germany would have won the war

I thought Venezuela would win the war. For exactly the same reasons you give above.

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I think it safe to say that if there was no Barbarossa, then Germany would have continued to enjoy all of the fruits that it was receiving from the Soviet Union.

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

Yes, but for how long? This would really depend on Stalin's patience. I have no doubt that while Hitler and Stalin refrain from taking overt action, the two would be sharpening their knives to stab each other's backs.

It was this action that precipitated the expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations was it not.

v.R.

No argument there friend.

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

Slava, are you a closet Trotskyist too?

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How is this possible? Russia was responsible for the fighting of German units that otherwise would ahve forught the British and Americans in the west after D-Day. The Germans would have far more rescources that they wouldn't have committed to the Russian front. They could use these rescources to thier advantage against the UK and the US if it entered the war. The list goes on and on. There was a chance for HUGE successes if the USSR and Germany went neutral. But that is to say that they didn;t become allies...god forbid.

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Best Regards, Hufflepuff

Lets assume that Hitler for what ever reason decides to fight his own personal demons and decides not to invade the USSR, well for a start he could have committed more troops in North Africa, imagine the senario that an entire Army Group was transferred to North Africa and in conjunction to the Italians the British 8th Army was put up against say 40 to 50 divisions Axis divisions (within this 6 to 10 Panzer Divisions) and say an entire Luftflotte or two, Britain with all her resources could not possibly repulse this, Egypt would be Axis within weeks and that the Suez Canal would be in Axis hands, meaning that the entire Mediterannean is an Axis Lake, soon to fall would be Malta, Crete, Cyprus and of course in the end Gibraltar, this would also put the Vichy French firmly into the Axis fold.

I would expect that after achieving this the Axis would somehow make a major push into the Middle East and with an additional Army Group being landed in The Levant two major thrusts being launched into the Middle East. Axis gains the control of the Oil supplies of the Middle East, Britain is starved of vital oil supplies, Germany and Italy begin to establish Naval bases in the Indian Ocean eventually cutting all supply convoys from the east via the cape.

If the Soviets don't move into Iran then the Axis will, i could se the possibilities that the Axis could reach India by 1942. Once the British have been blockaded with the numorous Wolfpacks sinking any merchantman daring to enter the danger field, by 1942 i would suspect that Hitler would go for broke and launch total war on Britain, with an all out attack on Britain, also to end Hitler refuses to declare war on America after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the Western Axis has by this stage has a "Britain First" policy.

v.R

If the Axis couldn't supply the scarce forces it had in Africa, how can you expect them to supply and "entire Army Group". Never mind the losses, just think of the shipping required and that was simply unavailable.

This 'nostalgia for what wasn't' can be tiresome at times.

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Deleted post for personal reasons.

v.R

1. Hitler informed Molotov that Finland was Germany's only supplier of a number of very important raw materials, but Molotov argued that Finland was a "threat to the national security of the USSR".

2. Why did Stalin take Bessarabia? He must have known that the Romanian oil fields were essential to the German war effort. I know it was agreed upon in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but then we are no longer talking about appeasement anymore, this could only be seem as a preparation for war. Why would Stalin take the step and ask for Bessarabia? Did he know that would threat the only oil supply Germany had?

3. Why did Stalin make a pact with the Yugoslav rebels when the Nazi puppet was overthrown?

All of the above suggest that the USSR was preparing for a war, what would you have done if you were Hitler? The conflict between Germany and Russia may seem inevitable when you read Mein Kempf, but Hitler didn't write anything about having Japan as an ally or fighting a war against Britain, but it happened.

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The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue. - Napoleon Donaparte

All the mentioned parts of land were negotiated in the Ribbentrop pact. So the USSR was allowed to take them whenever felt the time was right. Hitler agreed to Stalin´s requests in 1939 because he needed the pact in Aug 1939 desperately, and believed everything would change one day back to normal, i.e. Barbarossa plan.

I am not sure why Stalin really made the pact with the Yugoslav´s but the Slav ties are always very close ( if they meant anything to Stalin ever really ).

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1. Yes. And?

2. Bessarabia was former Russian Crown territory.

3. Sorry, fill me in with details as I can't remember the issue right now.

I fail to reach your conclusion. As said before, the USSR felt the border was too close for confort to the country's second largest city so negotiations were seeked with the Finnish government. These negotiations failed (details unnecessary now) and Winter War ensued. Bessarabia was separatist national territory, what would you say if, for instance, California declared independence and joined Mexico, or Northern Irlend seceded and joined the Republic?

