The Ants Who Ate The Elephant

for the record this topic is not easy i am going to be talking about wholesale slaughter there's just no other way to describe world war ii um so here's my deal if you feel like i've pushed you to your limits especially because all of us are still dealing with the stress of the pandemic and women are going to now lose their rights to everything because we're going gonna do a handmaid's tale i'm so glad i've been watching the show because now i can see the future better um if if you just get to the point where you can't take anymore i swear i won't do anything to pay my penalty wise you can still get credit for being here just take care of yourself and take care of your emotions um so having said that also if you're a neo-nazi uh this might be really hard for you to i don't know if you know this you probably don't they lost and so uh like if if that bothers you because you're a snowflake i get it you can also just go you just go now actually so having said all that having established that i'm gonna put my cards on the table a little bit i am part german uh i speak german i lived in germany for five years i am a fierce anti-nazi and so in i am very clear in my mind that the germans were the bad guys in this event um but it is also my goal to try to humanize everybody in the process because it has been my experience that good people do evil [ __ ] and so um good people and so at the end of the day i don't actually think that this narrative that hollywood has taught us that there's good versus evil that they keep shoved on our throats makes any sense when describing world war ii in part because an objective analysis of the sides whether they're the winners or the losers it all looks like shades of evil to me and so i think what we're better off doing is is trying to sort of bring a little bit of humanity to all of this in an effort probably to make sense out of it too and we need to make sense out of it world war two went eight years um some of you are doing quick math in your head and you're like wait a minute normandy to the end of the war that was only one year because of course our public schools aren't really great some of you are doing the math and you're going six years six years professor 39 to 45 japan attacked china and 37. people count that's the start of world war ii if you think world war ii started on september 1st 1939 that's because you just wanted to be white people versus white people and you're discounting the fact that the war between japan and china lasted eight years and went from 37 to 45 it only ended when japan surrendered to us so july 7 1937 over the course of those eight years 65 million people died that's our best guess yes that's eight million people a year but the vast majority of that death took place in the last four years in other words it was back-ended and it was wholesale genocide and tax to put things in a little bit of perspective the united states lost 400 000 people in the three and a half years we fought world war ii there's almost four years i'm just gonna say four years december to september that's that's all for you close enough we'll go with it um 400 000 people it's our second worst war right after the civil war where we cleared 620 000 people great britain lost 600 000 people so the brits lost an extra 50 percent yugoslavia lost 1.7 million people indonesia lost 2 million people japan lost two and a half million people poland lost five million people sixty percent of whom were jewish pulse sixty percent of the jewish fatalities in the war were polish of the polish fatalities were jewish so that's an easy one to remember germany lost seven million people china lost about 20 million i'm saying it like that because we really don't know it's just a wild guess 20 million people in eight years like i i don't even i can't even comprehend that the union of soviet socialist republics lost 28 million people in four years that's seven million people a year and you have to remember there was 170 million soviets when the war started and there was just over 140 million by its end that's brutality in a way that the world really hasn't seen there's an exception to that of course the 16th century when the spanish committed wholesale genocide against the native american population and they weaponized accidentally or purposefully who cares disease to can help conduct that genocide it makes the 20th century a really nasty time period to have been and so before we get in get anywhere i have to sort of give you the ideology of why this happened but it also helps frame what happens specifically in stalingrad and i'm also because i've been a teacher for 27 years i'm also going to give you a little bit of background before we get you to stalling grav so that i can nest song in the whole war so that you can see how it fits into the big picture so what happened was of course world war one ended and the brits and the french decided they were going to punish germany so for those of you who want to make star wars out of the world and have a good guy and a bad guy if anything the germans were the good guy in world war one and i'll give you a reason the british empire right the british empire wasn't made by being nice the british were ruthless they conquered brown and black countries they subjugated those populations they stole their lack they colonized them now the reason the war happened