How did it happen Veeky Forums? Why did they lose?

I've been reading The Last Battle by Cornelius Ryan and he details how most of the best and still coherent Wehrmacht divisions were sent to the Western Front instead. Guderian was freaking out that Hitler wanted to throw multiple quality divisions into the Ardennes offensive/hold onto the baltics/retake parts of Hungary and drive to the oil fields while the Red Army was literally camped out 50 miles from Berlin.

>If the weather meant so much, what stopped them from entrenching and sitting it out, using all that defensively?
Hitler being retarded and throwing away literally hundreds of thousands of men in stupid offensives and pointless "last stands"

Classic German autism.

This, I really don't get this "If only Germany did X they'd have won!" meme.

Capturing Moscow or Stalingrad wouldn't have knocked the Soviets out of the war. The British were resistant to invasion. The Americans joined the war when Hitler declared war on them (lel.)

Nazism was and always will be a false ideology.

Why is every thread about germany devolve into mindless bashing, Its always completely ideology driven ahistoric mindless bashing. Iam not a wehraboo nor am i german ,but i mean every time germany is mentioned all let loose and everyone keeps beaving like they are on pol but with the opposite side. This is a history board not an extension of pol or leftypol.

>Iam not a wehraboo nor am i german

Whatever you say, Fritz.

Miroslav actually

So why even support an ideology that considers your people to be sub-human?

Why didn't Germany just go full medieval siege and encircle those areas with full trenches until they starved out?

I never said i support it. I despise fascism ,but if we all talk about how shit germany was in the war and how retarded all of the strategic decisions were then we are simply wrong ,the wehrmacht was a highly functional army performing better than almost everys other in the war. THat is not a moral statement this is a factual one ,and all i wanna saay is keep your politics out of his and assess the things atleast a bit objectivally

which was exactly what they did at Leningrad

>How did it happen Veeky Forums? Why did they lose?
Very simple. They over-extended themselves trying to end the whole war in six months. They got progressively weaker and the Soviets progressively stronger the farther away they got from their main supply bases. They should have prepared for a year-long minimum multi-phase campaign, whereby 1942 ends with consolidating points around Kiev and Leningrad.

how did they lose then?

btw im legitimately asking these questions

Number of warm bodies doesn't really matter.

>Literally 6 months (1/8 of the war) of being outnumbered in which they also lost every battle
>what are Moscow and Rzhev

At Stalingrad, the city wasn't actually fully encircled. The Finns didn't fully close their sector and Germany lacked the manpower to strong-arm them into doing it. Meanwhile Germany wasn't able to maintain a full blockade because that army could only be supplied by ship (without subtracting unacceptable mobile elements from other parts of the army), and the British (who also seized 1/2 of Germany's merchant navy in the first few weeks of the war) would have something to say about that.

>Only 3.8 million
That was the issue , they were vastly outnumbered

>Soviet sources list even says that the data they have in it is totally unreliable
For fucks sake , whoever posted this is an idiot. Read your own meme

Can you read?
>Soviet strength data is accurate, but German strength is grossly inflated.
Good thing it uses the German sources for German strength figures instead.

Just looking at the strenght ratio at a certain time is not enough: being able to replace several million casualties within a short time span is also an aspect of numerical superiority, this is not reflected by the strenght ratio alone.

That said, some of these figures are contested as far as I know, gotta look it up.

>At Stalingrad
I meant Leningrad obviously.

>uses the German sources for German strength figures instead.
>One German Source and one American source
Pic discarded, I'll be damned if an Amerimutt tells me *anything" about history

>user posts source to back up claim
>FUCKING AMERIMUTT REEEEEEEE
You are an absolute degenerate user. People like you who just derail any discussion because you make an assumption, which may or may not even be true about a poster, because of some meme about how you are somehow better because "MUH MUDBLOOD" even when you are wrong. peak autism tbhfam

You're on 4ch, home of Reddit. What do you expect when a group of people have been trained since their infancy to hate Germans/nationalism and to praise "democracy"/socialism. This is the end result of it, complete emotional based hatred of a people and their ideology that died 70 years ago but pretend it exists today because children are posting cartoon frogs on the internet. This isn't even mentioning the strawmen and disinfo that spreads in this kind of environment.

if only they pushed moscow a few months earlier. they were off to such a strong start.

>I have no idea what the Roslavl–Novozybkov Offensive was or why it happened or what its outcome was.

also because any sympathy or positive mention of WWII germany get's you the card

>when all you want is the return of the second reich

That advantage in oil was very important

>leaving those 700k Soviets to either strike your incredibly long flank or allowing the Soviets to use man of them to reinforce Moscow
What did he mean by this?

>t. retards and tankies

t. has no argument.

Because despite Veeky Forums thinking they are superior to /pol/, they are just two sides of the same coin

Hitler was one of the only sane Germans during Barbarossa ironically. But really I do not see how saying that leaving 700k men unmolested is a bad idea makes me a tankie.

>HAha lets go stalingrad for no reason

>no reason
>So if Mr. Stalin expected that we would attack in the center, I did not want to attack in the center, not only because Mr. Stalin probably believed I would, but because I didn't care about it any more at all. But I wanted to come to the Volga, to a definite place, to a definite city. It accidentally bears the name of Stalin himself, but do not think that I went after it on that account.

