Why did Hitler attack the Soviet Union when he was still busy fighting the United Kingdom?

Question

This has always bothered me. Everyone knows that having to fight on two opposite fronts at once is bad... and it's also a well known fact that every European country which tried to invade Russia has always been thouroughly beaten.

So, apart from the standard "he was a crazy guy bent on taking over the world" answer, what was the rationale behind launching a full-scale attack on the Soviet Union when still actively fighting the British Empire?

Answer 1

I'm not sure there is any direct evidence that it was strategically a bad idea. Strategically it made sense to attack the Soviet Union while they were weak and unprepared for war. Hitler knew that as he made progress on the Western front that Stalin grew more and more nervous everyday about the growing power of Nazi Germany.

What must be remembered is that Hitler almost won the war with the Soviet Union. Hitler felt the army was not moving fast enough towards Moscow. If Hitler's commanders had done what Hitler had wanted, which was rush as fast to Moscow as possible, then it is possible the Soviet Union would have fallen without time to prepare a massive infantry army. Germany's army was also not prepared for fighting in cold weather. It was not expected that the Soviet Union was even close to capable of fighting back. The Soviet Union's army was in shambles throughout the entire war. It was ill-equipped and all it had to offer was quantity over quality.

The combination of the cold, unexpected resistance and the amount of time it was taking to get to Moscow because of cold weather and resistance was setting back Germany. The whole strategy was to get in and occupy Moscow and take the leadership. It took about 6 months for the Germans to get nearly to the gates of Moscow, when the tide finally started to turn at Stalingrad. Hitler most importantly underestimated the sheer will of the the country to defend itself no matter how much the cost in blood. The Soviet Union lost a whopping 13.5% of it's population to the war.

So in short, strategically a lot of it made sense at the time. The operation was blundered because the blitzkrieg was not fast enough, the underestimation of the kind of force the Soviet Union could pull together and an underestimation of the cold winter. The plan was also delayed because of setbacks in the Balkans and helping the Italians out where they had failed.

It's hard to find actual strategic proof of what was going on through Hitler's mind and his advisers to take on this risky operation. We do know however that these had been a part of Hitler's plans for years. In my opinion it was probably thought at the time the the odds were in Nazi Germany's favor. In all reality the Germans had pretty good chance of winning the war within 6 months, perhaps if just a few variables had changed they might have actually pulled it off. If they could have gotten there a month earlier, they probably would have won.

Also Great Britain was absolutely in no position to put up any kind of resistance except for the occasional bombing run, which was producing much larger losses than they could keep up with equipment wise.

Also Stalin and Hitler were not real allies, they only had a non-aggression pact, and both were not exactly known to be trustworthy. Stalin was also at many times gullible and Hitler took advantage of this diplomatically. Even when warned that Germany was going to invade, Stalin dismissed his advisers.

Taking in all these factors, the thought probably never occurred to Hitler and his officers that the Soviet Union would ever be able to launch any kind of counter attack. It took quite some time and the United States to intervene for the Soviet Union to really begin it's successful counter-offensive.

Answer 2

By this time, Germany controlled the entire European peninsula, and it was very hard to see the Allied forces coming back from that.

Hitler told one of his generals in June 1940 that the victories in western Europe "finally freed his hands for his important real task: the showdown with Bolshevism" [from here].

Reasons to attack the Soviet Union include:

• Because having a massive military power right next door when you're fighting a war a thousand kilometers away made Germany nervous.
• To exterminate Communism
• Capture oil fields and other strategic resources.
• Lebensraum, or "living space", a core ideology of the Nazis.

Answer 3

Germany always wanted to attack and defeat Soviet Russia. There is an ideological battle between Fascism and Communism. Germany really thought that Russia was the enemy of the world. Some Germans believed, such was the evil of Communism, that when they started the eastern front, the English would come over to there side to fight Communism rather than continue fighting.

The western front was secure. Invasion of England was off the cards but equally counter invasion by England was thought unlikely and at that time it was not possible for England to counter attack in Europe. There was some expectation that the English would make a deal for the status quo in the west and not fight on further.

Russia was getting stronger. Every month delayed saw Russia prepare better, building more tanks, more airplanes and stockpiling arms. Any delay would have made the war in the east more difficult. Russia new a major war was coming, either with Germany or Japan, and had been working as fast as it could to rebuild its armies.

Germany expected the war in the East to be quick and decisive, just as the wars in central Europe and the West had been. They did not expect to be pulled deep into Russia and into the winter of Russia. They also made mistakes in strategy during the advance that meant that they couldn't achieve the goals that would ensure quick victory, but were sidetracked.

