At what exact moment did Germany lose the opportunity to win the war with the Soviet Union?

Dorknought

The Ranger said:
When they treated those who could have and most likely would have joined them against Stalin like crap.
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Thats probably demeaning to the word 'crap'. They tried to articulate it at the Nuremberg Military Tribunal for the mobile death squads and in their judgement stated the following:
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[The facts] are so beyond the experience of normal man and the range of man-made phenomena that only the most complete judicial inquiry, and the most exhaustive trial, could verify and confirm them. Although the principal accusation is murder, [...] the charge of purposeful homicide in this case reaches such fantastic proportions and surpasses such credible limits that believability must be bolstered with assurance a hundred times repeated.

...a crime of such unprecedented brutality and of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray.
The number of deaths resulting from the activities with which these defendants have been connected and which the prosecution has set at one million is but an abstract number. One cannot grasp the full cumulative terror of murder one million times repeated.

It is only when this grotesque total is broken down into units capable of mental assimilation that one can understand the monstrousness of the things we are in this trial contemplating. One must visualize not one million people but only ten persons — men, women, and children, perhaps all of one family — falling before the executioner's guns. If one million is divided by ten, this scene must happen one hundred thousand times, and as one visualizes the repetitious horror, one begins to understand the meaning of the prosecution's words, 'It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children.'​
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Garrison

Donor
The Ranger said:
When they treated those who could have and most likely would have joined them against Stalin like crap.
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Problem is Germany needed all the food to feed the Wehrmacht, which in turn allowed the Nazis to reverse ration cuts in Germany and Western Europe, which was vital to maintaining war production, as was the slave labour rounded up in the east. It was horrifying and insane but it was motivated by what might generously described as pragmatic reasons alongside the insanity of Nazi ideology.
 

eltf177

Post said:
This doesn't take switches into account. Those complicate the issue.
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It's a lot more complicated than this. Soviet engines were bigger so the stations were farther apart. You don't just dump a load of coal and build a water tower, you need switches and side rails to allow trains to move past one another.

The switching of the rails was being done by the Reich's Railway Workers, civilians who went home at Christmas.

And it is frighteningly easy to derail trains, which given the number of Soviet Partisans and units trapped behind the lines guaranteed the system was going to be under constant attack...
 

naraic

The Ranger said:
When they treated those who could have and most likely would have joined them against Stalin like crap.
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Unfortunately the Germans didn't have an option to be anything other than a horrible occupier here.

There wasn't enough food to go around.

So I suppose Germany lost when they went to war without the agricultural production to sustain their population sufficiently.

They were worse than they had to be mind you but they couldn't have been nice if they wanted to.
 

kham_coc

Banned
naraic said:
They were worse than they had to be mind you but they couldn't have been nice if they wanted to.
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That's not entirely true - They diverted logistical assets from for example, France, to do Barbarossa, which reduced output.
Now, if the German industrial machine been tasked with fixing these problems all of this is solvable, they just couldn't solve it and do barbarossa. (altough maybe you could construct some sort of pod where they recognise logistical limitations, and think the war will take several years, but then they probably wouldn't do the war).
Post said:
Not if they're still Nazi's.
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Yeah this is/was the by far biggest impediment to changing the strategy, in any meaningful way - You could trivially make them nice(r) to the baltic people example, it wouldn't help you, you have to make them by nice to Ukrainians, and logistics and food aside, that was where the Germans were supposed to colonise. (For example a lot of occupations in russia proper was not that bad, entirely due to neglect, not policy).

ED, i think i confused this thread with another thread, so ignore this bit.
But i have been thinking about this - How to get a limited nazi victory:
First, we have to scrap barbarossa - So hitler dies in late 1940, internal convections preclude the war in 1941, instead the nazis try to fix their logistical and production issues.
Pearl Harbour happens, I would say that there is no Declaration of war, not because of any love and affection, just because absent the eastern front Dday is a fantasy - Uk is getting plenty of lend lease though so Germany is still 'losing' the Airwar. Consequently, no war with the USSR in 1942, in fact the German leadership is pretty desirous of peace, but aren't willing to agree the terms the UK want and frankly see no compelling reason to rush things along.
But now in 1943 Stalin has some aggressive ideas (mildly implausible imho, as he would fear a UK/German peace and then an imperialist intervention) - And war breaks out, but Crucially, the USSR is the aggressor, so no lend lease.
Still the Red army is mildly reformed and greatly strengthened - The Germans are a bit desperate, and consequently when their counteroffensives do reach into Ukraine, they aren't hungry and overextended thinking the just won, but rather, desperate, afraid they are losing, and crucially neither overextended nor hungry so they are nice(r) - If you are Jewish, or communists, you die, but if you are a Ukrainian (Most getting that's the right answer to the question) you are a recently liberated slavic brother, here is an STG.
At this point things are going mildly well for the Germans, and things are going badly for the Russians and Very badly for Stalin - This time they do kill him when he hides in the Dacha in 1944 or 45 and they make peace, the baltics and western ukraine is lost, Germany is a bombed husk as OTL, but an invasion remains a fantasy, and the UK is forced to make peace. If the US is in and wants to do something with Nukes, that ultimately only changes the equation, not the final result - some form of german victory.
 
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Myth

I've often seen the "But they're Nazis!" point made, and it certainly has merit, but I wonder how far it can be taken.

