Did the SS and Einsatzgruppen ruin "Operation Barbarossa"?

[wm]

Exactly, especially that the main railway lines leading to the front were relatively easy to protect. And the Germans were very innovative in devising new, frugal ways of doing that.

As to the rotten structure, I think I've never seen any contemporary, pre-war Polish source saying that. It was obvious the USSR had its problems but they were the results of the forced industrialization. It was assumed the problems would be overcome, and then the USSR would become a true and dangerous power.

The were persecutions, but enormous opportunities were available too. Those millions that benefited from them was the backbone of the USSR.

The Soviet people were told and usually believed\accepted that the hardship and the sacrifices were temporary and for good reasons, that a bright future awaits them later. And it was happening, the life there was improving, although slowly. Maybe frequently they hated their leaders, but liked and believed in communism anyway, contemporary sources saying exactly that, even from Ukraine have survived.

There were no indications that the USSR was rotten. Hitler simply deceived himself and others.
During Barbarossa, the German officers observed with delight that the Soviet buildings hadn't been maintained/repaired for years, the Soviets were poor, without shoes, badly clothed. In their eyes those proved the country was rotten.
But the maintenance money wasn't squandered, the money was going to arrive shortly as tens of thousands tanks, artillery pieces, and planes.

[David1819]

Barbarossa? No. (The mediocrily executed, very poorly prepared, poorly planned) Barbarossa was stopped by RKKA through force of arms.

Really? Could they have executed it any better? considering they had none of communication/satellite and navigation technology we have today.

Within the first week 600,000 Red Army troops killed or captured, 3500 Red airforce planes destroyed and advancing 300 miles into Russian territory. Buy 5th of December 1941 - 20,000 Russian tanks destroyed 21,000 aircraft destroyed and over 4 Million red army troops killed or taken prisoner.

I would not call it mediocre. But SS and Einsatzgruppen activity must have contributed to stiffer resistance and russians uniting against them would the rumors not spread through the USSR that the Germans are machine gunning people in pits and all the other brutal acts they committed? would surely result in a calls for arms?

[amcl]

I would not call it mediocre. But SS and Einsatzgruppen activity must have contributed to stiffer resistance and russians uniting against them would the rumors not spread through the USSR that the Germans are machine gunning people in pits and all the other brutal acts they committed? would surely result in a calls for arms?

I'm struggling to see why you think the actions of the SS & Einsatzgruppen behind German lines had much immediate impact on resistance in front of German lines. Not only that, but this smacks of the old, long-discredited "good army, bad SS" narrative. Wouldn't the actions of the army have mattered more, especially as news filtered back concerning the treatment of PoWs? While the USSR's propagandists would have come up with something, even if the Germans had behaved in a restrained manner, for once the plain truth offered them more than sufficient material for their needs.

Angus

[wm]

The Soviets knew what the Soviet propaganda told them, there were no independent sources of information there. And they had been told the Nazi were evil incarnate for a long time already.
The battle hymn of the Soviet Republics written a mere month after the beginning of the war starts by:

Arise, vast country,
Arise for a fight to the death
Against the dark fascist forces,
Against the cursed hordes.

We shall repulse the oppressors
Of all ardent ideas.
The rapists and the plunderers,
The torturers of people.

They really didn't need any Einsatzgruppen. They were told the Germans were Huns, oppressors, plunderers, rapists, torturers from the day one.

[BDV]

The Soviets knew what the Soviet propaganda told them, there were no independent sources of information there. And they had been told the Nazi were evil incarnate for a long time already.
The battle hymn of the Soviet Republics written a mere month after the beginning of the war starts by:
Arise, vast country,
Arise for a fight to the death
Against the dark fascist forces,
Against the cursed hordes.

We shall repulse the oppressors
Of all ardent ideas.
The rapists and the plunderers,
The torturers of people.
They really didn't need any Einsatzgruppen. They were told the Germans were Huns, oppressors, plunderers, rapists, torturers from the day one.

The mileage of this propaganda piece depends on the individual ethnic group. While Russians from the Oka-Volga basin might have been very gung-ho (see Zoia Kosmodemyanskaia), Crimea tartars, for example, were less than moved.

But a properly executed divide-and-conquer takes patience/time and skill.

[BDV]

Really? Could they have executed it any better? considering they had none of communication/satellite and navigation technology we have today.

Within the first week 600,000 Red Army troops killed or captured, 3500 Red airforce planes destroyed and advancing 300 miles into Russian territory. Buy 5th of December 1941 - 20,000 Russian tanks destroyed 21,000 aircraft destroyed and over 4 Million red army troops killed or taken prisoner.

This was not the socialist competition in prisoner-taking and assets destruction. It was a war, and the success is judged against goals. Tho, between planning, preparation, and execution, the Barbarossa execution was probably left least to be desired. Still, german generals' discombobulated pursuit of shiny objectives/flag planting instead of the (clearly outlined in Directive 21) needed soviet force elimination is a glaring failure.

I would not call it mediocre. But SS and Einsatzgruppen activity must have contributed to stiffer resistance and russians uniting against them would the rumors not spread through the USSR that the Germans are machine gunning people in pits and all the other brutal acts they committed? would surely result in a calls for arms?

