Hitler And His Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945 from Stalingrad to Berlin

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Rössler, Mechtild; Schleiermacher, Sabine (1996). Der "Generalplan Ost." Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (in German). Akademie-Verlag. Kirchubel, Robert (2005). Operation Barbarossa 1941: Army Group North. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84176-857-1. Germany's allies, in total, provided a significant number of troops and material to the front. There were also numerous units under German command recruited in German-occupied Europe and sympathetic puppet or neutral states, including the Spanish Blue Division, the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism, and the 369th Croatian Infantry Regiment. Hastings, Max (2012). Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945. New York: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-30747-553-4. Less than a thousand T-34s were available at the start of 'Barbarossa' and most were squandered in piecemeal actions by half-trained crews. But the Red Army could absorb significant losses of equipment as well as men. The mass mobilisation of Soviet industry had been set in train, which included relocating vital tank, aircraft and munitions factories eastwards to the Urals. This huge logistical undertaking was already bearing fruit. It meant that despite the early defeats, the Soviet Union was far better prepared for a long war than the Germans, whose own production of tanks and other weapons would be feeble by comparison. GERMAN LOGISTICAL PROBLEMS

Following the outbreak of war, the Nazi regime stiffened up policies, laws, and penalties for civilians and military personnel accused of undermining morale, sabotage, or espionage. Hitler believed that draconian measures would prevent Germany from experiencing another November 1918, when Imperial Germany signed the armistice ending World War I. The Wehrmacht dramatically increased the number of military courts responsible for trying such cases from less than 300 in December 1939 to almost 700 in 1944. Scholars estimate that German military courts passed some 33,000 death sentences against soldiers and civilians. In World War I, the German military issued 150 death sentences, of which it carried out only 48 executions. Mosier, John (2006). Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German War Machine, 1918–1945. New York: Henry Holt & Co. ISBN 978-0-80507-577-9.Hillgruber, Andreas (1965). Hitlers Strategie (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Bernard & Graefe Verlag für Wehrwesen. OL 6021187M. Breitman, Richard (1991). "Himmler and the 'Terrible Secret' among the Executioners". Journal of Contemporary History. 26 (3/4): 431–451. doi: 10.1177/002200949102600305. JSTOR 260654. S2CID 159733077. See also: Operation München and Battle of Brody (1941) General Ewald von Kleist (left), commander of the 1st Panzer Group, inspects a large iron works facility in Ukraine, 1941. The German high command consisted of Adolf Hitler, the War Ministry—after February 1938, the Armed Forces High Command ( Oberkommando der Wehrmacht , OKW)—and the high commands of the three services: the air force ( Luftwaffe ), the navy ( Kriegsmarine ), and the army ( Heer ). Despite its name, the OKW was not a unifying command organization; the other services maintained their independence, with the Army High Command ( Oberkommando des Heeres , OKH) and its General Staff holding a dominant position. Forczyk, Robert (2009). Leningrad 1941–44: The Epic Siege. Oxford, UK: Osprey. ISBN 978-1-84908-107-8.

Krivosheev, G. F. (1997). Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century. Greenhill Books. ISBN 978-1853672804. On the 22nd of June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of a campaign that would ultimately decide the Second World War. Overy, Richard (2006). The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia. London and New York: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-39332-797-7.

Resistance

During World War II, the German military helped fulfill Nazism's racial, political, and territorial ambitions. Long after the war, a myth persisted claiming the German military (or Wehrmacht) was not involved in the Holocaust and other crimes associated with Nazi genocidal policy. This belief is untrue. The German military participated in many aspects of the Holocaust: in supporting Hitler, in the use of forced labor, and in the mass murder of Jews and other groups targeted by the Nazis. Historian Victor Davis Hanson reports that before the war came to its conclusion, the Soviets had an artillery advantage over the Germans of seven-to-one and that artillery production was the only area where they doubled U.S. and British manufacturing output. [156]

Förster, Jürgen. "Operation Barbarossa as a War of Conquest and Annihilation". In Boog et al. 1998. Weeks, Albert (2002). Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939–1941. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-2191-9.From the start, there was cooperation between the army and the Nazi Party’s elite paramilitary wing, the SS . Before the invasion of Poland, the army provided the SS with lists of individuals who might resist German occupation. The SS made use of those lists to embark on a program to annihilate the Polish intelligentsia, including political leaders, priests, and even school teachers. Some senior army commanders objected, briefly and ineffectually, but for the most part, the army decided that this was a “political” matter in which it should not interfere. The German military knowingly supported the Einsatzgruppen, which worked in the rear of the German lines in the east as mobile killing units.

The whole strategy is a resumption of the Blitzkrieg idea that's been so successful in France, that is you win by not fighting. If you want to find out more about Blitzkrieg and how it works I've put a link to our video on the subject in the description. Ueberschär, Gerd R.; Müller, Rolf-Dieter (2008). Hitler's War in the East, 1941–1945: A Critical Assessment. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1845455019. After Kiev, the Red Army no longer outnumbered the Germans and there were no more trained reserves directly available. To defend Moscow, Stalin could field 800,000 men in 83 divisions, but no more than 25 divisions were fully effective. Operation Typhoon, the drive to Moscow, began on 30 September 1941. [290] [291] In front of Army Group Centre was a series of elaborate defence lines, the first centred on Vyazma and the second on Mozhaysk. [265] Russian peasants began fleeing ahead of the advancing German units, burning their harvested crops, driving their cattle away, and destroying buildings in their villages as part of a scorched-earth policy designed to deny to the Nazi war machine needed supplies and foodstuffs. [292]

a b c d The four Soviet military districts facing the Axis, the Baltic Military District, the Western Special Military District, the Kiev Special Military District and the Odessa Military District, at the outbreak of the war were renamed the Northwestern Front, the Western Front, the Southwestern Front and the Southern Front, respectively. A fifth military district, the Leningrad military district, became the Northern Front. [378] In the two years leading up to the invasion, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the codename Operation Otto). Over the course of the operation, over 3.8 million personnel of the Axis powers—the largest invasion force in the history of warfare—invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800mi) front, with 600,000 motor vehicles and over 600,000 horses for non-combat operations. The offensive marked a massive escalation of World War II, both geographically and with the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, which brought the USSR into the Allied coalition. Dear, Ian; Foot, M. R. D., eds. (1995). The Oxford Guide to World War II. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-534096-9.