How Hitler Could Have Won World War II

by Bevin Alexander

  Nevertheless Hitler could still have won if he had struck at the Soviet Union’s weakness, instead of its strength.

  His most disastrous error was to go into the Soviet Union as a conqueror instead of a liberator. The Soviet people had suffered enormously at the hands of the Communist autocracy for two decades. Millions died when the Reds forced people off their land to create collective farms. Millions more were obliged to move great distances and work long hours under terrible conditions in factories and construction projects. The secret police punished any resistance with death or transportation to horrible prison gulags in Siberia. In the gruesome purges of the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had systematically killed all leaders and all military officers who, in his paranoid mind, posed the slightest threat to his dictatorship. Life for the ordinary Russian was drab, full of exhausting work, and dangerous. At the same time, the Soviet Union was an empire ruling over a collection of subjugated peoples who were violently opposed to rule from the Kremlin.

  Vast numbers of these people would have risen in rebellion if Hitler’s legions had entered with the promise of freedom and elimination of Soviet oppression. Had Hitler done this, the Soviet Union would have collapsed.

  Such a policy would not have given Hitler his Lebensraum immediately. But once the Soviet Union had been shattered, he could have put into effect anything he wanted to with the pieces that remained.

  Hitler followed precisely the opposite course of action. His “commissar order” called for the instant shooting down of Communist party agents in the army. He sent Einsatzgruppen—or extermination detachments—to come behind the army and rout out and murder Jews. He resolved to deport or allow millions of Slavs to starve in order to empty the land for future German settlers.

  Two days before the Germans struck, Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s commissioner for the regions to be conquered, told his closest collaborators: “The job of feeding the German people stands at the top of the list of Germany’s claims in the east…. We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people.”

  The genuine welcome that German soldiers received as they entered Soviet towns and villages in the first days of the campaign was quickly replaced by fear, hatred, and a bitter guerrilla war behind the lines that slowed supplies to the front, killed thousands of Germans, and increasingly hobbled the German army.

  As wrong as this policy was, Hitler’s actual military plans were so false strategically that they could only succeed if the Red Army collapsed from internal stress. That, in fact, is what Hitler counted on. He did not expect to win by a superior method or concept, but by relying on the Russian army to disintegrate after a series of initial battles.

  Great generals don’t win wars in this fashion. They don’t depend upon their enemies to make mistakes or give up. A great general relies upon his own ideas, initiative, skill, and maneuvers to put the enemy in a position where he must do the general’s bidding. A great general wins his battles before he fights them. He obligates the enemy to take positions he cannot defend or from which he cannot extricate himself.

  Hitler’s greatest strategic mistake was his refusal to concentrate on a single, decisive goal. He sought to gain—all at the same time—three widely distant objectives: Leningrad, because it was the birthplace of Russian Communism; Ukraine and the Caucasus beyond, for its abundant foodstuffs, 60 percent of Soviet industry, and the bulk of the Soviet Union’s oil; and Moscow, because it was the capital of the Soviet Union and its nerve center.

  Hitler wanted all of them. Indeed, he expected to reach the line Archangel–Caspian Sea in 1941. That is 300 miles east of Moscow, and only about 450 miles from the Ural Mountains. But Germany did not have the strength to achieve all these goals in a single year’s campaign. At best, it had the strength to achieve one.

  Hitler scorned such a limitation, and ordered Army Group North to go for Leningrad, Army Group Center for Moscow, and Army Group South for Ukraine. These objectives, spread over the entire western face of the Soviet Union, could not possibly be coordinated. Leningrad is 940 airline miles from Odessa on the Black Sea. Each army group would be required to conduct a separate campaign. Because resources were to be divided in three directions, no single effort would have the strength to achieve a war-winning decision.

  The task Hitler set for Germany was almost inconceivable. He hoped to seize a million square miles of the Soviet Union in 1941, a region the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. The campaign in the west, on the other hand, had been fought out in an area of 50,000 square miles, roughly the size of North Carolina or New York State. Therefore, the ratio of space to men was twenty times greater in the east than in the west.