Men had been machinegunned into pits much before the Nazi invasion. Too, women and children.

[Sheldrake]

There is an interesting book on the "hunger war" which looks at the role of food in World War two.

Germany starved during the First World War. Allied (British) interdiction of imports of fertiliser meant that Germans did not get enough to eat. Hitler's strategy for WW2 was to ensure that others starved before the Germans. During the Russo German pact train loads of grain were sent to Germany.

One of the objectives of operation Barbarossa was to seize the Ukraine and settle it with German farmers to grow grain for Germany. The implications of this would be that the Russians would starve. A corollary was that eliminating 6 million "useless mouths" would reduce the pressure on German food supplies.

If this is so, the answer is no. The SS and Einzatzgruppen did not ruin Barbarossa, they were the embodiment of this monstrous project.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Sheldrake,

Well put!

Sid.

[wm]

Before the war it was estimated Germany needed 8 million hectares to achieve self-sufficiency. It was 3.5% of the total Russian arable land, or 43% of the Polish arable land.
So really it can't be said that one of the objectives was the settlement in Ukraine, or it was a war about land - Germany didn't needed so much land. It was at best a secondary objective.

Even more the locals were producing the badly needed food themselves, without any help form Germany's peasants, and there were only 9 million of them anyway. Not enough to populate Russia or even Ukraine, especially as they were badly needed in German factories.
Even before the war many Poles were working in German's agriculture because of that.

The settlement was a distant dream, and a multi-decade nebulous project. It didn't conflict with a short-time goal of gaining support of the Soviet people for the war.

The main problem was, Barbarossa didn't have enough resources to feed the Soviet population, as the Hague conventions required, especially assuming the inevitable destruction brought by war and the inevitable Soviet scorch earth efforts.
The Nazis didn't have enough food to feed them, so it follows they didn't have enough resources to buy their support too.

[David1819]

One of the objectives of operation Barbarossa was to seize the Ukraine and settle it with German farmers to grow grain for Germany.

That was part of Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East) that would be executed once Soviets where defeated

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

You write, "Before the war it was estimated Germany needed 8 million hectares to achieve self-sufficiency. It was 3.5% of the total Russian arable land, or 43% of the Polish arable land."

Leaving aside whether these unsourced statistics are accurate or not, it misses the point.

The Drang nach Osten and Lebensraum were not about self sufficiency, they were about building a local empire to match the "white" British Old Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, plus the USA. The Nazis weren't content that Slavs should grow food for them under German rule. Their long-term intention was that the Slavs should be displaced by German farmers, much like British settlers had displaced the indigenous populations in most of North America and Australasia.

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

Well, this is about Barbarossa, not the post Barbarossa plans, formulated after the decision to attack the USSR had been made.
Barbarossa was implemented after Churchill had rejected the offer of peace talks, and the Battle of Britain had been lost.
And suddenly Germany found itself in an extremely unfavorable strategic position, with no winning strategy in sight.
So the Generalplan Ost, Drang nach Osten, Lebensraum were at best secondary objectives.
Self sufficiency, autarky was Hitler's goal for a long time, and more or less attainable. The Lebensraum up to the A-A line was an unattainable distant dream.

The Soviet POVs, the Jews, the Ukrainians in Kiev were dying not because of Drang nach Osten, but because der Backe-Plan demanded they were starved:

1) The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
2) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation

Many tens of millions of people in this country will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone […] prevent the possibility of Germany holding out till the end of the war.

Efforts to save the population from death by starvation by drawing on the surplus of the black earth regions can only be at the expense of the food supply to Europe. They diminish the staying power of Germany in the war and the resistance of Germany and Europe to the blockade. There must be absolute clarity about this... A claim by the [local] population on the German administration... is rejected right from the start.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_Plan

The source of the 8 million hectares claim was the Institute of Business Cycle Research (IfK) report from 939 via The Wages of Destruction.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

Nazi planning for the settlement of Germans in the East predated Barbarossa.

Yes, "Barbarossa was implemented after Churchill had rejected the offer of peace talks and the Battle of Britain had been lost." However, preliminary planning for it was first ordered in late June 1940 and firmed up on 19 July.

No, Germany was in an extremely advantageous strategic position at the end of 1940. It had only one enemy in the field - the British Empire. Had Hitler pursued a Mediterranean strategy in 1942, it had every chance of overrunning the British position in the Middle East. It is arguable that at that stage "Generalplan Ost, Drang nach Osten, Lebensraum" should have been "secondary objectives", but mistakenly weren't.

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

So the Third Reich would be built with millions of poor Poles and Jews, the tiny Czechia with its incomprehensible language, the mountainous and cold Norway, a part of France, and the distant sands of Egypt.
I think it would be a rather pathetic empire, composed of territories invariably poorer than Germany (itself bordering on economic bankruptcy and implosion at that time), and still under the British and American blockade.

Bordered by the getting stronger and stronger Soviet Russia - only four hundred miles from Berlin. A country armed with a dangerous ideology, that would spread like cancer all over the new but impoverish empire. A country which leaders were finally getting its acts together.
This arrangement doesn't look stable, and ready to survive the next thousand years.

[BDV]

Czechia with its incomprehensible language

I am amiss to what exactly is achieved by this type of ethnically-disparaging comments.