Invading a country 100x bigger than your own with 5x the population

This. Also Italy crying for help in Greece.

>ussr supplies us
>great britain is still alive
>occupying russia will cost us shitload of manpower
>invading russia will cost us fuckload of materials that nobody will sell us because we would be at war with the entire world
>i deduce that invading the ussr is a good idea
I kinda agree with you, but Hitler was definitely autistic anyway

Mandatory read

heretical.com/miscella/14days.html

well with the way they were mowing down the russians i can see why they think they could take them on. cant believe they underestimated the russian winter meme tho

There was some logic to it. The idea was that the Red Army would be in disarray because of all of Stalin's purges. And there was certainly some truth to that, but not to the extent that the Soviets weren't able to get their shit together. Once Stalin started taking a more "hands-off" approach to military matters, things went a lot smoother for the Red Army. Any operation that Stalin tried to micro-manage was a disaster. He also temporarily legalized Christianity so that the Orthodox church would support the war effort, which helped although unfortunately that disappeared almost as soon as the war ended.

There were also plenty of people in the USSR who hated Stalin and probably would have supported the German Army if not for Hitler's extermination campaign. I've heard stories that near the beginning of the invasion, many villages sincerely greeted the Germans as liberators. However, all that goodwill vanished as soon as the Wehrmacht started to massacre locals and steal their food.

literally this
all Hitler had to do was not murder the occupied nations until Stalin had a bullet in his head

Also, the Soviet army performed very poorly in both Khalkhyn Gol and in the Finnish War. The Nazis had every right to think the Soviet military sucked (and it did for a while).

For a vastly numerically inferior force, the Germans really BTFO'd the ruskies. They were simply better soldiers and had better equipment, and might have well won the war. Hitler was a dumbass for not taking Moscow (Axis forces were right outside the city before being rerouted to Stalingrad).

>ussr supplies us
That was one of the reasons of the invasion, he didn't want to become too dependent on them.
>great britain is still alive
And they won't be defeated in the foreseeable future unless Germany suddenly gets a mega fleet.
>occupying russia will cost us shitload of manpower
A victory over it would bring over a hundred million more into the fold and an invaluable labor source, millions of Ukrainians were brought over for labor during the war.
>invading russia will cost us fuckload of materials that nobody will sell us because we would be at war with the entire world
And a victory, Hitler thought, would bring him closer to autarky with the grain and coal fields of Ukraine and Caucasus oil.
It wasn't necessarily a good idea, just the least shitty one out of a host of bad options in the corner that Hitler pushed himself into.

Since the some backwater finnish farmers really humiliated the russians just a year ago most of the world thought the red army was 2nd class,so at the time it was not unreasonable to assume the red army was imcapable.

>Hitler was a dumbass for not taking Moscow (Axis forces were right outside the city before being rerouted to Stalingrad)

God you do really not know what you are talking about right ?

Their supply lines were stretched to the max.

Moscow was a highly fortified city, Heeresgruppe Nord was not able to capture Leningrad so how the f.... do you think Heeresgruppe Mitte should be able to take Moscow.

Oh yeah lets just ignore Flanks lets ignore that we are outnumbered lets just walk into the city to get rekd.

Lets ignore the gigantic amount of forces that Stalin massed in Moscow for the counterattack that almost completely destroyed Heeresgruppe Mitte.

Do your research next time Wehraboo, you are a disgrace and your knowledge is superficial HOI4 tier.

greetings a educated german

POL BTFO!!!

there is nothing pol in this post just the facts that show how ridiculous his claim is that it was hitlers fault and that there was any chance for HGM to take moscow.

