General Paulus was an idiot also. Afraid not to obey orders and let die more then 250.000 men who were before under his command before. Trying to safe his own nuts, he let them die and not was trying a breakout....
Hitler was an idiot and a racist and his Mother had his mustage also ( hahaha) As militaire a small brain with tactics. Thank God for that!
Stalin was one of the biggest fuck shit basterds we (till now) have known.
The next one is probably a Muslim dictator, using the believe to get power and can kill as much as he like. Look our history... its so easy to say, we are the shit of the world, but why we follow sick basterds like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and so on? I am sad...
His Mother did not have a moustache. But yes, I think maybe he had an obsession with just "overwhelming" the enemy, when that's the complete opposite of what the German Military is designed to do. It's designed to encircle, destroy, and crush using Mobility, not land invasion via troops.
I see some of you, try to proclaim that the German Wehrmacht suffered from overconfidence when invading the soviet union.
Well it was not the Army's overconfidence that led to operation Barbarossa. There is on person, and one person alone that can be held accountable for the German invasion of the Soviet union, namely Adolf Hitler. Acting against the expressed advice form his military commanders.
@stianby The decision to invade the USSR was Hitler's political prerogative, so he is "accountable". Yes: there were commanders, like Raeder and Goering, who actually did advise against it (on military not moral grounds), and war diaries do show others having private reservations, but the general staff as a whole willingly acquiesced because they thought they would win. It was Hitler's baleful influence on field commanders and his operational interference they were unhappy about :-)
Wath i´d newer understand is , why dident England and France declare war against the Sovjet union aswell as Germany, i mean they too attacked Poland ???, And they attacked a tiny Finland, it is a bit hypocratic in my wiev !
And the American posision is even worse, despite all their grand words and pointing fingers at others they teamed up against one diktator against another, i can understand why England did as they did, they did not have a choice at that time , standing all alone, but later ??
This documentary tries to justify German failure against Russia...If they hadn't sent Panzers here or there, loosing fire power and so on..Who knows history good knows this..It's the Red army who won the war..D-Day, Market garden etc..ALL the western allies operations can't compare in numbers with a single Russian-German battle like Stalingrad...and there were so many of them...You CAN NOT diminish Russian Red army and all the hell they went trough to set your necks free..You should thank them..
@jogertennis The Red Army ultimately prevailed against the forces deployed against them, and the Germans lost: no reasonable assessment would belittle the suffering and struggle of the Soviet people to achieve that. OK: the Red Army "played a major role" in the German defeat, but it is not historically sensible to dismiss the contribution of the western allies (such as 'lend lease') to the Soviet war effort, and there are also other variables such as Hitler's baleful influence :-)
For the Germans to have taken England: They needed to have captured the 300,000 British Spartans and not let them pony on back to England. The Germans also needed a flotilla to quickly transport their troops and material across the channel. Alternatively, the Germans could have parachuted 3 divisions onto the beaches. England would have been defenseless. The u-boats would have been very useful in blockading the Americans supplies.
03030303 "Hitler never would have successfully taken England." Militarily, Germany could easily have taken England right after Dunkirk. With the Germans in England, how could the Americans have stepped up their efforts to prevent it without the British Isles giant staging areas?
My college history professor thought that Hitler's greatest blunder was not taking England.
I visited the Royal Museum in London and read articles depicting how close England came to surrendering. Indeed, after Dunkirk, they did not have enough armor to field a single division. Germany lost the air battle for Britain when it stopped bombing the radar antennas that provided critical coordination for its air defense. Likewise, they allowed the expeditionary force to escape back to England.
If you, like the Germans, attack a county ten times is size and three times its population without any logistic plan, you cant talk about logical decisions.
@aon10003 I think the German Invasion of Russia was just a simple case of overconfidence. Hitler had swept to easy victory in every land campaign thus far and the Russians ineptness in the Finnish Winter War of 1940 may have led him to believe that the regime would topple easily if put under pressure. I also think that if the Germans had not spread a reign of terror across the occupied territories, then they would have gained many useful allies in their war against Stalin's corrupt regime.
@MrRhar1 Ayway Thanks for uploading. It explains the hard fight that the german army fougth on the way to stalingad in a way that a guy with picturememory can understand.
@MrRhar1 I agree. Overconfidence. If Hitler had been of a higher military calibre -- someone who'd had experience devising large scale military operations -- he'd NOT have attacked both West & East simultaneously.
No matter how mighty you are -- & Germany was, from 1935 to 1942 -- fighting 2 mighty wars, each requiring ultimately millions of men + millions of tons of resources, on 2 opposite fronts, each involving enemies with X # of times more people than you, it's next to impossible to win.
