What if Hitler hadn't sent the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union?

Professor Evan Mawdsley tells Nige Tassell about the direction that World War II may have taken had the Nazis not turned eastwards

Published: June 20, 2024 at 9:05 AM

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The largest military offensive in history, Operation Barbarossa – which lasted from 22 June 1941 until 7 January – proved disastrous for Adolf Hitler and arguably signalled the beginning of his decline from power. Germany suffered more than 750,000 casualties. It was a game-changer. The course of the war altered, ending in Germany's defeat. But what would have happened had Hitler not sent the Wehrmacht, the nation’s unified armed forces, eastwards?

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"The only military alternative to invading the Soviet Union would have been to knock Britain out of the war." That's the view of Evan Mawdsley, honorary professorial research fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow and author of many books on World War II, including Thunder in the East: the Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (Bloomsbury, 2015).

In context

In the early summer of 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, a huge invasion of the Soviet Union. The idea behind the operation was not only to diminish, and possibly demolish, Communist ideology in Europe, but also to create Lebensraum – or ‘living space’ – to which Germans could be relocated and from where the German way of life, as defined by Nazi rule, could be protected and advanced. But the campaign was a complete disaster for Hitler, a terrible miscalculation of how easy he thought the invasion would be. It is estimated that around 200,000 German soldiers lost their lives during Barbarossa’s deeply bloody six months.

“Of course, Hitler could have settled for the stunning successes of 1938–1940,
which gave ‘Greater Germany’ control over western and central continental
Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Vistula River in Poland, and from Norway to the Alps. There was also an alliance with Italy, and compliance from a right-wing government of occupied France. But Hitler was in a hurry. He wanted to keep the initiative and stay in control of events.

Seeking peace

Had he refocused his attentions on Britain rather than the Soviet Union, Hitler had two options. One route was diplomacy, applying pressure on London to accept Nazi control of such a large swathe of Europe. Professor Mawdsley explains that such an approach might not have fallen on deaf ears in Westminster. "There were some politicians in Britain who would have accepted the German political domination of continental Europe in exchange for peace and German acceptance of the status quo as far as the British empire was concerned.”

Hitler’s other option would have been to engage Britain in direct combat, a path that was an uneasy one. “Britain was not a second-rate power. It had
the potential to fight Germany and blockade continental Europe, especially if supported by the United States. Plus, it would have taken a long time to build a navy powerful enough to compete with that of Great Britain."

Hitler could also have affected Britain by directing his military resources not eastwards but further south, specifically around the Mediterranean rim, be it Spain, North Africa or the Middle East. The cooperation of Spain – officially neutral although General Franco shared an ideological outlook with both Hitler and Mussolini – could have allowed Hitler access to secure Gibraltar and thus deny the passage of British armaments and personnel to North
Africa. But this would have made Spain, still recovering from the effects of its civil war, susceptible to British counter-attacks.

A constant threat

Had Hitler engaged Britain, or concentrated the Wehrmacht’s efforts away from any eastern front, there was always the danger of what the Soviets might do while the Nazis’ backs were turned. The Soviet Union always represented a threat, what Professor Mawdsley calls “a potential enemy looming in the background”.

Had Hitler delayed in invading the Soviet Union, the stronger that Stalin’s continually rearming forces could become. Although Professor Mawdsley doesn’t see them as sufficiently capable of conquering central Europe in 1941 or 1942, he could envisage such a scenario a little further down the line. The longer Hitler delayed in launching Operation Barbarossa, the stronger the chance that Stalin might authorise a pre-emptive invasion of his own. Had this occurred, it's unclear how long the war may have ended up lasting. It could all have been over before 1945, or it might have dragged on well beyond.

Did you know?

Operation Barbarossa was named after the 12th-century Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who - according to legend - remained asleep inside a cave along with his knights, waiting to restore Germany to ancient greatness

Had Stalin invaded and defeated the Nazis, would he have been content with stopping there, with just ridding the world of Hitler? Or might he have launched his own expansionist plans, with the Iron Curtain ultimately
falling somewhat further west than it eventually did during the Cold War?

If so, what would have been the reaction from Washington? “This is getting really interesting, but a little too hypothetical,” cautions Professor Mawdsley, noting the idea of a rearmed Soviet Union being quite that powerful, that rampant, to be a little fanciful. After all, until they became bogged down in that particular Soviet winter, the Wehrmacht were pretty formidable, having conquered so much of the European mainland, as Professor Mawdsley concludes. “Could the Red Army really have defeated Germany in a war without help from the British and the Americans?”

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Evan Mawdsley is honorary professorial research fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of Glasgow and author of many books on World War II, including Thunder in the East: the Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (Bloomsbury, 2015)

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