Could the Nazis have defeated the Soviet Union in WW2.

I will respond to his points as they are listed. I’m sorry I did not respond to your last round, as i did not take the rebuttal to be a serious one.1) Russia the USSR is an immense area and the Nazis had not the man power to take it all without lousing an immense foothold in europa. What the German military did not have in man power it tried to make up in technology. You could argue that this leveled the playing field for them. On the contrary, what the Soviet Union did not have in technology, it tried to make up for in man power. This is referred to as a “force multiplier” , you take one man and make him as lethal as the enemy’s 6 (for example). The Germans lost 2,839 tanks in 1941 compared to the Soviet Union’s 20,500 losses. This is a 7-1 kill ratio. Also, more soldiers mean more supplies and more food, whereas more tanks means more fuel. This shows that numbers are not always what they appear to be at face value. I address the numbers problem in more detail under your point #5. 2# Blitzkrieg needed land units to support it. Sappers would not be abel to keep up due to terrain and the lack of roads. Resupplying the advancing German army with troops and materials would not have proven to be so difficult if the German high command would have advocated a policy of prioritizing supplies to army group center once Leningrad had been sieged by army group north, and the Ukraine was occupied by army group south. Keep in mind that Leningrad was helpless until its liberation in by the Red Army in August 1944. In the Ukraine the Germans were greeted as liberators. Army Groups North and South had achieved their aims, and therefore no longer needed the vast supplies in order to advance further. Considering these facts, it is safe to say that sufficient supplies and troops could have been provided for Army Group Center in its drive for Moscow. This would also allow the sappers to be concentrated on a single front rather than dispersed throughout Russia. I believe in your second sentence you are referring to the Russian Rasputitsa when you mention the lack of roads. Rasputitsa (Russian mud produced from its biannual seasons) is indeed impassible at certain times; however it did not prevent the German army from reaching within 20 miles of Moscow. As mentioned in my thesis, the additional summer month of May would have proven more than enough time to assemble a much better position and supply network for the final drive on Moscow. The German invasion being launched in May would have put the German well in striking distance of Moscow with time for much better planning and preparation.3# Siberia is known for quick blizzards that would show up without warning and decimate air troops. Few generals would want to risk a Blitz. It is doubtful that the Germans would have proceeded any further into Russia beyond the Volga, let alone Sibera. If they had taken Moscow the Soviet leadership most likely would have dissolved, as well as the Soviet Union itself. At this point there would be no point to continue advances into Siberia for territorial gains. Having secured a naturally defendable position of the Volga, it would be hard to see why the Nazi’s would not have consolidated their gains. Also, anything beyond this point was not mentioned to be “Lebensraum” by Hitler. To the Nazi leadership the war ended in Eastern Europe; they were not interested in Asia. 4# Japan had stopped putting presser on the USSR giving them more veterans with skill in tundrawarfare. To this point I must take note that Hitler was not confident in the Empirical Japanese’s capabilities and therefore most likely did not base his war plans on their politics. He simply used them as a place holder ally to help the balance of power and counter the emerging American power opposing him in the Atlantic. As for tying down the Soviets; the Japenese never truly threated the Soviet Union. Since most of the Soviet Unions population resided in the west, and all of Siberia would have acted as a natural defensive barrier from the Japanese army, it is safe to say this even if the Japanese tried a land invasion, it would not have been a serious operation. They simply did not have the resources or the desire to take on another enemy knowing that the Chinese were yet to fall. Also, the Soviet war policy can be understood in terms of distance and time. The Soviets had the luxury of vast distances of territory, but what they did not have was time. So naturally they did everything in their power convert that distance into time. Even if the Japanese attacked the Soviet Union you would have seen the Soviet leadership sacrifice the territory in order to buy the time to first deal with the Germans, then the Japanese after they stopped the bleeding to their country's western front. No divisions would have been left to fight the Japenese with the Germans lingering at the gates of Moscow. Stalin had already ordered the relocation of most Eastern and Siberian units prior to Pearl Harbor and Japans entry into the war against the allies to fight the Germans. 5# In five months the nazis lost close to 750,000 men nearly 25% of their force of around 3 million. I would argue that this would be less of a factor than it first appears to be at face value. The German leadership was very clear that although casualties were mounted, that they would be unrelenting their brutality and persistence to crush the Bolsheviks. Examining later events in the war we can see that this “Hold all ground to the last man. ” mentality was common place right up to the Battle for Berlin. This fanaticism was expected of the Wehrmacht. Hitler was increasingly irrational on orders of retreat or withdrawal. Sacrificing entire armies did not seem to deter him; as seen in Stalingrad. Although your number of 734,000 men out of force seems a bit high, I can cite the Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg which states that 357,000 of that figure were reported dead or missing. Despite the enormous loss of life, we can presume that extending the war an additional month would not have caused losses which would have substantially inhibited or deterred the final drive on Moscow from taking place. Keeping with statistics we would note approximately 50,000 causalities per month until the end of 1941 (as averaged from the death toll of June 1941- December 1941). 6# The USSR had moved most of their factories north making it harder Nazis to shut them down. If Moscow had fallen in 1941, I do not see a situation where Stalin and the Communist government could have packed up and moved North or East to reconstitute their government in exile to run the relocation of the factories. The symbol of the Soviet capital being occupied by foreign invaders would simply have proven too much to hold the already loosely bound Soviet Union together. We would have seen a total collapse of its sovereign government had this happened. This would stop national production and relocation of the Soviet War Machine as there would be no government in place to coordinate it. In conclusion: I do not disagree with your premise that the Nazis grossly underestimated the Soviet Union in the planning and execution of Operation Barbarossa, I do feel that the reasons cited are no enough to persuade me that the war could not have been won by Germany in 1941.