@@15.kevindarunugroho30 Well irl reason Steiner wasnt able to have enough men is bcz wenck realized that it would be a suicide of his army to frontally attack the Russian and so he used his men for the evacuation of Berlin
I really like how CoD: WaW used propaganda footage in cutscenes. In 1942, there's a bunch of German propaganda films used in cutscenes, but as the Soviets get closer and closer to Berlin, you start seeing more Soviet propaganda, and the image of the elite German army falls apart when you see young children in nazi uniforms being dragged out of a sewer, or when you see the swastika atop the Reichstag get blown up.
I remember the scenes that you mentioned. Scenes that I also still remember are the ones where the German soldier gets executed or the iron cross with "the young, the old and the bitter"
Except there was NEVER a swastika above the Reichstag. Like the soviets who, like retards, thought he Reichstag was important, you didnt realize the actual center of nazi germany was the reichs chancelory. The Reichstag was literally not used since 1933 and was only left standing by the nazis as a reminder top the population that democracy (what the Reichstag actually stood for) sucks and is weak compared to the new nazi germany. The Swastika was on the Reichs chancellory. Very importance difference.
Wait you are telling me that the tiger wasn't able to hold out against a million t34 unbelievable I would like to know your source I only trust memoirs not some self called historians smh
Also: HOW DARE YOU suggest that all that equipment made by slave labour were pieces of shit, and that the production system that ultimately accelerated the end of the war was in any way flawed!
Wait wait wait... your telling me that a winter didnt completly halt the german offensive? And soviets arent man-beasts able to resist -100 celsius degree weather? Blasphemy
When is ISP coming on to talk about how the German's could've just driven around soviet lines and gone on their merry way to an undefended Moscow whilst also speaking of how an army based entirely on artillery is very feasible.
“If it weren’t for hitler and his stupid blondie too” I’ll have you know that Blondie was a tactical genius and had they just listened to her we’d all be speaking German Shepherd right now.
"Hans, get your buddies and push the tank towards the camera, we have to give the impression we have enough fuel to run it ... what do you mean you can't push a tank?"
A lot is said about how the enigma code was unbreakable. It wasn't in fact the first side to break it was the Polish. Five weeks before the war even began
More like "Oh crap, I can't show any destroyed, worn out or broken downTigers/Panthers/ panzers/wunderwaffen, I can't show any of the tens of thousands of dead soldiers of the Fatherland? Why risk my life, then? I'll just sit back here behind the lines and film fresh tanks and troops on their way to the slaughter."
well to be fair... if you have to make propaganda for roughly 6 years... you will kinda run out of ideas. And being fancy with camera work during wartime is probably not welcome..
The similar narrative about Japan is pervasive as well. Japan did so much damage throughout east Asia and to its own people but was quickly forgotten because the US need it as a bridgehead to curb communism. I am impressed that an American is challenging false and harmful narratives like this. You have my respect, you are a true historian.
One tiny little bit of context, that another pervasive narrative conveniently leaves out, is that the new monsters in charge (quite literally, considering that the russians used the nazi camps available for their own political and ethnic prisoners), like the Soviet occupiers in the totality of Eastern Europe or the communist genociders in Asia, were a very real problem for their victims and the people of the world, unlike the ghosts of the german nazies and of the imperial japanese.
It's crazy to think that the most massive war in history had basically happened between the allies and Japan in the early 1940s as they occupied and terrorized the Chinese, Koreans and others and some five years later many of the same American soldiers are in conflict with the Chinese and North Koreans and taking their leave in a peacefull allied japan.
@@varietywiarriorAnd what fighting force was that, among the ones he mentioned? The US armed the nationalist Chinese which was its ally and still is today in Taiwan. The north Koreans were not armed by the US either. They were using eastern bloc and various captured equipment. Saying captured weapons is arming someone would be silly, since that would mean soviets and germans were actually arming each other in the eastern front. It's like the troglodytes saying IS captured US weapons from the Iraqi army meant the US was arming IS.
Another thing is the way historians tend to leave the Nazi military units untranslated to add mystique. Panzer, Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht. But we mostly just talk about the French armies and Russian/Soviet tanks in the same war. Even in WW1, we just talk about the german military.
@Jure Herman What is their preferred term? Most English language history books I have read on the subject use "German Military". Perhaps not every book, but most English language histories use that term translated, which is not the case in WW2 English language scholarship.
@@legend-rx9ik well, I'll grant that panzer is a special case. But still historians often use "panzer divisions" instead of simply "armored/tank divisions", even though there were other tanks like the tiger in "panzer divisions". So using "panzer" to talk about tanks besides the specific models that were named panzer is actually really confusing and bad nomenclature because panzer is a proper noun, but also a general noun in German.
Well, with all things bad, eventually they will be shattered. As it is happening right now. Our perceptions of Germany are now changing from an invincible mechanized force destroyed by Hitler to an inherently stupid, ultranationalistic, dumbass, and unrealistic political system. Let the propaganda by these fascist pigs be shattered. They'll turn over their graves.
@@the_real_kevin8996 Goebbles was criticizing the German media of Weimar. But of course he lost the war so you were raised to think he said it and meant it.
@@StratMan9009 I know this is shocking to you, but you can interpret quotes in different ways even WITHOUT the context! For example, Irony can be used here. Goebbels was criticizing Weimer media while going on to do the same things he accused them of doing (spouting lies)
Wait, what? The German Army was almost totally mechanized. Millions of mechanized horsepower!!!! Well, millions of horses anyway...... That's kinda the same thing? Right??? BTW, I have the IHF 28 disc set of wartime newsreels "Through Enemy Eyes." Hell, according to Goebbels, 1945, WE BE WINNING!!!!! Good video, as usual. Keep'em coming.
Speaking as a German here - I think part of it is also that especially Americans loved to see Nazis as Übermenschen, because it made the victory even sweeter. I don't see the fanboying over Tigers and Mauses or the Bismarck as much in German conversation as in the contributions of English speaking people. It's a bit like the perpetual fight between British and Americans about whether or not saved the latters arse. Even Saving Private Ryan, or Band of Brothers, or The Pacific for that matter play this tune to an extent, although not as extreme as the earlier "golden era" war movies. As historians say, it was a mere game of numbers and as such pretty clear from the start (from a know-it-all future), but proclaiming so also devalues your own achievement.
I made a similar comment and I 100% agree though while looking at my comment, my original Take was that the Americans unintentionally made the conclusion that they were the super most effective in the war as the Soviets weren’t talking and all they had was Germans who were ready to make themselves seem super good. People joke about US propaganda films and how they made it like they were the 100% important people but I never see them ask why besides a internal loop of “Because propaganda”
I makes me also a bit angry how especially Americans are completely oblivious as to how the legacy of Nazis in our culture and political institutions persisted for a very long time - some might even say, to this day. As horrid as the RAF (Red Army Faction, not the Royal Air Force) terror attacks were, their sentiment and reasons for why they took up arms after the 1968 protests were largely a failure in their eyes resounded very well with a lot of young German people who were born during or after the war. The protestors, even before they radicalized, were frequently insulted by the generation that originally caused the war, thousands of Nazi officials were never punished for their crimes, hell, even variants of concentration camps and workhouses erected under the Nazis were kept open for troubled adolescents well into the 70s, until the SPD administrations und Brandt and Schmidt shut them down for good.
It's not about making victory sweeter. Portraying the Germans as superhuman, technologically far advanced merciless beasts helps Americans excuse their own crimes, such as the endless civilian terror bombings and the nuclear bombs.
I forgot the actual quote but Wernher von Braun, during an interview as he was doing his thing with NASA when asked about how it is possible to do something as impossible and unrealistically as landing a man on the moon he answered something in the meaning of "If the world was realistic and fair I'd be in prison for war crimes" As I said, this is what I believe to remember, I could be wrong. I remember reading that quote in the Speyer technology museum.
I can't imagine von Braun said anything of the sort since he went out of his way to avoid any responsibility for the crimes committed as part of the V-2 program.
Bruce Tucker I mean, at the point he was that far into NASA, he could have literally said he personally advised the Holocaust and I don’t think anything would have really happened given he had decisively proved his usefulness in the field of technology at that point. Also if you haven’t already, Tom Lehrer made a funny song about the NASA war criminal and you should check it out.
Because Spain wasn't fascist, Franco wasn't fascist, Falange was fascist. If you call Franco's regime fascist you either do not know what fascism is, what his regime was or both.
@@novkorova2774 I mean, he esentially created his own branch of Falange and otlawn all other parties, i can see your point, i wouldn´t say Spain past the 50s was fascist, but the period before that was... strange. Sure Franco followed different ideals than Italian or German fascism, but he was pretty happy to align his ideology with the others.
@@zyavoosvawleilte1308 Well, the only reason he received aid was because he was a potential ally against the reds, which again comes show that morality is not what motivates international relationships. Same as how some people think that ww2 was some good vs evil conflict, even though the western allies had no problem siding with Stalin and wouldn't have given a fuck about the holocaust had Germany not attacked them.
These "smaller scale" stories of Wehrmacht warcrimes do go around in germany, atleast amongst the part of the population that has relatives who served in the war. My grampa for example was drafted in 43 when he was 17 and got injured by a partisans grenade in 44. He once told me over a glass of wine that apparently his comrades went to the house the grenade came from and just shot everybody no questions asked, including women (and maybe children, he didnt talk about this). So yeah, these things happened, but after the war was lost, nobody wanted to talk about it and "low class" soldiers werent really inquired about it either. So many of these crimes were just sort of forgotten and the people connected to them put their energy after the war into "rebuilding their lives", getting a family, building a career, build a house, these things. And my grampa talked about the war a lot, but about this incident just this once
@@LuzikArbuzik77 Exactly. Ever since WWI, the Germans had an idiotic doctrine of "making examples" out of local villages and populations whenever resistance activity was met, which *obviously* only INCREASED resistance activity everywhere they went.
@@clusterflick6333 That litteraly how tito made several ARMIES of partizans in Yugoslavia, he jus went to a village and told the residents that they will all be killed if the germans knew the village had partisans passing through, and the villagers would all join him.
In the modern world, “History is written by the victors” no longer means “The winner controls the narrative”. It means “He who controls the narrative, ultimately wins”
True, I mean we (the US) really went out of our way to rehabilitate the view of the nazis post war to keep them as allies against the Soviets The myth of the clean wehrmacht really caught on after that, that only the SS were evil and the soldiers were all chill haha
Odin Satanas The Soviet Union was on-par, if not worse than the Nazi regime. No one really talks about how horrible they are in schools, and instead spend nearly the whole year talking about the holocaust, a horrible degenerate crime, yet not worse than what the Soviets did in the Ukraine & their gulags,
@@absolutelyyousless7605 I 100% agree with that and always wondered why myself. How come Stalin isn't just as demonized during the WW2 subject in history class? It's ridiculous how warped and smeared history is based on your country of origin. I would much rather be told the truth, blemishes and all, than be told a sanitized version.
@@KaladinVegapunk Same thing happened with Japan too. "Hirohito did nothing wrong. It was all Tojo. Why do we say this? Definitely not because the Soviets are pushing Communism in Asia."
I've said this about Viking history, and it certainly applies here; Winners don't always write the history books, and when the losers do, they're always pretty damn bitter about it.
@@WhenInDarknessSeekTheLight A. A lot of the Viking raiding was done while the various Scandanavian peoples who made up the Viking parties were Christian. Hardrada was Christian, as an example. B. Conversion was not loss, what even is this premise.
This in generally seen through the lens of England though. In which case the Vikings lost. Either assimilated to an extent into England or left. Alfred the Great on top. Not sure if it’s really a loss. Much of the negative reputation does come from the monks though, which makes complete sense as they decided to attack literate people, who of course wrote bad things about them.
The whole idea of "trust Germans because of WW2 track record" already came to bite the US and UK in the behind in the 1950s. Reinhard Gehlen, head of Russia desk of Wehrmacht military intelligence , was appointed the head of the West German intelligence BND (hiring few ex-SS members along the way). Gehlen, the master of missing on Red Army tank force size in 1941, overlooking Stalingrad, post-Kursk offensives and Bagration in 1942, 1943 and 1944, continued his usual mastery - in 10 years, the head of BND's East German desk (another ex-SS, ironically) was a Soviet spy, there was little progress in actual spying on the USSR and GDR, but 16 members of Gehlen's family were on BND's payroll. That "WW2 reputation of fighting the Soviets" works like a franchise for some people ;)
@@HingerlAlois Gehlen wasn't a Soviet spy - he just was an incompetent overhyped spy master, living off unearned WW2 reputation. His subordinate Heinz Felfe (leading BND coverage of USSR and East Germany) was a Soviet spy, subsequently exchanged by Stasi after his arrest by West Germans
As a German myself this annoys me to no end. Because to this very fucking day children get taught wrong stuff in history about the 3rd Reich. When I was in school World War 2 was almost non existent in the curriculum and the stuff they told us was plain wrong. I remember that my history teacher said that the Poles charged the German tanks on horses without any reason and were just inferior fighters(Almost how the Nazis spun it back then, huh?). Not mentioning the fact that they were carrying anti-tank rifles and bought the rest of the polish army important time. The Holocaust is talked about in detail but the whole war is not talked about in school at all. This is idiotic as the atrocities from the army and the whole concept of extinction warfare is not present in peoples heads. Even today there is this weird notion of the army doing nothing wrong back then. I also once had a drunk talk with some soldiers of the current German army and they were also spouting so much bullshit about how the Wehrmacht could have won the war bla bla bla. Nice guys but completly clueless about history.