  Field Marshal Brauchitsch, commander of the army, and General Halder, chief of staff, wanted the primary objective to be Moscow, with forces concentrated in the center. They contended that conquest of Leningrad, Ukraine, and the Caucasus depended on defeating the Red Army. The main body of this army, or an essential part of it, would be met on the road to Moscow.

  Stalin would be compelled to fight for Moscow. It was the hub of railroads, mecca of world Communism, headquarters of the highly centralized government, and a great industrial center employing more than a million workers.

  Moreover, an attack into the center of the Soviet Union would turn the nation’s vastness—generally thought of as its greatest asset—into a liability. Once the Germans possessed Moscow’s communications node, Red Army forces on either side could not coordinate their efforts. One would be cut off from aid and succor to the other, and the Germans in the central position between the two could have defeated each separately.

  The German army and economy could support a drive on Moscow. Though 560 miles east of the frontier, it was connected by a paved highway and railroads.

  This would have still been a direct, frontal assault against the strength of the Red Army, but the ratio of force to space was so low in Russia that German mechanized forces could always find openings for indirect local advances into the Soviet rear. At the same time the widely spaced cities at which roads and railways converged offered the Germans alternative targets. While threatening one city north and another city south, they could actually strike at a third in between. But the Russians, not knowing which objective the Germans had chosen, would have to defend all three.

  Hitler understood that he could not defeat the entire Red Army all at once. But he hoped to solve the problem by committing two of his four panzer groups, under Heinz Guderian and Hermann Hoth, to Army Group Center, commanded by Fedor von Bock, with the aim of destroying Red Army forces in front of Moscow in a series of giant encirclements— Kesselschlachten, or caldron battles. The Russians, to his thinking, could be eliminated in place.

  Army Group Center was to attack just north of the Pripet Marshes, a huge swampy region 220 miles wide and 120 miles deep beginning some 170 miles east of Warsaw that effectively divided the front in half. Bock’s armies, led by the panzers, were to advance from East Prussia and the German-Russian frontier along the Bug River to Smolensk.

  Army Group North under Wilhelm von Leeb, with one panzer group under Erich Hoepner, was to drive from East Prussia through the Baltic states to Leningrad.

  Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South, with the last panzer group under Ewald von Kleist, was to thrust south of the Pripet Marshes toward the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 300 airline miles from the jump-off points along and below the Bug, then drive to the industrial Donetz river basin, 430 miles southeast of Kiev.

  The first great encirclement was to be in Army Group Center around Bialystok, fewer than sixty miles east of the German-Soviet boundary in Poland, the other around Minsk, 180 miles farther east. The two panzer groups were then to press on to Smolensk, 200 miles beyond Minsk, and bring about a third Kesselschlacht. After that, Hitler planned to shift the two panzer groups north to help capture Leningrad.

  Only after Leningrad was seized, according to his directive of December 18, 1940, ordering Barb
arossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, “are further offensive operations to be initiated with the objective of occupying the important center of communications and of armaments manufacture, Moscow.”

  Hitler, however, showed his intention of gaining all three objectives by directing that, when the caldron battles were completed (and Leningrad presumably taken), pursuit was to proceed not only toward Moscow but also into Ukraine to seize the Donetz basin.

  In summary, Hitler’s original directive required massive strikes deep into the Soviet Union in three directions by three army groups, followed by a shift of half the army’s armor 400 miles north to capture Leningrad, then a return of this armor to press on Moscow, while Army Group South continued to drive into Ukraine, over 700 miles from the German-Soviet frontier.

  This was impossible. In the event, Hitler made the task worse because he seized an opportunistic chance to destroy a number of armies in the Ukraine around Kiev and abandoned his original strategy. Once the caldron battles were completed in Army Group Center, he sent only one panzer group north toward Leningrad, and ordered the other south to help seal the enemy into a pocket east of Kiev.

  Army Group North did not have enough strength to seize Leningrad. By the time the diverted panzers got back on the road to Moscow, the rainy season had set in, then the Russian winter. As a consequence the strike for Moscow failed as well. With insufficient armor remaining in the south, the effort to seize all of Ukraine and open a path to the oil of the Caucasus also collapsed.

