It could only be justified if you believed you represented the 'master race' or the 'vanguard of the proletariat' and that history was a 'science' and it's unfolding could be determined rationally. In other words if you're nuts.

OJ:

IIRC, the Pripet Marshes practically bisect Russia, and make a formidable natural barrier.

Meaning control all the way to the Pacific would be unnecessary.

Finally, the manual cite above is predicated on avoiding slaughter, not a particularly prominent part of Nazi theology.

The post is a giant non sequetor.

Hitler had no plans to "subjugate" the Slavs. He intended to exterminate them. You do know there is a difference between the two don't you?

daniel - Hitler intended to exterminate a lot of people, including all Christians. But he was politic enough not to reveal his intentions or to attempt all exterminations at once. Any revelation that he intended to exterminate the Slavs would have inspired fierce resistance - think the Warsaw ghetto, multiplied a thousandfold in numbers.

Hitler didn't want the entire Soviet Union. He was interested in a long term Lebensraum in Europe. So we're talking to the Urals here. He wanted the farmlands of Ukraine and the oilfields of the Causcasus, not Central Asia or Siberia. 20 million Russians died in the war. In case of victory, up this number.

In a German victory, there would be no need for Hitler to occupy much of Europe. There were already plenty of collaborators, and a Nazi victory would increase that. So no troops in France, the Low Countries or Scandinavia. Hitler also had plenty of allies in Eastern Europe: Hungarians, Croatians, Bulgarians, and Romanians. They can occupy themselves. What's left? Serbia and Greece? Even assuming need for troops, let Italy handle them for their reward as allies.

So we're only talking European Russia here. And even now the size and numbers are deceiving. The Finns and Baltics were all ostensible allies and sufficiently Aryan. There's also plenty of restive groups the Nazis can temporarily favor as well as larger groups who can actively collaborate, such as the Volga Germans.

I don't know the full details of the intended occupation in the East, but it would involve "rewarding" German veterans, especially SS, with land in the east. Presumably long term colonization would be helped through increased births from the Lebensborn program.

How successful would this be? And more important what would it mean for the US? Too many unknowns to fully guess.

However, we do know that the entire European economy is now integrated to support the Nazi war machine. Hitler now has control over both the Ploesti and Caucasus oil fields, as well as much influence in the Middle East. The prestige of victory bolsters support in not only his wartime allies, but all over Europe. Highly likely the returning Waffen SS recruits from Holland, Norway, France, etc. increase their countrie's allegiance to Hitler's New Order. Plus it will now be much harder for neutrals like Turkey, Sweden, or Spain to not be more pro-Hitler. And of course Germany has ballistic rockets and jets which the US doesn't have. And assuming the US still proves atomic weaponry is feasible, Hitler fires Heisenberg and puts someone better in charge of their atomic weapon program.

Seems to be me that even considering some troubles in the East, Hitler's resources are now greatly increased. In twenty years he took a defeated, dejected country and made them masters of Europe and prosperous to boot. He "saved" civilization from Bolshevism. I don't expect a fall in support anytime soon.

PJ, what would "fierce resistance" accomplish against a man-made famine similar to the Ukrainian genocide of the 1930s?

Fierce resistance by guerrillas in Warsaw was crushed in a matter of days by a defeated and retreating German army. Any modern urban area is only a few days from mass starvation. Establishing a cordon around a rebellious city reduces the inhabitants to cannibalism and rat eating in a matter of days. Disease sweeping through a population weakend by starvation does the rest.

Fierce resistance to occupation forces in Europe was a myth (except for Tito's guerillas). Collaboration was the reality. The countryside of eastern Europe is flat and provides no cover for guerilla operations. Kill sweeps by einzatsgruppen and later by the NKVD easily exterminated guerillas by exterminating the populations they relied on.

WTF? I can't make heads or tails of that post.

Chris,

All very good points. Had Germany won, by the 1950s the few remaining Slavs would have either escaped east of the Urals, be living like hunted animals hiding in the countryside or reduced to helot status on German plantations.

Mostly they'd be dead.

In a German victory, there would be no need for Hitler to occupy much of Europe. There were already plenty of collaborators, and a Nazi victory would increase that.

As a quick follow up to your point Chris, please note that collaboration was so extensive in Beligum (starting with its pro-German king) the Nazis required only a dozen admininstrators to manage occupied Belgium.

Gee, what a hard question.

How did Britain control 170 million Indians with 1,000 civil servants?

I guess that never happened.

Likewise, we "controlled" Hiroshima and Nagasaki in one day each, with no civil servants.

Harry;

so now you';re comparing the Soviets--who you yesterday had fightimng ;like tigers to defend their East German possessions--reduced to a docile Third World people under benign rule? Boy, you really do believe socialism superior to democracy.

