Alternate History Could Operation Barbarossa had been succesful megathread

[bintananth]

Georg Thomas was one of the German military men who appears to have known his logistics:

Georg Thomas - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

But he appears to have been ignored, fortunately.

Fortunately.

When Bismark and Prinz Eugen sortied the latter didn't have enough fuel to get to France after leaving Norway and sailing the through the Denmark Straight despite having a full load of fuel.

Prinz Eugen was down to about 150 tons in the middle of the Atlantic when she met up with a tanker. If the RN had intercepted that tanker she'd be at the bottom of the Atlantic instead of capsized on a reef in the Pacific.

 

[BlackDragon98]

Fortunately.

When Bismark and Prinz Eugen sortied the latter didn't have enough fuel to get to France after leaving Norway and sailing the through the Denmark Straight despite having a full load of fuel.

Prinz Eugen was down to about 150 tons in the middle of the Atlantic when she met up with a tanker. If the RN had intercepted that tanker she'd be at the bottom of the Atlantic instead of capsized on a reef in the Pacific.

Stupid Kriegsmarine decision to use high pressure steam boilers despite the proven success of full diesel like the Deutschland class.

 

[Chiron]

Aside from not being asshole occupiers, actually paying attention to logistics instead of outrunning supply lines and trying to muddle through would have done wonders for the Whermacht's chances.

Take the invasion of France for example. Hitler gets blamed for calling the halt before Calais. In actuality the lead Panzer units were pretty much out of gas and ammo. They couldn't take Calais.

A combination of the French blowing the Aa Canal, a British Amphibious Counter-Attack at the Channel Ports and strong local French and British Counter-Attacks is the reason for the "halt."

As to the Op.

I believe in stacking the deck. If I were Hitler, I would have told Mussolini to eat his losses in North Africa and stop writing checks he can't cash. I would disbanded 5th Light Division and parceled it out as replacements and augments to other units, plus return 4 infantry battalions used for DAK to their Parent Regiments. I would halt the formation of 22nd and 23rd PDs as a waste resources. 1st Cavalry Division would have its conversion to 24th PD postponed till after USSR is crushed. I would then have formed a Panzer Group Rommel consisting of the 2nd, 5th, and 15th Panzer Divisions.

Plan is simple, as soon as Guderian hits Yelnya Gap, he is to send the code signal, "The door is open."

As soon as it is received, Rommel is put on a Storch to his staging area, and drives on to Moscow with Guderian following behind after he replenishes his units from the reserves and the Smolensk pocket is closed. At this point, there is no organized resistance to stop an advance on Moscow. Zhukov took most of August to kick raw recruits into shape for the Yelnya Offensive and I simply don't give him that time.

No organized resistance means less ammo and fuel spent while Soviet Depots are overrun before they can be blown or recruits entering them can be organized. If Moscow is on the verge of falling in August-September period, the Ukrainian Front will start to disengage which would quickly turn into a strategic route.

 

[bintananth]

Stupid Kriegsmarine decision to use high pressure steam boilers despite the proven success of full diesel like the Deutschland class.

Not a dumb decision. The Hipper-class was 6kts faster and the Deutchland-class was kinda pushing it in terms of what diesels of the day could do.

The dumb decisions were undersizing the bunkers, shooting for steam temperatures/pressures the engineers couldn't make reliable, and the preference for using three shafts instead of two or four.

That last one bit Bismark in the ass when her rudder jammed c/o a torpedo and part of why RMS Titanic couldn't avoid an iceburg.

 

[BlackDragon98]

Not a dumb decision. The Hipper-class was 6kts faster and the Deutchland-class was kinda pushing it in terms of what diesels of the day could do.

The dumb decisions were undersizing the bunkers, shooting for steam temperatures/pressures the engineers couldn't make reliable, and the preference for using three shafts instead of two or four.

That last one bit Bismark in the ass when her rudder jammed c/o a torpedo and part of why RMS Titanic couldn't avoid an iceburg.

MAN Double-Acting Diesel Marine Engines | Old Machine Press

this article highlights the potential of German diesel engines had funding for further development not been diverted to steam turbines in 1933

Also, in WW1, MAN had built a marine diesel that produced just over 20000 hp.

Had they picked up that design once again for the Deutschland class, it would have had 4x20000 hp

 

[Chiron]

Not a dumb decision. The Hipper-class was 6kts faster and the Deutchland-class was kinda pushing it in terms of what diesels of the day could do.

