitler would support them if they fought the US, but were still planning on war even if he had said no.
 
Top