Why the Nazis couldn't liberate the East

I've heard it said a few times, that if only the Nazis supported the national liberation struggles in the USSR, and anticommunist Russians, then the USSR would have fallen. I even heard this from the professor who taught my Soviet history course. But could the Nazis have realistically done this?

The first major issue is Nazi ideology. OTL the Nazis viewed the east as a colonial space, whose resources and peoples were to be viciously exploited for the benefit of the Volk, and which were eventually to be conquered and settled by Germans. Obviously this is incompatible with the ideals of anti-Soviet nationalists and anticommunist Russians. For example, the Ukraine was to become Germany's breadbasket, and the Ukrainians were to become as Helots, with all surplus food sent to the Reich. The Ukraine was to be deurbanized and deindustrialized, and many millions of Ukrainians were to be starved to death or forcibly deported to Siberia (see the Hunger Plan and the various drafts of Generalplan Ost.) Getting the Nazis to abandon these ideas seems extremely difficult. Ideas of expanding east had been spread by the far right since the late nineteenth century, and during the First World War, there was discussion among the leadership of annexing and ethnically cleansing a "Polish Border Strip". So changing the Nazi worldview doesn't seem likely.

But let's assume that Hitler has one of his moments of "genius" and decides to temporarily support nationalist and anticommunist forces in the USSR before betraying them after Stalin's defeat. Would this work? I still think there are potentially unsolvable issues, namely food and supplies for these Nazi auxiliaries, as well as their effectiveness.

OTL Hitler and other leaders were extremely concerned about the food situation in the Reich. Germany was heavily dependent on imports, and Hitler feared a repeat of the starvation that occurred in the First World War. There was also the need to supply German and other Axis forces in the east. Given that food was limited, the Nazis made the deliberate decision to feed the German people and the Axis armed forces, and starve millions of people in occupied Europe, especially in Poland the the USSR. So there will in all probability not be enough food to supply the Reich, the Axis soldiers and the peoples of the USSR. I am not even sure they would be able to supply much to any nationalist Ukrainian or Baltic military force. OTL's collaborationist groups, like the Estonian, Latvian and Galician SS divisions were small. Would there be enough food for armies? For their families? For their nations?

There is also the issue of equipping the army. OTL the Nazis operated a patchwork force, which used materiel looted from across occupied Europe. For example, IIRC, most trucks used in Barbarossa were stolen from France. While they could use looted Soviet equipment, would that be enough to supply the nationalist and anticommunist forces?

Lastly, how effective would these forces be? OTL collaborationist groups like Vlasov's army barely saw action, and others, such as the Georgian and Armenian forces, defected as soon as they could. How effective would anti-Soviet forces be if Hitler "liberated" the East?

There are various other factors outside of German control, such as the successful evacuation of industry beyond the Urals, and the USSR's growing armaments industry. The USSR would also still receive lend lease, and the Nazis still need to also fight the Americans and the British.

All this leads me to believe that, in the unlikely event that Hitler tries to liberate the east, German victory is still unlikely.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
Well manpower shortages were a crippling issue for the Germans. They could generally get enough small arms to their own units, even occupation forces.

I think the best way to use defecting nationalists is to use them to fill out the occupation forces in nearby areas, and send the Germans doing this job to the Eastern Front.

At least that way small arms calibers stay consistent on combat fronts.



Second, everyone unemployed gets sent to a farm. They're fed and housed so long as they produce. And they can go back to their homes once the crisis is over (this is a lie, obviously).


Any captured tank plants just keep making T-34's and stick a German 75mm on it. Good enough until the Panzer IV plants work up.

Third, Graf Zeppelin and assorted crap are scrapped for Panzers.

Everything in occupied Europe is retooled for German equipment. Once the lead up is done, the equipment is much more useful (and fits with long term occupation since measurements and tooling in the factories will be germanized already).

Get the Italians, Hungarians, and Romanians cranking out Pak 40's.

Get the Italians to triangularize their divisions. Tell them to flute the chambers on their machine guns and ditch the oiling mechanisms.

See if Spain can't provide Tungsten for machine tools.

Stop dicking around in Stalingrad, reorganize, and encircle the thing, even if you're literally just driving around the outskirts of town.


OTL the Russians were at the end of their manpower pool as well. Emphasis should be on destruction of Soviet formations through defense and focused counterattacks ala the backhand blow.



I think this is the best way to make use of occupied/allied nations, and beat the Soviets.
 
On Italian Division structure early war

They were in the face of increased mechanisation 'and lessons learned from the Blitzkrieg' actual moving to Binary from Triangle division structure in 1940 in an effort to make their Divisions more suitable for the modern way of making war.