The dumb decisions were undersizing the bunkers, shooting for steam temperatures/pressures the engineers couldn't make reliable, and the preference for using three shafts instead of two or four.

That last one bit Bismark in the ass when her rudder jammed c/o a torpedo and part of why RMS Titanic couldn't avoid an iceburg.

Bismark was already fatally wounded before that torpedo. PoW's 2 hits to her hull compounded by Lutjen's refusal to slow down and do critical damage control made it impossible to keep her straight and she was unable to make it to France unless towed by the time the Swordfishes came along.

If Lutjens had allowed the DC teams to do their job, he could have been able to get to Saint Nazaire and been fixed up in a month. Though it would a hellish month, because every single Bomber Command Bomber would have been thrown at the place whether Harris liked it or not.

 

[sillygoose]

HL, how much of the decision to engage in the Holocaust do you think was due to Nazi food shortages? As in, had there been no food shortages, would the Nazis have still engaged in the Holocaust?

I've found an intelligence report from the World Jewish Congress based in Switzerland from 1942 after the Wansee Conference that directly links plans to exterminate 4 million Jews with the food shortages (if you want I can post a link, ironically David Irving of all people has it posted on his website); Goebbels diaries from 1942 are replete with references to really bad food shortages since 1941 in Germany too, so it seems they were quite definitely linked. Especially given that after the US entered the war they cut off Hoover's food relief program in Poland:

Commission for Polish Relief - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Hoover campaigned against the British blockade. He was critical of Churchill, and later wrote that for Churchill, civilian starvation, if speeding up the end of the war, was justified.[35] On 11 August 1940, Hoover issued a statement arguing that there was no reason why aid could not be sent to Europe through a neutral non-government organisation.[34] This statement specified that such a scheme should go ahead only if the German government agreed to not take food from the occupied countries—which the Nazis were doing in Poland from the start of the occupation.[34] Other demands by Hoover included permitting imports from the USSR and Balkan countries, granting unimpeded passage to aid ships and allowing the non-government organisation to control the distribution of aid to the degree necessary for it to be confident that these guarantees were being met.[34] Hoover also requested that the British allow aid shipments as long as the German Government met the conditions he had specified and asked that the governments in exile provide funding for aid supplies.[34] He also argued that "the obvious truth is that there will be wholesale starvation, death and disease in these little countries unless something is done about it".[36] The US Government did not support Hoover's statement and it also failed to win public support.[37] An opinion poll conducted on 1 September 1940 found that only 38 percent of Americans believed that the country should send food aid if famine broke out in Nazi-occupied European countries of Belgium, France and the Netherlands.[38] Nevertheless, a campaign to provide food relief to Europe continued in the US until the end of the war, though it attracted little attention after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.[36]

In response to the British blockade, the Commission for Polish Relief attempted to purchase food from the Soviet Union and the Baltic states, but the results were meager.[21] The Commission was able to continue to provide a very limited amount of relief to Poland until December 1941, when Nazi Germany declared war on the United States.[25] The Commission operated for several more years, providing aid to Poles outside German-occupied territories.[25] Hoover Institution Archives list the Commission documents from up to 1949.[21][39]

Same for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee:

By 1940, JDC was still able to help refugees in transit in more than 40 countries. The Joint opened shelters and soup kitchens for thousands of Jewish refugees in Poland, aiding some 600,000 in 1940. It also subsidized hospitals, child care centers, and educational and cultural programs. Even Passover supplies were shipped in. The goal of this was to provide refugees life-sustaining aid while trying to secure permanent refuge for them in the United States, Palestine, and Latin America.

With U.S. entry into the war following Pearl Harbor in Dec. 1941, JDC had to drastically shift gears. No longer permitted to operate legally in enemy countries, JDC representatives exploited a variety of international connections to channel aid to Jews living in desperate conditions in Nazis-controlled areas.

From Lisbon, JDC chartered ships and funded rescue missions that successfully moved thousands of refugees out of harm's way. Some made it to Shanghai, China, where JDC sponsored a relief program for 15,000 refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. In Europe, JDC directed funds to support 7,000 Jewish children in hiding.

So it seems that after US entry their ability to help was severely curtailed and limited to about 15,000 people in Central and Eastern Europe.

