Most important resources of World War 2

That's not the question : there were NO mass surrenders on Soviet side in 1941 and later;this indicates that the existing opposition to the regime was very weak before the war and became more weak during the war.


And yes : they had a choice : if millions of Soviet soldiers wanted to surrender because of hostility to the regime, they would have done it . Millions of Russian soldiers deserted in WWI, this would also have been possible in WWII .

There are no cases of mass surrender in WWII caused by opposition to the ruling regime :all these surrenders were caused by the hopeless military situation ,as in Stalingrad and Tunis .

No one forced the defenders of Brest Litowsk to fight to the last man .

 

You can't fool us, you know way too much of the war to pretend, you never heard of the soviet commissars. Why did no other army needed something like that?

German troops were welcomed as liberators everywhere in the first months of the war. Not only in the Ukraine and White Russia but even in Georgia, where Stalin comes from. Goebbels regarded it as one of the biggest mistakes of Hitler and him, to treat the soviet people like animals and not showing them a perspective to fight for.

 

It is not true that the Germans were everywhere welcomed as liberators: this was limited to the regions who were annexed by the SU between 1939/1941 : the Baltics and Eastern Poland . If they were everywhere welcomed as liberators, the SU would have collapsed in the summer of 1941, which it did not . In june the Ostheer lost 40000 men and in july 160000. Very quickly the Germans mentioned that the Soviets did fight fanatically . And this was not caused by the presence of the commissars,who had as mission to take care of the political reliability of the officers and to spread communist propaganda,but this was irrelevant in war time : soldiers do not fight for political aims . :ONE commissar for a company could not force 200 men to fight .

When the Germans adopted this system in 1943 with the introduction of the NSFO, it did not cause a stiffening of the German resistance .

In wartime soldiers are not interested in politics .

 

After the Russian civil war, the émigrés arrived in Western Europe with a lot of horror stories for which there was no proofs and 20 years later these stories ,meanwhile amplified, were accepted eagerly by the German population and the political and military leadership : the German were obsessed by the danger of communist partisan warfare behind the lines,directed by political commissars and decided to shoot them immediately when they became POW,an other benefit would be that without the political commissars the Soviet soldiers would be more willing to surrender .

As usual, reality debunked the perception : there was no partisan fighting during Barbarossa and the Soviet soldiers did not surrender in great numbers .

There are even no proofs that the commissars were fanatical communists and that their existence did influence the attitude of the Soviet soldier .

It was the same with the NSFO : Hans Helmut Kirst was a NSFO and after the war a pacifist writer .

 

This is a wrong perception : hostility to the Soviet regime (which existed ) does not mean willingness to fight with the Germans against the Soviet regime .

 

"Many russians regarded the germans initially as liberators":
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/vernichtungskrieg-im-osten-die-institution-wehrmacht-war-an-allen-verbrechen-beteiligt-1.1111250-3

800000 Russians, 280000 Caucasians, 250000 Ukrainians and 100000 Latvians were collaborators. Mainly in the SS.

The russians expected a friendly occupation, like they experienced it in the first World War.

 

1) This is more than questionable as it would have influenced the the attitude of the Russians soldiers in the Sowjet Army = they would have deserted

2) There were no 400000 Russians in the SS and even if 800000 Russians collaborated, this does not prove that they regarded initially the Germans as liberators .


3 ) As in WWI the German occupation of France and Belgium was not friendly at all (thousands of civilians were murdered in 1914 ), I don't see why the German occupation in the East would have been friendly .

 

Men and shipping were pretty important. I've been reading the Green books, and according to the Global Logistics and Strategy Volume, even in mid-1943 the Allied planners believed that a cross-channel attack in the Spring of 1944 was logistically impossible due to lack of shipping and build-up of men, and that a target date of summer 1945 or possibly Spring 1946 was the realistic date the British were targeting.

 

As of 22 July 1944, there were 358,830 HiWi serving in the Feldheer. More served with the Ersatzheer and with the other services. They were normally former Soviet (not necessarily Russian) POW.

At about the same time there were 350,000 "foreign volunteers" serving in units with the Wehrmacht.

As of April 1943, OT included 458,783 foreigners in its ranks, 70% of its total strength.

A large fraction of the Waffen-SS were foreigners.

The inference is at least 1.15 million foreigners, many of them Soviets, served in the Wehrmacht. Most of them served in combat, combat-support, or combat service support roles and at least 700,000 served in combat or combat support.

 

Oh that population growth was an error on my fault. I assumed it when seeing a SU census between 1939 and 1941 on wikipedia(at least I learned from my mistake ).

 

I really would like for you to showcase how The Harvest of Sorrow was "cold war propaganda" considering that Robert Conquest had heavy involvement from the Harvard Ukrainian Institute and involvement from the Ukrainian government.

Living conditions may have been well in the city, but not in the rural areas, fortunately for a dictatorship like the SU, they could easily hide it in those areas, where the peasants were extremely poor, illiterate and had virtually no contact with the outside world.

 

The obvious answer is men driven by the most common instinctive desire to survive.
One can eliminate all the natural resources and it ultimately comes down to man's will.
Wanta raise the odd's of winning? Get on your knees before going to battle.

 

The obvious answer is men driven by the most common instinctive desire to survive.
One can eliminate all the natural resources and it ultimately comes down to man's will.
Wanta raise the odd's of winning? Get on your knees before going to battle.

 

This is NOT true. German troops were welcomed as liberators in Western Ukraine (Galicia region). These are actually the same Ukranians who are in power today thanks to the coupe. They were also welcomed in the Baltic States (and NOT by everyone) small parts of Belarus and in Chechnya. They were most certainly NOT welcomed in Russia and even in Poland, where large parts of the population joined the Red Army not the Wehrmacht when given the chance.

The Bolshevik Revolution, was a peasant revolt against the elite. Had the majority of the population not supported the Soviet regime, the Bolshevik Revolution would have failed. As stated earlier, the life of a Russian peasant in 1937 was FAR better than it had been 20 years prior.

The Russians didn't fight for Stalin or the Soviet Regime, they fought first and foremost for "Mother Russia". Every Russian knows this. Many that aren't Russian seem to have a difficult time understanding.

Both Hitler and Goebbels considered the Slavik race "sub-human". Their racially ideology prevented them from anything else. Had they acted differently, that wouldn't have been very Nazi of them....

Commissars went away by late 43'.

 

Actually the number of Russians who fought for the Gerrmans is closer to 1 million. They all fought for a turn coat General Vlasov. He was captured by the Germans after the Battle of Moscow and decided to collaborate. All who fought under him were called "Vlasovtsi" by Russians. The term was synonymous with "traitor" the remnants of his army was caught in Romania by the Red Army. His soldiers were sent to the gulags while Vlasov and his senior officers were tried and hanged for treason (rightfully so).

It must also be mentioned that the soldiers who joined his ranks were all POWs.... Soviet POWs were treated very poorly (to say the least). Many that joined his ranks simply didn't want to starve.

As for Ukraine, I already stated in my previous post... These numbers came from the Western Part of the country. There were far more Ukrainians that voluntarily fought under the Red banner.

As for "Caucasians" they were Chechens. The same people who fought the Russians in the mid 90s under "Jihad" slogan with many pledging allegiance to Osama Bin Laden, with some becoming his personal body guards.

The Latvians weren't the only ones. All of the Baltic States (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) contributed men. They were not Russian or even Slavik but Finnish. They were treated the best out of all the collaborators mainly for that reason....