Jeff:

So the Russians regroup on the other side and the Germans can afford to leave them there as overstretched as they are?

h;

Yes, that's how we could have controlled Moscow, though not all of Russia.

daniel:

No, what's the difference in terms of logistics and manpower?

No, what's the difference in terms of logistics and manpower?

The difference between what? The engineered famine was accomplished with a handfull of Chekists. Compared to the logistical requirements of the Holocaust (especially in terms of people killed) the Ukrainian famine was far more efficient.

There was nothing especially benign about the Raj, but most of the policing was done by the indigenes.

The Germans easily recruited millions of USSR citizens, the 'hiwis.' The death camp guards were not usually German. Orthodox Christian Jew bashers were easily recruited.

In most empires, the imperial possessor is interested in maintaining most of the conquered as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The Germans were unusual in that respect. They wanted to murder everybody.

It does not take a lot of manpower to police the dead..

Hitler also had plenty of allies in Eastern Europe: Hungarians, Croatians, Bulgarians, and Romanians. They can occupy themselves.

That is a useful reminder to those who bemoan the fate of the so-called victims of eastern Europe.

Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were minor Axis allies of Hitler and participated in the invasion of Russia.

The Poland of 1939 was an anti-Semitic, fascist military junta. It was not a democracy. The Poles, Balts, Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans actively and enthusiastically participated in rounding up the Jews for the Holocaust. One of the dirty little secrets of WWII is just how popular the Nazi's anti-Jewish policies were throughout occupied Europe. From Ukrainian concentration camp guards to Vichy police officials, the occupied peoples of Europe happliy helped with the Holocaust.

The only Axis member with clean hands was Finland, and they were not occupied by the Soviets.

We Americans owed the peoples of Eastern Europe nothing in 1945. They were either the enemy or collaborated with the enemy. We had no obligations to them whatsoever.

Scenario 1: A complete Nazi victory over the Soviets. Probable outcome: something similar to the Cold War, with Nazi hegemony over many nations much like the Soviet Union's, maintained through collaborators and puppet dictatorships supported by Nazi army divisions. But the fall of the Soviets would have prevented later Communist victories in China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. So we would have lost a few hundred million Europeans to tyranny, while gaining a billion Asians to liberty.

And then we would have won the Cold War against the Nazis the same way we won it against the Soviets, and now the whole world would be free, instead of China and other Communist backwaters posing a continuing threat.

Scenario 2: give the Soviets just enough aid to stave off the Nazis, while defeating Japan in the Pacific first. Soviet-Nazi stalemate exhausts both. We get nuclear bombs and dictate settlement terms to both: Communism lives in the Soviet Union but all Europe is free. Then we win the Cold War as we did.

These are at least plausible scenarios. Now, I agree that these might be worse for many Jews than what happened. However, the time to help the Jews was the 1930s, not 1945. FDR refused to give them a haven. The fate of the Jews cannot be used to rehabilitate FDR's WWII decisions.

This is all very interesting, but I still have no idea what Orrin was trying to say in the original post.

But the fall of the Soviets would have prevented later Communist victories in China

That is flat out wrong.

Stalin advised Mao not to try to take over China, he didn't think Mao could win (and he didn't want a rival Communist super state). Mao ignored Stalin and beat the incometent, decrepit and corrupt Nationalists all by himself.

No matter what the outcome in Europe, it had no effect on China. Mao would have won no matter what happened in Europe.

Scenario 2: give the Soviets just enough aid to stave off the Nazis, while defeating Japan in the Pacific first. Soviet-Nazi stalemate exhausts both. We get nuclear bombs and dictate settlement terms to both: Communism lives in the Soviet Union but all Europe is free. Then we win the Cold War as we did.

Whoa there cowboy. How does a stalemate result in the destruction of Nazism?

As for Lend Lease, while helpful, the Russians beat the germans on their own. What aid we sent them via Persia and Murmansk was a drop in the bucket compared to there own war production.

The one exception being medium and heavy trucks. Without these trucks the Red Army would not have been nearly so mobile as it was in the later stages of the war. The stunning success of Operation Bagration (the destruction of Army Group Center which occured at about the same time as the Normandy landings) was made possible by American trucks.

So if you want a stalemate on the Eastern Front, don't give the Russians more. Given them nothing.

daniel:

Nuking Moscow would have had no effect on whether other nations chose communism under similar threat? tee-hee...

What does nuking Moscow have to do with the point I was responding to, PJ's scenario of a Nazi victory over Russia?

And what exactly is the difference between millions of people being killed by Stalin and millions of people being killed by OJ?

