” Soviet Army would eventually have crushed the Reich by itself”
BS.
If we are re-writing history... if Germany only had one front (the Russian) they would have kicked Stalin’s butt. What killed the Reich was two fronts and a poorly executed winter offensive in Russia.
People seem to forget that the Germans were desperately fighting the British (and Americans to a smaller extent) in North Africa at the time the Soviets turned the Nazis back at Stalingrad. The two front situation did NOT start on June 6th, 1944.
Yep. German troops were in view of the Kremlin by December 1941. Things went so swimmingly well in the south that they also sent the larger part of their force down to occupy the oil fields and Caucasian region rather than securing Stalingrad. At the time, it was thought that Stalingrad was within days, a couple of weeks tops of being secured.
Even when it was clear that Stalingrad was lost a year or so later, Hitler refused to allow the 6th army to make a tactical withdrawal. Stalingrad was a pile of rubble at the time and of zero strategic importance. Soft Romanian troops were guarding the flanks when the Red Army counterattacked.
That and thousands of Ford trucks from the U.S. - it allowed Stalin to have motorized logistics while Hitler's was still largely horse-drawn.
And what caused that ill-planned winter offensive was the Germans having to clean up behind an Italian debacle in the Balkans, esp. Serbia.
So, essentially, the Serbian won WWII for the allies - or the Italians lost it for the Germans!
And had allied supplies not been rolling in to help supply the red army the outcome would also have been very different.