is because the british were worried that the germans were eventually going to get into the colonization colonization project on a grand scale and compete with the british so the germans had evil motives for sure but they hadn't yet fully conducted the kind of evil the british had to get to that point for the british world war one was an attempt to knock germany down a notch and they won and they succeeded and so they hacked germany up they carved off a piece and gave it to lithuania they carved off a piece and gave it to poland they carved off a piece and gave it to france they carved off a piece and gave it to denmark another piece to belgium then they took austria which had seceded from the austro-hungarian empire and they carved off pieces of that too and gifted it peace went to czechoslovakia a piece went to hungary peace went to italy and so by the time this was done the german people felt like they had been wronged and in that sea that moment where they felt like they had been wronged something weird had happened germany didn't surrender because the allies captured berlin germany didn't surrender because they were militarily defeated in world war one germany surrendered because they ran out of food and had a communist uprising at the same time and this is going to surprise you but starving soldiers suck they are awful they're like walking around trying to figure out what to eat next instead of shooting the other guys and so the german army is collapsing on the front line because they're literally starving to death um there are no cats or dogs in germany that had ancestors living in germany prior to world war one everything got eaten leather boots rotten food it was a catastrophe and the communist revolution they captured bavaria germany's second largest province and they captured berlin germany's political capital financial capital and cultural capitals so the german army turned to the french and the british and they went we really need to surrender things are really awful and this is years before the allies thought the germans would surrender their allies thought there was another two to four years left in the war and so they so they're they go to the germans go and they say we're ready to surrender we need to surrender right now but for another reason so we can go kill these communists and take our cities back in our in our state of bavaria back please give us good terms they slaughter the communists they recapture berlin and bavaria and they get awful terms and that's why world war ii happens the british and the french make it certain it will happen because the germans feel like they have to get out from underneath the horrible peace treaty that's not a justification for hitler but it explains why hitler happens because think about it if you do if you try to name the greatest minds in the last 200 years i'm not going to try to do that list but let's take a shot at it bach hegel kant brahms beethoven strauss the other strauss schopenhauer goethe schiller einstein marx freud angles heidegger habermas searle notice what i'm not doing i'm not saying non-german names okay hawking boar a dane we got a dane in there sreenivasa ramanujan we got an indian in there wickenstein right heisenberg i didn't just keep going but we probably should stop now how do you convince the country on the planet that produced the greatest minds in the last 200 years to do a completely insane completely nuts insane thing and that is you push them to the point of madness throw in the great depression and throw in the great inflation the great inflation took place in the early 20s and by the time hitler gets into power he wins 32 percent of the population he wins 33 of the vote in november 1932 he wins 32 that was nice only the germans would line something up like that so perfect just a third of the population but that's all it took because one of the things that we know for example 40 of americans oppose abortion is minorities with enough emotion and incentive and maybe even madness can override the will of a majority a complacent majority the majority where life is too comfortable so they're not willing to shake things up in any case through a little bit of trickery the nazis end up creating an authoritarian state and eventually they decide to unleash hitler's plan on the world on september 1st 1939 the nazis attack poland and they just take poland out it's a catastrophe now the polls fight heroically you need to know this i i think one of our ideas is oh the polls suck they're terrible of course they got overrun it's not true they were valiant they did an amazing job in the war what happened was the germans unleashed the wagons creek but vegans krieg was actually an old concept that people incorrectly ascribed to the nazis as blitzkrieg a term that was coined by a british a british journalist it was not a a term that the germans used uh british journalist in poland and he thought that the nazis had sort of made it up and he was he was like accrediting them with this the vagueness trig is the idea that if you're a smaller force and you attack a larger force you want to do two things you want first of all not to go on the defensive because that's the end because the larger force will eventually overwhelm you you want to be on the offensive attack attack attack attack attack attack the other thing you want another thing you want is better soldiers and better