@HenryDavidT what's with your timeline there sailor? 1935 to 1942? To mighty wars? don't confuse annexations and political muscle-flexing with all out warfare.
Of course, no one is saying Hitler should have been more intelligent & should have won.
Imagine:
If Hitler had won --- which meant the Japanese, too, would've won --- then the Germans would've been Europe's "master race" & the Japanese would've been Asia's "master race". Their respective plantations & slaves (okay, let's be less dramatic & let's just call them "good & obedient colonized people") would really have been LARGE enough to have sustained TWO 1,000-year empires spanning the globe!
@MrRhar1 What you say is sensible, and pressure was not applied with clearly prioritized objectives; rather than being a war of liberation from communism it was more an effort to enslave Slavic peoples. For instance, the German army was initially well received by Ukrainians generally, but that was before they met Eric Koch, the Reichskommissar. General Gehlen said that his administration was so brutal that even a paid Soviet agent could not have done better at alienating the people :-)
@MrRhar1 Not really...it was inevitable. Germans knew that Stalin had plans to expand in Europe that's why they needed to make peace with USSR to focus on France and Britain. The parting of Poland was a sort of bribe but Hitler knew it wasn't enough for Stalin. Had Hitler defeated Britian, he could have defeated Stalin as well. But Hitler had no choice but to fight the war on two fronts which cannot be won due to lack of resources and men. Stalin's won because of US support.
They had the plans , the big problem was the lack of speed , and later the partisan thick backlands the suply routes went throug , but A Hitler should have left the mater of warfare to those of his briliant generals instead of taking comand himself , but thank heaven for that he did so, or else i fear we all would have speaking german at this point !!
@Holgerdanske12 My comment about lack of logistic plans come from Martin van crevelds book War and supply who is claimed to be standard education book in Westpoint.
Yes ,they did have a plan in the sence that they expected the Soviet Union to collapse after the first month.
Hitler forgot or disbelieved a few things about Russia, Stalin was as brutal as he was, "General" Winter, the capabilities of the T34 tank, capabilities and numbers of female soldiers and more importantly that Russians were HUMAN BEINGS...
And still they were so close, had Hitler not interfered, but left the matter of war to his Generals, and had they started a month before with Barbarosa so they had reach Moskva before the mud and frost got them bugged, well then who knows ???????
If the Germans were to have avoided the catastrophes of winter 1942-43, they would have had to make some key strategic decisions before the onset of winter. That is, ask questions like, 'Should we still go after Stalingrad or call it off?' Making changes in strategic plans during winter would have been equivalent to a hanging convict trying to undo the nooze. Too little, too late.
Stalingrad was nothing more than an attempted propaganda prize. There was no real military need to take it when they tried, and the fact that Hitler insisted on staying put despite the lack of proper winter clothing and the risk of encirclement makes it clear it had no purpose but to gain a propaganda victory. If the city had been named ANYTHING else but STALINgrad he would have allowed retreat until better equipped, and in a better position to lay siege to a city.
@Dr1Canuckchuck I agree with you, Stalingrad was a important propaganda moment for both Hitler and Stalin.
One of the leading German Generals (can't remember his name) was asked after the war as to which battle had been the most important one. Everyone expected him to say The Battle Of Stalingrad in 1942, but he actually said The Battle Of Britain in 1940. England became a land base for all the Allied campaigns that followed. None of these would have occurred without that victory.
I think the general's name was Gerd von Rundstedt.
...and he was right (To the chagrin of the Soviet generals)
It's amazing that Hitler had allot of military geniuses at his disposal but simply was too stupid to properly use them.
That's why Churchill cancelled the planned assassination attempt on Hitler out of fear that his place would be taken up by somebody who knows how to properly conduct a war.
@tamenga88 Hitler's influence as warlord was baleful, but he was not stupid: with an impressive memory for military detail and a ruthlessly successful politician, he recognized that the only force capable of removing him was the German Army, which is why he assumed offices within it, and belittled others, that were not otherwise the concern of a head of state. Your point on Churchill is germane: his purpose was the utter military defeat of Germany, not simply a removal of Nazism :-)
@MrRhar1 Yeah: thanks for the tip: I lost the thread: I tried going through FM VR's interview with the March 1946 'Intelligence Bulletin': nothing doing, and I can find no reference any where else to his ever having said any such thing. In the absence of a checkable source, I wish people would refrain from the assertion of vague recollection as if it were fact :-)
@MrRhar1 England was really the most important piece Hitler needed to conquer. For if he conquered Britain, Stalin cannot be supplied by ships from US;he controls the sea. Hitler will have the Middle East under his control (more than enough oil) and is now possible for him to implement the double envelopment tactic as originally planned (strike on north by armies group-north,center, and south....and another strike from the oil-rich south led by Rommel which will capture Russia's oil.