This is the same group of people that tricked and lied to their opponents and allies as a normal modus operandi. They were pragmatic enough, for example, to recruit units of Indian deserters despite admiring the British domination of India, and wanting to emulate it (albeit with vastly cranked up brutality) in the East. They got along well with Arab and Persian leaders despite -- again -- probably deeming these people to be eventual targets for oppression or domination. There are plenty of other examples of temporary accommodation. They also didn't absorb Czechoslovakia in one go. And they cranked up the horror gradually in some occupied countries. Part of the reason that "First they came for the -----, and I did nothing, because I wasn't a -------." became a warning is because the Nazis didn't immediately start attacking all of their numerous enemies in one go.

True, I can see the argument being put forward on pragmatic grounds that Nazi military needs during the invasion of the Soviet Union made their brutality logistically "reasonable" (for some sick versions of reasonable). Or that they would only lose time for the Soviets to rearm by stopping at Brest-Litovsk II lines. But these are military considerations, which would presumably be options open to a brutal non-Nazi regime as well. I am not sure that a climactic single battle where they immediately start slaughtering everybody in the East is an inevitable, purely ideologically-driven feature of the way the Nazis would fight World War 2 in the East.
 
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Carl Schwamberger

Broek said:
As i mentioned, there is always a question if an agreement can be reached but it may not be unattainable.

Following Dunkirk Britain was in a bad place.
In addition in France it is not implausible that the Socialist government in France is blamed for the poor performance of the funds deprived army.
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Fairly implausible. The Popular Front had lost the government several years earlier & not held power long enough to do much damage. Conservatives & centrists held power in the critical prewar years. The Decadence & Communism line traces back to the leaders who actually made the bade decisions 1937-1940 & earlier.
 

Carl Schwamberger

varyar said:
Has anybody ever done a TL where the Soviets were about to attack the Reich and Germany launched a successful preemptive strike before they could? Even that seems unlikely to end in a German victory, but it's less unlikely than most alternatives, perhaps?
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In a fashion that is what happened, or close. Soviet strategic planning placed priority on a first strike into Poland & Prussia. The general deployment of the frontier forces and reserves only make sense in that context. The difference is there was no intent to attack that month or that summer. That & the decision not to alert the frontier armies & get them out of their barracks & training camps & into battle positions screwed the Red Army in June-July & quite a while after with its knock on effects. So, its not a large step to have the Red Army at its battle positions, armed and ready to jump off in attack. All that must occur is Stalin give the necessary orders earlier in June.
 

Jellico

kham_coc said:
That's not entirely true - They diverted logistical assets from for example, France, to do Barbarossa, which reduced output.
Now, if the German industrial machine been tasked with fixing these problems all of this is solvable, they just couldn't solve it and do barbarossa. (altough maybe you could construct some sort of pod where they recognise logistical limitations, and think the war will take several years, but then they probably wouldn't do the war).
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The problem is you need to do Barbarossa. Not for ideology. But because the Russians have the Germans over a barrel and the windfall of the fall of France is fast running out. A point will be reached where Germany is out of trinkets to sell the Russians with the English still growing stronger. The Germans were pawning chunks of the navy to the Russians at this point.

The Nazis are often referred to as a house of cards. That suggests some kind of foundation. I prefer leaping from log to log in a raging river. Whish is great until you run out of logs, or someone too big to force off theirs. The Germans had nothing but bad choices after starting the war. They rode their luck and it got them a long way. But there were physical limits to what they could do, and when they bit, they bit hard.
 

Sam R.

To my mind the inevitability of NSDAP German defeat becomes inevitable with the Ural Siberian method’s resolution over class conflict and development in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s: Stalin’s dilemma is a political economic video game on this topic. The depths of state capacity achieved by soviet enclosure and thus primary industrialisation is sufficient to (horrifically) survive a fascist German attack on the state.
 

thaddeus

Donor
Finbarr the Fair said:
Though a wider point is that gifting designs and technical assistance in production to Italy and its minor allies would have been helpful to the German war effort. It's just wasn't something that Nazi Germany thought of or was capable of doing efficiently.
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my view is they could have developed a fair sized Hungarian air force and aircraft production, they tried to balance between (or play them off against one another) Hungary and Romania?

they could have just sided with Hungary to begin with? again, just IMO, they needed the totality of Romanian oil production, not to barter for half of it? they "puffed up" the Romanian army beyond all reason, and with predictable results that when things turned against the Axis, Romanian turned against them.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
When the delegation that went to Stalin's dacha begged his to come back and lead rather than putting a couple 7.63mm holes behind his right ear.

A lot of potential Soviet leaders would have failed to hold things together that first 4-5 months and cracked. Stalin lived up to his name and simply refused to acknowledge "reality" as the Germans (and pretty much every outside observer) saw it.

As long as Stalin* is alive and in charge, the Reich is Blued, Scewed, and Tattoo'd.

*Stalin was, unquestionably a right bastard, murderous sociopath who deserves a permanent delegation of demons in Hell. That said, he was the one man in the USSR who could both inspire immense fear AND be surprisingly politically adroit, at the moment when exactly that sort of right bastard was the only one who could get the USSR out of the disaster he had helped to create.
 

mial42

Gone Fishin'
Probably Stalingrad. The Eastern Front was a close-run thing through Kursk OTL; even in 1944, when the Germans had well and truly lost, the Soviets still came disturbingly close to running out of men and material. If the Germans had managed to win at Stalingrad*, they might've been able to win their battle of attrition with the USSR.

*Granted, fighting a numerically superior enemy in an urban environment at the end of thousand-mile supply lines was never likely to end well for the Germans, but I don't think a German victory at Stalingrad was impossible, just unlikely.
 
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