I am from germany and I can confirm that this is true to the point where the thing at 4:45 with nazi germany attacking the soviets first because "the soviets would have invaded germany anyway" was told to me in school by multiple history teachers.
Dont know when you went to school or which school in particular , but we were taught something else. And no offense to our current military, but a lot of soldiers nowadays didnt have the highest education... WW2 was a big topic when i went to school and we learned about the narratives presented and that a lot of them are wrong. For were taught about stalingrad and the scorched earth policy used by the wehrmacht duríng the retreat at the eastfront.
In Germany, we do not really learn about how the war went on. Not at all. We don't watch military films and so on. We don't learn, how famous Generals fought against the worst odds and etc. I watched, when I was in class 10, speeches of Goebbels, Himmler and Hitler, analyzed them, what language they used, to antagonize a minority. What psychology they had and why the German public broadly accepted it. We learned about how the first world war lead to the rising of the NSDAP, Hitler's party (broadly), how he grabbed for power, failed multiple times, and succeeded in the end. How the war started and why it started 1939. The appeasement politics. The development of the hatred towards Jews, Roma and disabled. We learned about Hitler's hypocrisy, him being so unfit, that he wasn't drafted into ww1, even though he was one of the first volunteers for it. And of cause so many facts about the Holocaust, i couldn't remember half of it. Though being interested in history and trying to remember most. In the end, I didn't realize how glorified the Nazis are in the west. In Germany the topic is still, to this day, 70 years later, a critical point, to speak about. And for the broad public, being called a Nazi, because if believe, speech patterns, dress up or action, is the worst insult, you could issue to someone. I don't have the picture in my head, when thinking about Nazis, as a successful war machine. I see Franz lambda, well dressed and soft spoken creating terror. A two sided snake, ready to poison everyone, coming too close. For me the Nazis weren't about creating "Lebensraum", it was a destructive killing Maschine, industrialized and optimized to kill as many as possible, as fast as possible, with the most limited resources as possible. Not a nice picture to have of once past, but one i will represent and give to, hopefully, generations after.
Maybe you have a different definition of hypocrisy in Germany, but how does being unfit for service make Hitler a hypocrite actually? He was still willing to put his ass on the line. I would argue promoiting human rights while getting high on Putins gas makes you modern Germany more hypocritical
I mean I went to school in whats regarded as one of the worst states to go to school in the US and this was how they taught us about the nazis and the war. I think maybe the problem isnt how they teach about the nazis but about how some people choose to learn about them. Which is to mean they either dont cause they dont give a fuck because "history is meaningless" or some such bs or they only focus on the shit that makes their wehraboo balls tingle.
I thought your policy was to ignore all and act as if Germany had never existed before 1945 Like "Germany magically appeared in 45 out of thin air and all of our culture is Tirol"
It's true, victors rarely do write history. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Vietnam (which is a far more interesting topic and far less over-done in my opinion). Ask any layman, and the idea is of viet-kongs hitting and running before the US could muster its superior firepower. So basically cowards hiding in the bushes. Read any amount of memories from actual marines/GIs there, and you'll see it's quite the opposite. One of the NVA's main strategies was to get in so short quarters, that US arty/airforce wouldn't shoot for fear of friendly fire. For anyone interested, read Firebase Illingworth, it's clinically insane, and one of the best war books ever written.
@Matthew Chenault agreed if you see the casualties you will laugh at how many vietcongs died compared to the Us soldiers The US lost because of the media's false depiction if the vietnam war and the US public opinion this is why i find the finnish winter war memes funnier
@@bongcloudopening5404 exactly. Vietnam is an easy thing for people that dont know much about the conflict to point and laugh at (the "when the trees start speaking vietnamese" memes are pretty funny tho). Vietnam is also an easy target for people who like to say "the us hasnt won a war since WWII", (despite that being wrong in the first place) because they dont know that we basically handicapped ourselves, as any big push or unexpected attack could possibly start a third world war.
@Matthew Chenault They still lost technically, because they didn't achieve their goal of keeping an independent and Non-communist South Vietnam on its feet. No doubt that the Americans were tactically superior, but much of the war was also fought by the South Vietnamese who were generally stomped on when they fought without American support and logistics. Not to mention ineffective counter insurgency strategies such as strategic hamlets and Search and Destroy missions. There are battles like the battle of Dak To and Hamburger Hill in which the area would be cleared, but then American soldiers would leave and the enemy returns to the area. Relying on body counts that underestimated the will of the communist forces to fight, and were very likely to be inflated since they also included civilians (mistaken or not), livestock, or maybe even faked counts.
many americans cannot accept that vietnam was failure for the US with their limited knowledge, from grouping the NVA with viet cong to comparing death counts ( i guess the german won eastern front for the number of people they killed amirite? If the effort to win the heart of the people failed from the get go ( read about strategic hamlets), then sending troops to fight directly is meaningless, only causing more civilians to join the viet cong
PH: so you see the Nazis weren’t the mechanized juggernaut most people are led to believe...take that wehraboos... Wehraboos: so you mean the Wehrmacht didn’t have a million tiger tanks? PH: No....they actually had more horses than vehicles... Wehraboo: and they still managed to fight an enemy on two fronts against overwhelming odds...with old men and boys, armed with shirt weapons? PH: well, yeah. But that’s not what I’m trying to Wehraboo: They weren’t bad asses, THEY WERE GODS!!!!
It's refreshing that shows like WW2 week by week on RUclips are currently showcasing the summer of 1941 and you can see that even before any winter, the Germans are getting beat hard.
In this month copy of "guerre et histoire", a french magazine, we have an article about the myth built by Guderian, where he pictured himself as the father of the german tank division, and how Liddell Hart decided to play along, in exchange for the legacy Guderian reconnized from him.
Germany: *Defeated in the eastern front.* Wehraboo: It was because it was winter bro. Germany: *Defeated under the scorching sun of North Africa* Wehraboo: It was just because Rommel was on sick leave bro. Germany: *Defeated in Italy* Wehraboo: The german soldiers were tired at that point and had eaten too much spaghetti bro.
but you can actually blame it all on logistics. The common "excuse" of why germany lost the war - no fuel - is simply true. This is also a reason why Hitler was so relentless about the Winter and didnt want his troops to dig in. While usually portrayed as him (Hitler) just being ignorant, he was very well aware of the fact that the Wehrmacht doesnt have enough Oil. Goering had the Order to amass a certain amount of oil before the attack on Russia, but he couldnt fullfill it so Hitler knew they only had a very short amount of time to conquer the important Oilfields, or at best just make the Soviet Union capitulate as a whole.
tbf in the east it took almost 5 years to defeat them. In afrika it took about 2 and a half same for Italy and the germans were outnumbered on all fronts in terms of equipment and manpower. Soo they were rather effective. Only in the west (france and germany) was the advance relatively fast as in it took about a year and a half to reach deep into Germany. On the contrary the germans somehow by some miracle managed to conquer most of europe and half of russia between 1939-1941.
The Krauts killed a lot more than their enemies. First week of Barbarossa the soviets lost almost 3.900 planes while the germans lost a 100. Check the numbers, they simply killed more. And thats it.
@@AK-Kessler0907 that doesnt matter tho?? Germany couldn't win a war of attrition. And I dont get what point you're trying to give with this. Yeah they shot down a bunch of planes at the opening of barbarossa. But the allied powers had the material and manpower to make and replace the planes as well as train new pilots for the planes. Youre right that the Germans caused a good amount of casualties. Especially during the "prime" of 1939-1941. But after that, as soon as the end of 41. They were losing people that they couldnt replace. And all the Soviets got was a bloody nose.
Very few people know about the nazi states film crew. I guess a lot of people think footage was done by "amateurs" . A lot of these footage was shown in movie theatres before the start of the film,they wanted you to see them hat way.It's no different than today how social media is engineering the things they want you to see. You think reddit is community controlled? The front page especially political things is run by supermods who work for a company,did you think its one person? That reddit user is multiple people.
I mean I hope people understood that about the Nazi war footage, the Allies did the same thing. Combat cameramen took the footage and then it was fed back through layers of bureaucracy until it was honed into a propaganda product that could be shown in theaters to improve public moral, sell bonds, and of course inform the public as to the state of the war (assuming it was good news). There were no amateurs with video cameras back then, no way for them to share that footage even if they did, not even a way to view it unless you had a projector. I'm only 23 and I understand how media worked prior to digital technology and smartphones, I hope I'm not a minority in that regard or society really is fucked.
Jake Shaw Companies playing globalist politics? I don’t think so, at least if you say that globalist politics is the primary objective. The primary objective of a company is to find profit. The secondary objective of a company is to find even more profit. Ignore some of their moralistic missions they posted on the company website. Most of it are probably propaganda to attract certain customers. What goal is it there for Facebook or Google to subvert information or engineering views if it didn’t bring them profit? Even the seemingly draconian espionage they did on their customers are based on gauging your interests to deliver advertisements and clicks. The only domination you’ll get from them is an economic monopoly or oligopoly over the market. Except doing so requires them to make friends. Why do you think these companies support a certain political side? Because there are money to be made there. Once people’s values change, they’ll change if it affects the bottom line. Also, companies have quickly learned that the best way is to not sell a product, but rather sell a lifestyle. How to sell an air conditioner? Sell the idea of how good it is to be in your chilled room during some of the hottest days of summer. How to sell a salad? Promote veganism or healthy lifestyle. The Old Spice ads sells body care products, but they target their advertising to sell the idea of masculine, sexy men that appeals to both men and women. Mercedes-Benz sold the idea of luxury driving. How to sell beauty products? Sell the people a commonly accepted beauty standard, like youth-looking or whiter skins (that last one is true in Asia, at least). So what do these tech companies sell as a lifestyle? Well, I’d say it’s freedom. Freedom to post silly things in Facebook, freedom to watch cat videos on RUclips, freedom to tweet, freedom to express yourself, freedom to see information you want to see, etc. Freedom can also practicality. Imagine how much more time you can do the things above had not Google (originally a search engine) made it easier for you to access your emails, browser, GPS, files, notes, and even to connect with friends and family, all under the same umbrella that is Google. There has been several important hearings between the tech companies and the governments of several countries within the last decade or two. Doesn’t matter if you are supportive of whose side there. Many people are still unaware that the majority, if not all, of your avenues of digital self-expression (as in, social media) and avenues to the internet are controlled by a few companies. And all of them are selling this same lifestyle and feeling for the people that not only helps fatten their bottom lines, but has the ability to change how people think. Just take the case of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook recently. They’re accused of providing a space for Russian trolls (whether independent or state-supported) to generate targeted ads and articles (some of which are blatant misinformation) during the 2016 US election. Or how social media played a major role in organizing mass protests from the Arab Spring to Hong Kong to BLM. There are numerous articles done regarding the usage of Facebook or Twitter, normally used to connect friends and families, as weapons of political activists; many of which cited the Arab Spring as an example. So, do they care about these changes? I don’t think so, as long as it doesn’t affect their bottom line or anyone brought it to their attention. Their aim is to establish a monopoly or at least an oligopoly between the biggest tech companies in the field of information and technology, where anyone who even just wanted to do a simple internet search must go through them. The problem is that such goal is against what many people believed is their inherent right to information. That’s about as political they would go.
@@alexanderchristopher6237 I'm going to skip the rest of your essay and say this. What happens when your company is *supposed* to make a profit, but becomes subverted to start pushing an Agenda?
As a German, I gotta say though that nowadays I would like to know for real what my relative did in WW2, whether he was one of the "Clean Ones" or the acceptable ones in the Wehrmacht. But with how little information there is, I don't think there's any way to find something like that out.
The "losers shaping the narrative of the war" definitely reminded me of Confederate leaders and southern scholars shaping the narrative after the U.S. Civil War into the wAr Of NoRtHeRn AgReSsIoN
At least the "War of Northern Aggression" I feel like has more of a kernel of truth to it than "The war was about States rights". Somehow they seem to have successfully sanitized the history of the succession being because of slavery. Even though at the time, there was absolutely no question about the reason. Just look at all the speeches made by Confederate leadership. It just rustles my jimmies.
Unofficial Plays The right to secede has never even been a thing ever since the Constitution was drafted and approved. The US government is not a confederacy of states where they contribute their ambassadors to meet with other member states, but a new government made out of those states joining together. A contemporary example of a conference of nations at the time would be the German Confederation. The doctrine of states right to secede was first implemented in the Nullification crisis of 1832-1833 during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. It was not found within the Constitution. The nullification crisis happened because South Carolina don’t want to pay the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832, which they deemed as unconstitutional. Seriously, what is it with South Carolina and creating American crisis?
This might be a more us-american problem. Ever since the '68 movement the public image in Germany is that if you didn't resist the nazis you were actively helping in their extermination campaign. People even deny that the armies were well lead in both wars, something even the Israelis of all people agree upon
It’s really fascinating how they manage to conjure these images of an unstoppable German war machine from the grave. I didn’t know that we had the Generals chronicle their side of the war. The fact that we just took everything for word for word for so long is strange.
It really is a shame because I love these subjects, but in recent years, I learned that a lot of it was propaganda that nobody felt the need to try and correct. I feel like I'm relearning everything I tried to learn since I was a kid.