@Dr1Canuckchuck Hitler became obsessed with taking the City because Stalin's military fame was based on his pretended defence of it during the civil war. However, when "blue" began it was seen merely as a culmination of preliminary actions to destroy the Red Army west of the Don, and strangle the Soviet war economy by closing the Volga to traffic. This could have been done had Hitler not vacillated at Voronezh, diverted 4 Pz Army south and unleashed a Caucasus attack prematurely
@Dr1Canuckchuck Stalingrad was a strategic area aside from being something of political importance because of the name. The city was the key to disrupting a major USSR supply line. If you capture the city, you get to control the river which was being used by Russians to supply its men and machines. T'was Hitler who insisted though despite complaints from his generals to bypass and attack it later Sebastopol-style.
General Paulus was an idiot also. Afraid not to obey orders and let die more then 250.000 men who were before under his command before. Trying to safe his own nuts, he let them die and not was trying a breakout....
vliegendehollander55 2 weeks ago
5.26 min. Hitler never was defeded England...
vliegendehollander55 2 weeks ago
Hitler was an idiot and a racist and his Mother had his mustage also ( hahaha) As militaire a small brain with tactics. Thank God for that!
Stalin was one of the biggest fuck shit basterds we (till now) have known.
The next one is probably a Muslim dictator, using the believe to get power and can kill as much as he like. Look our history... its so easy to say, we are the shit of the world, but why we follow sick basterds like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and so on? I am sad...
vliegendehollander55 2 weeks ago
@vliegendehollander55
His Mother did not have a moustache. But yes, I think maybe he had an obsession with just "overwhelming" the enemy, when that's the complete opposite of what the German Military is designed to do. It's designed to encircle, destroy, and crush using Mobility, not land invasion via troops.
RyanBrooksby 3 days ago
I see some of you, try to proclaim that the German Wehrmacht suffered from overconfidence when invading the soviet union.
Well it was not the Army's overconfidence that led to operation Barbarossa. There is on person, and one person alone that can be held accountable for the German invasion of the Soviet union, namely Adolf Hitler. Acting against the expressed advice form his military commanders.
stianby 4 weeks ago
@stianby The decision to invade the USSR was Hitler's political prerogative, so he is "accountable". Yes: there were commanders, like Raeder and Goering, who actually did advise against it (on military not moral grounds), and war diaries do show others having private reservations, but the general staff as a whole willingly acquiesced because they thought they would win. It was Hitler's baleful influence on field commanders and his operational interference they were unhappy about :-)
elrjames777 3 weeks ago
This has been flagged as spam show
Thanks alot for these video's - I really appreciate being easily able to find a History documentary on youtube.
fujifour 1 month ago
Thanks alot for these video's - I really appreciate being easily able to find a History documentary on youtube.
fujifour 1 month ago
Wath i´d newer understand is , why dident England and France declare war against the Sovjet union aswell as Germany, i mean they too attacked Poland ???, And they attacked a tiny Finland, it is a bit hypocratic in my wiev !
And the American posision is even worse, despite all their grand words and pointing fingers at others they teamed up against one diktator against another, i can understand why England did as they did, they did not have a choice at that time , standing all alone, but later ??
Holgerdanske12 1 month ago
This documentary tries to justify German failure against Russia...If they hadn't sent Panzers here or there, loosing fire power and so on..Who knows history good knows this..It's the Red army who won the war..D-Day, Market garden etc..ALL the western allies operations can't compare in numbers with a single Russian-German battle like Stalingrad...and there were so many of them...You CAN NOT diminish Russian Red army and all the hell they went trough to set your necks free..You should thank them..
jogertennis 1 month ago 3
@jogertennis The Red Army ultimately prevailed against the forces deployed against them, and the Germans lost: no reasonable assessment would belittle the suffering and struggle of the Soviet people to achieve that. OK: the Red Army "played a major role" in the German defeat, but it is not historically sensible to dismiss the contribution of the western allies (such as 'lend lease') to the Soviet war effort, and there are also other variables such as Hitler's baleful influence :-)
elrjames777 3 weeks ago
@jogertennis
You should thank Britain and US and France for distracting Germany.
Don't take all the credit, without weapons from the west Russia wouldn't have done shit to Germany.