  Hitler, by trying for too much, and then altering his priorities by sending a panzer group from the center into the Ukraine, failed everywhere. These failures meant Germany had lost the war. By December 1941, there was no hope of anything better than a negotiated peace. This Hitler refused to consider.

  Hitler’s plan rested on two false assumptions. The first was that he would have time enough (even without the shift of panzers to the Ukraine) to switch armor to the north then back to the center in time to win a decisive victory before the rains and snows of autumn. Distances were simply too great, Russian roads and climate too poor, and Red Army resistance too intense for such a plan to have had any hope of success. As Guderian summarized the campaign to his wife on December 10, 1941, “The enemy, the size of the country, and the foulness of the weather were all grossly underestimated.”

  The second great mistaken assumption was that after destroying the Red Army in caldron battles, Stalin would be unable to create any more armies. That is, once the Kesselschlachten were over, the Soviet Union would collapse, and the Germans could occupy the rest of the country at their leisure and without resistance. But Hitler did not count on the resilience of Soviet leadership and the willingness of the Russian people to defend their homeland. Moreover, Hitler’s ally Japan refused to attack Siberia, allowing Stalin to release a quarter of a million soldiers to rush west to fight the Germans at a crucial moment.

  Although Moscow was the only target the Germans might have gained in 1941, neither Brauchitsch nor Halder was willing to confront Hitler on the point. They hoped, when the time came, they could convince him to keep the panzers in the middle, change his ideas about shifting them, and continue the drive on Moscow. They were wrong.

  The concept of caldron battles appears on the surface to be a highly dangerous strategy—to rely on the enemy conveniently allowing German forces to wrap themselves around great concentrations of his troops, and forcing them to surrender. However, Stalin made this a feasible strategy because he lined up the vast majority of his forces along the frontier. Consequently, German breakthroughs at a few points would permit German forces to sweep past and behind large segments of the Red Army, blocking their retreat and creating a caldron.

  Such encirclements were a part of German doctrine, advocated by German theorists as far back as Karl Clausewitz in the early nineteenth century. They modeled their ideas on Hannibal’s classic destruction of a Roman army at Cannae by encirclement in 216 B.C. The greatest German victory up to the 1940 campaign in the west had been another—the encirclement of a Russian army at Tannenburg in East Prussia in August 1914.

  The Russian campaign was not to be a repetition of the blitzkrieg of 1940 in the west. Rather it was to be a series of classic encirclements, accelerated only by using the panzers to swing around the enemy flanks to create caldrons.

  In most wars, the inherent strength of the belligerents becomes more and more important once past the initial or opening campaign or phase. If a power is unable to achieve a decision with its original force, then long-term factors generally decide the war. Superior power exerted over time to wear down an opponent is called attrition. This is the single greatest danger that a weaker belligerent encounters.

  This is what Adolf Hitler faced. The Soviet Union’s resources were immense compared to Germany’s. Its great size forced an enormous dispersal of German military strength. Its population was more than twice Germany’s. It had unlimited quantities of oil, minerals, and power. Soviet war production over time would outstrip German production. In addition, the Soviet Union could tap the resources of the rest of the world, especially the United States, because the Allies controlled the seas and could deliver goods by way of Iran.

  Hitler had to gain a quick victory or be forced into a war of attrition that he could not win. Hitler refused to see this, and it was the cause of his destruction.

  For immediate use in the attack, Hitler assembled 107 infantry divisions, 19 panzer divisions, 18 motorized divisions, and one cavalry division, a total of three million men, with supporting troops. This represented the bulk of the total German strength of 205 divisions. The Barbarossa forces included 3,350 tanks, 7,200 artillery pieces, and 2,770 aircraft.