This backfired for several reasons

A Binary Division needs about as many staff officers as a Triangular one and so suddenly the Italian Military already struggling under the burden of an unplanned war and the necessary expansion of its military had to create Staff officers from line officers which had the effect of turning the more experianced regimental officers into inexperianced staff officers - creating a poorer staff pool and a poor regimental pool of officers in the process

The Binary division proved to be neither better at the manouver warfare stuff while also being worse at absorbing losses and its loss of a 3rd of its manouvre combat elements in practice defeated the original objective of making them more suitable for 'modern warfare'. This might simply have been because the Italian army did not have time to 'grow into' these new formations and as mentioned they never had enough staff officers.

And to be fair to them everyone was struggling to create the ideal combat division in the face of this modern warfare type stuff, and in all of the armies we can see changes and experimentation some of it good, much of it bad.

So I think that the reasons for the Binary division approch was sound in theory and given time would probably have evolved with increased experiance in to something that worked or ultimately revert back to a triangular formation (which is what happened from what I undestand).
 
The fundamental stumbling block, leaving aside ideology, is the needs of Germany for food and labour. Experience in Western Europe made it crystal clear that the best way to use the manpower of the occupied territories was to ship it to Germany and put it to work there as the industrial productivity of the occupied territories crashed hard. The necessity of maintaining adequate rations for the German populace and the 'guest workers' meant that the they pretty much had to strip the east of food stuffs. In reality though ideology can't be ignored, there is no more chance of the Nazi's being 'nice' to the Slavs than there is of them deciding to tone down their anti-Semitism.
 
I see ideology as one of the biggest stumbling block. The Freikorp already espoused a lebenstrum ideology which they put in practical effect by trying to carve out German states in the Baltics culminating with the Rape of Riga. Of course Freikorp would go on to form an influential group within the Nazi party.
 
I've heard it said a few times, that if only the Nazis supported the national liberation struggles in the USSR, and anticommunist Russians, then the USSR would have fallen. I even heard this from the professor who taught my Soviet history course. But could the Nazis have realistically done this?
What's the timeline here? Is the idea that Barbarossa would have an addendum re: not killing the perceived subhumans &c? As others said, that wouldn't fly.

Now, if you posit an alternate universe where Hitler stops abides by the Munich agreement and the German economy doesn't collapse for a few years (both large asks), could Hitler get somewhere by shipping arms and encouraging volunteers to help out resistance movements? Maybe. I think it's at least less impossible than incorporating "ally with non-Russian slavs" into Barbarossa.

Who knows, maybe instead of WWII you get the Russo-German war kicking off when revolutionary Ukraine invites the Germans in to protect them from the USSR.
 
The nazi goal was never liberation but enslavement and extermination.

There is however a part of the Ukraine and Russia that do not know this and do not understand it, and they claim that the nazis just wanted to liberate.

Now to the question COULD THEY

The answer is yes. This is the same answer as I have given in another thread, "was barbarossa doomed from the start".



What the axis can do is that they do not initially begin exterminating and raping the population. Many of the people were initially happy to be free from the communist system and Stalin, especially the areas that had belonged to Poland, only began resisting when they saw with their own eyes what the axis were doing.

This link here can require a bit of time to load, and if it says pages not available just scroll up and down for 15 seconds and they become available.

This all shows that initially the nazis were greeted as liberators, before it became clear to the people that the nazis were there to enslave and exterminate.

https://books.google.se/books?id=e_...BAIHcabA2gQ6AEwA3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false


The last paragraph on page 69 : "In every village we are being showered with bouquets of flowers, even more beautiful ones than we got in Vienna"

"General Guderian (the commander of the 2nd Panzer Army) was virtually taken prisoner by the residents of one happy Ukrainian village, which refused to let him go until they felt he had been properly honored"

From page 69 to page 70

"The villagers and peasants greeted the German troops in their native costumes carrying bread and salt (the traditional Ukrainian welcome for honored guests), serenaded them with balalaika music, offered them food and drink, and erected arches bearing slogans as: "The Ukrainian peoples thank their liberators, the brave German Army." AND THEN THE LAST PART YOU HAVE TO READ YOURSELF TO BELIEVE.

So yes they nazis COULD have liberated the lands.

The nazis COULD also have won if they had as I wrote in my post

What the axis can do is that they do not initially begin exterminating and raping the population. Many of the people were initially happy to be free from the communist system and Stalin, especially the areas that had belonged to Poland, only began resisting when they saw with their own eyes what the axis were doing.

Then in October or even November the Nazis and Soviets sign a peace deal and the new borders are drawn where the front line is. Stalin would have accepted this

There is some type of assumption going around, history and the world for those interested in such matters, that if a peace deal is signed then the Soviets hunker down and develop new tactics and equipment and build up etc etc

But that does not factor in STALIN. I think he would have gone to his default position and started purging. The failures were not of the previous purges of course not they were because there were not enough purges. So Stalin would purge the military again replacing the talented people with political cronies. Stalin would purge the science and engineering teams AGAIN because obviously the weapons systems failed or did not preform good enough because not enough people were purged the previous time. Stalin would also purge to preserve his own power which he always did so you would have even greater purges, followed by more purges and then purges after that, the purges would continue indefinitely.