Russia contained significant resources of oil, coal, gas, steel, etc. Germany needed these to continue its war efforts. Without securing Russian resources, Germany could have been starved out.

Answer 4

Unfortunately, we cannot ask Hitler about that and he didn't leave any written notices about his reasons. So every answer to that question is a speculation and I've seen a number of such speculations.

• The official Soviet version states an ideological war between fascism and communism that prompted Hitler to attack the Soviet Union without considering logic. A common "proof" are references to "Mein Kampf" where Hitler discusses the possibility of expanding the German Lebensraum to the east. This version is actually pure non-sense: there never was any such ideological war, with the fascist and communist ideologies being very similar Germany and USSR cooperated closely, especially after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The local conflicts between fascists and communists in Spain and Germany were rather due to the fact that both parties addressed mostly the same electorate. Also, by 1941 the Germans already occupied more territories than they could possibly process in the next decades.
• Then there is the version that Hitler and his generals got megalomaniac after all the victories. They knew perfectly well from WWI experience (not exactly ancient history at that point, all of them were there) that a war on two fronts is deadly. But they simply expected that the war against USSR would be over similarly fast as the war against France. This is a pretty ridiculous assumption: even occupying Moscow doesn't mean that the war is over (as Napoleon already discovered), the USSR offers plenty of room for the troops to retreat while the supply channels of the German army get too long. In fact, conquering USSR was obviously strategically impossible and Hitler could have been driven only by the assumption that the Soviet regime is too unstable and would immediately collapse (an assumption that he supposedly expressed but that turned out to be wrong as we know).
• In addition to the points above, Daniil Proektor brings up an additional point in his book "Aggression and Disaster": a defeat of the Soviet Union would have demoralized Great Britain that supposedly only continued fighting because it hoped to get help from Soviet Union and USA. I think that I've seen other historians mention that possibility as well.
• I'm not sure whether anybody considers this as a reason for the German attack on the USSR but once Germany went into war in 1939 it had to continue fighting and winning. Any lengthy period of peace would have made the German economical problems obvious and could have led to the collapse of the regime. The German external debt was already astronomical in 1939 and the war wasn't cheap. With the Battle of Britain lost, the victory in the war against Great Britain wouldn't happen any time soon - so Germany had to find somebody else to invade. However, USSR was a very illogical choice: at that point it was an ally of Germany and there was little reason to expect an easy victory.
• Another explanation is actively propagated by Victor Suvorov in many of his books. He describes facts speaking for his theory that Soviet Union intended to attack Germany and the German attack was indeed a preventive one. This isn't a new theory, the Germans actually used it already in their declaration of war on the Soviet Union. I'm not aware of any serious historians favoring this theory, and Suvorov unfortunately isn't one - he seems to be willingly omit or even falsificate facts in his books by misquoting and quoting out of context.

Answer 5

Hitler turned his attention from Britain to the Soviet Union because he lost the Battle of Britain and because Nazi ideology left him no other choice.

In the summer of 1940, Hitler launched a massive air campaign to destroy the RAF and pave the way for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain. Hitler believed that to get past the Royal Navy he needed air superiority and so ordered a campaign of concentrated bombing to destroy the RAF. He almost succeeded, but Churchill calculated that if he bombed Berlin Hitler would be forced to respond in kind to preserve his reputation and credibility. Thus Hitler, not knowing just how close he had come to destroying the RAF and under pressure by his own military to retaliate, was finally forced to switch targets to London, effectively ending the campaign against the RAF.

The change of targets was damaging to the Luftwaffe in two ways. First, pressure was lifted from the RAF, which allowed it recover, and second, with the increased range demanded for bombing London, Luftwaffe bombers were often left without fighter cover and thus became easy targets for the RAF. On 15th of September, 1940, two massive Luftwaffe attacks were completely defeated by the RAF with 60 German aircraft shot down. After this defeat, Hitler had no option but to postpone the invasion of Britain indefinitely.

This, Hitler's first defeat, turned opinion in the United States. Up to this point many Americans had assumed that Britain was bound to fall, but after Hitler lost the Battle of Britain, Americans started believing that Britain would survive and the United States began supporting Britain much more aggressively. The help from America, the rapid rebuilding of the RAF, and the strength of the Royal Navy, made the invasion of Britain next to impossible.

