We weren't discussing what COULD have happened, only what DID happen. Soviet Russia absorbed 80% of the German war effort, a history not taught in post war anti-communist America. The Germans pulled unit after unit out of western Europe and other theatres to send them to the Eastern Front to fight the Soviets, to the point where the opposition the allies did face on D-Day was a shell of what it had once been.
Germans ran west at the collapse, because they wanted to surrender to the Americans or British, not the Russians.
en.wikipedia.org
"Out of the nearly 110,000 German prisoners captured in Stalingrad, only about 6,000 ever returned. Already weakened by disease, starvation and lack of medical care during the encirclement, they were sent on death marches (75,000 survivors died within 3 months of capture) to prisoner camps and later to labour camps all over the Soviet Union. Some 35,000 were eventually sent on transports, of which 17,000 did not survive. Most died of wounds, disease (particularly typhus), cold, overwork, mistreatment, and malnutrition. Some were kept in the city to help rebuild. A handful of senior officers were taken to Moscow and used for propaganda purposes, and some of them joined the National Committee for a Free Germany. Some, including Paulus, signed anti-Hitler statements that were broadcast to German troops. Paulus testified for the prosecution during the Nuremberg Trials and assured families in Germany that those soldiers taken prisoner at Stalingrad were safe. [22]:p.401 He remained in the Soviet Union until 1952, then moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he spent the remainder of his days defending his actions at Stalingrad, and was quoted as saying that Communism was the best hope for postwar Europe. [22]:p.280 General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach offered to raise an anti-Hitler army from the Stalingrad survivors, but the Soviets did not accept. It was not until 1955 that the last of the 5-6,000 survivors were repatriated (to West Germany) after a plea to the Politburo by Konrad Adenauer." |
