The Whole Rotten Structure Will Come Crashing Down!!! Hitlers conviction that the Soviet Union was a rotten structure that would come crashing down was shared by many foreign observers and intelligence services including the British and Americans. Stalins purge of the Red Army, which had begun in 1937 had destroyed the centre core of the army and around 36,671 Red army officers were executed. Two and a half years after the purge began, the Red Army presented a disastrous spectacle in the Winter War against Finland. The Finns outmanoeuvred their opponents time after time. Only after deploying five times as many men as their opponents, and huge concentrations of artillery, did the Red Army begin to prevail. Hitler & Americans had observed this lamentable performance with excitement. 1941 : The German commanders had believed that no society run by political terror could defend itself against a determined attack from outside. The warm welcome from civilians convinced many Germans that they would win against Soviet Russia. Devout Ukrainians, who had suffered one of the most terrifying man-made famines in history, greeted the arrival of military vehicles with black crosses as symbolic of a new crusade against the anti-Christ(Soviets). The biggest mistake made by German Generals was to have underestimated Ivan, the ordinary Red Army soldier. They quickly found that surrounded or outnumbered Soviet soldiers went on fighting when their counterparts from western armies (French, British, Dutch) would have surrendered in 1940. Right from the first morning of Barbarossa, there were countless cases of extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice, although not perhaps as many as there were of mass panic, but that was largely due to the confusion. The defence of the citadel of Brest-Litovsk is the most striking example. German infantry occupied the complex after a week of heavy fighting, but some Red Army soldiers held out for almost a month from the initial attack without any resupply of ammunition or food. One of the defenders scratched on a wall: I am dying but do not surrender. Farewell Motherland. 20/VII-41. This piece of wall is still reverently preserved in the Central Museum of the Armed Forces in Moscow...
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 12:28:36 +0000