Case Blue

>>1194315
It wasn't possible. Fuck off alien space bats.

If it was successful then Germany would have more wiggle room in terms of oil supply for their mechanized corps.

they would still have to make the final drive to Moscow to ultimately win the war. Stalingrad and the drive for the Caucasus was just to relieve a desperate shortage of fuel, for which millions died just to achieve that supply.

whether that much manpower and resources dedicated to Case Blue was worth it or not was debatable, the Egos of Stalin and Hitler got in the way their "THIS IS THE LINE" talk concerning Stalingrad.

>>1194343
The oil would have burnt like the factories and fields in 1941 and 1942

Would Soviet resistance collapse if Stalin died in '41? How responsible was he personally for keeping the soviet civil & political & military constructs together?

>>1194355
This. They captured some of the wells around Maikop and the facilities were utterly destroyed so that they estimated that it would take one year to go into production again. The main short-term benefit of a succesful Case Blue (impossible btw) would be depriving the Soviets of much of their oil supply.

>>1194361
You're underestimating the zeal of the average Ivan if you think Soviet resistance would've collapsed if Stalin died. If anything he would've been martyred and they would've fought harder.

>>1194361
Stalin's orders only really held the line for the first year of the war, by the time Stalingrad and Kursk came around, and the wider extent of the Germans crimes against the Slavs was becoming known, most Red Army fighting out of hatred and wanted revenge against what the Germans have done to them.

During Kursk, there were constant reports of Soviet soldiers attacking entire Panzer formations by themselves, climbing onto tanks to place satchel charges, and staying their positions until either they died or ran out of ammo.

can't say they were in the wrong either. I'd fight like hell too in the same situation, knowing what the Germans planned to do with ethnic Russians and other slavs.

>>1194315

Soviet morale would be hit hard but I don't really see this being any kind of war-winning victory by itself. It seems their adventure in the USSR was doomed to fail by this point anyway, though a success here could delay their annihilation for the better part of a year and make the Soviets more reliant on the Allies to achieve total victory.

>>1194392
>knowing what the Germans planned to do with ethnic Russians and other slavs.
what did they know

>>1194387
What I'm wondering was how their civil, political & administrative branches would have functioned if Stalin just up and died. Everyone in the soviet system seemed to come from the top down. He didn't have an obvious successor. It could have potentially been chaos, I'm wondering how well prepared the USSR would be to absorb & recover from the sudden death of their authoritarian head.

>>1194399
Einsatzgruppen A-D + 1941 POW starvation

>>1194403
>Einsatzgruppen A-D
How did they know about those? Also, those were mainly dealing with Jews as far as I know

>>1194400
Zhukov

>>1194399
they knew about the Einsatzgruppen and the Hunger Plan that was starving out Ukraine and Belarus, with all the land they captured back after Stalingrad, they would find ghost towns where most of the population was either killed, dragged back to Poland, or starved. By the time the battle of Kursk was happening, the picture was pretty clear to the Red Army that the Germans planned to kill most, if not all of them off, Walking into the camps in '44-45 further proved it, which was probably met with an even sharper spike in looting and raping after those were found.