officers so you're going to out quality the enemy but the most important thing you do is you keep them off balance so you hit them and then as they're reeling and trying to get recover from it hit him again hit him again hit him again you're getting exhausted it doesn't matter just go go go go go go and it's more important to make a decision than it is to be right and so they trained their officers to make snap judgments and make snap decisions so the german officers were taught go make a decision it don't doesn't matter if it's wrong go go go go and that's how they approached this and then heinz guderian added tanks to the equation and what guderian said was instead of doing what the brits were doing in world war one where you'd mix the tanks in with the infantry and so the tanks were these slow lumbering vehicles you know three mile an hour speed just just basically slow forts instead of doing that have your tanks go fast have them in special units and they have those what you do is you have your infantry attack a point focus your infantry on a point shiverpoint a hardpoint hit that point punch a hole in the infantry and then bring your tanks flying through and if you have half tracks put infantry on the half tracks have them come flying through and then run your tanks with your armored infantry and the half tracks and get them behind the enemy and cut them off encircle and then as they're building the next line do it again and as they're building the next line do it again and that way you're constantly behind the enemy and you're constantly heading towards the capitol or whatever you're trying to capture and they never have a chance to get on their feet and they never have a chance to create a coherent line that's the wagons creek and it's a prussian concept and the nazis took this concept and they employed it in in poland with badarian's armored tank modifier and they overrun poland ironically i think this is one of the funniest parts german tanks sucked i'm going to say it again because i know it didn't go and you couldn't hear what i heard what i said because it's cons it doesn't make sense the polish tanks were as good if not better on on the whole than the german tanks that crazy the poles had decent artillery they had okay machine guns the germans had better machine guns but they had okay machine guns what they didn't have was german tactics and and the and the the german sense of just go go go don't stop for anything so that's how they overrun poland a little a really weird thing happens and this really weird thing is going to have a major consequence for layers i have to tell it to on on november 30th 1939. so uh basically two months after poland surrenders not even you know almost two months what happens is the soviet union attacks itty bitty little finland and the reason the soviet union attacked finland is finland owned property that was really close to saint petersburg which of course was at the time called leningrad and the soviets were really nervous that if the finns joined the nazis in a future war and and ganged up on the nazi on on the soviets together the first thing that the finns could do is grab st petersburg off the bat and the soviet union would instantaneously lose its second most important city economically politically symbolically and they didn't want that so they decided to preemptively attack finland in an effort to drive the finns the finnish border away from leningrad and give themselves a little bit of a buffer zone and they attack november 30th because clearly those soviets had gone to american public schools and didn't know anything about geography you don't attack finland in the winter and the finns tear the soviets up there's a million soviet soldiers fighting 10 000 finnish soldiers those aren't good odds 101 what are the chances finland will prevail and the finns got on skis they got behind the soviets they got in front of the soviets they tried every tactic imaginable the fins didn't have tanks the soviets were rolling through with tanks what the finns would do is they'd make grenade bundles they'd dig a hole in the snow they'd put a sheet over themselves so that they're they're camouflaged right bed sheets are great camo in in winter they put a sheet over themselves they'd lay down in the snow where they thought the soviet tanks would draw and they put a grenade bundle in a hole in the snow behind them and then as the tank would roll over the top of the fins they'd roll out from underneath they place the grenade bundle on the back where the armor is the thinnest where the engine is and they take out that soviet tank during the night they'd attacked the soviets during the day they'd set buildings on fire in the backfield so the soviets didn't have a place to sleep the temperatures dropped to negative 40 degrees you ask negative 40 fahrenheit or celsius and i say yes because that's where they intersect it's so cold your engines freeze the oil freezes in the tanks you can't turn them on if you turn them off so the soviets had to run their tanks all the time they couldn't turn them off because that was it you'd never get it started again the fins finally surrender in early april and when they did they lost territory but not a lot of territory um i'll show you on a map later and what that did though is it planted a seed in hitler's mind that the soviets sucked when you outnumber the enemy a