I have no expertise, but this is an area of history that interests me a great deal. In Conrad Black's biography of FDR it is very clear that FDR and Churchill were acutely aware that the Soviets were taking 90% of the casualties and "significant, secondary geopolitical" acquisitions in Eastern Europe were the inevitable price.

Then, in David Talbot's "The Devil's Chessboard" biography of Alan Dulles we find: that the policies that Gehlen's "intelligence" ultimately informed were precisely the policies with regard to the Soviet Union John and Alan Dulles had been pursuing since before the war at Sullivan & Cromwell when they represented large German and American industrial concerns; it was Alan Dulles who arranged to launder Gehlen's past and have him installed in Germany.

As "not the worst leftist" to comment here regularly, I share your intuition that Gehlen may have been a fraud. I may not understand what you perceive in this but to my eyes he may well have served as a cat's paw for Alan and John Dulles to externally legitimize views they already had about the USSR and how to treat it.

A few points, largely derived from Magnus Pahl's "Fremde Heere Ost", https://www.amazon.com/Frem...ärung-NS-Geschichte-ebook/dp/B071DFD32M. (Looking up Amazon link, I see an English translation is now available, https://www.amazon.com/Hitl..., which will be a relief to anyone whose reading German is as rusty as mine was.)

* Gehlen cannot be made responsible for the intelligence failures of 1941. The department at the time was headed by Eberhard Kinzel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wi.... An easy-going department head, he seems utterly unsuited even to recognize the degree to which the German military intelligence apparatus was unsuited to war against the USSR. His suicide in 1945 partially motivated by a sense of responsibility for the outcome of Barbarossa.

* Gehlen's appointment as his replacement is itself an indication of the very low status of intelligence officers in the Wehrmacht (and apparently earlier still in German military institutions). As a high-flier from his time in the Kriegsakademie, his career path was already marked out to be in the "1a" or "operations" staff specialization. He was brought in to FHO as an emergency troubleshooter because he was held in high esteemed by Halder and his operations chief Heusinger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wi..., probably an important figure for Gehlen's his postwar career as well). He had no particular background in intelligence collection.

* However, there was probably no officer of suitable rank or prestige who *would* have such a background, because, as I think Col. Lang mentions above, the German system simply did not produce such figures. From Pahl's description, it seems that the Germans considered that the Staff College grounding in troop intelligence collection, supplemented as needed by short refresher- or area-courses, was enough for an "Ic" (intelligence) officer.

* This means that part of Gehlen's achievement, from the German perspective, lay in his building a professional military intelligence organization in the first place. The problems resulting from the low status of intelligence officers only worsened with the outbreak of war, since growing proportions of General Staff-trained officers were absorbed to fill troop command and Ia positions in all the new units of the wartime Wehrmacht. Ic positions became increasingly filled by people with reserve commissions or "dugout" from retirement: regardless of individual talent, such individuals were even less likely to hold impress their superiors than their peacetime counterparts. Gehlen, both by intensified training of his officers and consistently "fighting the corner" of military intelligence among people who mattered (like Halder, Zeitzler, or Guderian), has a genuine claim to have established a serious intelligence organization with some institutional weight in a military system that had never had anything of the kind.

* It should be noted that a very "modern" aspect of Gehlen's success was that he was apparently brilliant at what modern officers might describe as the PowerPoint side of the job. David Kahn's rather neglected "Hitler's Spies" (https://www.amazon.com/DAVI... has a good description of how he pioneered many different ways of visualizing military information in graphs, maps or combinations thereof. (The excellence and abundance of the visual material in the German official history suggests that this skill has not been lost: it's certainly miles ahead of most Anglo-American efforts.) He always gave good briefing, as subtly important then as now to carry influence within civilian or military institutions.

* But what was the actual value of the intelligence produced by Gehlen's FHO? From what I can tell, he was good at producing assessments that could be read, retrospectively, as predicting essentially anything the Soviets did. While his reports were an improvement not only on Hitler's fantasies but also on their variants among the OKH/W (the intelligence failure of 1941 lies squarely on the professional German establishment), I don't think there is any example where the FHO product (as distinct from the "battlefield" intelligence produced at the Corps and Army level) allowed the Wehrmacht to anticipate Soviet actions in any decisive way. But here my knowledge is vague, and I would be happy for readers to correct me on this point.

* Re value of the "Gehlen Organization" behind the lines, my impression is that Gehlen was rather cavalier about what he called "agent," but here he might be in good company with all but the best intelligence organizations. (Only journalists worst in the sort of thing they'll call a "source.") I believe the overwhelming majority of his agents were either useless or known to Soviet counter-espionage. However, the US (like the 1941 OKH) was starting from zero, so this has to be taken into account to understand why what seems to us in retrospect an unimpressive intelligence product could make such an impression on its immediate customers.

