Hitler And His Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945 from Stalingrad to Berlin

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Excludes an additional 395,799 who were deemed unfit for service due to non-combat causes, transported out of their Army Group sectors for treatment, and treated in divisional/local medical facilities. 98% of those 395,799 eventually returned to active duty service, usually after relatively short treatment, meaning about 8,000 became permanent losses. Askey 2014, p. 178. Rich, Norman (1973). Hitler's War Aims: Ideology, the Nazi State, and the Course of Expansion. W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0233964768. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, was signed on June 28, 1919. Germany’s newly formed democratic government saw the treaty as a “dictated peace” with harsh terms.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson reports that before the war came to its conclusion, the Soviets had an artillery advantage over the Germans of seven-to-one and that artillery production was the only area where they doubled U.S. and British manufacturing output. [156] Menger, Manfred (1997). "Germany and the Finnish 'Separate War' Against the Soviet Union". In Wegner, Bernd (ed.). From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the World, 1939–1941. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-57181-882-9. At first, the Germans enjoyed stunning success, the panzers forged ahead, while the Luftwaffe ruled the skies. Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed or captured in huge encirclement battles. Germany seemed to be on the brink of another major victory. Weinberg, Gerhard (2005). A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521618267. Ingrao, Christian (2013). Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine. Malden, MA.: Polity. ISBN 978-0745660264.Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Just four days later, he met privately with top military leaders to attempt to win their support. This was especially important because the military had historically played a very important role in German society and therefore had the ability to overthrow the new regime. The results of these policies were catastrophic. The murder squads shot and gassed between 1.5 and 2 million people by the end of 1942: most victims were Jews, but Communists, people with disabilities, and suspected partisan s were also murdered . Over 2 million POWs and untold numbers of civilians died from starvation, exhaustion, exposure, and disease. Millions more were put to forced labor in tens of thousands of camps throughout Germany and the occupied territories. Hundreds of villages, towns, and cities were deliberately laid waste. Not all military personnel agreed with Nazi policy. Some protested while others actively rescued Jews. While these honorable individuals constituted a statistically small minority, they demonstrated that it was possible to resist and help Jews, even in the disciplined and authoritarian army structure. Main articles: Finnish reconquest of Ladoga Karelia (1941) and Finnish reconquest of the Karelian Isthmus (1941) Finnish troops advancing in Karelia in August 1941

Hastings, Max (2012). Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945. New York: Vintage. ISBN 978-0-30747-553-4.

9. Joachim von Ribbentrop

Baudot, Marcel; Bernard, Henri; Foot, Michael R.D.; Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf, eds. (1989). The Historical Encyclopedia of World War II. New York and Oxford: Facts on File. ISBN 978-0-671-24277-0. They're going to invade with about 3 million men and they expect the total Soviet army to be roughly the same. Whereas in actual fact by Christmas 1941, German armies have captured three million Soviet soldiers and they're still fighting.

a b c d The four Soviet military districts facing the Axis, the Baltic Military District, the Western Special Military District, the Kiev Special Military District and the Odessa Military District, at the outbreak of the war were renamed the Northwestern Front, the Western Front, the Southwestern Front and the Southern Front, respectively. A fifth military district, the Leningrad military district, became the Northern Front. [378] Halsall, Paul (ed.). "Modern History Sourcebook: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 1939". Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Fordham University . Retrieved 20 April 2021. Roberts, Andrew (2011). The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 978-0-06122-860-5.Glantz and House use the expression "The Great Patriotic War", which is the Soviet name for the Second World War—but this term represents by and large, the contest between the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany. The early capture of Moscow would have had an undeniable psychological impact and may have been the tipping point. Guderian in particular believed that using the panzers in traditional encirclement battles played into Russian hands and gave them chances to bring forward fresh reserves. He had advocated an all-out drive on the capital. But when Hitler resumed the assault with Operation 'Typhoon' it was too late. The German Army was now fatally weakened, the weather had worsened and Soviet reinforcements had arrived. GERMAN INTELLIGENCE FAILURES International Committee of the Red Cross. "Treaties, States parties, and Commentaries – Part VIII: Execution of the Convention – Article 82". ihl-databases.icrc.org.

The offensive was over, but looking at the whole picture as Barbarossa came to a halt Germany still seemed to be in a good position. Army Group North was sure that the besieged Leningrad was about to fall. Army Group Centre were at the gates of Moscow and Army Group South had taken the Ukraine and Kiev. When the new year came they planned to finish the job, however little did they know the Soviets had an ace up their sleeve. It is additionally important that considerable portions of the German General Staff thought of Russia as a "colossus of clay" which was "politically unstable, filled with discontented minorities, ineffectively ruled, and militarily weak." [85] On the 22nd of June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of a campaign that would ultimately decide the Second World War. Adolf Hitler committed suicide 76 years ago today, on April 30, 1945, in a bunker underneath his headquarters in Berlin. According to witnesses, Hitler swallowed a cyanide capsule, then shot himself in the head. A short time later, the Third Reich surrendered to the Allies. On V-E Day — May 8, 1945 — OSS officer and future CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms found a piece of Hitler’s stationery and wrote a letter of reflection to his 3-year-old son describing his feelings about the end of the war. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (20 June 2014). "Nazi Persecution of Soviet Prisoners of War" . Retrieved 24 March 2015.

The German army first encountered the Einsatzgruppen in Poland in 1939, to the consternation of some generals. For example in February 1940, Johannes Blaskowitz, German military commander for the eastern territories, complained about the SS policy of slaughtering some 10,000 Jews and Poles, which he believed would hurt Germany. He argued that such actions strengthened enemy propaganda about German atrocities, united Jews and Poles against Germany, weakened the respect of the Wehrmacht, and led to the spread of mass depravity among Germans. He urged that those units found guilty of carrying out such murderous actions be held accountable by military authorities. Weeks, Albert (2002). Stalin's Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939–1941. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-2191-9. In addition, a few high-ranking German officers participated in the unsuccessful plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. Yet this effort must be seen as an attempt to regain control of the war effort before Germany was destroyed rather than as an attempt to halt the Holocaust. Indeed, some of the conspirators themselves were deeply implicated in the army’s complicity in the Holocaust. The “Clean Wehrmacht” Myth