With invasion of Britain no longer a possibility, Hitler turned his attention to the only other obvious venue for expansion: the Soviet Union. It must be noted that Hitler had promised in Mein Kampf (1925) to invade the Soviet Union, asserting that the German people needed living space (Lebensraum) and that this space lay to the East. Also Nazi racial ideology considered the Soviets subhuman (Untermenschen) ruled by the despised Jews. According to Nazi thinking, mere subhumans would be no match for the superior qualities of the German race and the Jews had to be eradicated everywhere. Thus, there was almost a religious mission to liberate land from Jews and subhumans and prepare it for the supposedly superior German race. Hitler had to invade Russia because this was the only way to deliver the ultimate goal of Nazi ideology: to establish Germans in their rightful place as the masters of the world.

Answer 6

After Soviet performance in the Winter War in Finland, it was believed that the Soviet army could be rapidly and easily defeated. The Red Army had started to undergo significant reforms based on its experiences, as well as modernizing much of its equipment, particularly tanks. While Germany was unlikely to become significantly stronger over time, the Red Army would get better prepared, the longer the Germans waited

Answer 7

The two big Nazi goals were the extermination of Jews and the conquest of land in the East, to be settled by Aryans, with the native populations drastically reduced in number and existing as uneducated servants. Hitler had to invade the Soviet Union. Also, I don't think anybody thought the peace between Germany and the Soviet Union was going to last: the Soviets considered that period as "creeping up to war".

The Soviet Union looked vulnerable. The Russian Empire had collapsed in 1917, despite not being the main target of the Central Powers in 1914 and 1916. Hitler thought the Communist regime would be weaker, and the German attack stronger (they'd conquered France in six weeks, after all), and that the Soviet Union would therefore collapse given a serious attack. Their performance in the Winter War against Finland didn't promise effective resistance, nor the purging of the Soviet officer corps. Both of those were potentially fleeting advantages. (Indeed, if the Germans had attacked in 1942, they would have faced 40 tank divisions, many of them well equipped and fairly well trained.)

Conquering the Soviets would also be very useful in the medium term. The Germans were suffering from the Allied blockade, and the Soviet Union had a great many useful resources.

Also, there was no good way of attacking Britain. The plans discussed seemed to revolve on conquering the Mediterranean first, and then bringing submarine and air power to bear in a long slow process. Once master of all of Europe, the Germans could start building an unbeatable navy, but that would take a long time. Better to have Soviet economic resources first. In the meantime, the British weren't going to hurt the Germans much.

Hitler knew that Churchill was looking for allies, and thought that the conquest of the Soviet Union would at least be a morale blow, leaving the British facing a long hard struggle with little hope of victory.

So, the plan was to attack hard by surprise, destroy Soviet border forces, and watch the Stalinist regime collapse. Once the hard fighting was over, and the German Army occupying vast stretches of land, troops could be demobilized to aid in the economy while war production switched to supporting the Navy and Air Force. (Some of this switchover actually happened, when the attack seemed wildly successful.) Britain could then be dealt with, if they weren't asking for peace terms yet.

Answer 8

Germany wasn't "still busy" fighting Great Britain at the time.

The conflict against the GB was never really likely to develop onto a full-scale battle as Germany lacked the basic resources to attack mainland GB.

Hitler had no landing craft, the "Rhine barges" that have often been mentioned a being possibly used as landing craft would have been hopeless in such a situation as they would have capsized in anything but the calmest of waters.

The Royal Navy was also far too strong for the Kriegsmarine to have afforded any lasting protection to such landing forces, while they may have managed to land on the beaches of southern England they would not have been able to maintain naval supremacy to allow reinforcements or supplies to arrive in the coming days.

Even had the Luftwaffe managed to subdue the Royal Air Force, a feat that they came fairly close to achieving, this would have had little effect on sea actions. It's been well documented how bad the Luftwaffe were at engaging warships, look at how little damage they did to British forces evacuating at Dunkirk for example. Dunkirk was a good trial run for the Luftwaffe to see how they would fair against the Royal Navy and yet they had extremely poor results against ships that were often sitting ducks, not moving but tied up to the harbour wall while the troops embarked.

Hitler's last desperate gamble in changing the focus of the attack from the Royal Air Force and onto the cities was a vain attempt to get Britain to surrender or at least sue for peace.

So Hitler knew he had to attack Russia, before Russia attacked Germany. Britain at this time was not a major problem to Germany, Hitler knew they couldn't mount any serious opposition other than a few air-raids and even those were limited to night attacks as the Luftwaffe could mount a good defence of mainland Europe in those days.

The Russian Army was in a terrible state at the start of the war due to Stalin's purges where many of his best commanders were executed or sent to the Gulags in Siberia for not being Communist enough, to paraphrase.