RyanBrooksby 3 days ago
A Tragic Defeat for All Germanic Peoples,A Bloody Victory for the Barbaric Slav,But It Cost The Slav an Ocean of Blood,Therefore,A "Pyrrhic" victory.
thomasg74 2 months ago
For the Germans to have taken England: They needed to have captured the 300,000 British Spartans and not let them pony on back to England. The Germans also needed a flotilla to quickly transport their troops and material across the channel. Alternatively, the Germans could have parachuted 3 divisions onto the beaches. England would have been defenseless. The u-boats would have been very useful in blockading the Americans supplies.
wayne487msc 2 months ago
03030303 "Hitler never would have successfully taken England." Militarily, Germany could easily have taken England right after Dunkirk. With the Germans in England, how could the Americans have stepped up their efforts to prevent it without the British Isles giant staging areas?
wayne487msc 2 months ago
My college history professor thought that Hitler's greatest blunder was not taking England.
I visited the Royal Museum in London and read articles depicting how close England came to surrendering. Indeed, after Dunkirk, they did not have enough armor to field a single division. Germany lost the air battle for Britain when it stopped bombing the radar antennas that provided critical coordination for its air defense. Likewise, they allowed the expeditionary force to escape back to England.
wayne487msc 2 months ago
@wayne487msc
Yeah but USA would have stepped up their efforts more forcefully if England had fallen.
Hitler never would have successfully taken England.
03030303 2 months ago
Comment removed
CarpeDiemFS 2 months ago
If you, like the Germans, attack a county ten times is size and three times its population without any logistic plan, you cant talk about logical decisions.
aon10003 3 months ago
@aon10003 I think the German Invasion of Russia was just a simple case of overconfidence. Hitler had swept to easy victory in every land campaign thus far and the Russians ineptness in the Finnish Winter War of 1940 may have led him to believe that the regime would topple easily if put under pressure. I also think that if the Germans had not spread a reign of terror across the occupied territories, then they would have gained many useful allies in their war against Stalin's corrupt regime.
MrRhar1 3 months ago 4
@MrRhar1 Ayway Thanks for uploading. It explains the hard fight that the german army fougth on the way to stalingad in a way that a guy with picturememory can understand.
aon10003 3 months ago
@MrRhar1 I agree. Overconfidence. If Hitler had been of a higher military calibre -- someone who'd had experience devising large scale military operations -- he'd NOT have attacked both West & East simultaneously.
No matter how mighty you are -- & Germany was, from 1935 to 1942 -- fighting 2 mighty wars, each requiring ultimately millions of men + millions of tons of resources, on 2 opposite fronts, each involving enemies with X # of times more people than you, it's next to impossible to win.
HenryDavidT 3 months ago
@HenryDavidT what's with your timeline there sailor? 1935 to 1942? To mighty wars? don't confuse annexations and political muscle-flexing with all out warfare.
stianby 4 weeks ago
Of course, no one is saying Hitler should have been more intelligent & should have won.
Imagine:
If Hitler had won --- which meant the Japanese, too, would've won --- then the Germans would've been Europe's "master race" & the Japanese would've been Asia's "master race". Their respective plantations & slaves (okay, let's be less dramatic & let's just call them "good & obedient colonized people") would really have been LARGE enough to have sustained TWO 1,000-year empires spanning the globe!
HenryDavidT 3 months ago
@MrRhar1 What you say is sensible, and pressure was not applied with clearly prioritized objectives; rather than being a war of liberation from communism it was more an effort to enslave Slavic peoples. For instance, the German army was initially well received by Ukrainians generally, but that was before they met Eric Koch, the Reichskommissar. General Gehlen said that his administration was so brutal that even a paid Soviet agent could not have done better at alienating the people :-)
elrjames777 1 month ago
@MrRhar1 Not really...it was inevitable. Germans knew that Stalin had plans to expand in Europe that's why they needed to make peace with USSR to focus on France and Britain. The parting of Poland was a sort of bribe but Hitler knew it wasn't enough for Stalin. Had Hitler defeated Britian, he could have defeated Stalin as well. But Hitler had no choice but to fight the war on two fronts which cannot be won due to lack of resources and men. Stalin's won because of US support.
IMNODOCTOR 1 month ago
@aon10003
They had the plans , the big problem was the lack of speed , and later the partisan thick backlands the suply routes went throug , but A Hitler should have left the mater of warfare to those of his briliant generals instead of taking comand himself , but thank heaven for that he did so, or else i fear we all would have speaking german at this point !!
Holgerdanske12 1 month ago
@Holgerdanske12 My comment about lack of logistic plans come from Martin van crevelds book War and supply who is claimed to be standard education book in Westpoint.
