If in August 1941, Hitler had pushed onwards and taken Moscow before more Russian defences arrived...

If in August 1941, Hitler had pushed onwards and taken Moscow before more Russian defences arrived, instead of instead turning south towards the Donbass, he could have seized moscow and held on to it throughout the winter.

He would have captured an important communications and transport hub which would have pretty much crippled the soviets ability to move armies around. Not to mention Stalin refused to leave Moscow so there is a chance he could have even captured Stalin or senior members of the soviet high command.

Thus in spring 1942, he could have focused on mopping up the remaining soviet forces trapped in Ukraine, instead of over extending himself south towards Stalingrad.

I understand he wanted the oil, but he wasn't exactly in short supply at the time. Holding both Moscow and the Ukraine throughout 1942 and not pushing forward, but instead focusing on building up his defences and allowing his armies to restrengthen and consolidate the captured areas would have been far better than stretching his arms out as far and as fast as possible towards the caucasus.

Thoughts?

You're going to have to prove he could have actually taken Moscow, reaching it was already hard enough.

this, moscow was one of the most fortified efforts of anyone anywhere during the whole world war. additionally moscow is a very large city, overshadowing every single soviet city by a large margin

What do you mean most fortified? How much fortified? Care to elaborate?

He means Stalin turned out the entire population to dig trenches and tank traps.

Heeresgruppe Mitte was still stuck around Smolensk in August 1941 so it's unlikely they could push forward. The only way would be to ignore encircled pockets of Red Army in that area and proceed further, which would be dumb because those units would just hit them in the back, we're talking about entire armies.

There was no way to intelligently invade Russia. Any approach was a bad one.

By not attacking South you've left 600,000+ Soviet soldiers intact in Ukraine on the southern flank who were destroyed in Kiev, and will certainly fail to capture Moscow too, since the Soviets expended their forces in the period before the original Battle of Moscow in futile counter-attacks. Here, they will still be positioned in their fortifications around the city. Your army will fail to capture Moscow, and then the Southwestern Front will sweep up remaining German forces from the South. The Soviet Union will have not lost an entire Front, inflict catastrophic damage on the German army which might include the annihilation of Army Group Center, and will be placed in an even better position than historically for a Winter Offensive.

I'm not joking when I say that it is possible you've shortened the time period until an Allied Victory by years.

>He means Stalin turned out the entire population to dig trenches and tank traps.
The Germans did the same in 1945 to protect Berlin.
Well-equipped and organized engineers can overcome these kinds of obstacles quite easily. Most basic defenses like trenches can be combated fairly effectively with artillery as well.

Moscow was already enough of a beast to even reach, taking the city would most likely devolve into a larger scale stalingrad, with house-to-house, room-to-room fighting in a city of over 5 million. Sewers, subway stations/tunnels, everything would have to be cleared individually in order to secure control of a city that's over 2500 square kilometers.

it was a herculean task to even reach the city, taking it in the condition that the Wehrmacht was in, even by September 1941, was a pipe dream.

I say this because the chiefs of staff of the Wehrmacht concluded that they didn't have the manpower or supplies to assault and capture Leningrad by assault, a city of half the population and size, and opted to lay it to siege. In moscow's case, laying on mostly flatland without a coastline to box it in, had to either be taken by direct assault, or not at all.