* Finally (and I apologize for the length of this post), there's an interesting inter-Allied story behind Gehlen's eventual takeover of Federal German intelligence. It seems that at first he was viewed by suspicion and essentially blocked by a British intelligence community that viewed him as an unrepentant Nazi. However, their chosen man, an Abwehr defector called Otto John, https://en.wikipedia.org/wi..., became utterly discredited in 1954 after a bizarre double-defection scandal that made it possible for Gehlen, who had always been the American choice, to assume control of all foreign intelligence collection. (The "Otto John affair" and the eventual downfall of Gehlen are very well described in Hugh Trevor-Roper "The Secret World," https://www.amazon.com/Secr..., an excellently-edited collection of his writings on intelligence.)

Again, I apologize for the length of this post. Hopefully the source materials, if not the overlong gloss I made of them, will go some way towards justifying the effort involved in reading through the whole of it.

Thanks. Very interesting. So it does rather sound as if you think that he was mostly winging it.

Pretty much. I hemmed and hawed at such length because I think that, whatever mastermind airs Gehlen tried to cultivate, anyone in his position would have no choice but to wing it simply because military intelligence was such a poor relation in German military institutions.

As is too usual with me, I only remembered a very concise and I think fair analysis of the working and results of FHO in an article that came out in the Journal of Modern History, namely,

Thomas, David. "Foreign Armies East and German Military Intelligence in Russia 1941-45." Journal of Contemporary History 22, no. 2 (1987): 261-301. http://www.jstor.org/stable....

The strategic/operational record is actually far worse than I recalled: Stalingrad and Bagration entirely missed, the only year where the FHO predictions were basically in line with the eventual course of events. But, again, I think one can present as an extenuating factor that a big factor behind these failures was the utter inability Germany had to assemble accurate order of battles. If FHO constantly under-estimated how many strategic reserves the USSR could deploy, their non-Gehlen-directed counterparts at "Foreign Armies West" consistently over-estimated how many divisions the Allies had both before and after Normandy (you'll remember that part of why Fortitude so successful precisely because German intelligence carried all these phantom armies and divisions even when almost all the real ones had been committed in Normandy). So, while Gehlen's intelligence "successes" are mostly fictitious (tho', again, building a regular intelligence organization and securing institutional influence is a nontrivial achievement), his failures seem to have been quite ordinary given the possibilities German intelligence had at the time. (Or maybe the possibilities of *any* intelligence organization without the access the Allies achieved with ULTRA/Magic/etc.--Japan's appreciation of how many ships the USN had equally fantastic for most of the war.)

One way in which I think the mystique Gehlen cultivated actually reflects a dangerous idea of intelligence work is in the exaggerated value he put on select highly-placed HUMINT as a source for predicting enemy intentions, privileging it over the more modest aggregate indicators stuff like radio traffic analysis, etc. could provide. The below from that paper I mentioned above:

The information about Soviet strategy collected by agents... became a positively dangerous source of intelligence. For it can be proved that nearly every report concerning high-level Soviet military and political plans transmitted by agents of Abwehr I contained Soviet disinformation. Over time, these reports seriously disoriented Gehlen, the FHO evaluation group, OKH, and the Wehrmacht field commands about Soviet intentions.

The Abwehr possessed three important agents upon whose reports
about Soviet strategy and intentions Gehlen personally placed great
reliance: Max (Sofia); 'Stex' (Stockholm); and Ivar Lissner (Harbin).
Max was under Soviet control, ab initio, and functioned as a conduit
of strategic disinformation; Stex was a Soviet-controlled source, who
transmitted disinformation. With the clairvoyance of hindsight, it
can be seen that the dossier of Lissner reports consisted of a cunning
admixture of strategic disinformation, leavened with a modicum of
accurate tactical information about Red Army deployment, troop
movements, morale and promotions.

But, again, preferring the dramatic secret source over the mundane semi-open one is something that afflicted (afflicts?) many intelligence outfits. As Trevor-Roper noted during his own time in wartime British prewar intelligence:

‘Stuart Hampshire observed that S.I.S. values information in proportion to its secrecy, not to its accuracy. They would attach more value, he said, to a scrap of third-rate and tendentious misinformation smuggled out of Sofia in the fly-buttons of a vagabond Rumanian pimp than to any intelligence deduced from a prudent reading of the foreign press. And of course he’s quite right’

I don't have a sufficient knowledge base to suggest a response one way or the other to the first question. As for whether he had significant influence on the onset of the Cold War I believe the answer is "not much." The people of the USA had been experiencing red-menace scare-mongering from at least as far back as the October revolution of 1917, and the poobahs of our business community, who viewed the popular policies of FDR's New Deal as giant steps down the slippery red slope, were chomping at the bit for the war to end so they could once again raise the alarm. The strong popular support communist movements had in France and Italy, the two main European countries in which USA troops fought, as well as the continuing communist movement in China and the wars of colonial liberation in southeast Asia in which avowed communists were major players, fed the panic. In short, the Cold War train was leaving the station as the war in Europe ended.