Don't be too downhearted. Most WW2 sources are pretty reliable. It's just the memoirs of the German generals which are terrible, mainly due to the baneful influence of Halder
Alan Pennie and I get that. It just shakes me a bit since I’m really passionate about the history of warfare and the equipment they use. In this case however, a lot of it wasn’t true, and until recently, wasn’t corrected. I know it’s a silly thing to get worked up about, but i love this kind of thing.
I mean, the Red Army did use a ton of “human wave” tactics (or more accurately poorly coordinated frontal assaults) up until 1944-1945. And, as Hill points out, these assaults continued until the end of the war, but became increasingly rare. Of course, as Glantz argues, the inability of Red Army commanders to prevent such things, or even their active conduct of such assaults, was largely due to that army needing to completely re-learn how to fight a war.
It's half right. Russian tactics were less about maximizing the effectiveness of their soldiers, as the Germans did, and more about just throwing as many men at the enemy as possible. That's why the T-34 was an ergonomic nightmare. They didn't care if the crew lived or died, they just cared that they had a tank to throw at the Germans. It ultimately worked, but the male/female ratio in Russia is still fucky because of how many men died in the war
4:18 - 4:22 _"And it was super convenient for them that they had a laundry list of former colleagues that were either dead, (shows picture of East Germany) or worse"_ This is my favourite part of the video.
There’s a movie I just watched a few weeks ago called The Captain. It’s the true story of this 19 year old Nazi paratrooper (Willi Herald ) who deserts in the last two weeks of the war. While being hunted by MPs he finds a staff officer car stuck in mud. Inside is the uniform of a highly decorated Luftwaffe captain. He puts it on and manages to collect other soldiers he runs into for his “mission”. The “mission “? He’s been sent by Hitler personally to check on morale of the front line soldiers. And it works. All because of the authority of the uniform. So him and his rag tag end up at a detention camp for German soldiers who have deserted, looted, etc and he convinces the man in charge of the camp he has authority from the “highest “. The man is angry at the red tape and asks Willi Herald to help. So he “helps” by authorizing the massacre of all the prisoners. Then it’s hit in an air strike so they write on a car “Herolds Express Court” and murdered their way through the countryside. He was finally caught but let out by mistake til he got caught by a British soldier for stealing and recognized as the war criminal and hung. Fascinating story.
As a German I can only say that this is a particularly strange experience because the narrative in Germany itself is vastly different. It took about two decades of dedicated activism by the two generations born after the war to change that narrative though, losing the war and the Allies' demands alone were not enough to get to this point.
I'm so glad this issue is finally getting some attention. "The Soviet-German War, 1941-1945: Myths and Realities" is a brilliant and shocking book that any serious ww2 history buff should read.
The irony is that David Glantz is a propagandist who promotes German propaganda recycled and reused as NATO propaganda - "German vs Soviet military losses" narrative in particular. Any serious ww2 history buff should be aware of that.
Sin Collector No, not in every case. I’d say for more complete total warfare like in ancient times where the totalitarian side wins, it is rewritten. Take for instance Sparta conquering Athens, they could have done god knows what to historical documents, etc., and we would have no clue because of how limited those resources were.
@@keemstarkreamstar7069 well yeah, when you go back to the days when the victors literally slaughtered or sold the conquered into slavery there's not much of an opening left to write about anything. Although I do admit that the Peloponnesian War isn't a good example of this as the Athenians weren't treated so harshly.
Michael W Fair enough, also I was thinking along the lines of Carthage wars but couldn’t remember them instantly so I picked the Peloponnesian ones, even though there was still quite some room for the Athenians to air their criticism of the Spartans, and mock them in plays and such iirc.
This hasn't changed much throughout history. Just look at medieval artwork of gallant knights on horses, or open field battles. It was made to look glorious. The reality is, those were just people posing, and open field battles were rare as they were pointless. But when we think of medieval warfare? knights on horses...
YukoValis Sword just because they were uncommon doesn’t make them unimportant, the mounted knight was probably the single strongest tool in the hands of a medieval general. He’ll only a few hundreds well trained and armed Norman knights were able to carve out a new kingdom across the entirety of southern Italy and Sicily
@@Murphy-mw6be yes I understand that, my point was it works the same looking back that far as it does back to WW2. You think they have it better and stronger than they really did.
Dont know why but it reminded me about a text from spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte "La fiel infanteria", the faithful infantry. It goes about the paiting "The surrender of Breda". Ill translate the las part of it: "Look at the damn picture one last time. We named it and we are hardly seen. We are covered, and not by chance, by the generals, the horse and the flag".
I would also think of the Battle of Vienna in 1683, Sabaton published a song and now probably pretty much everyone thinks the relief army consisted pretty much only out of Winged Hussars and they did all the fighting when in reality they made up less than 5% of the allied troops...
To be fair, war at some point between the Nazis and USSR was inevitable, no two ways about it. But there was no plan by Stalin to kick such a thing off any time remotely soon in 1941.
This is great, historiography is so important. So much os the history is just accepted as fact without looking at where those details came from. Quality stuff as always
Reversed Audio: "General Sam put me on your podcast!" Nice video, learned a thing. Though your recommended feed makes me worried that you've never watched Thomas Sowell.
Give me one example and before you say the American civil war. The Northern version of events are universally accepted and the southern ones are laughed at by everyone expect a few southerners.
@@bengale9977 *Looks at southern education* A few? No. 'States rights' is the rallying cry of southern history education. And the sheer number of assholes turning out to protest the removal of the statues of literal slaveowning traitors says otherwise.
@@buzhichun wow, so your point to prove that not just the south believe the southern account of the civil war, is to link a post about how some southerners believe the confederacy account of the war. Truly they have control over the historical narrative. I'm sure scholars around the world are teaching that the confederacy were actually the good guys because some southerner said so.
What the heck is that ending? What are you saying? But on another note: Thank you for the video and talking about how the German Army presented itself. It's a bit unnerving when even in university I sometimes have to argue with some lecturers about some unsavoury details of the war
About how the alliance fell apart My great grandfather nearly got into a shootout with the Russian army at the end of the war. he was a Canadian paratrooper
I was watching a talk about the OKW the other day and the speaker said “we spend a lot of time and interest on the German military which is interesting since they’re 0 and 2”
One of your best works honestly. As a kid when I first started really getting into WWII I definitely fell for some of these narratives. I was never one for the memoirs or any direct material from former Nazis but looking back I can definitely see their influence seeping into other sources.
this is also a huge problem when looking at the Civil War as until recently the "Lost cause" view of the war reigned supreme. People believed that the South was honorable and didn't really lose, but was simply overwhelmed by hordes of northerners and their factories, when in fact the South nearly won the war and it is a miracle that the Union won the thing at all.
Lost cause in the Civil War is more the argument that the concept of states rights being preminent over federal law has rather vanished and that such a thing kind of sucks ass. It's less on the idea that the South could have won long term. Also to say that the North won by anything other than mass resources and poor early war decision making by the south wouldn't exactly be true either btw.
Thoughts like this are what make me respect Potential History. He despises the idea of Nazism and racial superiority, but later not doubling down to slowly deleting history (through censoring nazi swastika replacing it by Iron Cross or any other crappy type form of censorship you found sometime on historical youtube channel). He always manages to see historical narrative as objectively as possible and notices the context of geopolitics, economics, also culture and social norm at the time. Because I believe we cannot forget and gradually delete history, especially if the aspects of historical past still felt nowadays, furthermore to become invaluable and wise lesson for generations to come. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" George Santayana??? (I'm not sure whose phrase is it, but feel free to correct me in reply. also sorry if my english is bad)... EDIT: I wanna make myself clear, I don't mean to blame Potential History for censoring Nazi by the comment above. I'm reffering to other youtube channels, for example: *COUGH* extra credits *COUGH* nazi in video games *COUGH* *COUGH*
There's something to be said for remembering history - but don't become one of those assholes who believes we need to keep monuments to slaveowning traitors around because 'muh history'. There's a difference between remembering evil and glorifying it, after all. It's why even though Germany bans the public use of the swastika they still (IIRC) allow it's presence in educational and historical texts.
The Swastika is censored because RUclips will demonetize any content that has it, even if it's explicitly historical. This is due to German Law in presenting it, and RUclips doesn't want to fill out the paperwork involved to allow it. So most history RUclipsrs who want to make money off of their work do not use the Swastika.
@@fulcrum2951 And that's what happens when you demand a video hosting site comply with law without telling them they need to do it properly. Algorithms are cheaper than people.
So basically what I'm seeing here is how postwar Germany acted like postwar Belkans in the Ace Combat series; the seeped into every level of the prevailing powers'... power structure to forward a certain agenda right under everyone else's noses. For IRL Germany, it's more or less that "Yeah we lost the war but we lost in style.", where as the Belkans in Ace Combat are all about destroying every nation they can wiggle their way inside of from the inside by way of Coups (Zero), False Flag Operations (5), or infinite warfare with use of automated weapons technology.
9:41 My dad and I are both WW2 junkies and we kinda had this realization that WW2 histories are often presented as a mythology than history. Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Hirohito, etc are written as if they were biblical kings or Greek gods. Movies, books, shows, games etc propagate this idea.
As you alluded to a little in the video, I think that the Americans and British leaders along with their allies in the Cold War would not stop the narrative that the small German army almost held out against the innumerable hordes of Red Army soldiers and tanks that charged headlong into the Germans, with the Soviets sustaining very heavy losses to the Germans relatively "light" losses. This would have the propaganda affect on the general population that could make potential war with the Soviets more "palatable", as well as giving a morale boost to the soldiers.
This kind of content is pretty important to our understanding of the past. It seems like the internet, as well as a resurgence of interest in the topics in my generation, has me unlearning a lot of what I thought I knew about these periods in history.
It's still pervasive in the 23rd century. There was an episode of *Star Trek The Original Series:* _Patterns of Force,_ where the Enterprise comes across a Nazi planet. It turned out a Federation historian (and Kirk's old history professor at Starfleet academy) violated the Prime Directive and had copied the Nazi regime on an alien culture in order to save it from lawlessness… And the reason, the historian believed it to be _the most efficient system of government ever devised_ - since Germany was so effective in WW2 and just barely lost due to the combined might of everyone else. … … … [Or it could have been that the myth was strong in the late 1960's when the episode was made (aired Feb '68)].
9:25 See, this always confuses me, because I grew up with the opposite situation. I grew up with this Red Armyaboo culture all around me in American culture, and it took the mid 2000s for any negatives about them to come into the mainstream. It seems now we are going into a bit of synthesis trying to find the truth between the 2.
I agree with the idea that the Germans would eventually have to fight the Soviets anyway. The Soviets invaded Poland for no reason. This gets overlooked by history and the media. I doubt the Soviets would have stopped at Poland. Just look at what Russia is doing in Ukraine today. The Soviets were expansionist like any empire.
Operation Barbarossa wasn’t a preemptive strike. Sure, the Soviets would’ve invaded had they the strength in 1941, but the Germans definitely didn’t know that. If they did know that, they wouldn’t have prodded at the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1941.
Very good video. I love history, and I really appreciated this video 'cause I didn't know many things about this topic. So, thanks again @Potential History
"Held out against all odds for so long to the end." Germany lasted 6 years in that war and was romanticised heavily. But everyone ridicules France when they lasted 30 years through six different wars in the 19th century. >_>
I think about this a lot with regards to the invasion of Poland in particular. The most iconic moment in popular culture is the Polish cavalry charging the German tanks with swords - an event which never happened and was made up by pro-Nazi propagandists.
The Russians had their own reasons for promoting this myth, and of course it echoes ideas about the brave and foolhardy Poles going back (possibly) to the days of The Bugler of Cracow.
This is definitely a topic that will hopefully resolve itself as more information and understanding of the Eastern front continues to become mainstream. It still kinda baffles me learning the US plan to fight the Soviets was to basically do what the Germans did, only better somehow. I don't even think I thought about the Soviets using strategy and tactics, or even having strategy and tactics, until I started watching videos like this about the Eastern Front, well into high school, or possibly even college. It's just crazy how little info I knew about the Eastern Front considering how freaking brutal and massive it was.
I think the best evaluation of the German Military and losing the war would be: A Good Enough Army that was made of a Quart of Skill, a Quart of Luck, and a Half Gallon of Reality.
I grew up in the USSR and was conscripted into the Soviet Army in the 1980s. In officer training we were told that the Germans were strategically incompetent and tactically good in the small to medium level. But their tactical competence deteriorated over time either not improving at all or very little. Mainly they just became weaker and made no changes to compensate. Where the Soviet Army became to mobile, co'ordinate and able to focus the Germans could only co'ordinate locally. Focus being strategically motivated the Germans failed. To German commanders on the ground it must have always looked like the Soviets had just more men, machines and guns. The Soviets just used what they had better. Strategically and tactically the Soviets were just more sophisticated and maybe more modern. Weapons designed and produced to fit tactics not grand political visions.
Da comrade, as general zhukov said: "when our troops reach a minefield, they attack as if it were not there". Truly an enlightened and "sophisticated" approach to war.
@@rbgerald2469 Hey now that was 2 years ago, and I was just having a laugh. You russian? Nice going in Ukraine, though I am severely dissapointed by the lack of progress.