hundred to one hmm and they give you that much hell surely you can cert you can defeat them what's also really strange in that moment is great britain and france had decided to come to finland's aid great britain and france planned to go to finland and fight the soviets is that not crazy this is what they came up with the british and the french they decided they needed to take out the soviet union and finland and so here's what they came up with they were going to invade norway because norway did not give them permission to do this they were going to invade sweden they're going to invade two neutral countries territory they were going to march into finland and reinforce it and fight the soviets alongside with the fence the finns surrender but the british and french ships were already loaded and on their way to norway the germans attacked norway the day before the french and british troops land and so when the germans attack all of a sudden these french and british troops show up and they tell norway we're here to save you and the norwegians were like how did you get here so fast oh we're fast and of course they couldn't admit yeah we were planning to attack you just the germans got to you first and there's no point in fighting you now anyway because finland already surrendered then then the next crazy step happens it's it's 1940. finland has surrendered germany has taken out denmark and norway and on may 10 1940 germany attacks france in world war one on two occasions the germans came really dangerously close to knocking a french out in the opening opening move the opening attack in 1914 france got a little wobbly and basically the only reason the germans didn't take france out right at the very beginning of the war was the germans had got the german soldiers had gotten so far ahead of their supply lines right that's what they were doing they're just going but they just couldn't go any further the troops were way ahead of the ammunition and the food so they had to stop and wait for everything to catch up and while they're stopping and waiting they were like well let's protect themselves so they dug trenches and the next is carnage on an industrial scale because now everybody's trapped in these trenches and then in spring of 1918 so just months before germany surrenders on november 11 1918 at 11 on november 11. right just months before that surrender event the germans launched an offensive called the spring offensive and they almost take france out again but they didn't do it either occasion and as a result germany loses the war had they taken france out it might have been different because you got to remember the the russians surrendered so germany did successfully defeat the russian empire in world war one you know how we have like the story the russians never lose they did in world war one they surrendered and so if france and russia had surrendered germany would have won so for the germans france was this really awful pain in the ass they needed to they needed to knock it out so what they did was they they they had a plan to do the same thing they did in world war one and for some reason the plan was on an on an air force pile of top luffa and he got shot down over the english channel and the english got a hold of his plan and the germans went well i guess we're not doing that plan so they had to come up with a new plan and of course the british and the french set up for the world war one plan which was the germans invaded through belgium and they were planning to fight in belgium just like they did in world war one so the british and french are just waiting for the battle to start and charge into belgium and the new plan was heinz guderian and irvine rommel were going to cross the moose river at sedan and dinant and come up behind the french army and head to the english channel and be in between the french army and paris on may 10 the germans attack the british and french rush everything into belgium on may 13th budarian and rome will arrive at dinanton in sudan they cross the news on may 16 so the battle has been going for six days on may 16 churchill flies to paris he's just become prime minister of the united kingdom and he wants to confer with his french allies and he gets there and the french government officials are throwing boxes of papers out of the windows in the courtyard and they've got a bonfire and there are french soldiers throwing the papers on the bonfire and churchill goes what are you doing and the french turned on and they go we just lost the war because it's six days old what are you talking about they're going out the germans are between the our army and paris he goes send in the reserves the french we already did we send them into belgium there's no way to turn them around and bring them back churchill goes do what you did last time when you get everybody in taxis and you drive them to the front that's how you stop paris from falling last night they got odds we already we already basically did that we put them into reserve units and sent them into belgium it's over and churchill who had done multiple charges through no man's land in world war one said it was the first time in his life he was truly frightened because he realized in that moment great britain was alone against germany had no ally because france was going on may 19 so three days after that the guderian and rommel reached the english channel and they