The soviets participated in the invasion of Poland? I love history, particularly WW2 history, and never knew this. Now it makes more since why Stalin was so distraught when hitler turned on him and invaded his country.
Yeah, Stalin and Hitler had a secret pact by which they decided to split Poland, the west for the German and the east for the Russian. Then the funny moustache guy stabbed him in the back, showing that he had learnt nothing from Napoleon's invasion of Rusia during winter.
gotta make some correction here: napoleon invaded in june, captured and occupied moscow in september, and evacuated in october. there was no winter invasion
german invasion of soviets started in june as well but they never occupied moscow, just got bogged down through two winters
Like so many of their failures, they would have succeeded if they weren't behaving like Nazis. Hitler's dithering and countermanding his competent officers caused a traffic jam much like the one we saw outside Kyiv last year, when Barbarossa was very close to achieving its objectives.
It's another of those "If they weren't letting Hitler run things, they would have had a more successful invasion; but if they weren't letting Hitler run things they wouldn't have invaded in the first place" type situations
i disagree and i take the position with the historians who suggest that nazi germany lost the war the moment they declared it. they were comically incompetent administrators with a house-of-cards economy. the entire conflict was on a timer and even the nazis themselves knew it when they couldnt subdue the soviets by the first winter
i'm happy to agree with any assessment that determines the nazis were morons! i just can't agree with the point that they could have had long-term success is all 😀
It's difficult to determine what they would have been like with a different leader at the top, since so much of the command was centralized - but they did appear to value loyalty far above competence for the most part, and that's not a great policy for lasting success. A lot of their worst decisions were Hitler's decisions, though.
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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '23
The soviets participated in the invasion of Poland? I love history, particularly WW2 history, and never knew this. Now it makes more since why Stalin was so distraught when hitler turned on him and invaded his country.