Their armed forces were generally badly trained and equipped too, while the T34 was available it was only in small numbers and they had only a few modern aircraft and the ones they did have generally did not have trained pilots to fly them

Arguably Hitler should have attacked even sooner, but he got bogged down helping the Italians in the Balkans conflicts and so Barbarossa did not start until June 1941, a month or so earlier might have made a big difference to the outcome.

So, the reality is that the Germans weren't actually fighting on two fronts as the war with Great Britain was limited to the Luftwaffe providing air-defence of the Reich. Most of the troops deployed to defend the coastline were poor quality conscripts and even prisoners.

Answer 9

Basically, he had no choice. He knew Stalin is preparing for war. Ribentrop-Molotov Pact was just meant to give Soviet Russia more time.

You could read more on this in Victor Suvorov's books (i.e. "Icebreaker"). However, he is not a historian and many people regard this as a controversy.

Answer 10

This is from my World War II manuscript: "Because the defeat of Britain was not an objective in itself, but rather the means to the end of global domination... Germany was not interested in a fight to the death that would have enabled her to conquer Britain but leave her too weak to pursue her further aims."

Basically, Germany had a bare preponderance of strength against Britain. It sought to increase that preponderance by first conquering the Soviet Union, then dealing later with Britain, (and the United States). The idea was that Britain could be "contained" while Germany conquered the Soviet Union. Also Hitler had the totally wrong notion that such a war would be "easy," and successfully completed in about six months.

Answer 11

I think the best approximation to a true answer is that he wanted to kill all Jews as quickly as possible. Britain had little Jews, while the western part of the USSR and Poland had the highest population of Jews in the world due to pale of settlement of the former Russian Empire which mandated Jews to live only in the western parts of the country.

In 1939 Gestapo made a research and concluded that the western parts of the USSR were a biological base of the Jewry.

Answer 12

Because Finland was never a puppet state ,it was one of the axis countries .Red army invaded Finland in 1941 . Secondly,In 1941 there were highs and lows between Nazi Germany and soviet russia . Thirdly , Red army came near the east polish border . Fourthly , when greece and yugoslovia were invaded by third reich ,soviets supported greece and yugoslovia and aided them .

Answer 13

First of all, I don't think the reason was primarilie a political one. I think it was a decision of a military-strategical viewpoint.

In 1940-41 Germany/England weren't able/strong enough to deal each other the final blow. Both Sides were in the curiously military situation (because of the might of the "Royal Navy" und the numerous/technically advantage of the continental german "Heer").

To march to Berlin, the UK needed a strong continental/economical Power at her side (for example Sovjetunion or USA). To land in or sucessfully besiege the UK, Germany needed to build a lot of naval/air vessels (Bombers, Uboats), and for that enough ressources.

With the elimination of the Sovejetunion, Germany would had loss a potential continental threat (alliance between UK and Sovjet) and would have gained enough ressources to even can fight the seapowers UK/USA.

Answer 14

1. There was little action taking place between Britain and Germany at the time. And Germany just single handedly decided that they were at peace with Britain and the States.
   
2. There was very little oil to be found on the entire european continent, meaning germany desperately needed to capture an oil field somewhere. The choice was between going into the middle east, or going into Russia. Russia had been a long time foe and hitler had already declared it an enemy in his book "mein kampf". So by invading Russia Germany could potentially solve two problems at the same time, Russia and access to oil.
   
3. The soviet union had just been humiliated in its invasion of Finland making them appear very weak. And also Stalin had killed millions of Soviet citizens already, making them again appear weak.
   
4. Germany was very concerned about a war on two fronts and figured it would be better to have already dealt with the Soviets by the time the allies attack.
   
   And at last, this thing about the oil cannot be overemphasized. Without oil all wars are automatically lost and it was the main reason for why Germany lost. As late as april 1945 Germany still had massive amount of, for instance, U boats. But they just didn't have any oil to operate them so they were utterly useless.
   When they lost in Russia the rest of the war was just formality. That's why Hitler was so peristent on not retreating from Russia, giving up the Russian oil fields ment the fighter aircrafts, bombers, tanks, ships and u boats would soon all stop operating.
   The war was lost.
   
   

Answer 15

Because Hitler was crazy. He was not normal by any standards.

Had he anticipated that US will join Britain and Russia against Germany, and that US will send practically unlimited military help to Russia -- even then he'd invade Russia, but he was doomed the day he invaded. Although it took 4 long years for Hitler to fall.