Agreed. Senators McCarthy and Taft did not need Gehlen's help in promoting the second Red Scare. The history was already there from the first one in the 1920s. And even before that. Check out anti-bolshevik cartoons from 1912:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

My understanding is that Gehlen was, during WW2, not actually a spook but a staff officer with solely military background.
He was iirc also involved with the flipping of Vlasov, and with the organisation of the Vlasov army.

In terms of intel: The Germans were good at one thing, decryption of Soviet radio commands, especially on the tactical level. RKKA radio hat serious issues early in the war, and radio operations were often frankly unusable.

Concerning possible German victory: I sincerly doubt Guderians assessment. Kiev was held by effectively 2 Soviet fronts, the Kiev military distract was regarded as the prewar "best" in the red army, and could have struck from the south should an offense against Moscow happened.
Second, the Soviets brought new reinforcements to bear during the Kiev operation in the Moscow area. They immidiatly wasted these reinforcements by attacking frontally (the aim was to cut of Guderians south swinging Panzers) as Stavka did not yet understand how many troops they needed to have offensive success against Germans. This attack achieved nothing but mauled Soviet divisions. (while they only faced German infantry, this infantry was entrenched and on defense duty) Had the "diversion to Kiev" not happened these divisions would have entrenched themselfs and had contributed far more to Moscows defense.

So, imho (and I seriously hate Hitler and what he stands for) he made the right call there tactically.

Patrick -

On your question #1:

I would say no from 46 and later. After he formed the Gehlen Organization he probably was winging it as the MGB directorates for counter-intel were extremely efficient.

However I would say yes during the war and immediately after. I agree with Colonel Lang that Gehlen was NOT a spymaster during the war. At that time Gehlen would have been a consumer of spook info, not a producer. The truly valuable data that he provided in 1945 would have been Soviet weapon specs - maps and aerial photography of Poland, the Baltics, the Ukraine, and areas of occupied Russia - analyses, one of the documents turned over reportedly was an investigation into 'The Russian High Command and Its Concept of Strategy', etc. Wiki says he turned over 50 cases of intel regarding the Eastern Front. Even if that is true, much of the OOB unit info would have been overtaken by events after the war when units were dispersed or in some cases dissolved or re-organized.

I am interested in the Hitler/Mannheim recording you mention. How reliable is that recording? Hitler reportedly sacked Gehlen and many other generals for 'defeatism' when they briefed him on Soviet capabilities. Strange that Hitler himself would show defeatism to a foreign leader that he was trying to win over as an ally. Plus since 1922 there was a great deal of Soviet/Weimar cooperation including German help in establishing tank production at factories in Leningrad and Kharkov. Also, Junkers was building aircraft near Moscow. Krupp was active at Rostov-on-Don. In 1925, a flying school was established in the Don Basin to train pilots for the future Luftwaffe and for the Soviet AF. Ditto for an armor school at Kazan. True that Hitler cancelled this in 33(?) but even after that commercial and trade cooperation continued up to June 41. How could he not have known of Soviet industry?

> True that Hitler cancelled this in 33(?) but even after that commercial and trade cooperation continued up to June 41.
> How could he not have known of Soviet industry?
How could USA not have known of Russian Army capabilities it displayed ni Syria since September 2015 ?
In 1990-s US advisers were everywhere, including Yak blueprints which influenced F-35-B jet.
Russia had commercial cooperation with NATO states and still has, including buying French optics and guidance for T-90 tanks.

So, how could USA fail to foresee Crimea and Syria ?

> All of which leads me to this observation: German intelligence on the Soviet military was poor.

The known revisionist Vladimir Rezun wrote a book on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

He there bring more examples, like German military maps of Soviet railways were worse than what German public schools had, and it was especially astonishing as German industrial workers and engineers were directly involved in constructing Soviet railway bridges over most wide rivers.

> While the initial attack surprised the Soviet leadership (although it did have quite a bit of intelligence of the coming attack)

Exactly. Germans managed to drown the signal in noise. They kept radiating so many alerts, that very few real alerts were totally eclipsed by hundreds of fake ones.

Remember "How to Steal a Million" movie ?
BTW, this could backfire, they perhaps could consider reports of Soviet strong military industry as intended fake disinformation on Soviet side. Just like their own multiple "we attack next week" fake alerts.
In a sense, doesn't it look like all the US military bravado about "gas station masquerading as a country" before a small part of Russian Army went public on September 2015?

Thanks. Hadn't heard of that book although I've read several others (although Glantz told me that Icebreaker wasn't good).

