Could the Eastern Front become the Nazis' "Vietnam"?

How possible was it for the Eastern Front of WWII to become a Vietnam-style War for Nazi Germany? Where they make initial gains at first but then the Soviet Union goes full-on guerrilla warfare and the German forces are unable to really deliver a knockout blow so to speak? Would the vastness of the Russian steppes be an advantage for the Red Army or would the openness of the terrain also be a disadvantage (unlike where the NVA and Viet Cong could hide in the Southeast Asian jungles)?
 
Given the Nazi plan was to starve like 1/3 of the population within a year probably not very likely as there would be not enough healthy people to carry on the fight.
 
The Vietnam War (at least the 1963-1972 period when the US was involved) was a guerrilla war in which the base area of the "guerrillas" was off limits to US ground forces. This included North Vietnam, and also Laos and Cambodia.

This would not apply in the USSR. If the Soviet Army was completely defeated and the Axis occupied all of the European USSR, there would be no base area for post-conquest guerrillas.

Indigenous guerrillas would no doubt make trouble, but the Germans would crush them eventually, just as the Soviets eventually crushed anti-Communist guerrillas in Ukraine. They would have no compunctions about exterminating the entire population of an area if neceessary.
 
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Most scenario's I've seen depict "guerilla activity" as limited to the border regions in the Urals between the Reich and rump Soviet state. Whether or not that's really sustainable in such a way as to qualify as a "Vietnam," I don't know. Skirmishes would certainly take place for awhile assuming the Soviet state stays organized in some capacity, but even that is something of a big assumption.
 
There was no American Dirlewanger in Vietnam destroying village after village and exterminating villagers. Germans would eventually stop guerilla by killing civilians. Guerilla is not that effective against such barbarian opponent as nazi Germany.
 
The Vietcong and NVA was an irritant for the United States. Vietnam exhausted and demoralized society mainly because the media and the elite turned against the war and after they did focused the public attention on the costs (with graphic pictures and video) and hammered the public that it didn’t matter for their security and they were dying for someone else’s civil war.

It was the same media that pushed the country and political class to enter the war at the early to mid 60s. The U.S. at the same time was fighting the war with a fraction the force it would have a decade or two earlier due in large part to the new media environment. Just think about Ike’s plans for the Korean War in 1954 if it didn’t end in ‘53 and one would have an idea.

A Totalitarian state can’t have a ‘Vietnam’ the same way. They control the information and by in large can sway what the public thinks about several thousand losses a year and what their troops are doing to the civilian population as part of anti-partisan actions.

Dictatorships simply can absorb casualties far easier and tolerate long partisan wars much more then modern democracies. The key word here is ‘modern’ as the 19th and early 20th century democracies didn’t have the same media environment and had much better staying power in insurgent wars.

The IJA in China is a better analogy for a protracted war in the East where Germany can’t quite win, but the Soviet’s can’t quite get their act together for large scale offensive conventional operations to drive out Germany. A long war on that scale would tax German society over time.
 
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The IJA in China is a better analogy for a protracted war in the East where Germany can’t quite win, but the Soviet’s can’t quite get their act together for large scale offensive conventional operations to drive out Germany. A long war on that scale would tax German society over time.

Ok, maybe this is a more likely scenario. Basically, what would it take for Russia to essentially become a "sponge" for Germany? Where no matter how many troops, tanks, and airplanes they send, how much casualties they inflict, they can't land the knockout and force the Russians to surrender.

I remember reading in Bevin Alexander's "Sun Tzu at Gettysburg", he discusses in his chapters on the American Revolution where he says that the only ground that the British Army truly controlled was the ground under their feet. How realistic was that scenario?
 
The nazis were willing to commit genocide, what do you think they would do?

True, the partisans would still have Siberia as a "base" which the nazis can't occupy, but even IOTL Hitler once thought about using poison gas to create a dead zone in the east the Russians couldn't cross. If he dies ITTL and his successor who was no WW1 soldier has no qualms about using chemical weapons... horror.
 
IIRC, OTL MacArthur advocated spreading radioactive material south of the Yalu to keep the Chinese out of Korea. Could the Nazis do something similar, to create dead zones to protect "Aryan Europe" from the "Asiatic Hordes"? That would totally prevent support reaching any guerrillas.
 
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