Daniel: Lend lease, particularly in 41, 42 and 43, allowed the Russians to keep fighting and to ramp up their own production. It was not by any measure a minor factor. In particular, we supplied enough food to feed 12 million men for the entire war and about 40% of the explosives for the ammunition that the Russans used. The planes we supplied early in the war robbed the Germans of air superiority. The steel and trucks we supplied were the only reason the Russans were able to produce much in the way of armor. The trucks, in particular, were the equivalent of giving them a fully staffed, supplied and equiped light truck manufacturing facility. The Russians did the fighting and the dying, and more power to them, but Lend Lease was probably a necessary component of that victory.

Lend Lease may have been a necessary compnent of victory, but it wasn't necessary to prevent defeat. From an operational analysis:

The subject of Lend-Lease and other aid to Soviet Union during W.W.II has been the subject of considerable discussion. Opinions vary, even amongst the Russians, as to the effect of this Allied assistance on the Eastern Front.

The first question to be considered is; did Lend-Lease prevent the defeat of the Soviet Union? Probably not, the most important defensive battles were fought and won, before the arrival of large amounts of Allied aid. The survival of the Soviet Union was secured essentially with its own resources. The campaigns during the summer to the end of 1942, were definitely influenced by the Lend-Lease materials received until the Soviets production was brought up to capacity and then was further enhanced.

This brings forward the final question to be considered. Was Lend-Lease the factor that enabled the Soviets to win their war with Germany? A qualified yes. An examination of the types and volume of aid the Russians received very strongly supports this view. The enhancements to all aspects of Soviet mobility provided by large numbers of U.S. trucks can not be overstated. Most importantly, the Soviet logistics system was considerably augmented by the large numbers of trucks received. Each successive Soviet offensive launched in the second half of the war required longer and longer preparation times. This was primarily due to logistics difficulties caused by longer and longer lines of supply. Any serious reduction of the number of trucks available would have increased greatly the preparation time for each Soviet offensive.

Soviet ammunition shortages were almost entirely eliminated by Lend-Lease shipments of munitions. Were these shipments not made, ammunition supplies would have been an inordinately large factor in Soviet doctrine and planning. The resulting shortages of ammunition would certainly have led to even further delays of Russian offensives. Allied transfers of non-military items, such as food, enabled the Soviets to release large amounts of manpower for direct military use. This made it possible for the Russians to stave off manpower shortages until late in the war. All things considered without Lend-Lease the Soviet Union would probably have only been able to liberate its own territory by the time the Allies eventually defeated Germany.

daniel:

Dead Russians to create a Communist dictatorship is bad. Dead Russians to end one is good.

daniel:

Yes, even absent Lend Lease Hitler couldn't take Russia, as we've been saying. But absent Lend Lease and a Western Front Stalin couldn't have taken Hitler either.

Containment (what we actually did) to end Communist rule without any dead Russians was even better.

Daniel: Wargamer.com? Seriously?

I prefer to stand with Marshall Zhukov, who said:

Speaking about our readiness for war from the point of view of the economy and economics, one cannot be silent about such a factor as the subsequent help from the Allies. First of all, certainly, from the American side, because in that respect the English helped us minimally. In an analysis of all facets of the war, one must not leave this out of one's reckoning. We would have been in a serious condition without American gunpowder, and could not have turned out the quantity of ammunition which we needed. Without American "Studebekkers", we could have dragged our artillery nowhere. Yes, in general, to a considerable degree they provided our front transport. The output of special steel, necessary for the most diverse necessities of war, were also connected to a series of American deliveries.

Or, better yet, Zhukov as secretly recorded by the state security organs in 1963 and discovered in his file after the fall of the USSR:

It is now said that the Allies never helped us . . . However, one cannot deny that the Americans gave us so much material, without which we could not have formed our reserves and could not have continued the war . . . we had no explosives and powder. There was none to equip rifle bullets. The Americans actually came to our assistance with powder and explosives. And how much sheet steel did they give us? We really could not have quickly put right our production of tanks if the Americans had not helped with steel. And today it seems as though we had all this ourselves in abundance.

Containment = Zero Dead Russians but also = 45,000 Dead Americans in Vietnam = Many Dead Americans in Korea. Not to mention the costs to our economy and society to maintain it over 50 years.

Containment may have worked out all right in the end but that did not make it a wise policy.

Containment was in fact a disaster domestically.

David:

Now you've done, we'll need the soft restraints for Harry...

I hate the Germans as much as any but to think that even Hitler wanted to or could kill every Slav is flat out wrong. Look at the numbers of civilans actually killed. Other than Jews, no majority of any large population was exterminated, not even in Russia.

The Germans certainly wanted to reduce these people to slavery but who would have worked in the mines or worked in the factories or grown the wheat?

In the Yalta threads, DD thought the Russians were invincible. Now they couldn't have even beaten the Germans without Lend Lease. Sort of proves OJs points.

Germany failed to defeat the USSR in September-October 1941. Lend Lease had nothing to do with that.

