Some thoughts on the seventieth anniversary.
All Hitler had to do was not be as bad as Stalin. The Ukrainians initially welcomed the Nazis as liberators.
But being a fellow leftist, he couldn’t manage it.
2 thoughts on “Operation Barbarossa”
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I think a big mistake that Hitler made was deviating from the original battle plans to take the oil fields in the Caucasus. Had he simply chose to lay siege to Stalingrad and once fully contained went ahead and pushed across the Don river into the heart of Russia’s oil fields then they could have cut off the pipelines and starved the Russians out. Instead he became obsessed with doing the same thing he did to Warsaw and completely level the city and mow down everyone left standing in it. But this sacrificed his most experienced soldiers in needless street fighting. Also a great deal of material and man power was wasted IMHO on the construction and use of massive 800mm mortars that were used to level entire city blocks.
This is also a good post on the topic:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/22949.html