@@DanDan-du9mo ..I ain't Russian hahaha! Sorry for overreacting. I sometimes feel now as a historian that the Soviets contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany will be thrown out of the window because of Putin.
It's kind of an unfortunate habit of western countries to try categorizing sides in many conflicts as two-dimensional when things are often more complicated than that. In ww2 both the soviet union and nazi germany were two evil countries but for different reasons. However, since we fought the Nazis alongside the Soviets we thought of the Nazis as the "bad guys" while the Soviets were the "good guys". Next thing you know, the war is over and now the Soviets are the "bad guys" and the Nazis are the "good guys".
I think thats also wayyyy oversimplifying it as if Nazi germany didnt start WW2 with a clear intention of ethnic cleansing and race ideology to conquer Europe. That Stalin was vile and evil is obvious but he didn’t exactly start the war either. Also yeah back during the Cold War Western world was painting their history two-dimensionally, with their stories of imperial conquest, with WW2, with communism. But also thats literally what governments do??? Every side in a war sees themselves as the good guys thats still a thing. I mean wtf do u think the Japanese and Nazis did. Also you forget to even mention how evil the Japanese empire was during WW2, and im sorry but you seem to be siding exactly with Western propaganda of two-dimensionalism when you just dismiss the Soviets as evil. Against Japan and Nazis, the Soviets were not exactly on the same level, and also its not as if Westerners just thought they were wholeheartedly ’good’. Also the way we talk about colonial wars, and WW1 is far different from the two-dimensionalism back then. I think its an insane stereotype that you believe that its only the West that ever uses two-dimensional framing, no government would survive declaring war if they didn’t frame it as good vs bad, regardless of whether its a massive war or one of oppression
My German grandmother had this anecdote from her father(who was a medic on the eastern front), he once took a globe and pointed to Germany and said “Little Germany vs. the rest of the world.”
That was beautiful! Starting around age eight I read everything I could get my mitts on (though Soviet stuff was ridiculously rare). By far the Third Reich, from personal accounts to "official" histories was uniform and monolithic. Even when I was young a lot of it seemed to be unreal. Thanks for yet another great video!
Wow, this was really eye-opening, but it makes total sense. By welcoming many members of the German hierarchy into our history and military books, we've inadvertently given a bias toward the German side of the war, simply as it matched the anti-Soviet sentiments of the time. Perhaps the concept of America's ego was perpetuated by the idea of us defeating such an "indestructible" enemy. Either way, it really goes to show how 1st person sources aren't always accurate but are always effective.
Here is another thing, if you were in Germany as a kid. Would you want to see the tanks? or the old school horse infantry? I would say kids want tanks 8/10 times. I think the other thing we have a hard time understanding is the red scare during the cold war. The terror of the waiting war with possible nukes was pervasive. It's also silly to think that war is anything less then hell and that many good people do awful things on all sides.
Ok, ok, Suvorov appears again in your video. That prompts me to write this: Will you ever make a video on him? Because, in fact, I own his "Icebreaker" and have read it. I've, however, not come to the conclusion that Barbarossa was a pre-emptive strike, but moreso that it so happened that Soviets wanted to attack in the near future, and Germans beat them to it. It sounds similar, I know, but it does not whitewash the aggressive motives of the Nazis. I've found the border razor-wire cutting argument especially strong for that theory. At the same time, I have not developed much interest in that problem, so I've never searched for refutations of those arguments and I have not seen Suvorovs interviews. Most of the time he is just described as a hack. So I wanted to know, whether you will produce something on him, given you are aware of his takes.
I seem to have heard this a lot, and correct me if I'm wrong or if this is just another example of such propaganda aimed to back up the Nazi claim of Barbarossa being a pre-emptive strike, Stalin had kept his western border defenses fairly light, and more so after annexing eastern Poland in 1939, since the Soviet Red Army doctrine had always been geared to go on the offensive and that at some point they'd "continue to bring the revolution westward". Maybe not in 1941. Maybe not in 1942. But sometime in the future.
@@ChenAnPin the defence of soviet western border was not light, they had Molotov line, they had Stalin line, both of them usable - though you are right those were not meant to be maginot competitors, just protection for launch of export of revolution
I mean, to be fair, I think every conflict has some narrative, and truth is always more complicated than what we see. If I say "Desert Storm", what comes to mind? Probably M1 Abrams in the desert, maybe AAA going up over Baghdad at night, and perhaps, thanks to a single photographer, the burned corpse of a man who died crawling out of the window of a vehicle after it was struck by an airstrike. None of that is inaccurate, per-se, but it is overly simplified, and the vast majority of it is very favorable to the U.S. We don't have any imagery of Iraqi soldiers being buried alive, for example. There were logical reasons why this was done, and we can debate the morals of burying someone alive vs. killing them with high explosives, but it wasn't a fun topic to talk about, and it wasn't filmed. In the 21st century, we've gotten much better at showing the raw nature of war, with documentaries like Restrepo or Vice's "This is What Winning Looks Like". However, we have our own issues now. For example, discussion of strategy is extremely shallow, if it exists at all. What is the narrative for Afghanistan? 9/11 happened, we invaded Afghanistan, Tora Bora, then 20 years later we left with our tail between our feet. What happened in those 20 years? I have some clue between 2012 and 2017, because I was in the military and was heavily involved in Afghanistan, deploying there twice and doing a lot of related work in the states as well. There was plenty of major strategy that was routinely discussed at the time, that I can only find any reference to at all in old, rarely visited war blogs, and even there, there are a lot of gaps. I suspect the reason for some of this is because most of the time, the strategy was invented by nameless think-tanks and then issued directly by the administration to the generals, who dutifully carried out that strategy, regardless of whether the strategy made any sense at all. We spent a lot of times doing things that didn't work, and often we failed to even critically examine the effect of what we were doing because we had no mechanism to provide meaningful feedback to the people who made the strategy. We couldn't get anything changed, so what was the point? Even if we cared a enough to submit feedback anyway, who could we talk to? Our chain of command? They clearly weren't in charge, and no one knew who the think tanks were. Now we're left with the myth of the unbreakable Taliban fighting spirit, that could never be defeated no matter what we did. I would posit that this is a grave misunderstanding of the war, and while the Taliban were savvy strategists, our own strategic failings, which, at a granular level, are lost to history, were equally to blame.
This isnt true that the Soviets wouldnt talk about this. The West just didnt want to listen. Despite Stalin’s many attempts at a detente with the Western powers, they had instantly set themselves on war footing with the Soviet Union upon the conclusion of the war, and so the control of the narrative was vital to their war aims. Soviet narratives that would very obviously show the Germans up for their brutality, was not convenient for the US’ project to rehabilitate the ex-Axis powers in a united front against the communist world. They actively WANTED to whitewash the nazi’s history, the Wehrmacht’s crimes, because the new German and ex-axis powers were to be a central part of the West’s Cold War military strategy.
@@DanielGarcia-kw4ep There were two attempts by the USSR to join NATO. First: in 1949, the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky sent a proposal to the British Foreign Ministry to join the Western European Union (on the basis of which NATO was created). Second: in 1954, after Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev sent an official request on behalf of the USSR, as well as the BSSR and the Ukrainian SSR, to join NATO.
Much of what was said here is definitely true. It reminds me of my old supervisor, a Germany expert and a German, who explained that first there was 'denazification'. But then came the Cold War and 'Renazification'. It was realized by the US in particular that old Nazis are good anti-communists. In turn, many individuals with important positions in the Third Reich found employment in the new West Germany. Not only in the military but the judicial system, education, culture, etc. I would disagree, however, with the notion that the decisions that resulted in this outcome were made by Germans but the leading circles of the western allies in 1945 and thereafter. After all, the West Germans were not in control of their country. I myself met Germans who were deeply unhappy about these developments. Do you think that German socialists or Communists who were in Nazi camps were happy to see such people rise to prominence again?
This is probably the best video you’ve done yet. Your most interesting work is about subjects broader than just tank specs. Keep up the good work and critical analysis!
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This is just Soviet propaganda, the Maus along with Steiner's offensive would of clearly changed the tide of the war.
They would have had a 141 2/3 chance of winning
Hitler in his bunker waiting steiner to attack be like: "anytime now... "
@@15.kevindarunugroho30 Well irl reason Steiner wasnt able to have enough men is bcz wenck realized that it would be a suicide of his army to frontally attack the Russian and so he used his men for the evacuation of Berlin
@@ibbi32 yep thats the joke mate
@@15.kevindarunugroho30 I knew it was a joke just thought to share you some info
I really like how CoD: WaW used propaganda footage in cutscenes. In 1942, there's a bunch of German propaganda films used in cutscenes, but as the Soviets get closer and closer to Berlin, you start seeing more Soviet propaganda, and the image of the elite German army falls apart when you see young children in nazi uniforms being dragged out of a sewer, or when you see the swastika atop the Reichstag get blown up.
I remember the scenes that you mentioned. Scenes that I also still remember are the ones where the German soldier gets executed or the iron cross with "the young, the old and the bitter"
@@retrogamer7571 "the old, the young, the weak... If they stand for Germany, they die for Germany."
That was the zeppelin field in Nuremberg where the swastika was blown up
I’m actually surprised WAW showed scenes of Nanking massacre in the beginning, it’s how I learned about it
Except there was NEVER a swastika above the Reichstag. Like the soviets who, like retards, thought he Reichstag was important, you didnt realize the actual center of nazi germany was the reichs chancelory. The Reichstag was literally not used since 1933 and was only left standing by the nazis as a reminder top the population that democracy (what the Reichstag actually stood for) sucks and is weak compared to the new nazi germany.
The Swastika was on the Reichs chancellory. Very importance difference.
Wait you are telling me that the tiger wasn't able to hold out against a million t34 unbelievable I would like to know your source I only trust memoirs not some self called historians smh
Also: HOW DARE YOU suggest that all that equipment made by slave labour were pieces of shit, and that the production system that ultimately accelerated the end of the war was in any way flawed!
@@Reddsoldier how dare you suggest that ww2 wasnt all about Tigers and Panthers and that most of the war was fought by panzer 2/3/4.
Wait wait wait... your telling me that a winter didnt completly halt the german offensive? And soviets arent man-beasts able to resist -100 celsius degree weather? Blasphemy
Da
And what do you mean the panzer division's were full of children, and what's "panzer chocolate" checkmate pro-allied libtards
When is ISP coming on to talk about how the German's could've just driven around soviet lines and gone on their merry way to an undefended Moscow whilst also speaking of how an army based entirely on artillery is very feasible.
smh if Hitler had just trucked to moscow he would've won the war
What is this, the Prussian offensive against the Danes?
Germany would have won if they did artillery only
I would love to have him on if he wanted to be.
@@michdem100 And if they built more Schwerer Gustavs.
“If it weren’t for hitler and his stupid blondie too”
I’ll have you know that Blondie was a tactical genius and had they just listened to her we’d all be speaking German Shepherd right now.
It was just nazi race politics preventing that trusty dog from taking the lead of the German nation!
From what I heard blondie was so good at strategies, she could win a chess game in one move.
ze woofen
Too bad that Blondie was a dog. If he were a cat then everyone would have known who the real mastermind was and who was the slave....
@@Pikkabuu the introverted nature of cats means that had Blondie been a feline she wouldn’t have understood squad tactics nearly as well as she did.
Oh my god, you're right. Why *would* the germans film anything but collections of tanks bunched up in frame?
"shit hans, hide the millions of horses!"
@@Reddsoldier "hide the Horse, hide the panzer II's and III's, hide the broken equipment"
"Hans, get your buddies and push the tank towards the camera, we have to give the impression we have enough fuel to run it
...
what do you mean you can't push a tank?"
It really is like people renting private planes to take selfies to look cool on social media. Except you know, Nazis.
@@edvard8449 "What do you mean the transmission is broken?"
The Germans should've used ExpressVPN for encryption smh
Nice lol
I see this man on half of the channels I'm subscribed to. What a legend.
A lot is said about how the enigma code was unbreakable. It wasn't in fact the first side to break it was the Polish. Five weeks before the war even began
u have me-262 likes
Scheisse, we didn't thinkk dat through.
Every propaganda cameraman in the german army: "Cinematography is for gays, I'll just film the exact same shot 150 times in a row, that should do it."
More like "Oh crap, I can't show any destroyed, worn out or broken downTigers/Panthers/ panzers/wunderwaffen, I can't show any of the tens of thousands of dead soldiers of the Fatherland? Why risk my life, then? I'll just sit back here behind the lines and film fresh tanks and troops on their way to the slaughter."
They probably hate cinematography because the most early pioneers were Jews and Russian directors
well to be fair... if you have to make propaganda for roughly 6 years... you will kinda run out of ideas. And being fancy with camera work during wartime is probably not welcome..
Well they filmed that one guy falling off a cliff so they get a pass in my books
To be fair, if you only have 6 Tiger tanks - you need to use clever camera trickery to make it look like you have 6,000 on parade.
The similar narrative about Japan is pervasive as well. Japan did so much damage throughout east Asia and to its own people but was quickly forgotten because the US need it as a bridgehead to curb communism. I am impressed that an American is challenging false and harmful narratives like this. You have my respect, you are a true historian.