You may try to scan through chapters 13 & 14 - http://militera.lib.ru/rese...
Use www.translate.ru and Google Translate side by side - very different engines would give somewhat different results for complex places, so comparing them would perhaps help.
With Rezun being propagandist and kind of pulp fiction writer, still he should have valid points dispersed through his texts.

Icebreaker... Like with Solzhenytsyn's books it is a mix of two effects: catering to the intended audience and retransmitting rumours when archives are closed. Like today some British dissident would try making a book about Rudolf Hess - what facts can he collect? few.

There were books that check Icebreaker line by line, and turns out that every page has 3-4 stretches or even outright mistakes/lies.
All that said, one can see those books as rumours acquisition, as log of brainstorming session. Many claims later would fail verification and get removed. However there perhaps be some jewels in the pile too.

And, of course, the poor showing in the Winter War and the purges would not have inspired much confidence in the Soviet AF. (Another question, BTW, that has long puzzled me is who taught whom to use armour properly? Did the Germans teach the Sovs or was it the other way round back when they were all training together in the 20s?)

Interesting, that Rezun himself strongly opposes the idea of bad Winter War performance. He claims that no other army of then could lead any offensive in that weather and terrain, nor could even NATO armies of 1980-s without strategic bombers and nukes.

Granted, if we buy that Stalin set to conquer all the Finland - then it was a loss. But if to recall that escalation started with Finland refusing to prolong leasing of one uninhabited island for USSR to build a navy outpost, then comparing with this initial demand the Winter War was overachievement.

Now, one thing often overlooked is mere experience. The very KV-1 tank was selected after real battle testing vs competing projects. Equipment, food, command structure - it all underwent a harsh test, that could not be achieved in usual drills. When in 1941 winter Wehrmacht suddenly failed - they were hoping for the winter to come and to set solid roads for them, they were sure as the autumn mud freezes they would smash Red Army to pieces again, and then that sudden setback - it was in part due to Winter War, where Red Army matched with a European army armed in part with Third Reich weapons and get some hard lessons.

I don't think that armor was used "properly" - what does it mean afterall?

All the nations had that idea about two phases - once heavy slow tanks gnaw through fortifications, then fast light tanks destroy enemy from the inside. And all the nations saw specialized tank destroyer corps, tugged or self-propelled. But tank-on-tank battles were seen a heresy by every nation.

Reality however changed that theory a lot. To the point that Abrams/Leopard2 tank was developed to overcome T-64 tank, and then T-80 was developed to overcome A/L2. So the concept changed to its opposite. And so the question of "proper use" looses the ground under the feet.

What Soviets were definitely learning from both Germany and USA - thanks to global Great Depression - it primarily was industry and engineering. It is argued that mobile warfare was more or less understood by Red Army because of huge experience during civil war cavalry raids. But constructing and building tanks for those concepts was but impossible to mostly illiterate state USSR was back then. So it was more like "joint project". Germany and USSR together were learning how to make tanks, then how to operate them, then with this new experience were rethinking requirements and limits, tried to make enhanced adjusted tanks to updated requirements, learnt to operate them, etc. Iterative process.

Again, was those German engineers who taught Americans to make Abrams? Or was those American engineers who made Leo2 for Germany? Or is such a question meaningless?

If anything, in 1920s Red Army had some noticeable background in mobile warfare, but almost zero technical/engineering capacity. While for Landswehr the opposite was true - very tech-savvy nation with only experience of trench warfare. They naturally complemented one another I guess.

The Germans presumed to teach the Soviets. And perhaps they gave them mechanical tips. But it was the Russians that had vast cavalry experience. And not just with hayburners and cossacks. In the Civil War they used armored cars as maneuver units. And they had gone up successfully against White tank units under General Wrangel's Don Army. They captured or destroyed over 80, including the Renault FT used by both France and General Patton in WW1, and some of those British behemoths also.

it looks like listened to former German officers who were more interested in rehabilitating there own image and for some reason, acted as if they were looking out for our interest.

I found Glantz's conclusion about Smolensk being the point where Barbarossa failed very convincing. The Germans thought the war was over after Minsk. They advanced 300 miles in the first 2wks. The losses they inflicted there and on the other fronts were so massive they figured the Red army was gutted. When they advanced another 300 miles and faced even stronger resistance at Smolensk and slugged it out for a month, it completely destroyed their timetable. This is when Guderian flew to Prussia and had his famous shouting match with Hitler about driving straight onto Moscow vs. swinging south to encircle Kiev. The point being that they were already on Plan B. Plan A. was out the window.

Glantz's book, 'When Titan's Clashed' is a concise book based on his access to new archive material to the Soviet archives.