cut the french army off from the rest of france the vegans unbelievable if you had if you had written that as a novel before world war ii your reader would have never gotten through it because they would have said it's unbelievable and they were throwing the book on the ground nine days to take out the french empire poland took longer now the french refused to surrender right away and they don't surrender until june 25th and they fight an extra 37 days for pride so we tend to malign the french like we do the polls and think of them as terrible soldiers fought for pride they couldn't win they knew they couldn't win i think that speaks to the valor of the french soldiers i think we should stop judging others so quickly all of this creates this enormous confidence in the nazis in fact uh let's click it all right so this is the situation in may 1941. the yellow is occupied territory it's conquered territory um italy is an ally so they're in the darker color green the light colored green are also allies in the case of finland they were never officially an ally they declared that they were a co-belligerent the finn said that they actually didn't like the nazis and didn't like what they stood for but they had a common enemy the soviet union because finland wanted its land back um the blue is surrendered france they we call it vichy france because the surrendered government moved its capital to vichy because the german military occupied paris and a world war one hero became the collaborator president of france which is just totally embarrassing and then of course you can see germany's huge because it's been annexing stuff there used to be yugoslavia germany broke it up and germany also took out greece greece and yugoslavia really matter and here's why right before may so april yugoslavia had a coup d'etat and the government that had been in yugoslavia was a pro-nazi government and when they had the coup d'etat the new government was a pro-british government and hitler wanted to attack the soviet union he was really nervous about what would happen if there was a pro-english yugoslavia in his rear and so he decided to take yugoslavia out but he thought you know what while we're here let's go ahead and take greece up and so the germans attacking the slavian greece and then chop it up and you trap yoslavia and grease up into pieces and hand them off to their friends so that's why there's a croatia in the serbian a montenegro italy annexed whole chunks of yugoslavia it was good for italy i guess in any case the reason why they wanted to do greece is italy had attacked greece and the greeks were defeating the italians it was a humiliating route and so hillary went oh if you're our ally i guess we have to help you out so the germans take out greece some of the italians couldn't do this delays attacking the soviet union by five weeks that five-week delay may have been the deciding factor so here's the thing when you're 70 million people and you're going to attack 170 million people you could win it's possible but you're gonna have to play a perfect game you can't afford to make a mistake when you're outnumbered that badly when you're out resource that battle you've got to make this happen now if it was the soviet union that the russian empire from world war one this would have been a cake walk oh that's racist isn't it you gotta stop using that uh as pie there we go um and the reason is is because in world war one the soviet union was two percent industrialized but the one of the miracles of communism and one of the miracles of of stalin was he forced the soviet union into a mass industrialization event he he killed probably right around 2 million people doing it but in the process he made it so that the soviet union was about sixty percent industrialized instead of two percent industrialized in other words the only reason the soviet union survives world war ii is because stalin was a really brutal bastard and he actually paved the way for the soviets to have the kind of industry necessary to fight germany because remember germany is a super industrialized state that focuses on quality and so if you're going to win you're going to have to overcome them with quantity so germany can't afford to make any mistakes that five-week delay is going to come back and bite them really badly to make things even weirder when they're fighting the greeks the long island at the bottom end of greece is crete for those who went to american public schools um and daycare and uh hitler wanted crete because he was worried that if if the english kept it they can use it as a as a platform to bomb they could use it as a platform to run do raids and so the british had fallen back to crete because the british actually went into greece to help the greeks and once it was it was over they fell back to crete in a desperate attempt to hold onto the island just for that purpose and so hitler decided he ordered germany to attack and capture crete to do it they went in with paratroopers well they needed to send in reinforcements so they began flying in transport aircraft as fast as they could with reinforcements but they didn't have time to take the transport aircraft off the runway in a gentle way so they just began bringing in bulldozers and shoving them off the runway and they destroy a bunch of transport aircraft and in the process they [ __ ] their ability to supply a city they