I was thinking about almost the exact same thing the other day, only not with Hitler. Rather, what if a conservative Weimar Republic or a constitutional, at the very least not-very-authoritarian monarchy established in the interwar years (Kapp succeeding in his putsch?) attacked the USSR instead. Preferably without occupying Western Europe and all that, so you'd have to hand-wave the actual invasion too. Let's just call it a paranoid pre-emptive strike and say Britain and France looks the other way.
You'd have to hand-wave things like rearmament and such, but I arrived at a somewhat similar conclusion, that if this ATL Germany was humane and non-psychotic in its conduct of the war they could have done pretty well, playing the liberator card in the Ukraine and all that. I mean, Ukrainians greeted the goddamn Nazis before they started murdering everyone. If the Germans had allowed a conservative/democratic Russian to head a provisional Russian government in the liberated zones that would help as well, after all, in this scenario they would not be after Lebensraum or wiping Russia off the map, just the collapse of Communism in Russia.
If they had the same early success eastwards as the Nazis did I think a lot of people would desert the Communists, because it would actually be a valid option without the imminent genocide and slavery thing.
That's not to say the war would have been easy or "over by Christmas", but I think they'd actually stand a fair chance. I hope this doesn't come off as overly pro-German or anything, some people seem to dismiss anyone as a closet-Nazi racist who claims Germany could have won the war against Soviet Russia, whether or not Germany is either of those in the TL.
No they didnt, I'll post what I have elsewhere when that comes up.
If you count
Hiwis, the total numbers who supported the German war effort was probably in excess of 200k. But this only tells one side of the story. The other side is the number of partisans who formed resistance movements within the occupied zones long before the central government thought to harness such efforts. Just in the Ukraine, where the population had PLENTY of reason to hate the Soviets and Stalin (somewhere around 2,000,000 to 6,000,000 had died during a famine) partisan numbers exceeded 100,000. More than one hundred thousand volunteer fighters supporting the government in a region where Stalin
et al STARVED up to six million people to death. That is not the profile of a populous waiting to revolt or turncoat.
Across the USSR the total number of partisans dwarf the 200k who decided to support the Reich. For every volunteer to support the Germans (and BTW, get far more, and better, food for themselves and their families, and avoided getting killed by the Nazis) there were at
least two who volunteered to live in the forests and eat pine needles so they could oppose the invader.
The fable is that the vast majority of Soviet peoples hated the government enough to betray the
Rodina. They didn't, as the almost unbelievable sacrifices of the Soviet people demonstrated. Had the various subject peoples been as disaffected as some, including, it would seem, you imagine, the Germans would have been able to
walk into Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, Sevastopol, Kiev, and every other city without firing a shot. There were not enough NKVD, NKGB, and GRU troops to prevent a mass uprising if the desire was there in ANY of the cities across the war zone. It simply wasn't.
Even in Leningrad (a city where the loyalty of the population was deeply questioned by the Communist Party), where the suffering was beyond description, the civilian population was supportive of the war effort even as some segments of the populous began to eat the dead (several hundred cases of cannibalism were documented in NKVD records). If you are in a circumstance where you are eating wallpaper (or worse) and the populous still supports the war effort in overwhelming numbers, the desire to revolt simply
isn't there.