Patrick, I gonna read this again. No idea why this article irritated me. It did. Gotta find out why. Maybe it's the present Zeitgeist? To the extend its not a work product in your larger promotional lain. I may be misguided ... Irony alert: in search of ...?

if I more arbitrarily chose the time-frame of the audio as evidential snippet in your larger argument:
After other remarks indicating that he is beginning to realise that he is in a contest Germany cannot win, the recording ends.

Can you explain? What made you write this? ...

Let's say with this in mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

I don't understand what you're asking. It's a question I've wondered about for a long time; I just decided now, for whatever reason, to write it up. But certainly in the back of my mind is the matter of bad intelligence leaning to disaster.

the image I would like to direct your attention on needs some time to load.

It's a map of Axis power at its maximum extent, So what?

Well, yes do you feel Gehlen could /should have helped Hitler to conquer Russia, if only people like Gehlen had given him good intelligence? Is that what your Hitler quote suggests? And is that really were you want to go?

All of which leads me to this observation: German intelligence on the Soviet military was poor.

Maybe that's the central thing plus the quote in context that stuck in my neck on its way to my mind. Didn't quite find the appropriate synapse there . No idea how exactly you would like me to make it fit in. Maybe otherwise your argument would work. Even for me?

But then what exactly is it, were is it heading.

Offer: The bad German intelligence may have been central to the American cold war state of mind via the continuation of bad German Nazi-intelligence into the post WWII era? The "German Mind" contaminated the innocent American one?

Would that be a misreading where you were heading?

********

I studied a lot of German post WWII biographies and I don't think he quite deserves the honor you may want to grant him. But yes, as others within his networks he survived, sometimes they are even both NSDAP and SS members. Like him.

********

Last:

Now it is true that, in whatever country the Soviet Army had ended the
war, "elections" were held in which socialist or communist parties came
to power and stayed in power. (Austria being an exception).

The devil lies always in the details. Still. More arbitrarily how about another part of the earlier Austrian empire. Czechoslovakia? A "1948 Coup d'état" or "Victorious February"? You tell me.

My favorite theory about the printer's devil or the apprentice is no 2. By the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Germans had decent raw intelligence but their interpretation was subject to ideology, preconceptions, and wishful thinking and was horrendous. The many Soviet surprises mentioned above were not so much surprises as they were German self-delusions.

Secrecy is a great cover for incompetence. Admiral Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, was convinced that he had a dense network of agents in Britain, when in reality there were two double agents (codenamed Tricycle and Garbo) and a team at MI6, who ran the imaginary network.

Canaris even awarded an Iron Cross to Garbo, late in 1944, after he had been fed a diet of garbage about a planned landing near Calais, to be commanded by Patten.

And you might be amused by this piece on MI5:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/...

I think it's a bit harsh. After all, by the '90s, the Provisional IRA was heavily infiltrated and largely inoperative. We'll never know whether the credit for that should go to the RUC Special Branch, but MI5 was supposedly the co-ordinating agency for counter-terrorism.

Prince Monolulu,

Small correction. The double agent network was emphatically not run out of MI6, but rather out of MI5 and the Naval Intelligence Division.

(The ability to act on the assumption that the deception fed through the network had been swallowed whole, crucial to the success of the landings in Sicily in 1943 and Normandy in 1944, was due to the successful breaking of the Abwehr ciphers, first by the Radio Security Service and then Bletchley Park.)

Before the war, MI6 was both useless and dangerous – encouraging Chamberlain to pursue policies that were inherently likely to push Stalin into the arms of Hitler.

During the war, it was useless, but largely marginal, particular after its agent network in Europe was essentially destroyed, after the successful entrapment of two of its agents by the ‘Sicherheitsdienst’ in November 1939: which may have been a blessing in disguise.

Today, it is still useless, but unfortunately no longer marginal.

I guess your second question is your main one, Patrick. It feels either Pat or TTG referred to a US military institution in Germany training military officers for or in the cold war. But both surely are aware of the institution.

Concerning 1. Not much, he had no intelligence experience, knowledge about the Soviet union or Red Army, didn't even speak a foreign language, none, including Russian. Besides at the point of the Hitler audio you refer to he was in his office as head of the Foreign Army Division East only for about a month.

Here the translation of his German article via Google-translate. It's not too bad, superficially checked:
https://tinyurl.com/Wikiped...

Here the translation is misleading though:
Foreign Army Division East
Quickly he rebuilt his authority, which originally rated information from the Chief of Defense Admiral Wilhelm Canaris .

Should read: He quickly reorganized the institution, which originally analyzed information from the Chief of Abwehr Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

Abwehr Russa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

But before I get to the question, a vignette in a railway car in
Finland. On 2 June 1942, a year after the German attack on the USSR,
Hitler invites himself to Marshal Mannerheim's 75th birthday
celebration. The Finns record the first eleven minutes of their
conversation before the Germans catch them and the recording exists. This bit sets the scene:

Any chance to listen to the recording? The link does not work.