It was only during the war where Stalin could do as he wished and where what he did made things worse and after years of that he finally got the message and let off a little bit during Stalingrad until early 1945 and allowed the Generals a bit more freedom.

Take the winter war, during the winter war the political commissars were removed because it became obvious that they were in the way, but after the war they are back again, and they are only removed in late 1942, only to be reinstalled again after ww2.

Now after the peace has been settled THEN the axis can use the people for hard labor and or extermination, this can easily be achieved there were many who didnt like "the jews" so you have the local population hand them over, then everyone who is half jewish, then quarter Jewish then 1/8 Jewish then 1/16 Jewish and so on (the nazis counted anyone who was 1/4 jewish to be fully jewish and had to be exterminated, my examples here are just what they tell the local collaborators, the end goal is full extermination of everyone), and then it is off to the next "group" and same there, everyone who is polish then half etc everyone who is this or that, there are always some local collaborators who hate some other "group" and with no Red Army fighting the axis and no Soviet command equipping partisans the people can do nothing. The USSR will do nothing because Stalin will not launch an attack until he feels he is "safe" to do so, and his mentality is to allow the "capitalists" to kill each other off and in the meantime you have 50-80 million dead in the former USSR territory.

Then the Axis can launch an attack again in the Summer of 1942 and finish off Stalins again purged military.

Quite simple really.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
Any captured tank plants just keep making T-34's and stick a German 75mm on it. Good enough until the Panzer IV plants work up.
Can you name a single instance of a Soviet tank factory captured intact by the Germans and held for a significant amount of time? Because I can’t.
 
I've heard it said a few times, that if only the Nazis supported the national liberation struggles in the USSR, and anticommunist Russians, then the USSR would have fallen. I even heard this from the professor who taught my Soviet history course. But could the Nazis have realistically done this?

The first major issue is Nazi ideology. OTL the Nazis viewed the east as a colonial space, whose resources and peoples were to be viciously exploited for the benefit of the Volk, and which were eventually to be conquered and settled by Germans. Obviously this is incompatible with the ideals of anti-Soviet nationalists and anticommunist Russians. For example, the Ukraine was to become Germany's breadbasket, and the Ukrainians were to become as Helots, with all surplus food sent to the Reich. The Ukraine was to be deurbanized and deindustrialized, and many millions of Ukrainians were to be starved to death or forcibly deported to Siberia (see the Hunger Plan and the various drafts of Generalplan Ost.) Getting the Nazis to abandon these ideas seems extremely difficult. Ideas of expanding east had been spread by the far right since the late nineteenth century, and during the First World War, there was discussion among the leadership of annexing and ethnically cleansing a "Polish Border Strip". So changing the Nazi worldview doesn't seem likely.

But let's assume that Hitler has one of his moments of "genius" and decides to temporarily support nationalist and anticommunist forces in the USSR before betraying them after Stalin's defeat. Would this work? I still think there are potentially unsolvable issues, namely food and supplies for these Nazi auxiliaries, as well as their effectiveness.

OTL Hitler and other leaders were extremely concerned about the food situation in the Reich. Germany was heavily dependent on imports, and Hitler feared a repeat of the starvation that occurred in the First World War. There was also the need to supply German and other Axis forces in the east. Given that food was limited, the Nazis made the deliberate decision to feed the German people and the Axis armed forces, and starve millions of people in occupied Europe, especially in Poland the the USSR. So there will in all probability not be enough food to supply the Reich, the Axis soldiers and the peoples of the USSR. I am not even sure they would be able to supply much to any nationalist Ukrainian or Baltic military force. OTL's collaborationist groups, like the Estonian, Latvian and Galician SS divisions were small. Would there be enough food for armies? For their families? For their nations?

There is also the issue of equipping the army. OTL the Nazis operated a patchwork force, which used materiel looted from across occupied Europe. For example, IIRC, most trucks used in Barbarossa were stolen from France. While they could use looted Soviet equipment, would that be enough to supply the nationalist and anticommunist forces?

Lastly, how effective would these forces be? OTL collaborationist groups like Vlasov's army barely saw action, and others, such as the Georgian and Armenian forces, defected as soon as they could. How effective would anti-Soviet forces be if Hitler "liberated" the East?

There are various other factors outside of German control, such as the successful evacuation of industry beyond the Urals, and the USSR's growing armaments industry. The USSR would also still receive lend lease, and the Nazis still need to also fight the Americans and the British.

All this leads me to believe that, in the unlikely event that Hitler tries to liberate the east, German victory is still unlikely.
Nazis don't "liberate". They Conquer, and subjugate. At least they did in this timeline.
 
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