The armies in the West constituted a reserve that the Germans could have thrown into defending breakthroughs if their lines had been sufficiently shortened. Tactically the Germans were far superior to the Russians, as the defense on the Elbe showed.
The Germans were cooked either way, the reserves would have been chewed up certainly more Russians would have died but Stalin didn’t care. There were vastly out producing the germans and had gained control of the battlefield and the air over the battlefield.
Of course it helped that we supplied coupious amounts of trucks and soem airplanes (p-39) for ground attack to compliment the Il-2.
At best the war might have been prolonged. BTW Hitler was never inclined to give up territory to shorten up the lines that hastened the destruction of Army group center for example. See the decisions at the Kosun pocket and the Crimea for just 2 examples.
The German Army was destroyed at Kursk the rest was downhill from there.
“The armies in the West constituted a reserve that the Germans could have thrown into defending breakthroughs if their lines had been sufficiently shortened.”
The armies in the West were mostly the battered remnants of units that had been ravaged in the east. Even the Battle of the Bulge was a skirmish in contrast to Kursk, Stalingrad, Leningrad, or Kharkov. By the end of the war the Soviets had nothing but time; they were fighting on someone else’s land.