******
You may want to contact the person in charge of that part of German military history in the Military archive over here. By now the Eastern and Western military archives are united. As far as I am concerned it's no big surprise the East published about Gehlen. While the West ignored his history. ... The military archive is part of the Federal Archives. After 1989 a lot of reorganization took place, obviously, but their headquarter seems to be still in Freiburg. Personally I experienced them as pretty helpful. Maybe since I didn't want to dig that deeply, admittedly?

I am sure one can easily find more about Hitler in his specific authority as Leader of the Wehrmacht. Like his orders.

Try this https://www.youtube.com/wat...

I think Hitler was not very socially secure and a man like Mannerheim was extremely impressive and very aristocratic (he had been a Lieut-General when Hitler was a corporal after all). And M had actually defeated the Sovs (in the Winter War -- it was a defeat even if the Finns lost territory in the end). Altogether H may have found himself saying thing he might not want to. (I love the story that M fired up a cigarette knowing H wouldn't dare object).

This audio is better on "first hear". Now what is it precisely. 11 or 24 minutes?

This one is fake? Subtitled too. The audio no doubt seems to be restored vs your version.

https://www.youtube.com/wat...

*******
It feels it is a central piece of evidence in your argument. I doubt I will have the time it feels it deserves, but I'll try to keep it in mind.

thanks, Patrick. I may have found this one. The translation dialogue patterns in the speach-to-text-version irritate me. As German speaker. Really superficial check. ... Would need time.

But I can see Hitler's voice on this tape may have been the audio-evidence for one of my favorite actors: Bruno Ganz. He must have listened to it over and over again. ...

didn't even speak a foreign language, none

He may have had a knowledge of classical languages. At least that's what rightly, or wrongly I assume the languages taught at a "humanist gymnasium" in "Breslau" at his time were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

PS - Allen Dulles did serve six months right after VE Day as OSS station chief in Berlin. But at that time Gehlen was still an Army asset working for the ETO G2 . The Gehlen organization was formed in June 46 long after Dulles had returned to the States. He would probably have known about Gehlen but I doubt if he had any control. The Dulles brothers were busy at their Wall St law firm and trying to help Tom Dewey get elected. Dulles did not join the CIA until late 1950. Gehlen went to work for the CIA in 1947.

Gehlen was a fraud when you assume he was a "Geheimdienstler", the only interesting aspect was that he could sell his stuff easily after the war. It means that the US sources were worse.

Did Gehlen speak Russian? Did he have deep knowledge in respect to Soviet industry? Why did he get his job?

The interesting fact is that some of the issues that later surfaced could easily be avoided when material that was already available within the Reichswehr had been actually read and processed by the upper echelons.

And for me the 800 pound gorilla still is: With the professional opinion of the Generalstab (Halder) that the SU could be defeated within one year some of the later issues were not relevant in 1940, when the campaign was decided.

The problem was not faulty intelligence but a too optimistic operational plan which failed after 6 weeks when Soviet ground forces were not destroyed in sufficient numbers. And for a longer campaingn the GERMAN resources were not sufficient.

One could also add that in 1940 it was not obvious how far the allied deliveries of material would influence Soviet output in 1943/44. The high number of tanks were only possible as the SU had not to build many trucks, the same argument in other fields.

> One could also add that in 1940 it was not obvious how far the allied deliveries of material would influence Soviet output in 1943/44

It was not just not obvious, it was totally irrelevant.

The success of German campaign was bound to the idea of pushing the USSR east of Ural river in just 6 months, before winter sets.

One of the reasons USSR did not believe enough in German invasion - there was no significant preparations for winter battles. And Germans did not prepare for they put all their bet on 6 months campaign.

The Land Lease for USSR materialized in any significant numbers only at the end of 1942. That is, 18 months instead of 6. At that point, German strategic assumption was also broken.

However crazy that German initial idea in 6 months war was, it correctly casted aside "allied deliveries of material" problem. Whether those deliveries would materialize or not - it would anyway be known far after the success of the war is already defined.

"According to Guderian, the Wehrmacht could have defeated the SU if Hitler had not halted his panzers when they had reached the outskirts of Moscow (because Hitler wanted them to deal first with the huge Kursk pocket)."

This narrative was quite common after the second world war in Germany and IMHO only proves that the autobiographies of German generals should be handled with extreme caution. :-)

The historic facts are dicussed in Volume 4 of the series "The Third Reich and the Second World War", the history published by the historical department of the Bundeswehr. At the moment the best you can get on this topic, according to the authors:

1) Both, Hitler and Halder, expressed on different occasions already in August 1941, that the campaign against the SU would very likely not be over in one year, clear admission of faulty planning.

2) The Moscow argument fails to explain, how Moscow could have been substituted for the huge losses of the Red Army in the south, the German motorized forces could only achieve one goal, not both.