Now that said it doesn't mean that the Holocaust was just to do with food shortages, as there obviously was targeting of Jews for persecution and murder before 1942, but the Wansee conference that started the Holocaust as we think of it with the death camps came out of further shortages and reduction in food supplies after US entry.

Whether or not enough food would have prevented the Holocaust it is hard to say, but it does seem that one of the motivations was the the lack of food to even feed their own people 2,000 calories per day in 1941.

 

[WolfBear]

I've found an intelligence report from the World Jewish Congress based in Switzerland from 1942 after the Wansee Conference that directly links plans to exterminate 4 million Jews with the food shortages (if you want I can post a link, ironically David Irving of all people has it posted on his website); Goebbels diaries from 1942 are replete with references to really bad food shortages since 1941 in Germany too, so it seems they were quite definitely linked. Especially given that after the US entered the war they cut off Hoover's food relief program in Poland:

Commission for Polish Relief - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Same for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee:


So it seems that after US entry their ability to help was severely curtailed and limited to about 15,000 people in Central and Eastern Europe.

Now that said it doesn't mean that the Holocaust was just to do with food shortages, as there obviously was targeting of Jews for persecution and murder before 1942, but the Wansee conference that started the Holocaust as we think of it with the death camps came out of further shortages and reduction in food supplies after US entry.

Whether or not enough food would have prevented the Holocaust it is hard to say, but it does seem that one of the motivations was the the lack of food to even feed their own people 2,000 calories per day in 1941.

Interesting. Thank you. It appears that the British wanted to starve the Germans out in WWII like they sort-of did in WWI, but the Germans "outsmarted" the Brits by being willing to resort to mass murder in order to avoid a repeat of the starvation of German civilians as in WWI. In his book Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze talks about how it was only thanks to an unusually good bumper crop harvest in 1942 that millions of non-Jewish Poles avoided starving to death in 1943. So, once they would have ran out of Jews, the Nazis would have apparently targeted non-Jewish Poles next for starvation rather than have German civilians starve. And of course many Soviet POWs in WWII likewise starved to death--I'm presuming at least in part for a similar reason (food shortages), correct?

 

[sillygoose]

Interesting. Thank you. It appears that the British wanted to starve the Germans out in WWII like they sort-of did in WWI, but the Germans "outsmarted" the Brits by being willing to resort to mass murder in order to avoid a repeat of the starvation of German civilians as in WWI. In his book Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze talks about how it was only thanks to an unusually good bumper crop harvest in 1942 that millions of non-Jewish Poles avoided starving to death in 1943. So, once they would have ran out of Jews, the Nazis would have apparently targeted non-Jewish Poles next for starvation rather than have German civilians starve. And of course many Soviet POWs in WWII likewise starved to death--I'm presuming at least in part for a similar reason (food shortages), correct?

The thing that is a bit surprising is that more people didn't starve in Russia given Nazi pre-invasion planning and the unexpected Soviet destruction/removal of the harvest and agricultural equipment as well as their refusal to help feed their PoWs which even Ribbentrop asked them to do in August.

The British were only part of the equation; the US also refused to help feed people as well with some exceptions when things got really bad, like the Netherlands. In the British case it as Greece thanks to lots of political pressure, but then it was Turkey who fed the Greeks thanks to money spent by the Greek diaspora:

Great Famine (Greece) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Seems like the Germans were willing to accept if the Allies were willing to help feed people, even in Poland:

REPORTS POLES GET FOOD SENT TO THEM; Head of Relief Group Says Little of Shipments Is Lost (Published 1941)

Repts to Polish Amer Council on food shipments to Poland

www.nytimes.com

According to the org food got to where it was supposed to go rather than being stolen by the Germans.

I found this video as well; usually this youtuber's videos are pretty suspect, but I checked his source and he did a pretty good job with this one:


Edit:
found more evidence:

Bottom-up approach of the Holocaust - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In Götz Aly's book 'Final Solution': Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, Aly points to a very specific proposal by Rolf-Heinz Höppner, who at the time was simply an SS-Obersturmbannführer (or an SS Officer).[2] This letter written by Höppner was sent to Adolf Eichmann about a viable solution to solve the Jewish question. In a portion of the letter he wrote:

There is a danger that, in the coming winter, it will become impossible to feed all the Jews. It must seriously be considered whether the most humane solution is to finish off the Jews unfit for labour through some fast-acting means. This would definitely be more pleasant than letting them starve to death.[3]

