Certainly I would agree on most points you make, @svetron . While I don’t subscribe to the certainty that Germany could never have won in the East (they could have, one just has to dig deep enough into the facts and rewind the clock far enough), I would agree that they threw any almost any real chance of said victory almost as soon as the shooting started. And, as I said in my first post, probably even BEFORE the shooting started (this is where I would agree with you, btw 🙂 ). Additionally, one must take a realistic assessment of what such a “victory” would have entailed. It’s not like the panzers would have rolled all the way to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. Operational planning for both Otto and Barbarossa entail a general holding line somewhere between Leningrad-Moscow-Stalingrad and the Urals further east. Given how the Soviets were able to relocate their manufacturing base east of the Urals, even the loss of key communication and transport centers like Moscow and Leningrad, and EVEN the loss of the Ukraine breadbasket, Caucasus oilfields, and manufacturing of the Donbas would not have held the Soviets down indefinitely.

So long story short (too late for that, perhaps), yes, I agree. Even if the Germans HAD won in 1941, that victory hardly seems sustainable or tenable. To my mind we’d be looking at a “ceasefire” with the remnants of the Soviet regime east of the Urals somewhere, building up for a massive push back into European Russiain 5-10 years at the latest. Given how the Germans had treated the Soviets vis-a-vis the German-Soviet nonaggression pact of August 1939, I can’t see the Soviets honoring any deal made with the Third Reich in 1941 or 42.

So in the end, the Germans have a slim chance of winning in Russia in 1941, but even if they win, they lose. 🙂

That said, we can’t subscribe to the idea that Communist Russia would never have given up. Former Soviet archives have clearly identified evidence of backdoor cease-fire overtures the Soviets were desperately making to the Germans as early as August 1941 (through Swiss, Rumanian, and Bulgarian embassies, I believe), promising to cede huge swaths of Belorussia, the Ukraine, the Baltic States, Bessarabia, and other territories just to be left alone. Stalin was absolutely ready to “give up,” at least for a brief window. Again, we have to assume the Soviets would have ripped up such agreements as soon as they were ready for payback.

We can also look at possibilities that might have opened up had the Germans pursued their invasion of the Soviet Union differently. It wasn’t 200 million Russians, it was 200 million Soviets, and the difference there is significant when one recalls that German forces were INITIALLY welcomed as liberators in many parts of the “Stalinist Empire.” The Baltic States and the Ukraine might well have been mobilized against Moscow (add 30-40 million people to the Axis side and take the same number away from Stalin) had the Germans not immediately adopted their horrific “lebensraum” policies in these territories. The fact that even with these policies in full effect, Ukrainian and Lithuanian partisans operated violently against the Soviet regime until about 1950 is telling.