Posted on 06/22/2021 10:05:55 AM PDT by Captain Peter Blood
I was waiting to see of anyone would mention this and as of now no one has.
80 years ago today Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack.
It started one of the bloodiest and catastrophic episodes of W.W. II.
The scope, scale, casualties , and atrocities almost dwarf anything that happened anywhere else in the ETO.
Without the sacrifices the Russians made on the Eastern Front the invasion of Europe would not have been successful.
Estimated deaths on the Eastern Front are not totally known but an estimated 20 million died
Awesome movie. I hate subtitles but this one is worth the hassle.
No it isn't. There are things I wish I could unsee. But just a minor point, the movie took place in Belarus.
Bob Hoskins was in HEART CONDITION with Denzel Washington as well...He played a racist cop who got a heart transplant from a black attorney played by Washington...The movie was OK...
Hoskins passed away many years ago...
Indeed, Kretschmann has been in many WW2 movies...He was in DOWNFALL also...DOWNFALL is a good movie...I watched that movie a long time ago.
In his memoirs “White Nights” the late Israeli PM Menachem Begin describes how in early 1940 he and other Polish intellectuals imprisoned by the Soviets were lectured to by a Red Army political officer on exactly that view on Europe. The political genius in the Kreml (Stalin of course) had turned the European power triangle on its side, and caused Berlin and London to fight each other instead of Berlin and Moscow.
However, much contemporary evidence from the late 1920s and 1930s indicate that Hitler and Stalin had started to cooperate long before the fateful summer 1939 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
It will take too long to go through all the evidence, but if you are interested I recommend the memoirs of the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky (In Stalin's Secret Service, 1939) and the journalist and novelist Arthur Koestler (The Invisible Writing, The second volume of an autobiography, 1932 - 1940; 1954). Also, some historical books (but exciting enough to read like novels) on among other things politics of the Soviets prior to WWII: Chekisty; The history of the KGB by John Dziak (1988) and Double Lives; Stalin, Willi Münzenberg, and the Seduction of the Intellectuals by Stephen Koch (1995). If I had to chose one of these books I would chose the last one. It is not only a good read, but very revealing on Soviet disinformation campaigns both before and after WWII.
All the "Feigelein" parody videos are hillarious. But seriously, I cannot bring myself to watch the scene in Downfall with the Goebbels' children.
And the thing about Downfall. All those vile characters and the one I wound up hating the most after watching it, was Magda Goebbels.
Not true, the scientists working on the Manhattan project were either US born or Europeans that had managed to flee the Nazis and Europe prior to the war. The one notable exception was Niels Bohr who was helped to escape from occupied Denmark by the British.
Also, it is unlikely that the Germans would have been able to succeed with their atomic project, among other things due to lack of resources. However, the Allies did not know that until after the war.
Moscow would had turned into Stalingrad, if Hitler had focused his armies on Moscow instead. The Nazis were not prepared for the Russian winter so they would had lost momentum by the time they’ve reached Moscow.
Hitler wanted the Caucauses oil fields. Taking Moscow was only strategic in my opinion in that the fall of Moscow may have doomed Stalin and caused division in Soviet ranks. “Divide and Conquer” probably would have been a winning strategy for Hitler, but he saw it as much as a racial war as a military one.
For the Wehrmacht, 5.5 million casualties.
In the first three months of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht conducted 5 envelopment maneuvers equal to or larger than the 1940 campaign in France, killing or capturing over 3.5 million Red Army soldiers.
When Romania joined the campaign a week after the start the front stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the longest continuous land warfare front that ever existed.
The size and savagery of the fighting dwarf any other land campaign in history.
In grad school I had a long discussion with a German professor who argued that if Guderian had not been diverted and some other forces had been deployed that Germany would have taken Moscow and, triumphantly he added, "We would have won the war!"
I replied, "Well, then we would have nuked you."
The Soviets pretty much shipped their infrastructure beyond the Urals. Taking Moscow militarily would have been of minor consequence, but again, it may have had a huge impact in terms of Stalin keeping his power.
They also rolled into Poland, too. When the Soviets attacked Finland, Britain came close to declaring war against the Soviet Union as well.
The USA no longer has that option as we pre shipped our industrial base to our enemy already. Free traders sold us out.
The Soviets inflicted a terrible defeat on the Japanese Army in Mongolia in 1939 using air/armor combined arms. The Japanese had never seen anything like it and got their butts kicked and never undertook any military action threatening the Soviets again.
The RAF was in straits, but its demise is exaggerated. The RAF had a lot more planes and pilots in areas out of range of the Luftwaffe that would have been used.
Also if you look at the Germans’ invasion preparations, they were woefully inadequate. Germany didn’t have the naval cargo capacity to supply an invasion. Nor any way to bring heavy artillery or tanks over. On top of that the Royal Navy was quite immense and capable. Probably not one of Hitler’s ridiculous barges would have made it across the Channel.
I also recommend the movie “Europa, Europa”.
That was some general named "Zhukov" if I recall correctly.
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