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Za Rodinu

On your last statement, pure Soviet propaganda, Supreme Soviet Joseph Stalin was just as big of a war monger as Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, Finland was a soft target, Stalin never forgave Finland from breaking away from Mother Russia, and neither did he forgive the Baltic, Byelorrusian and Ukrainian territories for doing the same, unlike the Baltic, Byelorusssia and Ukraine States. Finland fought back, told Stalin to shove his demands up where the sun don't shine, it had nothing to do with securing Leningrad. It mattered not if Germany declared war on the Soviets, the Soviets wanted Western Europe and given time it would have invaded Western Europe and have Communist states as far west as Ireland and Potugal and enslaved hundreds of millions and murdered tens of millions.

v.R

Von,
All of the information available on the matter would contradict such an observation. Stalin did not want to conquer Finland but only as Za correctly pointed out, to create a buffer zone for Russia's second largest city ( A legitimate reason as wars have been fought for less ). If Stalin wanted Finland, then he could have very well taken the opportunity of exacting revenge on the Fins as retribution for supporting Hitler and breaking the Moscow peace treaty but he did not. Instead, Stalin just took back the territories agreed upon after the Winter War between Finland and Soviet Union.

As for the Soviet Union taking over Western Europe, well that my friend has nor will ever be proven as there are no facts supporting it. I am afraid this is more of a myth created in the West.

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

And that explains why Stalin was so ticked off when, from his perspective, the western Allies let the Soviets and Nazi's pound it each other to bits for three long years, and then stepped in, in June, 1944, to pick up the pieces. His own strategy apparently used against him, LOL!

Sloniksp

Was it not that the Soviet Union after been rebuffed by an independant sovereign Finland over territorial demands finally invaded and it was during this invasion that the League of Nations finally booted the Soviet Union out of the League of Nations for it's unprovoked invasion of Finland.

Also how many of those Finish POW's in Soviet hands returned to Finland, not many. Stalin dealt with breakaway territoried harshly, out of the 50,000 sevice troops in the Baltic States that were rounded up, only a handful came out of the war alive, we are talking about a monster that under his reign of terror murdered around 25 million of his own citizens.

I do believe that come hell or high water Stalin would eventually invade Western Europe after the Western Powers beat the you know what out of each other.

v.R

If nothing else would have provoked the Soviets into attacking Hitler's Germany, this would have. The last thing Stalin wanted was to have German forces on the Soviet Union's southern flank, and Stalin would have reacted immediately to any such threat.

In any case, as another poster has pointed out, given the terrain in the Middle East, Germany didn't have the logistical capability to supply such forces overland (nobody did, except perhaps the United States), and the British Navy certainly would have put paid to any attempt to supply them by sea. Germany wasn't going to end up in control of the Middle East no matter what else happened; there were just too many powerful countries that would have violently opposed such a development. Even Axis ally Japan would have been very nervous about an event of that nature

As for Hitler "refusing to declare war on the US" after Pearl Harbor, that's pretty much a moot point because, one way or another, the US at war with one Axis partner will eventually go to war with the entire crowd, especially if the survival of Britain is at stake. the US already had a "Germany First" strategy before the Japanese attack on PH.

Oh, thank you for the pleasantries! This is not propaganda, this was the way how the problem was seen from the "other" point of view, but if you like to sound insulting, please go ahead and see me worry about that. On breakaways, I never saw any leader taking a kind view of nations breaking away from the mother country but you never know.

I had never looked at things this way. It may be somewhat distorted but anyway it's a good idea

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Take a look at the various Allied conferences held between 1942 and mid-1944. Stalin kept pushing for an invasion of Europe by the western allies to open up a "second front" against the Germans and take the pressure off his forces. The US wanted to launch one as quickly as possible, but the Brits kept dragging their feet, claiming the troops needed more training and that there simply wasn't enough logistical shipping to adequately support a major invasion. Stalin distrusted these claims and felt the British and Americans simply wanted to weaken the Soviet Union by letting it do most of the fighting against the Nazis. Whether this was true or not is debatable, but that's what Stalin suspected and, as it turned out, that's pretty much what happened. On the other hand, it meant that, post war, the Soviet Union was able to claim most of Eastern Europe as buffer states.

numerous books i have read all point to an eventual invasion of Russia upon Germany...whether this is a fact or not, i have never read this as a soviet plan....what i do know, is communism was ripe, and did plan for expansion....they favoured taking control or gaining territory what could be called diplomatically or with little military action i.e.Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland handed to them via Germany...whether an invasion of Germany was in the plans, maybe someone could help with this,,,,but if it was...what better time then waiting for A nation to blunder/weaken/lack defense after just facing a lenghty and costly war...hen armies have been ripped apart, ships sunk, and air-force shot to pieces...