One tiny little bit of context, that another pervasive narrative conveniently leaves out, is that the new monsters in charge (quite literally, considering that the russians used the nazi camps available for their own political and ethnic prisoners), like the Soviet occupiers in the totality of Eastern Europe or the communist genociders in Asia, were a very real problem for their victims and the people of the world, unlike the ghosts of the german nazies and of the imperial japanese.
It's crazy to think that the most massive war in history had basically happened between the allies and Japan in the early 1940s as they occupied and terrorized the Chinese, Koreans and others and some five years later many of the same American soldiers are in conflict with the Chinese and North Koreans and taking their leave in a peacefull allied japan.
@@LiamSmith-r3pWhat, America funding, training, and arming a fighting force that they later have to go in and fight against? Nah, that's wild.
@@varietywiarriorAnd what fighting force was that, among the ones he mentioned? The US armed the nationalist Chinese which was its ally and still is today in Taiwan. The north Koreans were not armed by the US either. They were using eastern bloc and various captured equipment. Saying captured weapons is arming someone would be silly, since that would mean soviets and germans were actually arming each other in the eastern front. It's like the troglodytes saying IS captured US weapons from the Iraqi army meant the US was arming IS.
Another thing is the way historians tend to leave the Nazi military units untranslated to add mystique. Panzer, Luftwaffe, Wehrmacht. But we mostly just talk about the French armies and Russian/Soviet tanks in the same war. Even in WW1, we just talk about the german military.
@Jure Herman What is their preferred term? Most English language history books I have read on the subject use "German Military". Perhaps not every book, but most English language histories use that term translated, which is not the case in WW2 English language scholarship.
Wouldn't that be really weird like
'Here we have the tank 4'
@@legend-rx9ik well, I'll grant that panzer is a special case. But still historians often use "panzer divisions" instead of simply "armored/tank divisions", even though there were other tanks like the tiger in "panzer divisions". So using "panzer" to talk about tanks besides the specific models that were named panzer is actually really confusing and bad nomenclature because panzer is a proper noun, but also a general noun in German.
@@ripred42 yeah I agree. I think historians think it looks cool to call enemies different names
I had never thought about that, but to my recollection it definitely seems true.
Kinda disappointed this wasn't the second part of the monte casino but a good video nonetheless.
Same comrade.Same.
I mostly want to see it cause there’s a good chance he’s gonna mention Canada for that national pride
I forgot there was a video on Montecasino
Monte Casino ahahahaha
Kinda dissappointed because this isn't another GUP video, but hey, at least he is still alive
*"If you keep telling everyone a lie. Then The people will eventually start to believe it."*
Dr Goebbles agree
Very relevant what with current events
Well, with all things bad, eventually they will be shattered. As it is happening right now. Our perceptions of Germany are now changing from an invincible mechanized force destroyed by Hitler to an inherently stupid, ultranationalistic, dumbass, and unrealistic political system. Let the propaganda by these fascist pigs be shattered. They'll turn over their graves.
@@the_real_kevin8996 Goebbles was criticizing the German media of Weimar. But of course he lost the war so you were raised to think he said it and meant it.
@@StratMan9009 I know this is shocking to you, but you can interpret quotes in different ways even WITHOUT the context! For example, Irony can be used here. Goebbels was criticizing Weimer media while going on to do the same things he accused them of doing (spouting lies)
Wait, what? The German Army was almost totally mechanized. Millions of mechanized horsepower!!!! Well, millions of horses anyway...... That's kinda the same thing? Right??? BTW, I have the IHF 28 disc set of wartime newsreels "Through Enemy Eyes." Hell, according to Goebbels, 1945, WE BE WINNING!!!!! Good video, as usual. Keep'em coming.
Horses are organic machines, so you are technically correct.
if Germany had just 20 more horses they would've won!
ARE YA WINNIN SON?
@@HoChiMeme Oh, hell yeah.
Horses are just mechs.
Speaking as a German here - I think part of it is also that especially Americans loved to see Nazis as Übermenschen, because it made the victory even sweeter. I don't see the fanboying over Tigers and Mauses or the Bismarck as much in German conversation as in the contributions of English speaking people. It's a bit like the perpetual fight between British and Americans about whether or not saved the latters arse. Even Saving Private Ryan, or Band of Brothers, or The Pacific for that matter play this tune to an extent, although not as extreme as the earlier "golden era" war movies. As historians say, it was a mere game of numbers and as such pretty clear from the start (from a know-it-all future), but proclaiming so also devalues your own achievement.
I made a similar comment and I 100% agree though while looking at my comment, my original Take was that the Americans unintentionally made the conclusion that they were the super most effective in the war as the Soviets weren’t talking and all they had was Germans who were ready to make themselves seem super good.
People joke about US propaganda films and how they made it like they were the 100% important people but I never see them ask why besides a internal loop of “Because propaganda”
@@Predator20357 True that
I makes me also a bit angry how especially Americans are completely oblivious as to how the legacy of Nazis in our culture and political institutions persisted for a very long time - some might even say, to this day.
As horrid as the RAF (Red Army Faction, not the Royal Air Force) terror attacks were, their sentiment and reasons for why they took up arms after the 1968 protests were largely a failure in their eyes resounded very well with a lot of young German people who were born during or after the war. The protestors, even before they radicalized, were frequently insulted by the generation that originally caused the war, thousands of Nazi officials were never punished for their crimes, hell, even variants of concentration camps and workhouses erected under the Nazis were kept open for troubled adolescents well into the 70s, until the SPD administrations und Brandt and Schmidt shut them down for good.
It's not about making victory sweeter. Portraying the Germans as superhuman, technologically far advanced merciless beasts helps Americans excuse their own crimes, such as the endless civilian terror bombings and the nuclear bombs.
@@td6460 Also possible.
I forgot the actual quote but Wernher von Braun, during an interview as he was doing his thing with NASA when asked about how it is possible to do something as impossible and unrealistically as landing a man on the moon he answered something in the meaning of "If the world was realistic and fair I'd be in prison for war crimes"
As I said, this is what I believe to remember, I could be wrong. I remember reading that quote in the Speyer technology museum.
I can't imagine von Braun said anything of the sort since he went out of his way to avoid any responsibility for the crimes committed as part of the V-2 program.
Bruce Tucker I mean, at the point he was that far into NASA, he could have literally said he personally advised the Holocaust and I don’t think anything would have really happened given he had decisively proved his usefulness in the field of technology at that point. Also if you haven’t already, Tom Lehrer made a funny song about the NASA war criminal and you should check it out.
Good example for propaganda. Just claim some utter nonsense, people will believe it.
@@lennykump8396 to who was that?
@@vermas4654 the one who posted the comment.
Gotta love how we, Spain, pretended that we werent fascist during most of the cold war just to get the american tonks
BASEDDD
Have you even watched the news ?
Because Spain wasn't fascist, Franco wasn't fascist, Falange was fascist. If you call Franco's regime fascist you either do not know what fascism is, what his regime was or both.
@@novkorova2774 I mean, he esentially created his own branch of Falange and otlawn all other parties, i can see your point, i wouldn´t say Spain past the 50s was fascist, but the period before that was... strange. Sure Franco followed different ideals than Italian or German fascism, but he was pretty happy to align his ideology with the others.
@@zyavoosvawleilte1308 Well, the only reason he received aid was because he was a potential ally against the reds, which again comes show that morality is not what motivates international relationships. Same as how some people think that ww2 was some good vs evil conflict, even though the western allies had no problem siding with Stalin and wouldn't have given a fuck about the holocaust had Germany not attacked them.
These "smaller scale" stories of Wehrmacht warcrimes do go around in germany, atleast amongst the part of the population that has relatives who served in the war. My grampa for example was drafted in 43 when he was 17 and got injured by a partisans grenade in 44. He once told me over a glass of wine that apparently his comrades went to the house the grenade came from and just shot everybody no questions asked, including women (and maybe children, he didnt talk about this). So yeah, these things happened, but after the war was lost, nobody wanted to talk about it and "low class" soldiers werent really inquired about it either. So many of these crimes were just sort of forgotten and the people connected to them put their energy after the war into "rebuilding their lives", getting a family, building a career, build a house, these things.
And my grampa talked about the war a lot, but about this incident just this once
Once you realize how often warcrimes are commited because of fucking partisans you kinda start to go against the whole concept
@@eckusprosion5166 maybe if local population wasn't treated by germans like shit then partisans wouldn't be so big problem for them.
@@LuzikArbuzik77 Exactly. Ever since WWI, the Germans had an idiotic doctrine of "making examples" out of local villages and populations whenever resistance activity was met, which *obviously* only INCREASED resistance activity everywhere they went.
Jesus.
@@clusterflick6333 That litteraly how tito made several ARMIES of partizans in Yugoslavia, he jus went to a village and told the residents that they will all be killed if the germans knew the village had partisans passing through, and the villagers would all join him.
German Propaganda is Deutsche Qualität
That's what the German Propaganda makers thought
Nein.
So it breaks down and combusts itself
@@lukavidakovic2385 Exactly, lol
@@Umbrella419 hahaha nice comments
@@Umbrella419 And BMWs.
In the modern world, “History is written by the victors” no longer means “The winner controls the narrative”.
It means “He who controls the narrative, ultimately wins”
True, I mean we (the US) really went out of our way to rehabilitate the view of the nazis post war to keep them as allies against the Soviets
The myth of the clean wehrmacht really caught on after that, that only the SS were evil and the soldiers were all chill haha
Odin Satanas The Soviet Union was on-par, if not worse than the Nazi regime. No one really talks about how horrible they are in schools, and instead spend nearly the whole year talking about the holocaust, a horrible degenerate crime, yet not worse than what the Soviets did in the Ukraine & their gulags,
@@absolutelyyousless7605 I 100% agree with that and always wondered why myself. How come Stalin isn't just as demonized during the WW2 subject in history class? It's ridiculous how warped and smeared history is based on your country of origin. I would much rather be told the truth, blemishes and all, than be told a sanitized version.
Adam G because stalin could nuke you and most countries want to keep good relations with each other.
@@KaladinVegapunk Same thing happened with Japan too. "Hirohito did nothing wrong. It was all Tojo. Why do we say this? Definitely not because the Soviets are pushing Communism in Asia."
I've said this about Viking history, and it certainly applies here; Winners don't always write the history books, and when the losers do, they're always pretty damn bitter about it.
The Viking lost though they got converted and their stories were recorded by thier enemies who won.
@@WhenInDarknessSeekTheLight A. A lot of the Viking raiding was done while the various Scandanavian peoples who made up the Viking parties were Christian. Hardrada was Christian, as an example.
B. Conversion was not loss, what even is this premise.
@@jassen1924 Christian monks were losers and they were damn sure to make of Vikings a very dark description
This in generally seen through the lens of England though. In which case the Vikings lost. Either assimilated to an extent into England or left. Alfred the Great on top. Not sure if it’s really a loss. Much of the negative reputation does come from the monks though, which makes complete sense as they decided to attack literate people, who of course wrote bad things about them.
@@WhenInDarknessSeekTheLighta good example of why amateur "historians" need to shut the fuck up and listen instead of talking in 99% of conversations
If the Germans used a vpn we wouldn’t have seen them coming at Kursk!
imaging the U-boats using vpn...
Horrifically OP tank...
I surrender
When you are so fast rudel is let go Scott free but Hartman is blamed a war criminal
Hartman was captured by Soviets while Rudel surrenderd to Allies. That’s why Hartman was blamed by Soviets as a war criminal and Rudel got Scott free.
@@matthias5651 Hartman flew to the allied airfield on may 8 I believe
@@ibbi32 yeah and he was given to the Soviets
@@hussite7235 wow those blokes are jerks
Your grammar hurts.
The whole idea of "trust Germans because of WW2 track record" already came to bite the US and UK in the behind in the 1950s. Reinhard Gehlen, head of Russia desk of Wehrmacht military intelligence , was appointed the head of the West German intelligence BND (hiring few ex-SS members along the way). Gehlen, the master of missing on Red Army tank force size in 1941, overlooking Stalingrad, post-Kursk offensives and Bagration in 1942, 1943 and 1944, continued his usual mastery - in 10 years, the head of BND's East German desk (another ex-SS, ironically) was a Soviet spy, there was little progress in actual spying on the USSR and GDR, but 16 members of Gehlen's family were on BND's payroll.
That "WW2 reputation of fighting the Soviets" works like a franchise for some people ;)
What’s your source for claiming that Gehlen was a Soviet spy?
@@HingerlAlois Gehlen wasn't a Soviet spy - he just was an incompetent overhyped spy master, living off unearned WW2 reputation. His subordinate Heinz Felfe (leading BND coverage of USSR and East Germany) was a Soviet spy, subsequently exchanged by Stasi after his arrest by West Germans
zpcossack
I see I misread your comment and thought you claimed that Gehlen himself was a Soviet spy.
If you se just how many Soviets they killed, you will see it wasnt actually an unearned reputation
SS guys being socialists?
Who’d have thought?
What does NSDAP stand for again?
As a German myself this annoys me to no end. Because to this very fucking day children get taught wrong stuff in history about the 3rd Reich. When I was in school World War 2 was almost non existent in the curriculum and the stuff they told us was plain wrong. I remember that my history teacher said that the Poles charged the German tanks on horses without any reason and were just inferior fighters(Almost how the Nazis spun it back then, huh?). Not mentioning the fact that they were carrying anti-tank rifles and bought the rest of the polish army important time. The Holocaust is talked about in detail but the whole war is not talked about in school at all. This is idiotic as the atrocities from the army and the whole concept of extinction warfare is not present in peoples heads. Even today there is this weird notion of the army doing nothing wrong back then. I also once had a drunk talk with some soldiers of the current German army and they were also spouting so much bullshit about how the Wehrmacht could have won the war bla bla bla. Nice guys but completly clueless about history.