The letter, which was sent on July 16, 1941,[4] is one that functionalists arguing the bottom-up approach utilize as evidence. Aly goes deeper and explains that the letter had not only been written by Höppner, but it had also been discussed at a lower level.[5]

 

[stevep]

Well at least your made clear your an holocaust denier. Not so much in that it happened but in trying to find any excuse to avoid the Nazis being blamed. That totally ignores that they were killing Jews pretty much from when they gained power, that they were shooting Jews in large numbers, taking resources away from the operation once Barbarossa started or that even when everything was falling apart they were still putting a higher priority on killing Jews than actually fighting the powers advancing towards Germany.

 

[WolfBear]

Well at least your made clear your an holocaust denier. Not so much in that it happened but in trying to find any excuse to avoid the Nazis being blamed. That totally ignores that they were killing Jews pretty much from when they gained power, that they were shooting Jews in large numbers, taking resources away from the operation once Barbarossa started or that even when everything was falling apart they were still putting a higher priority on killing Jews than actually fighting the powers advancing towards Germany.

You're talking to sillygoose here, right? Anyway, my own view on this is to look at the evidence wherever it leads, though honestly it's worth noting that the Nazis were already comparing Jews to rats back in this 1940 film:

The Eternal Jew (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So, the dehumanization of Jews was already well-progressed by 1940.

 

[sillygoose]

Well at least your made clear your an holocaust denier. Not so much in that it happened but in trying to find any excuse to avoid the Nazis being blamed. That totally ignores that they were killing Jews pretty much from when they gained power, that they were shooting Jews in large numbers, taking resources away from the operation once Barbarossa started or that even when everything was falling apart they were still putting a higher priority on killing Jews than actually fighting the powers advancing towards Germany.

Where did I say the Holocaust didn't happen? I said it was tied to the food situation, but was not exclusively the result of it. The Nazis of course deserve culpability for what they did, because they killed those people. I was answering a question of what role the food situation played in the decision to commit the Holocaust.
As I said Jews were killed prior to the Wansee conference, so food wasn't the sole issue at play, just that food shortages were a major driving factor for genocide from 1941 onwards; if you bother to look up the number of Jewish deaths pre-war, in 1939, in 1940, and from 1941 and onwards it goes up exponentially as the food situation got worse, which by the way was immediately a problem in 1939. Noticing that correlation and the fact that the Nazis themselves and the Jewish World Congress at the time said that was the motivating factor isn't Holocaust denial. If you bothered to read the sources the Einsatzgruppen murders of 1941 were explicitly linked to anticipated food shortages by one of the planners.

When things were falling apart in 1944 Germany itself was starving and the average person was getting less than 2000 calories a day, even heavy laborers (who per Goebbels were already getting shorted food in 1942 and on average had lost 6kg from the pre-war period), so the rush to kill Jews toward the end of the war was still also related to the collapsing food supply, outbreaks of disease due to malnutrition and infrastructure collapse due to the bombing, need to steal resources from Hungarian Jews to finance the war, etc.

As to the claim that the Germans weren't fighting as hard as possible in 1944-45 I think the Allied soldiers who died by the millions in that period would disagree.

You're talking to sillygoose here, right? Anyway, my own view on this is to look at the evidence wherever it leads, though honestly it's worth noting that the Nazis were already comparing Jews to rats back in this 1940 film:

The Eternal Jew (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

So, the dehumanization of Jews was already well-progressed by 1940.

As I said the targeting of Jews pre-dates the food shortages, though Aly Goetz (author of one of the books I quoted from) as well as Adam Tooze notes that the theft of Jewish resources pre-war was very important to financing rearmament and preventing the economy from collapsing as coffers were depleted. So even then it is hard to differentiate anti-semitism from material need, especially when the constant looting of resources from Jews in occupied countries then provided loot to be distributed to the German public and not just keep up public morale, but regime loyalty as the bombings and food shortages escalated.

Clearly the Nazis were extremely racist and targeted ethnic groups based on that racism to bear the cost of Hitler's plans, I'm just saying that the genocides are also linked to the food situation as well otherwise the Nazis would have started their genocidal plans considerably sooner than they did if it were just about racism and anti-semitism.