get surrounded and that's going to haunt them later because they lose too many transport aircraft in other words they're making mistakes all along every step of the way and they can and they capture crete they do it they pull it off but at a heavy price stalin believed that he could postpone the war if he cooperated with the nazis and the reason he wanted to postpone the war so much because he did he's a little desperate for this is he had just gotten through doing the purges so stalin had just had an event he probably needed one of our fancy drugs that we have today for such an event but he had a paranoid event right most narcissists are prone to this so you have to be careful when you make them your leaders and when he had this paranoid event he decided to purge the government and he decided to purge the military and he literally decapitates the officer corps he slaughters generals he slaughters colonels he sends people off to gulags it's it's a disaster for the officer corps so he needs to retrain them so he needs time so he makes the nazi soviet peace pact and he's hoping that will work the germans needed a bunch of russian resources so an integral part of the nazi soviet peace pact was that the russians would send them the resources they needed which is of course ironic because the germans were then making tanks and bombs out of those resources she used against the russians and what stalin is hoping is if he buys enough time his officer corps will recover his military will be ready and then when the soviets do get attacked they'll be able to repulse the germans that's that's the gamble on june 22nd 1941 the vermont crosses into the soviet union at that moment there were there were trucks crossing in to german-controlled territory filled with oil and steel and so the german military is trying to get around these trucks filled with the valuable goods that they need to fight the war because they need to let the russians go through and the russian truck drivers have no idea what's going on they're like dude what's that tank rolling by for and it's the middle of the night and the germans are launching artillery they're flying in with aircraft in the morning and bombing things the russians are completely caught off guard it's a catastrophe the russian military gets torn to pieces this is called operation barbarossa in operation barbarossa the germans are going to gobble up a huge chunk of soviet territory they're going to end up with so much soviet territory that germany is like a tiny tiny tiny fraction of what this what the nazi empire is it's mostly russia at that point in terms of territory uh let's do it again so this is um what the first phase of the operation barbarossa looks like the german military advances against the russians the russians keep trying to put up defenses and they just keep crumbling and the germans keep hitting them with the vaguely creep just keeping them off their balance keeping them off their bounce not letting them form into lines and they're just gobbling up territory stalin had kind of anticipated this because he had started to build factories east of the ural mountains and as this is starting to happen the soviets began disassembling factories brick by bricks sticking them on trains and sending them east because they know two things they can sacrifice lives and they can sacrifice territory but they can't afford to lose their factories because they know they're going to have to build guns and tanks and planes and so this is what the opening looks like right this is september 1. look at how much territory gets gobbled up i mean compared to what the germans have basically germany's already double its thoughts next all right oh actually go back for a second i want to i forgot i need to show see those arrows right in the middle going down there's there's three going south uh heading towards kiev if you're ukrainian you see him so here's what happened heinz guderian is charging towards moscow he's got this thing there he's thinking there's nothing in between me and moscow i've got it i'm just gonna go hitler goes no stop turn around head to kiev guderian's like wait why hitler says it's more important to take out russian soldiers than it is to capture russian territory there's a bunch of russians in kiev there's about six hundred thousand seven hundred thousand let's go wipe those guys out then we won't have to fight them later budarians like in tears weeping going no moscow it's right there let me just go but he doesn't disobey his orders and he heads to kiev now now put it to the next slide and kiev is a disaster as most of the battles were so i i thought you should see some numbers just to kind of give you an idea i'm only going to give you one example of the disasters in barbarossa and it's scared but if you look um the russians outnumbered the germans by the way the russians got about 70 000 reinforcements so it's about 700 000 to about 540 000 and the germans lost 15 000. uh they had another 46 500 or so wounded on the other side the russians lost 164 000 to death 84 000 were wounded 452 000 were encircled only 15 000 of whom have managed to escape the russian losses were about 11 times greater than the german losses can you imagine marching 130 435 000 soldiers to a pow camp what does that look like i i can't even comprehend the number it's insane for the record most of those russian soldiers will not