I am from germany and I can confirm that this is true to the point where the thing at 4:45 with nazi germany attacking the soviets first because "the soviets would have invaded germany anyway" was told to me in school by multiple history teachers.
Dont know when you went to school or which school in particular , but we were taught something else. And no offense to our current military, but a lot of soldiers nowadays didnt have the highest education... WW2 was a big topic when i went to school and we learned about the narratives presented and that a lot of them are wrong. For were taught about stalingrad and the scorched earth policy used by the wehrmacht duríng the retreat at the eastfront.
In Germany, we do not really learn about how the war went on. Not at all. We don't watch military films and so on. We don't learn, how famous Generals fought against the worst odds and etc.
I watched, when I was in class 10, speeches of Goebbels, Himmler and Hitler, analyzed them, what language they used, to antagonize a minority. What psychology they had and why the German public broadly accepted it.
We learned about how the first world war lead to the rising of the NSDAP, Hitler's party (broadly), how he grabbed for power, failed multiple times, and succeeded in the end. How the war started and why it started 1939. The appeasement politics. The development of the hatred towards Jews, Roma and disabled. We learned about Hitler's hypocrisy, him being so unfit, that he wasn't drafted into ww1, even though he was one of the first volunteers for it.
And of cause so many facts about the Holocaust, i couldn't remember half of it. Though being interested in history and trying to remember most.
In the end, I didn't realize how glorified the Nazis are in the west. In Germany the topic is still, to this day, 70 years later, a critical point, to speak about. And for the broad public, being called a Nazi, because if believe, speech patterns, dress up or action, is the worst insult, you could issue to someone.
I don't have the picture in my head, when thinking about Nazis, as a successful war machine. I see Franz lambda, well dressed and soft spoken creating terror. A two sided snake, ready to poison everyone, coming too close.
For me the Nazis weren't about creating "Lebensraum", it was a destructive killing Maschine, industrialized and optimized to kill as many as possible, as fast as possible, with the most limited resources as possible.
Not a nice picture to have of once past, but one i will represent and give to, hopefully, generations after.
Maybe you have a different definition of hypocrisy in Germany, but how does being unfit for service make Hitler a hypocrite actually? He was still willing to put his ass on the line. I would argue promoiting human rights while getting high on Putins gas makes you modern Germany more hypocritical
Seems like Germany is shooting to far in that direction, focusing only on the negatives of your past, we do the same here in the Netherlands.
I mean I went to school in whats regarded as one of the worst states to go to school in the US and this was how they taught us about the nazis and the war. I think maybe the problem isnt how they teach about the nazis but about how some people choose to learn about them. Which is to mean they either dont cause they dont give a fuck because "history is meaningless" or some such bs or they only focus on the shit that makes their wehraboo balls tingle.
I thought your policy was to ignore all and act as if Germany had never existed before 1945
Like "Germany magically appeared in 45 out of thin air and all of our culture is Tirol"
And prohibit anyone from asking anything about German past
ARE YOU SURE THE MUSIC IS LOUD ENOUGH AT THE END?
YEAH I AGREE I CAN STILL HEAR MYSELF THINK. IT NEEDS TO BE LOUDER.
NO I'M NOT REALLY A FAN OF METALLICA.
No, its never loud enough.
It's true, victors rarely do write history. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Vietnam (which is a far more interesting topic and far less over-done in my opinion). Ask any layman, and the idea is of viet-kongs hitting and running before the US could muster its superior firepower. So basically cowards hiding in the bushes. Read any amount of memories from actual marines/GIs there, and you'll see it's quite the opposite. One of the NVA's main strategies was to get in so short quarters, that US arty/airforce wouldn't shoot for fear of friendly fire.
For anyone interested, read Firebase Illingworth, it's clinically insane, and one of the best war books ever written.
I agree with you but dont say rarely cause most of the time it is anyways yeah I think I'll check out the book
@Matthew Chenault agreed if you see the casualties you will laugh at how many vietcongs died compared to the Us soldiers
The US lost because of the media's false depiction if the vietnam war and the US public opinion this is why i find the finnish winter war memes funnier
@@bongcloudopening5404 exactly. Vietnam is an easy thing for people that dont know much about the conflict to point and laugh at (the "when the trees start speaking vietnamese" memes are pretty funny tho). Vietnam is also an easy target for people who like to say "the us hasnt won a war since WWII", (despite that being wrong in the first place) because they dont know that we basically handicapped ourselves, as any big push or unexpected attack could possibly start a third world war.
@Matthew Chenault They still lost technically, because they didn't achieve their goal of keeping an independent and Non-communist South Vietnam on its feet. No doubt that the Americans were tactically superior, but much of the war was also fought by the South Vietnamese who were generally stomped on when they fought without American support and logistics. Not to mention ineffective counter insurgency strategies such as strategic hamlets and Search and Destroy missions. There are battles like the battle of Dak To and Hamburger Hill in which the area would be cleared, but then American soldiers would leave and the enemy returns to the area. Relying on body counts that underestimated the will of the communist forces to fight, and were very likely to be inflated since they also included civilians (mistaken or not), livestock, or maybe even faked counts.
many americans cannot accept that vietnam was failure for the US with their limited knowledge, from grouping the NVA with viet cong to comparing death counts ( i guess the german won eastern front for the number of people they killed amirite?
If the effort to win the heart of the people failed from the get go ( read about strategic hamlets), then sending troops to fight directly is meaningless, only causing more civilians to join the viet cong
PH: so you see the Nazis weren’t the mechanized juggernaut most people are led to believe...take that wehraboos...
Wehraboos: so you mean the Wehrmacht didn’t have a million tiger tanks?
PH: No....they actually had more horses than vehicles...
Wehraboo: and they still managed to fight an enemy on two fronts against overwhelming odds...with old men and boys, armed with shirt weapons?
PH: well, yeah. But that’s not what I’m trying to
Wehraboo: They weren’t bad asses, THEY WERE GODS!!!!
Germany had a 10 year head start change my mind
@@Aaron-wq3jz I cant, in the 30s they were the only country truly preparing for war🤣🤣🤣
they wear hugo boss and drive porsches
@@bb-61ussiowa75 it's easy to prepare for a war you intend to start. It's less easy to still lose
@@anenemystand5582 Yea
It's refreshing that shows like WW2 week by week on RUclips are currently showcasing the summer of 1941 and you can see that even before any winter, the Germans are getting beat hard.
"History is written by the victors."
As you said, not true.
"History is written by the survivors."
Way more true and rhetorically fitting.
Yeah
Most of time? The winners are the survivors thought.
@@MrTigracho very rarely is the opponents wiped out. The losers take most casualties but theyll be there and they will make their note.
@@TheIfifi and not true in soviet case because despite being the victors they lost way more people
@@TheIfifi and their notes will be censored by the victors especially during the Cold War
In this month copy of "guerre et histoire", a french magazine, we have an article about the myth built by Guderian, where he pictured himself as the father of the german tank division, and how Liddell Hart decided to play along, in exchange for the legacy Guderian reconnized from him.
Yet almost nobody seems to know that Charles de Gaulle was one of the first to envision fully mechanised warfare.
Germany: *Defeated in the eastern front.*
Wehraboo: It was because it was winter bro.
Germany: *Defeated under the scorching sun of North Africa*
Wehraboo: It was just because Rommel was on sick leave bro.
Germany: *Defeated in Italy*
Wehraboo: The german soldiers were tired at that point and had eaten too much spaghetti bro.
Eating too much spaghetti seems like a legit reason to lose something.
but you can actually blame it all on logistics. The common "excuse" of why germany lost the war - no fuel - is simply true. This is also a reason why Hitler was so relentless about the Winter and didnt want his troops to dig in. While usually portrayed as him (Hitler) just being ignorant, he was very well aware of the fact that the Wehrmacht doesnt have enough Oil. Goering had the Order to amass a certain amount of oil before the attack on Russia, but he couldnt fullfill it so Hitler knew they only had a very short amount of time to conquer the important Oilfields, or at best just make the Soviet Union capitulate as a whole.
tbf in the east it took almost 5 years to defeat them. In afrika it took about 2 and a half same for Italy and the germans were outnumbered on all fronts in terms of equipment and manpower. Soo they were rather effective. Only in the west (france and germany) was the advance relatively fast as in it took about a year and a half to reach deep into Germany. On the contrary the germans somehow by some miracle managed to conquer most of europe and half of russia between 1939-1941.
The Krauts killed a lot more than their enemies.
First week of Barbarossa the soviets lost almost 3.900 planes while the germans lost a 100.
Check the numbers, they simply killed more. And thats it.
@@AK-Kessler0907 that doesnt matter tho??
Germany couldn't win a war of attrition. And I dont get what point you're trying to give with this. Yeah they shot down a bunch of planes at the opening of barbarossa. But the allied powers had the material and manpower to make and replace the planes as well as train new pilots for the planes.
Youre right that the Germans caused a good amount of casualties. Especially during the "prime" of 1939-1941. But after that, as soon as the end of 41. They were losing people that they couldnt replace. And all the Soviets got was a bloody nose.
Very few people know about the nazi states film crew. I guess a lot of people think footage was done by "amateurs" . A lot of these footage was shown in movie theatres before the start of the film,they wanted you to see them hat way.It's no different than today how social media is engineering the things they want you to see. You think reddit is community controlled? The front page especially political things is run by supermods who work for a company,did you think its one person? That reddit user is multiple people.
Its true all big companies want you to apply to their globalist politics
I mean I hope people understood that about the Nazi war footage, the Allies did the same thing. Combat cameramen took the footage and then it was fed back through layers of bureaucracy until it was honed into a propaganda product that could be shown in theaters to improve public moral, sell bonds, and of course inform the public as to the state of the war (assuming it was good news). There were no amateurs with video cameras back then, no way for them to share that footage even if they did, not even a way to view it unless you had a projector.
I'm only 23 and I understand how media worked prior to digital technology and smartphones, I hope I'm not a minority in that regard or society really is fucked.
Jake Shaw Companies playing globalist politics?
I don’t think so, at least if you say that globalist politics is the primary objective. The primary objective of a company is to find profit. The secondary objective of a company is to find even more profit. Ignore some of their moralistic missions they posted on the company website. Most of it are probably propaganda to attract certain customers.
What goal is it there for Facebook or Google to subvert information or engineering views if it didn’t bring them profit? Even the seemingly draconian espionage they did on their customers are based on gauging your interests to deliver advertisements and clicks.
The only domination you’ll get from them is an economic monopoly or oligopoly over the market.
Except doing so requires them to make friends. Why do you think these companies support a certain political side? Because there are money to be made there. Once people’s values change, they’ll change if it affects the bottom line.
Also, companies have quickly learned that the best way is to not sell a product, but rather sell a lifestyle. How to sell an air conditioner? Sell the idea of how good it is to be in your chilled room during some of the hottest days of summer. How to sell a salad? Promote veganism or healthy lifestyle. The Old Spice ads sells body care products, but they target their advertising to sell the idea of masculine, sexy men that appeals to both men and women. Mercedes-Benz sold the idea of luxury driving. How to sell beauty products? Sell the people a commonly accepted beauty standard, like youth-looking or whiter skins (that last one is true in Asia, at least).
So what do these tech companies sell as a lifestyle? Well, I’d say it’s freedom. Freedom to post silly things in Facebook, freedom to watch cat videos on RUclips, freedom to tweet, freedom to express yourself, freedom to see information you want to see, etc. Freedom can also practicality. Imagine how much more time you can do the things above had not Google (originally a search engine) made it easier for you to access your emails, browser, GPS, files, notes, and even to connect with friends and family, all under the same umbrella that is Google.
There has been several important hearings between the tech companies and the governments of several countries within the last decade or two. Doesn’t matter if you are supportive of whose side there. Many people are still unaware that the majority, if not all, of your avenues of digital self-expression (as in, social media) and avenues to the internet are controlled by a few companies. And all of them are selling this same lifestyle and feeling for the people that not only helps fatten their bottom lines, but has the ability to change how people think.
Just take the case of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook recently. They’re accused of providing a space for Russian trolls (whether independent or state-supported) to generate targeted ads and articles (some of which are blatant misinformation) during the 2016 US election. Or how social media played a major role in organizing mass protests from the Arab Spring to Hong Kong to BLM. There are numerous articles done regarding the usage of Facebook or Twitter, normally used to connect friends and families, as weapons of political activists; many of which cited the Arab Spring as an example.
So, do they care about these changes? I don’t think so, as long as it doesn’t affect their bottom line or anyone brought it to their attention. Their aim is to establish a monopoly or at least an oligopoly between the biggest tech companies in the field of information and technology, where anyone who even just wanted to do a simple internet search must go through them. The problem is that such goal is against what many people believed is their inherent right to information. That’s about as political they would go.
@@alexanderchristopher6237 that's why they're selling the globalist politics for profit, I never said it wasn't.
@@alexanderchristopher6237
I'm going to skip the rest of your essay and say this.
What happens when your company is *supposed* to make a profit, but becomes subverted to start pushing an Agenda?