  The great weakness of the panzer divisions was the condition of the roads. In the vast Soviet Union there were only 40,000 miles of paved highways. Most routes were dirt and turned into muddy morasses in wet weather. In a panzer division fewer than 300 vehicles were fully tracked, while nearly 3,000 were wheeled and largely restricted to roads. In the west this had been little problem, because of the abundance of all-weather roads. In Russia their relative absence meant that panzer mobility would end with the first mud.

  The Red Army was not prepared for the German onslaught, in part because of the condition of its forces, in part because too many troops were positioned right against the frontier, but also in part because Joseph Stalin had guessed wrong where the main German onslaught would come and put a preponderance of his forces south of the Pripet marshes.

  The Russians assembled 171 divisions in five army groups or “fronts” along the frontier. Behind the five forward fronts, separate groups of five field armies were being formed as a second strategic echelon. This Reserve Front was assembling on the line of the Dnieper and Dvina rivers, some 180 miles east and 100 miles northeast of the frontier. Before hostilities these forming reserves were virtually invisible to German intelligence.

  Soviet authorities had ample warning of the attack, but Stalin hoped the Soviet Union could escape Hitler’s wrath, at least for a time, and ignored plain evidence.

  On March 20, 1941, Sumner Welles, United States undersecretary of state, informed the Soviet ambassador of the attack, picked up by the American commercial attaché in Berlin. Winston Churchill alerted Stalin in a personal note delivered on April 19, 1941, based on Ultra intelligence intercepts (which he didn’t reveal to Stalin). American Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt informed Molotov of reports to U.S. legations pin-pointing the attack almost to the day. High-altitude Luftwaffe reconnaissance aircraft made more than 300 overflights of Soviet territory in the weeks leading up to D-Day, June 22, 1941. On June 16, the German embassy evacuated all but essential personnel. There were many more warnings.

  Up to the last day, the Soviet Union continued to supply Germany with raw materials, including 4,000 tons of rubber, plus manganese and other minerals shipped from the Far East over the Trans-Siberian Railway.

  But Stalin had actually been
preparing for war. On May 6, he took over personally as chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, or prime minister, replacing Molotov, who remained foreign minister. It was the first time Stalin had taken a government office.

  In April Stalin implemented readiness measures, including partial mobilization. He transferred forces from Siberia to the west, sent twenty-eight rifle divisions and four armies to the border, and began assembling a fifth army near Moscow. In late May he called up 800,000 reservists.

  Nevertheless, the Soviet Union was not ready. Its forces were poorly arrayed, trained, and equipped. Soviet political leadership had been paralyzed by its fixation on maintaining peace. Hope clouded reality.

  For example, when Mikhail P. Kirponos, commander of the Kiev military district, deployed some troops to the frontier in early June, the Kremlin countermanded the order, and told Kirponos flatly: “There will be no war.”

  The purges had left a severe shortage of trained commanders and staff officers, unlike the German army with its long emphasis on officer quality, its experience in war so far, and its supreme confidence. Red Army officers had learned to keep a low profile. Any independent judgment might lead to a firing squad or a trip to a Siberian gulag.

  Few troops were concentrated where most needed. Aside from more troops being stationed below the Pripet Marshes, they were spread evenly across the front, and not many were held back for counterattack. These dispositions played directly into German tactics of punching a few holes with overwhelming force, then sending powerful motorized forces rushing through the gaps into the rear.

  The Soviets had about 110 infantry (or “rifle”) divisions along the western frontier. In theory they were about the same size (15,000 men) as German divisions, but in June 1941 they averaged only about 8,000 men.

  The greatest fault of the Red Army was its organization of armored and motorized forces. It possessed fifty tank divisions and twenty-five mechanized (motorized) divisions, far more than the Germans, but Stalin had not accepted the German doctrine of concentration of armor. The largest armored formation was a mechanized corps of one motorized and two tank divisions. These corps were widely dispersed across the front, not massed as were German panzer formations. Furthermore, each corps’s divisions were often a hundred kilometers apart. Some corps had the job of supporting local counterattacks. Others were held in reserve to take part in counterthrusts under front (army group) control. Soviet armor, spread out in small packets, thereby repeated the error that the British and French had made in the 1940 campaign.