Actually, if Germany had not invaded the Soviet Union they could have turned almost their entire Luftwaffe against the western powers, both over England as well as in the African theatre. As Taranto, the Bismarck, and the Pacific "naval" battles demonstrated, air power can easily defeat a naval power that doesn't have air superiority. You are right that the Axis powers didn't have enough transport capability to support their forces in Africa but this is because the Axis was losing a lot of those ships to Allied air and naval power that was superior to their own. With a few air fleets in southern Italy and North Africa the British navy could have been neutralized. And then, even with their smaller number of transports, the Axis could have supplied and augmented their forces in Africa. It is difficult to predict the future in these "what if"s but in this case I think the Axis would have stood a very good chance of taking over at least Egypt.

And, as already pointed, with Egypt comes the severing of the Suez canal for the Allies and this would pressure not only Vichy France to become an active ally of Germany, but also Spain would feel the pressure as well. Allied oil in the Middle East would now be under threat and the Mediterranean would become impossible for Allied naval elements to function in effectively, in the same way that it became unsafe to Italian ships after the actual Allied victory. How much further Germany and Italy could have gone is unclear to me but with the African theatre essentially shut down, Britain's stance as the lone opponent of Germany in Italy would have certainly become a lot more precarious.

I think such a preemptive attack by the Soviet Union on Germany would have been disastrous in the extreme for Stalin and the Soviets. Remember that the Red Army didn't become this conquering collosus until after a whole series of crushing tactical defeats in 1941 and 1942. The Red Army reformed itself because of these defeats. So, while the Red Army would have been a monstrously large force when Stalin would attack in this scenario, it wouldn't be that effective and I doubt it would have gotten very far before the Germans could transfer their troops to the new, Eastern Front. And now, in this scenario, Europe really would be united in a crusade against the Bolshevik hordes that now most Europeans would see as their common enemy. Conversely, the spirited nationalism that supported the Russians through the war would be far more difficult to inspire, given that the war was clearly started by the Soviets. In addition, the anti-Hitler movement among the military in Germany (and among the civilian population as well) would lose most of their basis, since Hitler's prophetic visions of a future war against the vile Bolsheviks would have been confirmed. The claim that the warmongering Hitler was leading them all to destruction wouldn't ring as true.

Now, the Red Army, even though far less effective than it was later on in the real war, would have still mauled the Germans badly and it still would have been a difficult war. But I think there would have been more of a chance that someone would take out Stalin, in the same way that Hitler was targeted by his own generals in 1944. Naturally, the course of the war would be affected by exactly when this hypothetical attack by Stalin on Germany would have occurred, and to what extent the Americans were involved with the British and other Allies, so I hesitate to say who would have ultimately won the war. However, I can say that if it ended up being a very long war of attrition, the Germans would certainly still lose the war. However, if the Germans could have finished off the Russians in one or two years, this would have certainly disheartened the Allies and if they didn't already possess the atomic bomb I could see WWII ending with a "cold war" of sorts between the Germans and the Americans.

In any case, as another poster has pointed out, given the terrain in the Middle East, Germany didn't have the logistical capability to supply such forces overland (nobody did, except perhaps the United States), and the British Navy certainly would have put paid to any attempt to supply them by sea. Germany wasn't going to end up in control of the Middle East no matter what else happened; there were just too many powerful countries that would have violently opposed such a development. Even Axis ally Japan would have been very nervous about an event of that nature

As for Hitler "refusing to declare war on the US" after Pearl Harbor, that's pretty much a moot point because, one way or another, the US at war with one Axis partner will eventually go to war with the entire crowd, especially if the survival of Britain is at stake. the US already had a "Germany First" strategy before the Japanese attack on PH.[/QUOTE]

Yes, Stalin took the land which Finland did not want to trade as he felt it was a matter of national security. Yes, Stalin was a bad man...... And yes Stalin wanted to spread communism to all of Europe after the Western Powers tore each other to pieces.

Whats your point?

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler