Hitler's Biggest Mistake

On June 22, seventy-five years ago, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his ill-fated attempt to conquer the Soviet Union and dominate Europe.

The invasion was doomed to failure from the start. The principal German error was one of intelligence. The Wehrmacht underestimated the potential size of the Soviet Army and its capacity to regenerate itself after countless bloodlettings. 

There was just no way that an initial invasion force of some 3 to 4 million Germans, buttressed by a paltry reserve of about 300,000, could make headway against a Soviet army of 5 to 6 million already in the field and, even more importantly, behind that army an easily mobilizable trained reserve of between 14 and 15 million.

To be sure, Hitler expected that, after the first shock of meeting the better trained, and initially better armed, German troops, the Russians would simply quit.

Although hundreds of thousands surrendered at the outset, the mass of the Russian army did not quit.

Perhaps if Hitler had muted his racist, anti-Slavic policies, certainly the Ukrainians (perhaps the worst victims of Stalin's repressions), if not also many Great Russians, would have rallied to the German side. 

But Hitler's war was always a racist one, and he was not about to abjure his sacrosanct ideological beliefs.

In the aftermath of the war, many German generals advanced the argument that they might have won, were if not for Hitler's unfortunate tactical interventions.

In particular, it is argued that if Hitler had not diverted some tank forces from Army Group Center, aimed at Moscow, to the south in August, 1941, they would have been able to capture the Soviet capital before the rigors of the Russian winter set in.

This is a curious argument on a number of grounds. It of course assumes that the Russian state would have collapsed if the capital had been taken.

That didn't happen when Napoleon took Moscow in the 19th century. There is no reason to think it would have happened in the 20th century.

To be sure, Moscow was, and is, a vital administrative and industrial center and the hub of the network of Soviet railways and roads. Its loss would have been quite serious.

But Stalin had already made plans to move the government to the east, and the Soviets had demonstrated in the summer and fall of 1941 an uncanny ability to dis-assemble factories in the path of the German invader and re-assemble them in geographically remote areas without sacrificing nearly as much production as most expected.

The contention of the German generals posits a tactical solution to a strategic dilemma. If the Germans had managed to take Moscow, would that have enabled them to neutralize the immense Soviet manpower edge? Would it have offset the Soviet superiority in weapons production, which was already becoming obvious in the statistics on 1941 tank output, as pointed out in an earlier blog?

I doubt that the answer to either of these questions is yes. 

Once having made the commitment to attacking Russia on a broad front, Hitler ensured his defeat. 

But what if he had attacked on a narrow, more circumscribed front?

Suppose that, in 1940, he had sent Rommel with a force large enough to wrest the Middle East from Britain.

At that stage of the war, Rommel easily could have taken Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Persia, thus depriving Britain of its oil.

Then, he could have invaded the Soviet Caucasus from the south. On a considerably narrower front, the Russian advantage in numbers might not have counted for much.

Once ensconced in the Caucasus, Rommel might have been able to dig in and wait for the Soviet military machine to grind to a halt. Germany would be oil rich, the Soviets and Britain oil poor. 

Frederick Barbarossa, the twelfth century German ruler after whom Hitler's invasion was named, was one the organizers of the Third Crusade to free the Holy Land. Perhaps Hitler would have been more successful if he had started his modern-day "crusade against communism" in the same geographic area.