You don't like facts? Back to your Hoi4 or Coh2 forum.

the problem of germany was that you had the following options:
option 1: not invading russia, and wait until the allies attack on the western front. i mean it was obvious that the usa will eventually enter the war (see ww1). when the allies attack in the west, the chances are very high, that the russians will attack in the east (world revolution and shit)
option 2: invade russia and hope that this war is over when the allies attack on the west.

when you think about it, it is very rational to attack the soviets, this way you have at least a little chance going out of this war as a winner

Yep, poor grasp of English. The only thing I believe is that you're a g**man

World revolution was Trotsky's thing. Stalin was more into "Socialism in one country"

nice ad hominem

So you have nothing else to add other than "I am a butthurt wehraboo and I go for ad hom. when I am shown to be wrong"?

I speak 4 languages, how about you?

counts nothing when it's poorly done lmao

>my dad works at nintendo
Germans are fucking autistic.

yeah, thats right, but facing a germany fighting the allies on the western front, being exhausted from the ongoing war, im pretty sure that stalin couldnt resist attacking germany. plus the soviet army would be better equiped than in 1941

Going to ignore your pathetic attempt of triggering me.

You demonstrated that you have absolutely no knowledge on the subject and rely on insults when you are shown to be wrong.

Come back in a few years when you are old enough to argue and gained some knowledge.

Now back to Hoi4 my little friend.

Germans chose to starve leningrad out. They could have taken it early on if they launched an assault.

How do you know they could have taken it when in fact they never tried?

Unjustified assumption nothing else.

>what is lake ladoga

Yes, ignore everything that doesn't support my bias. Very objective.

You had no arguments or facts that supported your claim.

You are the one being biased and irrational.

It would have been if it hadn't been preceded by one that was just as dumb, and then followed by something even dumber. I mean seriously, you have no serious naval capacity other then some U-boats and you declare war on the British empire? You go to bat for the Japanese empire when they declare war on the USA when there was zero fucking chance the nips could have helped you in any way shape or form other then the theoretical?

Hitler was a dumbshit who got real lucky early on.

Yeah, because Germany was at war with two-thirds of the planet at the same time.

How ironic.

>haha lmao those faggots lost against the fucking Spurdo Army of Funland we can sure beat them with our superior german tactics
They were welcomed as liberators, but then went full retard. However not that much of ukranians joined their lines, I really doubt they could have won the war if they hadn't done that.

>that pic
Those threads constitute 90% of Veeky Forums what are you on about?

That completely ignored the smart operational and strategic decisions the ussr made. Look at China and Japan in the same time frame and see how "muh more population" turned out there. The soviets were a decent military which managed to plan successful operations like bagration against an increasingly weak and incompetent german military

>Tfw the only time the Teuton tries to copy Anglo bantz he fucks it up so hard his country gets torn to pieces
Just fuck off lads, the Nazis were clearly trying to be ironic, this is all your fault with "muh Germans have no sense of humour" memes, you forced their hand and made them adopt Anglo tier bantz instead of mastering his own German brand of bantz to detrimental effects.
You did this because you never laughed with Germany, instead laughing at Germany till he went to far.
Fucking cretins.

Yep, people often criticise the Germans for invading Russia in 1941, but it was genuinely the best possible Time to invade if war was considered inevitable

>1944
>having any hope of victory
The germs should have won by the end of 1943 and that's the last timeframe I can see them winning (with a possible successful taking of baku in '42).

Yeah april would've been better

How could they have possibly won in 42 or 43? It was the time frame in which Soviet industry had fallen behind the Urals and lend lease had really started to kick in. It was almost logistically impossible to take Baku considering the resistance the soviets put up at Stalingrad alone. Same goes for kursk. Unless the soviets surrendered in 1941 after losing Moscow, the Germans simply couldn't win.

Oh yeah a couple months earlier would have been better. I was just saying that any other year would be disastrous for the Germans

>100x bigger
>5x the population

But they never could've taken moscow in 1941, maybe if they invade in april but I don't think it would've made any difference considering it was the time of the spring rasputitsa and everything was flooding.

That last one on the bottom, that can't be real....right?

Yeah, I was just saying that that was the only possible way the soviets might want peace. Realistically, it was impossible to even dream of taking Moscow

Anything is possible when you have the guys who designed this.