Yes ,they did have a plan in the sence that they expected the Soviet Union to collapse after the first month.
aon10003 1 month ago
Hitler forgot or disbelieved a few things about Russia, Stalin was as brutal as he was, "General" Winter, the capabilities of the T34 tank, capabilities and numbers of female soldiers and more importantly that Russians were HUMAN BEINGS...
rescyou 1 month ago
@aon10003
And still they were so close, had Hitler not interfered, but left the matter of war to his Generals, and had they started a month before with Barbarosa so they had reach Moskva before the mud and frost got them bugged, well then who knows ???????
Holgerdanske12 4 weeks ago
If the Germans were to have avoided the catastrophes of winter 1942-43, they would have had to make some key strategic decisions before the onset of winter. That is, ask questions like, 'Should we still go after Stalingrad or call it off?' Making changes in strategic plans during winter would have been equivalent to a hanging convict trying to undo the nooze. Too little, too late.
Waterflux 4 months ago
Stalingrad was nothing more than an attempted propaganda prize. There was no real military need to take it when they tried, and the fact that Hitler insisted on staying put despite the lack of proper winter clothing and the risk of encirclement makes it clear it had no purpose but to gain a propaganda victory. If the city had been named ANYTHING else but STALINgrad he would have allowed retreat until better equipped, and in a better position to lay siege to a city.
Dr1Canuckchuck 5 months ago
@Dr1Canuckchuck I agree with you, Stalingrad was a important propaganda moment for both Hitler and Stalin.
One of the leading German Generals (can't remember his name) was asked after the war as to which battle had been the most important one. Everyone expected him to say The Battle Of Stalingrad in 1942, but he actually said The Battle Of Britain in 1940. England became a land base for all the Allied campaigns that followed. None of these would have occurred without that victory.
MrRhar1 5 months ago
@MrRhar1
I think the general's name was Gerd von Rundstedt.
...and he was right (To the chagrin of the Soviet generals)
It's amazing that Hitler had allot of military geniuses at his disposal but simply was too stupid to properly use them.
That's why Churchill cancelled the planned assassination attempt on Hitler out of fear that his place would be taken up by somebody who knows how to properly conduct a war.
tamenga88 5 months ago
@tamenga88 Hitler's influence as warlord was baleful, but he was not stupid: with an impressive memory for military detail and a ruthlessly successful politician, he recognized that the only force capable of removing him was the German Army, which is why he assumed offices within it, and belittled others, that were not otherwise the concern of a head of state. Your point on Churchill is germane: his purpose was the utter military defeat of Germany, not simply a removal of Nazism :-)
elrjames777 3 weeks ago
@MrRhar1 Did you make enquiries to find out which general it was: I would be interested to know: thank you :-)
elrjames777 1 month ago
@elrjames777 As mentioned in the comment above yours - the General's name was perhaps Gerd von Rundstedt ?.
MrRhar1 1 month ago
@MrRhar1 Yeah: thanks for the tip: I lost the thread: I tried going through FM VR's interview with the March 1946 'Intelligence Bulletin': nothing doing, and I can find no reference any where else to his ever having said any such thing. In the absence of a checkable source, I wish people would refrain from the assertion of vague recollection as if it were fact :-)
elrjames777 3 weeks ago
@MrRhar1 England was really the most important piece Hitler needed to conquer. For if he conquered Britain, Stalin cannot be supplied by ships from US;he controls the sea. Hitler will have the Middle East under his control (more than enough oil) and is now possible for him to implement the double envelopment tactic as originally planned (strike on north by armies group-north,center, and south....and another strike from the oil-rich south led by Rommel which will capture Russia's oil.
IMNODOCTOR 1 month ago
@Dr1Canuckchuck Hitler became obsessed with taking the City because Stalin's military fame was based on his pretended defence of it during the civil war. However, when "blue" began it was seen merely as a culmination of preliminary actions to destroy the Red Army west of the Don, and strangle the Soviet war economy by closing the Volga to traffic. This could have been done had Hitler not vacillated at Voronezh, diverted 4 Pz Army south and unleashed a Caucasus attack prematurely
elrjames777 1 month ago
@Dr1Canuckchuck Stalingrad was a strategic area aside from being something of political importance because of the name. The city was the key to disrupting a major USSR supply line. If you capture the city, you get to control the river which was being used by Russians to supply its men and machines. T'was Hitler who insisted though despite complaints from his generals to bypass and attack it later Sebastopol-style.
IMNODOCTOR 1 month ago