jeger wrote:The Soviets i 1944 had to bring the war in Finland to a standstill in order to be able to concentrate upon Berlin and East Europe.
Remember the peace treaty between Finland and Soviet-Rusland was not signed in 1944 as some people seem to think, but in Paris in 1947 after the war was over.
Jeger
Well the peace maybe yes, but the armistice does count, doesn't it? If you don't get an armistice in 44' to secure flanks, you cannot launch an attack on the center. The fact is the Red Army followed its part of the armistice, otherwise the Finns could have opt to fight on. If Romania could have gotten another armistice, well, the only way the Red Army could attack was on center.
Do you think only the Western Allies wanted to get closer to Berlin than the Russians? My perspective is that Stalin envisaged a bitter fighting on flanks and wanted to avoid it. He also might have decided to "breathe more air" and put a soft end to ostilities with the Germans. He always considered the West as his true enemies (although these considered him as an "ally") than the Germans. Remember they were socialists, too. Maybe he expected them to hold a little more so he could spare them a little to fend off the Western Allies, while he could build up enough force to smash all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Why didn't he want to lead the Victory Parade? Because that was no victory for him.
Stalin always wanted the war to last longer, not shorter. Bleeding the West was his reason of supporting the Germans. In 43 he could be confident about winning the war against Axis. But that's not his only war.
Creating some apparent stalemate conditions in 44 could have been a devious way of using the Deutsches Reich as a "buffer state", weak and incapable of challenging USSR, but strong enough to keep the allies at bay until Soviet Union mounts its final assault.
Most of the time the Soviet Union wanted to appear weaker than they were, because this ruse was their usual disguise. From '44 on they switched to boasting and threatening, as they did with minor eastern nations. Why? Because they understood they have been exposed. The Polish exile government was going to break diplomatic ties with Soviets, a lot of other nations joined the antibolschewik war effort and, provided the Reich was not going to lead such a coalition, there was "the danger" that a lot of European minor states could go rogue upon Soviet Union, unconditionnal surrender or not. They had nothing to lose. In fact, a lot of them wanted the Western Allies to come and militarily occupy them. Just to be sure the Soviets don't.
So Stalin suddenly has a lot to gain if Hitler stays more in power (I think the Wehrmacht fully understood that, that's why they got as close as getting against Hitler as they could) so the Soviet Union can get out of its attrition war and prepare for the "real war" they had in mind: the war against the West.
My thoughts about Hitler's suicide is as follows: he wasn't afraid of Russians killing him or torturing him physically. He was afraid of them "killing" him politically - because he wanted to remain as an ideological inspiration after his death. He feared the most that Stalin could get and put him as "kommisar" for Germany, effectively killing his alleged "legend" and making him hated by the Germans on the spot. He never understood that the Germans were not the national-socialists he wanted them to be.
Stalin could have kept him as a governor of defeated Germany until he was deemed as not needed anymore and could have been disposed by trial and execution, or forced labour for life as "redemption". That was "the communist way".