Could Germany have ever defeated the Russia in WW2?

In the many threads that have appeared on this subject much has been made of strategies , tactics , weapons and of course the great Russian General - Winter.

I think it worthwhile to note another great strenght of the Russians , in the words of the great writer Boris Pasternak it was '' our accursed capacity for suffering ''.
What other country could have suffered and endured so much but keep fighting ?

@Sand's post raises some very interesting points.

Stalin's regime was indeed as cruel, venial and corrupt as the Nazis, but even despite that I would question whether, on the basis of what we've seen recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, an invading army (as opposed to a returning one) can ever be regarded as liberators?

To answer the OP's original question, I think the economics of the war have to be taken account of.

German war plans were predicated on the basis that economic output in the occupied territories (whether to the east or west) would, over the long term, be unaffected by German domination; that after a decline, they would recover to their pre-war levels.

The truth was that aside from Norway and Denmark (where economic growth was stagnant from 1940 to 1945) every other country occupied by the Nazis saw a collapse in economic output. For example in France, steel production was less than one-third what it had been in the peak years of 1930 to 1932, and French coal production fell by 18% in 1940 in a country that previously needed to import 40% of its annual requirement - a significant proportion of which came from Britain.

During the War, German GDP increased substantially, but at the expense of the territories occupied. Before the War the combined GDP of the occupied countries and Germany exceeded that of the British Empire, but by about the middle of 1942 it was about three-quarters of the British Empire - and that's before you take account of America.

Over 1940ish-1945 combined Allied GDP increased dramatically, whereas German / Axis / Grossraum GDP went slowly downhill (exclude Germany and the decline is more significant).

Once the Germans headed East they locked themselves into a death spiral, economically speaking......

To make war, they needed steel........to make steel they needed coke........to make coke........they needed coal........to get coal they needed miners......miners like workers and soldiers and the population in general need to be fed.

They problems they faced were manifold. First, mining in Germany was still highly labour intensive and skilled miners were in high demand - the same skilled young men who the Wehrmacht also wanted.

The estimated steel needs for the Reich were 46m tonnes per annum, of which it was estimated that the Ruhr could produce 17.5m tonnes pa. The invasions and occupations of France and Czechoslovakia secured the ore supplies they needed.

Coke production from the Ruhr (virtually the only source for the Germans) peaked at 131m tonnes on 1939 but by 1941 was falling by 2m tonnes per month.

Overall, the coal deficit was about 11m tonnes, which was manageable - if it had been managed!

The system was re-organised to ensure miners were better paid and the Wehrmacht released as many skilled miners as it could back to the mines in 1941. However, production still declined - miners were working 7 days per week, with no recovery days and even though they were relatively well fed (to the rest of the population) they were still not nourished sufficiently for this kind of hard physical work.

Nor could they be better fed. Germany started the war with 8.8m tonnes of grain - enough to provide bread for the German population for a year. By the end of 1940 the reserve was down to 1.3 million tonnes.

The high intensity dairy farms in France and the Netherlands relied on imported grain and oil seed to feed the animals and maintain output, but this largely came from Argentina and Canada. Unable to feed their animals many farmers began to cull them for their meat, the same also happened on the poultry farms, thus permanently reducing the capacity of these sources to supply fat and protein.

Even those farms still producing milk could not get it to creameries to be processed - France was reduced to 8% of its pre-War supply of petrol, meaning no trucks for collections.

To compound it all, the grain harvest in Europe in 1940 was less than half what it had been in 1938 because the fertiliser industry had been turned over to producing explosives and because of the need for horses.

The irony is that the only regions producing grain surpluses enough to feed people and horses were Romania and Ukraine (with Ukraine providing the bulk). Another irony of the whole situation was that when the Germans demanded that the Soviets double their grain shipments in 1940 and they did so immediately (by dipping into their own national reserves), it persuaded Hitler of the correctness of his decision to launch Barbarossa and in particular to target Ukraine.

The Germans could have 'gone all the way' and taken Moscow, but their defeat was inevitable, it was just a question of when.

I've no data specifically on Czechoslovakia, but Italy is covered in the attached table.

This graph (using the data from the table) shows how Axis and Allied GDP fared over the course of the war....



The data is taken from this paper

....and if you are a real sadist, the book the paper is taken from (The Economics ofWorld War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison) is a real page turner!!!