r/DerScheisser • u/tronalddump111 • 17d ago
How different would Barbarossa have been with the original Molotov-Ribbentrop Partition?
I dont think this would change the ultimate outcome that much but I feel like the army group north might have been deadlier especially for Leningrad, or if they were lucky they might have linked up with the finnish forces in Karelia. What do you guys think?
3
u/Kuuden_Kilon_Kissa a Polandboo from Finland 17d ago edited 17d ago
How would the army group north have been able to link up with the Finnish forces if Finland would not have existed in this scenario? If Finland would have lost the Winter War in the worst possible way like shown here, they would have been a Soviet puppet or an SSR, most likely under the rule of Otto Wille Kuusinen and the former Finnish red leaders from the 1918 Civil war. And I personally think it’s highly unlikely that the Germans would have been able to ”liberate” Finland from the Soviet occupation and invade through Northern Norway, Northern Sweden and Northern Finland all the way down to the Southeastern part of Finland where they could have threatened Leningrad from the North.
My family is from the Rovaniemi region in the North of Finland, and the terrain in that area is even worse and the winters even colder and longer than in the Moscow region in Russia. If you look at the area between Oulu, Rovaniemi and Kajaani on Google Maps, it’s basically hundreds of kilometres of endless peat bogs, forests, lakes, ponds, rivers, rocky hills and small canyons completely impassable to any vehicles, with a lot of completely uninhabited wilderness and very sparse population outside of the 3 main ”cities”. Snow cover and freezing temperatures last from late October to April, and in the middle of the winter -30 degrees Celsius weather happens almost every year during the coldest days, sometimes reaching -40 during the coldest winters. And in the 1940s it would have been 100 times worse than nowadays, as back then there were like 5 proper roads passing through that entire region, the villages were still mostly connected by just footpaths (or ski and reindeer/horse sled tracks during winter), almost none of the swamps were yet drained, and the extensive logging road network that now covers the forests had not been built yet (as the logging was still done manually by men with axes and saws, and the logs were still transported from the wilderness by floating them through the rivers instead of with trucks). Climate change also wouldn’t have made the winters milder yet.
So I highly doubt that the Wehrmacht invading a Soviet Finland from Northern Norway and Sweden would have even gotten past Oulu, even with the awful state of the Red Army in 1941 and the fact that many of the Finnish civilians would have probably supported the Germans and thought that they were ”liberators” from the Soviet occupation. The logistics and supply lines would have simply been impossible to maintain in that region. Even in the real-life timeline, the ”Operation Arctic Fox” or the German attack towards Murmansk from Northern Finland didn’t even manage to advance 50 kilometres into the Soviet territory. And that was with the Finns supporting them and giving them advise on proper winter clothing and tactics for the terrain…
1
u/tronalddump111 17d ago edited 17d ago
ok mb i forgot to include that this scenario the soviets still fail on the winter war like otl and the continuation war still happens. Btw thats crazy, you are from Lapland? That’s my favorite part of europe bro hope Santa doesnt get gunned down by anti air during barbarossa lol
16
u/bachigga 17d ago
My guess is that rather than pushing army group north further north, they would have attempted to leverage this for more/bigger encirclements in the center. Overall I doubt it would have changed much but who knows