Moscow would have some logistic advantages and, therefore, may have hurt the Red Army a little bit more, but there is no evidence that the fall of Moscow would have be a real solution of the German predicaments.

Ok, by the way. My favorite review of the book is by Umland.

on the other hand both Umland and me seem to be fans of Roger Griffin. :)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/r...

department of the Bundeswehr.

Ulenspiegel, I pondered if I should direct Patrick's attention to the more academic/educational Bundeswehr field, or more precisely the relevant specialists there, but realized maybe I didn't want to. The possibly more interesting ones, considering the topic, seemed to have an army background. :)

I stumbled across the meme as one of the more central arguments. Maybe? No expert in the field, obviously Strictly the way he used it seemed to make some sense within his larger argument.

https://www.amazon.com/Russ...

But yes, i wasn't familiar with it before.

"According to Guderian, the Wehrmacht could have defeated the SU if Hitler had not halted his panzers when they had reached the outskirts of Moscow"

They were not on the outskirts of Moscow, after Smolensk, they were still about 300 miles from Moscow. Guderian was arguing that they better hurry up and get to Moscow before the fall rains.

Before speculating about what could have been, let's review what actually did happen. Guderian's Central Army had two Panzer groups, one was sent south to help trap 600,000 Russians at Kiev and another to assist the Northern Army to break a stalemate near Leningrad and begin the tragic siege.

[Using Northern Army instead of Army Group North for readability]
Composition:
Northern Army: 4th Panzer group
Central Army: 2nd and 3rd Panzer group
Southern Army: 1st Panzer group.

Battle of Moscow: starts 10/2 with the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th panzer group, ends in a Russian victory.

If Guderian charged in with the Central Army, then it's reasonable to assume that the the 4th Panzer group would either have stayed pinned at Leningrad or Leningrad would not have been under siege and would have been able to send material to Moscow. Also the Russians at Kiev would have been a thorn at his side. I'm going to take off my General hat now because, Guderian is a better General than me but Zhukov also makes a few points, I'll only mention one.

Zhukov, says that the Germans did not have the logistics to encircle Moscow that far into Russian territory. That they could only reach it. All of the great German victories involve enveloping cities, cutting off armies, forcing them to retreat and then cutting them to pieces as they move. The Germans never did well trying to take cities building by building. This rings true to me because the original plan was to annihilate the Red Army on the frontier, drive into Moscow in a Mercedes and then dictate terms of surrender.

Like all amateurs, I have a pet theory on Germany's best chance to win the war but this wasn't it. They took their best shot in 1941.

Their biggest Intelligence failures:
1. They didn't know about the new Russian tanks.
2. They didn't know the size of the Russian army reserve.

Guderian's Central Army had two Panzer groups, one was sent south to help trap 600,000 Russians at Kiev and another to assist the Northern Army to break a stalemate near Leningrad and begin the tragic siege.

That must have been the what Michael Kellogg mentions. Right or wrong, I assume it must have been a "Führerbefehl"*. Kellog concentrates on the larger ideological network, nationalist allies, white or anti-communists. The Ukraine surfaces in this context.

* an order by the Führer=Hitler.

> Germans could see the spires of the Kremlin
..... yeah, they were
> as they approached Moscow
....in the very last weeks of 1941
when Soviet army had to pull together old tanks from soldier schools and monuments to hack together yet some more resistance force.
Guderian I guess ;aments about August/September timeframe, before falls turned everything into mud, before Germans started to crave for winter to come faster and save them from the rasputitsa.
And here we have to look at USSR casualities in the Battle for Berlin, when Germany was bleeded dry by 4 years of the total war, when Berlin was perfectly encircled, etc. BTW, even then USSR failed to capture Flak Towers by force.
German casualities in their attempt to capture September-1941 Moscow would be much higher. Even without Stalin having Flak Towers of his own. Won't it be Phyrric victory, if at all?
Napoleon once put all his bets on Russian capitulation just because of capital city fallen. Hitler probably knew that story.

"However, I do recall his writing that the Germans could see the spires of the Kremlin as they approached Moscow."

That is true but that was in Dec. 5, 1941. That was the high water mark of the German advance on Moscow. They got within 19 miles of the city. The offensive was authorized by Hitler on Oct. 2.

Guderian's argument with Hitler was in late August, after Smolensk. That was when Hitler ordered the re-assignment of Guderian's Panzer groups to Kiev and Leningrad and when he had his fit about Hitler losing the war. Guderian has a reputation for being a decent person, I have no reason to doubt that.

Marshal Zhukov: "Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war. We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."

More than 200,000 deuce and a half trucks to be specific.

