I have to point out the problems here of substantial disruptions to production while factories retool to produce a different model of aircraft, not to mention lowered productivity as factories have to learn how to efficiently build a new design.
And surrender access to food and vital raw materials from the Ukraine et al. This would be a crippling blow for Germany.
Whatever the Germans do after Stalingrad is just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Better choices (from their POV) may prolong the war a few months, worse choices may shorten it a few months. They're just too heavily outnumbered in men and material.
agree with you, not sure how clear my post was IF Leningrad had already been captured prior to this, since that is not the OP, I see little they can do other than, Houdini-like, avoid the worst debacles?
And the Germans were sending 70 year old men and 12 year old boys out to hunt tanks with panzerfausts that they could barely manage lift in 1945. The Soviets, on the other hand, despite taking utterly insane losses for the "honor" of taking Berlin (best estimates are 75,000 KIA, 300,000 WIA) managed to throw better than 1.5 MILLION troops at the Japanese in Manchuria while keeping heavy divisions in Germany and Eastern Europe on occupation duty.
The thing about 'running out of manpower' for USSR is that generation of people that were born in 1924-1927 was coming of age in 1943-45 respectively and it was larger than generations that were born in 1921-1923 (Civil war and famine generations) that become available to draft in 1940-1942. So Soviets were gaining basically several million new draftees every year.
Germans never managed to extract any significant amount of raw resources (be it foodstuff or minerals) out of their Soviet conquests. The whole affair with 'securing the living space and materials for war effort' was huge debacle from the very beginning. They achieved basically nothing at that front and spent much much more on the war than they gained from it.
I suggest you look up the 'Hunger Plan' if you really think they didn't extract significant amounts of food from the Ukraine.
I take some issues here, mainly because you're taking the POD as being after Operation Uranus starts, rather than in September like the OP states. Taking the oil was absolutely needed to continue the war, even if Germany decided to adopt a defensive posture, so just leaving the Caucuses without a major military defeat is strategically out of the question. The POD is Hitler deciding to take a defensive posture in September 1942, well over a month before Operation Uranus. If the Germans give up on taking Stalingrad and content themselves with bombarding it, redeploying their troops in a defensive layout across the front and placing their focus on eliminating the Soviet bridgeheads over the Don, they might conceivably stand a chance of repelling the Soviet attack, or at least buy enough time for a withdrawal to be conducted. The non-German Axis troops IOTL managed to initially repel the Soviet attacks, until their dismal lack of proper anti-tank guns caused them to be overrun.
Ah, I wondered when some-one would point out the elephant in the room.
I think I can see the disconnect here, the German armed forces certainly seized food (and clothes, blankets, firewood, horses, livestock, hand carts, anything with an engine etc). Basically because they ended up having to live off the land because their logistics had issues.
That was part of the mechanics of the Hunger Plan, feed the Ostheer by stripping food from the Ukraine while at the same time stopping shipments of food from the Reich to the Ostheer. So yes little of that food reached the Reich, but it achieved its intended effect of increasing the food supply in Germany and Western Europe allowing the Reich to reverse ration cuts and to feed their 'guest workers' enough to get useful work out of them. Fall back to the pre-war border and mass starvation is inevitable.
With regard to this - I really wonder about the use of nuclear weapons in EuIrope.
They didn't. Germans managed to extract about 18 million tons of various foodstuff from USSR during the entire war. Ukraine alone produced about ~20 million tons of grain in 1940. It was determined post-war that German invasion reduced production in the occupied areas by the factor of ten or so.
Except as TDM pointed out most of the food they stole never left the East, it was used to feed the Ostheer instead of supplying them from Germany. Yes productivity collapsed, which didn't stop the Germans from executing the Hunger Plan to ensure adequate food supplies for Germany. The Central Government in Poland which had been a net importer of grain was ordered to export large quantities to the Reich. Again this isn't a matter of opinion, you can find details of the Hunger Plan online or its discussed at length in 'Wages of Destruction'.
It depends. If the Germans still had an air defense worth the name, they wouldn't have risked it.
My point is that conquest of the USSR was a net drain on the economy of Nazi Germany. Withdrawal from the Soviet Union (or even cancelling the invasion altogether) would not cause economic collapse or anything like that. Germans were spending on the conquest vastly more than they were gaining out of it.