"The victors write history"
Germans: Oh, I don't think so
Peak "Pro-gamer move".
Königsberg ist Deutschland!
Then why reddit censores everything with Wehrmacht and why ww2 games/films played on the soviet/american perspective every fucking time? idiot xd
@@tylerbozinovski4624 Nein
@@quisqueyanguy120 Ja.
As a German, I gotta say though that nowadays I would like to know for real what my relative did in WW2, whether he was one of the "Clean Ones" or the acceptable ones in the Wehrmacht.
But with how little information there is, I don't think there's any way to find something like that out.
Joseph "My face tries to get away from the rest of my head" Goebbels.
Thank you
The "losers shaping the narrative of the war" definitely reminded me of Confederate leaders and southern scholars shaping the narrative after the U.S. Civil War into the wAr Of NoRtHeRn AgReSsIoN
At least the "War of Northern Aggression" I feel like has more of a kernel of truth to it than "The war was about States rights". Somehow they seem to have successfully sanitized the history of the succession being because of slavery. Even though at the time, there was absolutely no question about the reason. Just look at all the speeches made by Confederate leadership. It just rustles my jimmies.
@@Jcod_ "States rights to what, exactly?"
GaldirEonai To secede from the Union.
Unofficial Plays to own slaves*
Unofficial Plays The right to secede has never even been a thing ever since the Constitution was drafted and approved. The US government is not a confederacy of states where they contribute their ambassadors to meet with other member states, but a new government made out of those states joining together. A contemporary example of a conference of nations at the time would be the German Confederation.
The doctrine of states right to secede was first implemented in the Nullification crisis of 1832-1833 during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. It was not found within the Constitution. The nullification crisis happened because South Carolina don’t want to pay the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832, which they deemed as unconstitutional.
Seriously, what is it with South Carolina and creating American crisis?
This might be a more us-american problem.
Ever since the '68 movement the public image in Germany is that if you didn't resist the nazis you were actively helping in their extermination campaign.
People even deny that the armies were well lead in both wars, something even the Israelis of all people agree upon
It’s really fascinating how they manage to conjure these images of an unstoppable German war machine from the grave. I didn’t know that we had the Generals chronicle their side of the war. The fact that we just took everything for word for word for so long is strange.
It really is a shame because I love these subjects, but in recent years, I learned that a lot of it was propaganda that nobody felt the need to try and correct. I feel like I'm relearning everything I tried to learn since I was a kid.
Don't be too downhearted.
Most WW2 sources are pretty reliable.
It's just the memoirs of the German generals which are terrible, mainly due to the baneful influence of Halder
Alan Pennie and I get that. It just shakes me a bit since I’m really passionate about the history of warfare and the equipment they use. In this case however, a lot of it wasn’t true, and until recently, wasn’t corrected. I know it’s a silly thing to get worked up about, but i love this kind of thing.
"tHE sOvIetS jUsT sEnT wAvEs oF mEn aT tHe gErMaNs"
Soviet combined arms tactics during Operation Bagration: "Am I a joke to you?"
Yeah, people who say that don’t have a brain. I don’t support the Soviets, but they played a major role in the War.
Most chuds who believe the lies about "human waves" couldn't spell Bargration if you spotted them every consonant.
I mean, the Red Army did use a ton of “human wave” tactics (or more accurately poorly coordinated frontal assaults) up until 1944-1945. And, as Hill points out, these assaults continued until the end of the war, but became increasingly rare. Of course, as Glantz argues, the inability of Red Army commanders to prevent such things, or even their active conduct of such assaults, was largely due to that army needing to completely re-learn how to fight a war.
It's half right. Russian tactics were less about maximizing the effectiveness of their soldiers, as the Germans did, and more about just throwing as many men at the enemy as possible. That's why the T-34 was an ergonomic nightmare. They didn't care if the crew lived or died, they just cared that they had a tank to throw at the Germans. It ultimately worked, but the male/female ratio in Russia is still fucky because of how many men died in the war
@@jorm916 Yes, it didn't help that Stalin killed off most of his best officers not long before the war started
4:18 - 4:22
_"And it was super convenient for them that they had a laundry list of former colleagues that were either dead, (shows picture of East Germany) or worse"_
This is my favourite part of the video.
I don't think there was any attempt to blame anything on the unfortunate Paulus.
There’s a movie I just watched a few weeks ago called The Captain. It’s the true story of this 19 year old Nazi paratrooper (Willi Herald ) who deserts in the last two weeks of the war. While being hunted by MPs he finds a staff officer car stuck in mud. Inside is the uniform of a highly decorated Luftwaffe captain. He puts it on and manages to collect other soldiers he runs into for his “mission”. The “mission “? He’s been sent by Hitler personally to check on morale of the front line soldiers. And it works. All because of the authority of the uniform.
So him and his rag tag end up at a detention camp for German soldiers who have deserted, looted, etc and he convinces the man in charge of the camp he has authority from the “highest “. The man is angry at the red tape and asks Willi Herald to help. So he “helps” by authorizing the massacre of all the prisoners. Then it’s hit in an air strike so they write on a car “Herolds Express Court” and murdered their way through the countryside. He was finally caught but let out by mistake til he got caught by a British soldier for stealing and recognized as the war criminal and hung.
Fascinating story.
As a German I can only say that this is a particularly strange experience because the narrative in Germany itself is vastly different. It took about two decades of dedicated activism by the two generations born after the war to change that narrative though, losing the war and the Allies' demands alone were not enough to get to this point.
I'm so glad this issue is finally getting some attention. "The Soviet-German War, 1941-1945: Myths and Realities" is a brilliant and shocking book that any serious ww2 history buff should read.
The irony is that David Glantz is a propagandist who promotes German propaganda recycled and reused as NATO propaganda - "German vs Soviet military losses" narrative in particular.
Any serious ww2 history buff should be aware of that.
“History is written by the victors”
*laughs in Lost Cause*
I've came up with a better phrase
"History is not written by the Victors, the court documents however, are"
History is written by salty losers.
Sin Collector No, not in every case. I’d say for more complete total warfare like in ancient times where the totalitarian side wins, it is rewritten. Take for instance Sparta conquering Athens, they could have done god knows what to historical documents, etc., and we would have no clue because of how limited those resources were.
@@keemstarkreamstar7069 well yeah, when you go back to the days when the victors literally slaughtered or sold the conquered into slavery there's not much of an opening left to write about anything.
Although I do admit that the Peloponnesian War isn't a good example of this as the Athenians weren't treated so harshly.
Michael W Fair enough, also I was thinking along the lines of Carthage wars but couldn’t remember them instantly so I picked the Peloponnesian ones, even though there was still quite some room for the Athenians to air their criticism of the Spartans, and mock them in plays and such iirc.
This hasn't changed much throughout history. Just look at medieval artwork of gallant knights on horses, or open field battles. It was made to look glorious. The reality is, those were just people posing, and open field battles were rare as they were pointless. But when we think of medieval warfare? knights on horses...
@Félix Sánchez exactly. The elite units were not as common as the paintings have use believe.
YukoValis Sword just because they were uncommon doesn’t make them unimportant, the mounted knight was probably the single strongest tool in the hands of a medieval general. He’ll only a few hundreds well trained and armed Norman knights were able to carve out a new kingdom across the entirety of southern Italy and Sicily
@@Murphy-mw6be yes I understand that, my point was it works the same looking back that far as it does back to WW2. You think they have it better and stronger than they really did.
Dont know why but it reminded me about a text from spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte "La fiel infanteria", the faithful infantry. It goes about the paiting "The surrender of Breda". Ill translate the las part of it: "Look at the damn picture one last time. We named it and we are hardly seen. We are covered, and not by chance, by the generals, the horse and the flag".
I would also think of the Battle of Vienna in 1683, Sabaton published a song and now probably pretty much everyone thinks the relief army consisted pretty much only out of Winged Hussars and they did all the fighting when in reality they made up less than 5% of the allied troops...
I’m so early that Rommel hasn’t turned back yet
He might even have a tiny amount of fuel left to burn!
Some say that he is still going at it
To be fair, war at some point between the Nazis and USSR was inevitable, no two ways about it. But there was no plan by Stalin to kick such a thing off any time remotely soon in 1941.
if they attacked later the soviets will be even more ready
This is great, historiography is so important. So much os the history is just accepted as fact without looking at where those details came from. Quality stuff as always
Reversed Audio: "General Sam put me on your podcast!"
Nice video, learned a thing. Though your recommended feed makes me worried that you've never watched Thomas Sowell.
The victors write history they say, a quick look at lost cause revisionism says otherwise.
Give me one example and before you say the American civil war. The Northern version of events are universally accepted and the southern ones are laughed at by everyone expect a few southerners.
@@bengale9977
*Looks at southern education*
A few?
No.
'States rights' is the rallying cry of southern history education. And the sheer number of assholes turning out to protest the removal of the statues of literal slaveowning traitors says otherwise.
Ben Gale WW2 Eastern Front in the west.
@@bengale9977 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy#19th_century
@@buzhichun wow, so your point to prove that not just the south believe the southern account of the civil war, is to link a post about how some southerners believe the confederacy account of the war. Truly they have control over the historical narrative. I'm sure scholars around the world are teaching that the confederacy were actually the good guys because some southerner said so.
When are you gonna release the Minor Allied Tanks meme.
@@Nuuk_Nuke_Nook Chinese frankensteins would be fun
I keep coming back to this every now and again and I would like to say that for me this is the single most important WW2 video you've ever created.
I feel like this might be a build up to a southern lost cause video... and I’m here for it.
What the heck is that ending? What are you saying?
But on another note: Thank you for the video and talking about how the German Army presented itself. It's a bit unnerving when even in university I sometimes have to argue with some lecturers about some unsavoury details of the war
About how the alliance fell apart
My great grandfather nearly got into a shootout with the Russian army at the end of the war.
he was a Canadian paratrooper
I was watching a talk about the OKW the other day and the speaker said “we spend a lot of time and interest on the German military which is interesting since they’re 0 and 2”
One of your best works honestly. As a kid when I first started really getting into WWII I definitely fell for some of these narratives. I was never one for the memoirs or any direct material from former Nazis but looking back I can definitely see their influence seeping into other sources.
this is also a huge problem when looking at the Civil War as until recently the "Lost cause" view of the war reigned supreme. People believed that the South was honorable and didn't really lose, but was simply overwhelmed by hordes of northerners and their factories, when in fact the South nearly won the war and it is a miracle that the Union won the thing at all.
Lost cause in the Civil War is more the argument that the concept of states rights being preminent over federal law has rather vanished and that such a thing kind of sucks ass. It's less on the idea that the South could have won long term. Also to say that the North won by anything other than mass resources and poor early war decision making by the south wouldn't exactly be true either btw.
To be honest, that fella had a good point, you were paid to pretend to like Shadow Legends.
" No one can defeat the German propaganda !!!"
- Stroheim Jojo Bizzare Adventures
Thoughts like this are what make me respect Potential History. He despises the idea of Nazism and racial superiority, but later not doubling down to slowly deleting history (through censoring nazi swastika replacing it by Iron Cross or any other crappy type form of censorship you found sometime on historical youtube channel). He always manages to see historical narrative as objectively as possible and notices the context of geopolitics, economics, also culture and social norm at the time. Because I believe we cannot forget and gradually delete history, especially if the aspects of historical past still felt nowadays, furthermore to become invaluable and wise lesson for generations to come.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" George Santayana??? (I'm not sure whose phrase is it, but feel free to correct me in reply. also sorry if my english is bad)...
EDIT: I wanna make myself clear, I don't mean to blame Potential History for censoring Nazi by the comment above. I'm reffering to other youtube channels, for example:
*COUGH* extra credits *COUGH* nazi in video games *COUGH* *COUGH*
There's something to be said for remembering history - but don't become one of those assholes who believes we need to keep monuments to slaveowning traitors around because 'muh history'. There's a difference between remembering evil and glorifying it, after all. It's why even though Germany bans the public use of the swastika they still (IIRC) allow it's presence in educational and historical texts.
The Swastika is censored because RUclips will demonetize any content that has it, even if it's explicitly historical. This is due to German Law in presenting it, and RUclips doesn't want to fill out the paperwork involved to allow it. So most history RUclipsrs who want to make money off of their work do not use the Swastika.
@@starwarssith54 I 100% agree
When it comes to such things, context is important
Bots cant detect context
@@fulcrum2951 And that's what happens when you demand a video hosting site comply with law without telling them they need to do it properly. Algorithms are cheaper than people.
So basically what I'm seeing here is how postwar Germany acted like postwar Belkans in the Ace Combat series; the seeped into every level of the prevailing powers'... power structure to forward a certain agenda right under everyone else's noses. For IRL Germany, it's more or less that "Yeah we lost the war but we lost in style.", where as the Belkans in Ace Combat are all about destroying every nation they can wiggle their way inside of from the inside by way of Coups (Zero), False Flag Operations (5), or infinite warfare with use of automated weapons technology.
9:41 My dad and I are both WW2 junkies and we kinda had this realization that WW2 histories are often presented as a mythology than history. Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Hirohito, etc are written as if they were biblical kings or Greek gods. Movies, books, shows, games etc propagate this idea.
