Operation Barbarossa - who knows ?

[JasonC]

It really isn't an interesting topic, it is an exercise in excuse making and reguritated German wartime propaganda being recycled by ideological axe grinders. Present company excluded, of course; I mean those reselling it and peddling books about it. You will not find a single solitary point made in any of them that isn't already directly there in Hitler's speech announcing the invasion. Look it up.

The militarily interesting thing about Barbarossa is the rapid evaporation of every large Russian mech formation within days of making contact with the enemy. That, and the fact that Russian dispositions and orders were made under the assumption that Russian mech corps and armies would behave approximately like Germans ones, accounts for nearly all of the early shocks. The Russian high command then reacted to that new fact with a misdiagnosis of its cause - morale failure or cowardice or treason, all rolled into one big stew of suspicion of the men out at the pointy end. Needless to say that was exceptionally destructive in its own right, not helpful. It also led to senseless orders to stand fast or push west when backpeddling rapidly was the only sane course.

The Germans naturally put all of it down to their own brilliancies, and thereby set themselves up for a fall as soon as the Russians learned better. But that is a much later story.

The other significant piece of the Barbarossa campaign is how the Germans managed to get time working against them despite inflicting 10 to 1 loss ratios. Since Russia had at best twice German capacity, and in many measures no better than equality, this took some doing on Germany's part. Russian mobilization efforts were extraordinary, to be sure, but Germany's utter lack of them was even more extraordinary. To wipe out the entire initial starting strength of an enemy army in six months, and still have the odds ratio move *against* you, requires world-historical levels of complacency about own-side mobilization efforts.

The paradox must simply be faced - the Germans lose a tenth what the Russians do from the border to the gates of Moscow, but are weaker than when they started when they get there. The Russians lose 10 times as much and territory containing 40% of their prewar population and industry, but are stronger on December 1st than they were when the war began. This implies the Russian replacement rate exceeded their losses and the German replacement rate was less than German losses (by a large factor, actually) - which means the ratio between them was even more lopsided than the loss ratio. Something like 15 or 20 to 1 against Germany. With capacity differences a tenth that ratio of less, that must essentially all be put down to German lolligagging and hubris. They didn't get the replacement stream because they flat did not think they would need it.

Pride is a weakness...

There is much more of real strategic interest in those two aspects of the campaign, than in all the spun fantasies of justified German aggression from the day of Hitler's speech on the invasion event, to now.