Without Lend-Lease, the death struggle would have lasted a lot longer -- to Orrin's glee, I guess -- but the outcome would not have changed -- Germany would never have defeated Russia. As Manstein says, Germany's best hope was for stalemate in the east, a standdown and organization of her conquests in the west.

Eventually, Russia would have rolled Germany out of Russia, Poland etc.

The US could, by then, have dropped Abombs here and there, though it is insane to think that it would have.

But that's hindsight. Orrin is wrong to say that Americans did not want war in Europe. My father, among many, chose a military career before Pearl Harbor because he opposed the dictators.

By the time he had helped dispose of 3 of them, the 4th was too powerful to attack.

Orrin's views boil down to this: bolshevism wa so weak it had to fall of its own dead weight, but it was strong it was worth destroying half of Europe to get rid of it.

Anonymous's point that no one would have seen any reason to fight for Eastern Europeans is right both in prospect and in retrospect.

No one at the time thought it worth the bones of a Pomeranian or any other kind of grenadier for those evil, hopeless countries; and knowing what we know now, nobody's opinion needs to be revised.

My grandparents opposed war in Europe. So that's 80-20%

I know I'm a little late to this, but doesn't preventing the extermination of the Jews of Europe count as a reason to have gotten involved, even if that reason was unknown at the time. Not to mention femme gays, gypsys, and other undesirables.

While it's a pity that we couldn't save the Kulaks, too, you have to pick your battles.

Am I hearing what I think I'm hearing up there? Tell me this is an academic exercise.

Seriously David.

Before you go all ad hominem on me, kindly take the time to actually read the article and review its impressive list of source documentation.

The reality remains as follows:

The Nazis failed to defeat the Russians ouside of Moscow before America was even in the war.

The Russians defeated the Germans at Stalingrad a year later before Lend Lease supplies were significant. At this point the Germans could not have defeated Russia.

Once Lend Lease became significant, the critical supply was medium and heavy trucks. These made true mobile operations for the Red Army possible, operations like Bagration in the Summer of 1944.

Without Lend Lease, logisitical constraints would have slowed down and limited the extent of any Soviet counter-offensive. As such it is doubtful that the Russians would have reached Berlin before the Americans.

Unless, however, the Wehrmacht transfered more divisions from defending against the ponderous Russians to stop the rapid Americans. In which case, the war would have lasted until 1946, with greater loss of Allied lives - including American GIs.

Containment = Zero Dead Russians but also = 45,000 Dead Americans in Vietnam = Many Dead Americans in Korea.

Do you think America would have been able to go to war with Russia in 1945 and not suffer any casualties?

Not to mention the costs to our economy and society to maintain it over 50 years.

So how much is a human life worth to you in terms of percentage of GNP? Do you really think we would have no world wide military committments and costs after WWII? Do you really think America could have returned to a pre-war isolationism?

Containment was in fact a disaster domestically.

How so?

Containment = Zero Dead Russians but also = 45,000 Dead Americans in Vietnam = Many Dead Americans in Korea.

Do you think America would have been able to go to war with Russia in 1945 and not suffer any casualties?

Not to mention the costs to our economy and society to maintain it over 50 years.

So how much is a human life worth to you in terms of percentage of GNP? Do you really think we would have no world wide military committments and costs after WWII? Do you really think America could have returned to a pre-war isolationism?

Containment was in fact a disaster domestically.

How so? How many people did containment kill domestically?

In the Yalta threads, DD thought the Russians were invincible. Now they couldn't have even beaten the Germans without Lend Lease. Sort of proves OJs points.

Bob, your historical ignorance doth exceedeth OJ's. The massive victorious Red Army of 1945 and the Yalta was not the same animal as the battered and decimated defenders of 1941.

Seven:

No. No one is saying it wasn't good that Hitler was stopped from killing Jews, gypsies, Christians, etc. before he was finished. But since we didn't fight him in order to stop him the question is was fighting him at the cost of merely replacing him with Stalin the best course of action.

We Americans owed the peoples of Eastern Europe nothing in 1945. They were either the enemy or collaborated with the enemy. We had no obligations to them whatsoever.

Nobody except Harry has addressed this point, and he agreed with it.

Any of you Nazi lovers, er I mean FDR haters, care to dispute this point?

daniel:

Yes, well into the 50s we could have done the regime without American casualties.

Yes, we've always returned to a fairly non-interventionist posture. It's impossible to put a dollar figure on the 100 million dead we allowed the Communists after WWII.

45 million so far.

The Russians are magicvally transformed into mythical fighting beastsat the precise point FDR, Harry and daniel choose to feed them Eastern Europe...

Yes, I'll address it. FDR made the same point at Yalta--he too hated the Germans, Poles and other Eastern Europeans and pretty much figured they deserved whatever they got. May as well have let Hitler do it.