 

[bintananth]

MAN Double-Acting Diesel Marine Engines | Old Machine Press

this article highlights the potential of German diesel engines had funding for further development not been diverted to steam turbines in 1933

Also, in WW1, MAN had built a marine diesel that produced just over 20000 hp.

Had they picked up that design once again for the Deutschland class, it would have had 4x20000 hp

If they could make it fit in the machinery spaces without compromising hull strength, stability, or the armour scheme. The 12,000hp one in the article you shared would need three decks before the stuff needed for airflow gets attached to it. A 20,000hp diesel would need four decks. The Deutchland-class - based on a quick glance at drawings of one from the side - had I think five decks between the weather deck and the keel, two of which were above the armoured deck.

 

[WolfBear]

Where did I say the Holocaust didn't happen? I said it was tied to the food situation, but was not exclusively the result of it. The Nazis of course deserve culpability for what they did, because they killed those people. I was answering as question of what role the food situation played in the decision to commit the Holocaust.
As I said Jews were killed prior to the Wansee conference, so food wasn't the sole issue at play, just that food shortages were a major driving factor for genocide from 1941 onwards; if you bother to look up the number of Jewish deaths pre-war, in 1939, in 1940, and from 1941 and onwards it goes up exponentially as the food situation got worse, which by the way was immediately a problem in 1939. Noticing that correlation and the fact that the Nazis themselves and the Jewish World Congress at the time said that was the motivating factor isn't Holocaust denial. If you bothered to read the sources the Einsatzgruppen murders of 1941 were explicitly linked to anticipated food shortages by one of the planners.

When things were falling apart in 1944 Germany itself was starving and the average person was getting less than 2000 calories a day, even heavy laborers (who per Goebbels were already getting shorted food in 1942 and on average had lost 6kg from the pre-war period), so the rush to kill Jews toward the end of the war was still also related to the collapsing food supply, outbreaks of disease due to malnutrition and infrastructure collapse due to the bombing, need to steal resources from Hungarian Jews to finance the war, etc.

As to the claim that the Germans weren't fighting as hard as possible in 1944-45 I think the Allied soldiers who died by the millions in that period would disagree.

Was the food situation in Hungary and Romania much better than in Germany?

 

[sillygoose]

Was the food situation in Hungary and Romania much better than in Germany?

I don't know to be honest. I haven't tried to look specifically, but haven't seen any such references. Since both were more agricultural than Germany was and had fewer men conscripted or working in factories due to less industrialization. Plus they were out of range of bombing for much of the war too, which changed things as well. The anecdotal references I have been able to find indicate they really did not until 1944.

 

[WolfBear]

I don't know to be honest. I haven't tried to look specifically, but haven't seen any such references. Since both were more agricultural than Germany was and had fewer men conscripted or working in factories due to less industrialization. Plus they were out of range of bombing for much of the war too, which changed things as well. The anecdotal references I have been able to find indicate they really did not until 1944.

Interesting.

As a side note, do you believe that Hungary's decision to try and prematurely defect from the Axis was one of the stupidest since it resulted in over half a million Hungarian Jews getting murdered by the Nazis with the help of Hungarian collaborators?

 

[sillygoose]

Interesting.

As a side note, do you believe that Hungary's decision to try and prematurely defect from the Axis was one of the stupidest since it resulted in over half a million Hungarian Jews getting murdered by the Nazis with the help of Hungarian collaborators?

No, it was the smart play and would have been a great thing if pulled off, but the problem is German intelligence in Hungary was excellent so they were able to stop it. Had it worked then the war probably would have ended quite a bit sooner and we'd be praising Horthy.

 

[WolfBear]

No, it was the smart play and would have been a great thing if pulled off, but the problem is German intelligence in Hungary was excellent so they were able to stop it. Had it worked then the war probably would have ended quite a bit sooner and we'd be praising Horthy.

Would this have resulted in Hungary's borders being larger after the war?

 

[sillygoose]

Would this have resulted in Hungary's borders being larger after the war?

If they defected before Romania, yes. Not sure if they'd be allowed to retain Slovakia, but maybe if their defection resulted in a lot of Soviet success and it was before the Slovak uprising.

 

[WolfBear]

If they defected before Romania, yes. Not sure if they'd be allowed to retain Slovakia, but maybe if their defection resulted in a lot of Soviet success and it was before the Slovak uprising.

You mean southern Slovakia, right? And what about Northern Transylvania and the Northern Banat?