Plus 14,000 aircraft, 150,000 smaller trucks, 44,000 jeeps, 8,000 tractors and 12,700 armored vehicles (used mostly on the Baltic Front), 1.5M blankets, 15M pairs of boots, 100,000 tons of cotton, 2.67M tons of POL, 4.5M tons of food supplies, 2000 locomotives, 11000 RR cars.

The Brits and Canadians also sent aid not shown here.

Where are you getting this from...?

Here are the facts about Lend-Lease...Britain received THREE times as much as the Soviet Union...$31.4 vs $11.3 billion...but nobody talks about how Lend-Lease 'saved' Britain...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Furthermore...if one looks at the timeline of the deliveries we see very little coming until 1943 by which time the Red Army had basically crushed the Germans...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Britain did send aid early in 1941 as well as a squadron of pilots and flight instructors...along with Hurricanes, other aircraft, trucks etc...

Of course Britain was also very grateful that the Soviets crushed the Germans at Stalingrad and breathed a huge sigh of relief...as Hitler was a Sword of Damocles over Britain...

Overall the Lend-Lease aid was a very small part of Soviet materiel production...here is an article that breaks down the numbers quite accurately...

https://orientalreview.org/...

It's too bad that this issue continues to be propagandized...

"Furthermore...if one looks at the timeline of the deliveries we see very little coming until 1943 by which time the Red Army had basically crushed the Germans..."

That is at least debatable. The losses of the SU until 1943 were far from sustainable and in 1943 it was still the Wehmacht which could (a last time) launch a large operation - at Kursk, where the Red Army again paid a very high price. The Red Army was in Berlin in May 1945 because they won the war of attrition 1943/44.

The Red Army was in Berlin in May 1945 because they won the war of attrition 1943/44.

The real war of attrition started in June 1941 and, however "attrition" is defined, was "over" after Kursk Battle. After July 1943 there was absolutely no doubt in USSR that the war not only will be "won", but that it will end with total destruction of Nazi Germany. In fact, Kursk Battle was so significant that understanding of it significance was universal across the globe. Mollie Panter Downess of New Yorker magazine left a startling evidence in her London War Notes about unease in British society during Battle of Kursk since everyone, as she stated, was feeling anxiety not only because everyone understood what was at stake at Kursk but because of a "helplessness of people standing on the sidelines while watching their friend (Red Army)" fighting a monstrous decisive battle. Interestingly, American press removed reports from Kursk Battle from its front pages. By the spring of 1944 Wehrmacht was basically hollowed out. It still remained a potent force, no doubt, but it was a pale shadow of its own self circa 1941-42 when it was capable of massive strategic offensive campaigns. Kursk ended all that.

"The real war of attrition started in June 1941 and, however "attrition"
is defined, was "over" after Kursk Battle. After July 1943 there was
absolutely no doubt in USSR that the war not only will be "won", but
that it will end with total destruction of Nazi Germany."

Sorry, that is, considering the hard data, wrong. The situation became worse for the Red Army in 1943, they burnt through their tanks (no net addioton) and still had unsustainable high losses of infantry. On the other hand, the tank ratio improved for Germany in 1943.

The change in 1944 was, that in June the Red Army had almost one order of magnitude more tanks than Army Group Center and could destroy the enemy. This was only possible because of delivery of thousands of tanks.

A quite sober discussion is found e.g. in Zetterlings "Kursk: A statistical analysis". Kursk was NOT special and did of course not broke the German army.

Without tanks there would not have been a destruction of Army Group Center in 1944 and considering the state of the Russian infantry divisions no chance that this could have been achieved later. Here I refer to really good discussions on the Dupuy Boards.

> The situation became worse for the Red Army in 1943, they burnt through their tanks (no net addition)
It is hard to guess what is "net addition".
Do you mean that USSR Armies should be hiding in basement and collecting more and more tanks for the means of collection?
As of production, 1943 saw more "working horse" T-34 production, than 1942
The factories were relocated and reconstructed in Ural region and the production was restarting.
It was 1941/1942 when Red Army was "burning through" their depot and reserves, in 1943 it was sustained in-flow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Curious. This places the effect of Lend Lease in a different light than usually portrayed vis-a-vis USSR. My understanding was that the impact of LL was more on industrial and logistic side of the Red Army: trucks, aluminum, locomotives, explosives, food (of certain types at least), rubber, and so on. Russians would have been able to defeat the Germans, in a defensive campaign, had they been left to their own resources, one would think, but they probably would not have been able to break the Germans, as in take the offensive effectively against the Germans, had they lacked these resources.That phase began only in latter half of 1943, after Kursk, but not necessarily because of Kursk. While taking into account the unreliability of German generals' accounts, they seemed fairly unanimous in thinking that they could still hold their own defensively even after Kursk. While their blame usually turns to Hitler, the real ingredient could have been added mobility/offensive punch of the Red Army from LL supplies/resources.