This! Procreation is the greatest evil there is.

>Not attacking the soviets
>Build the fortress europa
>not declaring war to the US
>win the war in north africa
I bet Hitler never thought of this fine idea

I wish they had built this, would have been laf

you just get what, within a mile of it and it can't bring a gun to bear :D

To be fair, it was meant to bring naval caliber artillery to a land based platform without the limitation of train rails.

This is doable, in theory, but I'm curious what they do to capitalize on this victory. I would assume some sort of proxy states in the ME?

It's not doable because the Nazis still would have run out of money to re-capitalize the economy. Conquest based economies don't work without conquest.

That and Stalin would have invaded eventually. The USSR was industrializing and mobilizing fast, Hitler was afraid of Stalin being able to actually leverage Russia's potential.

>after that they get oil from the middle east
>hitler not wanting an aesthetic desert campaign
Truly an autist

It almost worked fyi, which is the funny part.

Or he could have invaded North Africa, captured the Suez, pushed up through the Middle East and then would have Wehrmacht troops on the Soviet's southern borders, close to the oil reserves of the Caucuses. Then, if he chose to invade the USSR, he could quickly capture that crucial source of the Red Army's supply.

Not capturing a single city after Kiev, getting anihilated in front of moscow in 41.

Gaining some clay in 42 and 43 while getting anihilated in gigantic coubteroffensives.

Yeah it was not close.

To add to this, the decision to steadily push across the entire front was the best strategy.

Even more correct was the decision to resupply the army with consistent flow of materials via horses and trucks.

As you're BTFOing ivan and you run low on food, fuel, spareparts, and ammunition, you simply call up a 1000 ju52s that can carry 3 tons of supplies each and they fly in with a supply drop. sort through all the supplies dropped that will never land too far ahead that they fall into soviet hands or too far behind to where your entire column has to stop until the quartermaster companies find them and brings them forward.

Then you think about it for more than a few seconds and it becomes clear what a fucking retarded idea rushing to moscow was in the first place. The sheer number of generals in post war interviews that shared this opinion goes to show that adolf and his generals were broken clocks that complimented each other.

Had they simply pushed to moscow and relied on resupply from the air... they would've stalingraded themselves in the open steppes instead of city streets.

Naturally they got overconfident after conquering France. It almost succeeded though, if they had taken Moscow.

Moscow isn't some fucking El Dorado, where reaching and taking would magically solve all of Germany's problems.

...

It would at least give them a chance.

Don't forget that rather large army that was forming up around Kiev that they're implicitly assuming will just sit on its hands and do nothing for no reason.

Germany needed more land and resources in order to compete with the United States.

Sometimes they had to airdrop supplies in as a result of using both horses and trucks to resupply. The fast-moving mechanized divisions would move far ahead of the horse-drawn infantry, sometimes over 300km, bringing their truck convoys with them. When these "suitcases" unloaded their payloads as needed, they would turn back towards the railheads to resupply, but they were actually driving towards the mass of infantry advancing forward. This could cause serious bottlenecks on the shitty Russian roads. This happened to the 4th Panzer Army at the very start of the campaign; they had traveled 350km in 5 days far ahead of the infantry, but their convoys ran into the trailing infantry as they drove back, causing traffic jams that had to be temporarily solved by air resupply. They had to wait around a week for a supply base to be moved forward, and then had a more limited advance using the entire haulage capacity of Army Group North, causing the delay of the 16th Army. They wanted to use this haulage on a rapid advance towards Leningrad, but this would make the 16th and 18th armies immobile, and significantly stretch out their supply lines, so Leeb ordered them to wait for infantry to arrive at Leningrad. Having a hybrid horse-truck system in a place like Russia could be a serious pain the ass.

So, the Ratte never would be useful right?

>win the war in north africa
kek the supply situation there was even shittier than the soviet union

Hey man it was doing pretty good until everyone died.