>Indeed, it could have an altogether different name. But only because it is an important point, that is, there 30 million tons of traffic can be cut off, including about 9 million of oil shipments. There all the wheat pours in from those enormous territories of the Ukraine, of the Kuban territory, then to be transported to the North. There the manganese ore was forwarded. A gigantic terminal was there; I wanted to take it. And do you know, we're modest: that is, we have it; there are only a couple of very small places left there.

.>1941
>their operation was to take Russia
>1942
>their operation was to take the Caucasus
>1943
>their operation was to pinch off a salient

anything we can infer from this sweeties

that the Wehrmacht could never recover post 1942 due to losses in men, material, and resources?

Holy shit, is this the biggest blow out in terms of strength and casualtie numbers? How did this even happen?

nu-Veeky Forums just sucks. It has nothing to do with history or unbiased discussion, or even any discussion. It's just shitposts about ww2 now

Like in each case with muh German k/d ratio

33,771 were murdered at Babi Yar, you're being dishonest if you're saying this explains the high disparity in casualties

>Strength: 672,000
>Losses: 700,544

Only the Soviets can lose more men than they had.

That's not included in Soviet casualties, idiot, it's merely a result of the German victory.

Also, it's interesting how the wiki author keeps up the old Soviet tradition of omitting the Jewishness of the victims of massacres, calling them just "the Kiev city residents"

>Why is every thread about germany devolve into mindless bashing
They don't like this thread.

Posts like this make me wonder if people know what /int/ is and what shit memes it has produced. Do people really think things like 56%, amerimutt, "insert nationality here with asterisk like a slur" and so on all came from /pol/?

>Why did they lose?
They pushed Stalingrad instead of Moscow
That's literally the reason they lost the war.
All because hitler wanted to take the town named after stalin.

The Soviets were expecting an offensive on Moscow in 1942, the area was well-defended and fortified as a result.

Alot spergs going on about muh retarded hitler muh moscow muh leningrad when the germans need caucusus oil fields to fuel the mobile operations your all going on about.

Better fail at taking a target that will win you the war, than a target that will only hurt Stalins pride

That really wasn't the reason why it was targeted, see where it's recognized by Hitler as an important chokepoint in oil shipments from the Caucasus

>half a million finns

Jesus fuck

They tried and failed to take moscow in 41, the russians then had half a year of winter to further reinforce and fortify the city. The germans simply wouldn't be able to punch through.
So what do you do, push your fatigued army straight into the strongest parts of the enemy front for a heroic loss, or attack the soft and undefended underbelly in hopes that the momentum might cut off vital supplies and force the enemy to widen their front?

They didn't engage in the invasion proper, they only pushed into Karelia, and towards Leningrad without actually attacking the city or the supply lines going there.

>retake parts of Hungary and drive to the oil fields
They had no choice. If an immediate assault on the oil fields did not work, the panzer divisions involved would cease to have panzers. All function of motor vehicles was going to come to a halt very soon (it was some absurd number like 60 days before even extreme rationing failed to help and every internal combustion engine stopped going). They had a critical horse shortage as well, and wood-gas truck conversion was hideously slow--they were also running out of tires, because why the fuck not. Germany was rapidly collapsing into its WW1-style self, with all movement either on foot or a train swarming with Allied bombers.

The only winning move for the Axis in WW2 was not to play.

Ironically the only real way they could have won was to abandon the ideology that justified the invasion in the first place, and behaved like the liberators they were initially welcomed as. Almost as if they needed to win the brains and main circulatory organs of the conquered peoples. Could use a phrase for that...

>The only winning move for the Axis in WW2 was not to play.
I disagree, the best thing they had going for them was the surprise effect and the blitzkrieg tactic, which got them a long way despite being outnumbered and generally in a worse spot. If they pulled the right strings, concentrated on producing the right weapons, convinced all the rest of the axis to attack properly (finland, italy) they would have had very realistic chances of just overrunning the soviet union despite their lack of manpower and resources.
I know these are a lot of ifs, but I can't stand when people act like WW2 was doomed to fail and couldn't have worked out well for Axis under any realistic conditions.

Personally, I never bought the whole "War with the USSR was inevitable" line. Stalin was extremely risk averse. He would not invade a superpower, especially if that superpower had an ally on his other border. He'd probably just slowly subvert governments in the middle east, feed the Chinese resistance, and generally play the long game. Meanwhile Germany could consolidate its position as the master of Europe and go from there.

What is Britain going to do? Invade?

Problem in consolidating your position as Germany is that you need to supply the needs of both you and your allies/occupied territories, primarily in oil and crops. Oil was needed for obvious military reasons, but also to keep the war economy going, and crops to feed people and herds of animals. Pre-war Europe was very reliant on overseas imports of these goods, and the British blockade cut almost all of it off, so the Soviet Union was the only option left for trade. The issues with this are:
1) There's not enough imports to meet demand.
2) Prices are high, and the Soviets are tough negotiators; they mainly ask for capital goods and technical blueprints in exchange for their raw resources, so they grow stronger the longer you trade with them.
3) The Soviets can take their business anywhere else in the world while the Germans were not so lucky under blockade. This potential dependence on Stalin greatly concerned the German high command.
With these factors in mind, it's easy to see why the Germans just thought it easier to take essential Soviet resources through conquest.