'So I was watching a folding ideas video'
respect for potential history +1
As you alluded to a little in the video, I think that the Americans and British leaders along with their allies in the Cold War would not stop the narrative that the small German army almost held out against the innumerable hordes of Red Army soldiers and tanks that charged headlong into the Germans, with the Soviets sustaining very heavy losses to the Germans relatively "light" losses. This would have the propaganda affect on the general population that could make potential war with the Soviets more "palatable", as well as giving a morale boost to the soldiers.
This kind of content is pretty important to our understanding of the past. It seems like the internet, as well as a resurgence of interest in the topics in my generation, has me unlearning a lot of what I thought I knew about these periods in history.
No its not, the dude is a scammer and the information useless.
It's truly a mood when the integrated ads are interrupted by RUclips's own ads.
It's still pervasive in the 23rd century.
There was an episode of *Star Trek The Original Series:* _Patterns of Force,_ where the Enterprise comes across a Nazi planet.
It turned out a Federation historian (and Kirk's old history professor at Starfleet academy) violated the Prime Directive and had copied the Nazi regime on an alien culture in order to save it from lawlessness…
And the reason, the historian believed it to be _the most efficient system of government ever devised_ - since Germany was so effective in WW2 and just barely lost due to the combined might of everyone else. …
…
…
[Or it could have been that the myth was strong in the late 1960's when the episode was made (aired Feb '68)].
RUclips notifications actually working for once!
Absolutely love this channel. He always sources everything and encourages everyone to do their research before claiming ridiculous things
9:25 See, this always confuses me, because I grew up with the opposite situation. I grew up with this Red Armyaboo culture all around me in American culture, and it took the mid 2000s for any negatives about them to come into the mainstream. It seems now we are going into a bit of synthesis trying to find the truth between the 2.
I agree with the idea that the Germans would eventually have to fight the Soviets anyway. The Soviets invaded Poland for no reason. This gets overlooked by history and the media. I doubt the Soviets would have stopped at Poland. Just look at what Russia is doing in Ukraine today. The Soviets were expansionist like any empire.
Operation Barbarossa wasn’t a preemptive strike. Sure, the Soviets would’ve invaded had they the strength in 1941, but the Germans definitely didn’t know that. If they did know that, they wouldn’t have prodded at the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1941.
Very good video. I love history, and I really appreciated this video 'cause I didn't know many things about this topic. So, thanks again @Potential History
"Held out against all odds for so long to the end."
Germany lasted 6 years in that war and was romanticised heavily.
But everyone ridicules France when they lasted 30 years through six different wars in the 19th century. >_>
I think about this a lot with regards to the invasion of Poland in particular. The most iconic moment in popular culture is the Polish cavalry charging the German tanks with swords - an event which never happened and was made up by pro-Nazi propagandists.
The Russians had their own reasons for promoting this myth, and of course it echoes ideas about the brave and foolhardy Poles going back (possibly) to the days of The Bugler of Cracow.
This is definitely a topic that will hopefully resolve itself as more information and understanding of the Eastern front continues to become mainstream. It still kinda baffles me learning the US plan to fight the Soviets was to basically do what the Germans did, only better somehow. I don't even think I thought about the Soviets using strategy and tactics, or even having strategy and tactics, until I started watching videos like this about the Eastern Front, well into high school, or possibly even college. It's just crazy how little info I knew about the Eastern Front considering how freaking brutal and massive it was.
I think the best evaluation of the German Military and losing the war would be:
A Good Enough Army that was made of a Quart of Skill, a Quart of Luck, and a Half Gallon of Reality.
I grew up in the USSR and was conscripted into the Soviet Army in the 1980s. In officer training we were told that the Germans were strategically incompetent and tactically good in the small to medium level. But their tactical competence deteriorated over time either not improving at all or very little. Mainly they just became weaker and made no changes to compensate. Where the Soviet Army became to mobile, co'ordinate and able to focus the Germans could only co'ordinate locally. Focus being strategically motivated the Germans failed.
To German commanders on the ground it must have always looked like the Soviets had just more men, machines and guns. The Soviets just used what they had better. Strategically and tactically the Soviets were just more sophisticated and maybe more modern. Weapons designed and produced to fit tactics not grand political visions.
Da comrade, as general zhukov said: "when our troops reach a minefield, they attack as if it were not there". Truly an enlightened and "sophisticated" approach to war.
I think that's about right.
The Red Army really learned fast.
@@DanDan-du9mo .You don't even know what's Deep Battle do you?
@@rbgerald2469 Hey now that was 2 years ago, and I was just having a laugh. You russian? Nice going in Ukraine, though I am severely dissapointed by the lack of progress.
@@DanDan-du9mo ..I ain't Russian hahaha! Sorry for overreacting. I sometimes feel now as a historian that the Soviets contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany will be thrown out of the window because of Putin.
It's kind of an unfortunate habit of western countries to try categorizing sides in many conflicts as two-dimensional when things are often more complicated than that. In ww2 both the soviet union and nazi germany were two evil countries but for different reasons. However, since we fought the Nazis alongside the Soviets we thought of the Nazis as the "bad guys" while the Soviets were the "good guys". Next thing you know, the war is over and now the Soviets are the "bad guys" and the Nazis are the "good guys".
I think thats also wayyyy oversimplifying it as if Nazi germany didnt start WW2 with a clear intention of ethnic cleansing and race ideology to conquer Europe. That Stalin was vile and evil is obvious but he didn’t exactly start the war either. Also yeah back during the Cold War Western world was painting their history two-dimensionally, with their stories of imperial conquest, with WW2, with communism. But also thats literally what governments do??? Every side in a war sees themselves as the good guys thats still a thing. I mean wtf do u think the Japanese and Nazis did. Also you forget to even mention how evil the Japanese empire was during WW2, and im sorry but you seem to be siding exactly with Western propaganda of two-dimensionalism when you just dismiss the Soviets as evil. Against Japan and Nazis, the Soviets were not exactly on the same level, and also its not as if Westerners just thought they were wholeheartedly ’good’. Also the way we talk about colonial wars, and WW1 is far different from the two-dimensionalism back then. I think its an insane stereotype that you believe that its only the West that ever uses two-dimensional framing, no government would survive declaring war if they didn’t frame it as good vs bad, regardless of whether its a massive war or one of oppression
My German grandmother had this anecdote from her father(who was a medic on the eastern front), he once took a globe and pointed to Germany and said “Little Germany vs. the rest of the world.”
You and oversimplified= my entire RUclips feed.
Great video!! Glad you’re still keeping them coming
That was beautiful!
Starting around age eight I read everything I could get my mitts on (though Soviet stuff was ridiculously rare).
By far the Third Reich, from personal accounts to "official" histories was uniform and monolithic.
Even when I was young a lot of it seemed to be unreal.
Thanks for yet another great video!
So what we learned is, aesthetic>reality.
Wow, this was really eye-opening, but it makes total sense. By welcoming many members of the German hierarchy into our history and military books, we've inadvertently given a bias toward the German side of the war, simply as it matched the anti-Soviet sentiments of the time. Perhaps the concept of America's ego was perpetuated by the idea of us defeating such an "indestructible" enemy. Either way, it really goes to show how 1st person sources aren't always accurate but are always effective.
Solid taste in video essayists, my dude. Dan's stuff is great
The fact that film makers still study Triumph of the Will really testifies to this.
Here is another thing, if you were in Germany as a kid. Would you want to see the tanks? or the old school horse infantry? I would say kids want tanks 8/10 times.
I think the other thing we have a hard time understanding is the red scare during the cold war. The terror of the waiting war with possible nukes was pervasive.
It's also silly to think that war is anything less then hell and that many good people do awful things on all sides.
12:49 I knew it, I knew that dog had a bigger part in all of this!
Yep, it's true. Blondi was the brains of that operation.
Bad girl!
Ok, ok, Suvorov appears again in your video. That prompts me to write this:
Will you ever make a video on him? Because, in fact, I own his "Icebreaker" and have read it. I've, however, not come to the conclusion that Barbarossa was a pre-emptive strike, but moreso that it so happened that Soviets wanted to attack in the near future, and Germans beat them to it. It sounds similar, I know, but it does not whitewash the aggressive motives of the Nazis. I've found the border razor-wire cutting argument especially strong for that theory.
At the same time, I have not developed much interest in that problem, so I've never searched for refutations of those arguments and I have not seen Suvorovs interviews. Most of the time he is just described as a hack. So I wanted to know, whether you will produce something on him, given you are aware of his takes.
I seem to have heard this a lot, and correct me if I'm wrong or if this is just another example of such propaganda aimed to back up the Nazi claim of Barbarossa being a pre-emptive strike, Stalin had kept his western border defenses fairly light, and more so after annexing eastern Poland in 1939, since the Soviet Red Army doctrine had always been geared to go on the offensive and that at some point they'd "continue to bring the revolution westward". Maybe not in 1941. Maybe not in 1942. But sometime in the future.
@@ChenAnPin the defence of soviet western border was not light, they had Molotov line, they had Stalin line, both of them usable - though you are right those were not meant to be maginot competitors, just protection for launch of export of revolution
@@ChenAnPin
Absolutely not.
Stalin crowded men on the frontier, where they were. slaughtered in the first days of the German attack.
This'll get buried but this might be your best video ever
I find videos like this very interesting, because it talks about how history is recorded, not just history facts
I mean, to be fair, I think every conflict has some narrative, and truth is always more complicated than what we see. If I say "Desert Storm", what comes to mind? Probably M1 Abrams in the desert, maybe AAA going up over Baghdad at night, and perhaps, thanks to a single photographer, the burned corpse of a man who died crawling out of the window of a vehicle after it was struck by an airstrike. None of that is inaccurate, per-se, but it is overly simplified, and the vast majority of it is very favorable to the U.S. We don't have any imagery of Iraqi soldiers being buried alive, for example. There were logical reasons why this was done, and we can debate the morals of burying someone alive vs. killing them with high explosives, but it wasn't a fun topic to talk about, and it wasn't filmed.
In the 21st century, we've gotten much better at showing the raw nature of war, with documentaries like Restrepo or Vice's "This is What Winning Looks Like". However, we have our own issues now. For example, discussion of strategy is extremely shallow, if it exists at all. What is the narrative for Afghanistan? 9/11 happened, we invaded Afghanistan, Tora Bora, then 20 years later we left with our tail between our feet. What happened in those 20 years? I have some clue between 2012 and 2017, because I was in the military and was heavily involved in Afghanistan, deploying there twice and doing a lot of related work in the states as well. There was plenty of major strategy that was routinely discussed at the time, that I can only find any reference to at all in old, rarely visited war blogs, and even there, there are a lot of gaps.
I suspect the reason for some of this is because most of the time, the strategy was invented by nameless think-tanks and then issued directly by the administration to the generals, who dutifully carried out that strategy, regardless of whether the strategy made any sense at all. We spent a lot of times doing things that didn't work, and often we failed to even critically examine the effect of what we were doing because we had no mechanism to provide meaningful feedback to the people who made the strategy. We couldn't get anything changed, so what was the point? Even if we cared a enough to submit feedback anyway, who could we talk to? Our chain of command? They clearly weren't in charge, and no one knew who the think tanks were. Now we're left with the myth of the unbreakable Taliban fighting spirit, that could never be defeated no matter what we did. I would posit that this is a grave misunderstanding of the war, and while the Taliban were savvy strategists, our own strategic failings, which, at a granular level, are lost to history, were equally to blame.
This isnt true that the Soviets wouldnt talk about this. The West just didnt want to listen. Despite Stalin’s many attempts at a detente with the Western powers, they had instantly set themselves on war footing with the Soviet Union upon the conclusion of the war, and so the control of the narrative was vital to their war aims. Soviet narratives that would very obviously show the Germans up for their brutality, was not convenient for the US’ project to rehabilitate the ex-Axis powers in a united front against the communist world. They actively WANTED to whitewash the nazi’s history, the Wehrmacht’s crimes, because the new German and ex-axis powers were to be a central part of the West’s Cold War military strategy.
Comrade, can you give sources for the attempts made from Stalin to negotiate with the Western powers?
@@DanielGarcia-kw4ep There were two attempts by the USSR to join NATO. First: in 1949, the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinsky sent a proposal to the British Foreign Ministry to join the Western European Union (on the basis of which NATO was created). Second: in 1954, after Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev sent an official request on behalf of the USSR, as well as the BSSR and the Ukrainian SSR, to join NATO.
@@Ailasher both attempts were simply to have justification to have the Warsaw pact
@@ismaeljimenez6562 Why would they have "justification" for Warsaw pact? To whom? To you?
Much of what was said here is definitely true. It reminds me of my old supervisor, a Germany expert and a German, who explained that first there was 'denazification'. But then came the Cold War and 'Renazification'. It was realized by the US in particular that old Nazis are good anti-communists. In turn, many individuals with important positions in the Third Reich found employment in the new West Germany. Not only in the military but the judicial system, education, culture, etc. I would disagree, however, with the notion that the decisions that resulted in this outcome were made by Germans but the leading circles of the western allies in 1945 and thereafter. After all, the West Germans were not in control of their country. I myself met Germans who were deeply unhappy about these developments. Do you think that German socialists or Communists who were in Nazi camps were happy to see such people rise to prominence again?
This may not be your most popular video you have made. But I think it’s the most important one.
This is probably the best video you’ve done yet. Your most interesting work is about subjects broader than just tank specs. Keep up the good work and critical analysis!