Until he realized how massive the Soviet army was. You can actually hear how he has lost hope after realizing the scale of the Soviet army.
youtube.com/watch?v=ClR9tcpKZec

I do wonder, if Hitler had sued for peace, returning all lands to the USSR in 1942, would Stalin have accepted it? Let's say they do it after the spring and summer offensives by the Russians were thoroughly trashed and they pushed towards Stalingrad, so they're still bargaining from a position of relative superiority.

I mean its a fort that has some strategic mobility and costs 10,000 times more than a normal fort. You would be better off just sticking all those turrets in the ground and connecting them with tunnels.

Possibly but Stalin wouldn't have kept his word. He would have simply rebuilt the Soviet military and invaded Germany in 1944 or 1945.

Seriously, the scale of the Soviet military was absolutely immense. In 1940 Germany invaded France and the Benelux countries supported by Britain. The combined enemy forces had about 3,400 tanks and 2,900 aircraft. 13 months later Germany and a coalition of smaller nations invaded the Soviet Union, who had 11,000 tanks and 7-9 thousand aircraft. The coalition in 1941 had a slight numerical advantage in personnel but the Soviets had about a 4 to 1 advantage in tanks and aircraft.

The way the early war went it was hard for anyone to not believe it.

Let's say Hitler also doesn't go full retard and declare war on the US, so it's the UK and RU at war with Nazi Germany.
And that just turns into Germany vs UK in a best case scenario, with the Wehrmacht pulling back to Poland and Romania. And let's be doubly generous and say Germany starts making peace deals with the UK to pull out of France and the Low Countries and Denmark and Norway in exchange for peace.
Does Stalin still declare war under these circumstances? Would Britain ever accept any conditions for peace that weren't surrender?

>Let's say Hitler also doesn't go full retard and declare war on the US, so it's the UK and RU at war with Nazi Germany.
US likely would have declared war after Pearl Harbour anyway, so your scenario pretty much requires that Japan decides to fight China without proper resources and hoping to tough it out. I highly doubt they would do this, but for the sake of argument lets say they do.

The US would still be supplying Britain and the USSR with materiel aid.

>Does Stalin still declare war under these circumstances? Would Britain ever accept any conditions for peace that weren't surrender?
I doubt Britain would accept any terms except return to the pre-war borders, Germany gives up the Danzig corridor, and Hitler looks like a failure. Considering that we are talking about him agreeing to peace when he looks like he is at the height of his power some sort of coup is possible. However lets disregard that, Hitler confides in important leaders and military officers about the scale of the USSR and the inability to meaningfully defeat Britain and gets them on board with peace.

Then Stalin agrees to peace, and Hitler dumps everything into the battle of Britain 2 electric boogaloo and North Africa in the hopes of Bringing Britain to the negotiating table. Pro peace politicians win elections in Britain and decide to agree to a peace with honour to Germany, essentially everyone lays down their guns and goes home as though the war never happened, Petain is executed for treason, and Poland is restored to statehood. Now the USSR won't invade since Hitler went to such lengths to end the war the west sees him as actually being reliable and trustworthy meaning that the USSR can't really declare war on him without risking aggression from the west.

>US likely would have declared war after Pearl Harbour anyway
On Germany? Uh, why?

Why not? They are already fighting the same enemies as Britain and the western allies in Japan, they are already supporting the western allies with materiel, and Germany has killed thousands of American merchantmen with its submarine warfare.

Because it's not thousands at this point it's not even hundreds. I think a few thousand merchant marine were killed in the entirety of the war, definitely negligible casualties before that.
The whole submarine thing is really overblown. The US was tracking Germany U-boats and telling the British ships where they were, but engagements where fire was traded were very rare.
It was pre war tensions, but like with all pre war states, actual death and destruction is minimal.
There were still more than enough people unwilling to commit to war with Europe, it's just that Hitler declared war first instead of condemning the Japanese attack.
Any delays in the US joining the war in the West would have been significant. Probably not game changing, but significant.

Stalin would have nothing to gain from an attack. Even if he wanted domination in Europe the best way to get it was to lure the enemy deep into your land and encircle him, ie what happened irl

There are some claims by German officials after the war that Stalin offered white peace after Stalingrad and a return to 1914 borders, but Hitler rejected the offer. He counteroffered with a German border on the Dnieper but Stalin refused. I think Stalins offer was sincere since it was in his interest for a non hostile Nazi Germany to exist as a buffer zone

>So explain the colonization of the new world
>Colonial India?
>Sino-Japanese Wars?
You're ignoring the context for all of these.

They already had a shoot on sight order on german ships in american waters before pearl harbour and they were also already involved in some active fighting.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Greer_(DD-145)#The_Greer_incident.2C_September_1941

Except Indians, other Indians, and Chinese didnt have tens of thousands of tanks

t. Idiot

Great counter argument.

What exactly is the difference between Irredentism and Revanchism?

>Irredentism
This is mine and always will be mine

>Revanchism
You've hurt me, so I'll hurt you too

With the German Army as constituted in the Spring of 1941, there was never any hope of Barbarossa's success. The Marcks Plan, which was drawn up in the late Summer and early Fall of 1940, was more Napoleonic in its emphasis on Moscow.

The Marcks Plan gave rise to a Wehrmacht Quartermaster's report that stated, quite bluntly, that the German Army would run out of supplies after conducting high-intensity operations up to 500 km past the German/Soviet Frontier. However even the relative focus of the Marcks Plan and the conclusions of the Wehrmacht Quartermaster didn't stop Hitler from demanding a more expansive plan.

Barbarossa was the result of Hitler's intention to conquer all of European Russia in one fell swoop, instead of focusing on what the Army demanded: Moscow. The Heer had a logical reason to focus the bulk of the Panzer Divisions in HGM. Moscow was the Administrative Center of the CPSU and the Soviet State. AROUND Moscow was the Ring Road and the lateral nexus of the Soviet Rail Network that allowed Timoshenko and Zhukov to move Divisions from north to south along a 1500 mile front. The Tula tank works was just outside Moscow (although, to be fair, there is no indication that anyone in the Abwehr had any idea, outside of a few people in Gehlen's outfit perhaps, of the importance of the T-34 project).

One historian of the opening months of the campaign wrote that Hitler had a "siege mentality", which led him to grasp for the wheat and metal resources of the Donbas, leaving Moscow aside. His economic obsessions flowed from the capture of vast reaches of empty space, and it was his undoing. Between the flawed design of Barbarossa and the murderous conduct of the a Wehrmacht and the SS in the East, the German dictator sealed his own fate.

Why does everybody seem to think that the Soviet government would just disintegrate upon losing Moscow? Yes, losing Moscow would have been a great loss. But Napoleon also took Moscow and it did not grant him victory.

It wouldn't have, but Stalin placed enormous personal prestige on holding Moscow and the seizure of Moscow in, say, September, by HGM would have forced him to flee to Gorki. Also, once again, there would have been enormous strains on the lateral movement of the Red Army, whereas in Bonaparte's time, the Imperial Russian Army could spot Napoleon Moscow and wait outside the city while the Streltsy and others savaged French supply lines. It would have taken Stalin a year to recover, while the Germans would have been in Winter Quaters.

That said, they win in the end, it's just that if Moscow falls, the entire conduct of the Wallies war is different, with a much more active role in the Balkans and the Soft Underbelly bullshit.

Hitler never wins. Taking Moscow provides him with the illusion of victory. However, the United States and Britain would never allow Germany to dominate Eurasia that way.

How would they even plan on taking Moscow anyways, a heavily fortified city with 9 times the population of Stalingrad?

>How would they even plan on taking Moscow anyways, a heavily fortified city with 9 times the population of Stalingrad?

that thing wouldn't make it 2 miles away from the factory before become unrecoverably bogged down, leaving only a demolished road in its wake.