get back to russia um russian soldiers that ended up in german pow camps about 19 and 20 don't get home it's not that's not a good outcome all right next so uh again so now one more time we're getting to moscow he went there we go so the green is the the next phase of captured territory and if you look they got really close to moscow on the top left and not so far from it on the bottom right there just just to the southeast of moscow um by the way that's heinz guderian since i keep mentioning him i tell you that the guy coming up to tula or alongside tula is heinz guderian he never saw visually saw moscow but the other guys on the other flank did they were looking at it they could see it that's how close the germans got they're not like napoleon napoleon took it the germans don't take it they just look at it and of course guderian's like man if hitler hadn't sent me to kiev i would have taken it and one of the really important things about this too is because there's a little bit of hitler was a genius [ __ ] that sort of floats around in the mythology like oh yeah now he's an idiot every time he got involved he cost the germans the victories the war would have never happened without him but he's also the guy who made sure his side did not win stop stop valorizing hillary he's just stupid at every level you don't have to give him credit for anything well except for the audubon and and volkswagen he invented those so i guess that's good and then uh he also did retirement plans for housewives that's kind of cool and he also did vacation packages for housewives uh he liked women more than the united states not so um this is the maximum extent the germans got they basically had stretched their supply lines to the point where they couldn't go anymore and then the winter set it actually first it rained uh because god hated the nazis so it rained and for the record not much of the soviet union was paved mud roads kind of suck tanks and trucks sink into them and then you get a nice good freeze the freeze is solid and now your tanks and your trucks are stuck in the frozen ground and they have one of the worst winters recorded in the 20th century the temperatures are going to drop again to negative 40. and a huge section of the german military just freezes to death in part because hitler thought if he sent them winter uniforms they would wreck their morale because they would know they were going to fight in the winter and so he kept them in their summer gear that genius that there you go you wanted an example of hitler genius how about that so what's really interesting about this moment is the whole time in the war whenever stalin got intelligence from his secret service his spies stalin would ignore it he just refused so like the day the germans attacked the the russian spies were like stop you gotta we're gonna get attacked it's coming it's eminent he's like no never happened ignore it and he refused he just kept ignoring them he just he's told by an operative in japan a russian operative in japan that the japanese are planning to attack the united states on december 7th he had been horrified at the prospect of fighting a two-foot war where the japanese attacked the soviet union from the east and then he was fighting the russians of the germans in the west in fact that was the plan hitler in japan had worked out a deal where the japanese were gonna attack the soviet union from the other side and the whole time the germans are heading to moscow they keep telling the japanese why aren't you attacking you're supposed to attack from the other side please attack why aren't you attacking the germans even gifted the viet the gifted vietnam to the japanese they're like take it take it from the french they don't need it we just conquered france we'll make them sign it over to you and the japanese are like thanks and then they attack the united states and for the first time stalin believed his intelligence before the japanese attacked the united states he pulled his soldiers that were in the east and he sent them to the west they were siberians next slide all right i don't know why i did the tanks did i not do a pic try the next slide maybe i screwed this up uh one more no oh yeah i guess i did it there all right uh i guess we should go back to the tanks should we go back to this i'll just tell you what what about the tanks and then uh let's do the siberians next okay yeah you put it there all right so these are the tanks that uh played a major role in 42 not so much 41 although there were some of these in 41 as well um the reason i'm focusing on 42 because that's when the battle of stalingrad takes place and i'd rather have you familiar with that the top left is a panzer iii it was the main german tank it had a 50 millimeter gun uh it was okay if you were going to be fighting the british it was a decent tank the bottom one over here is the sturmkischutz 3 it had a 75 millimeter gun but a really short barrel which meant it had uh no real anti-tank ability it was meant primarily as a infantry support weapon um this is the 3b they didn't even bother to actually put a machine mounted machine gun on it the guy that the thing that the guy has he's actually brought to the and he's holding it up on top but they didn't actually have it mounted in it um over here on the on the right at the top is the famous t-34 that was the main uh russian tank it was better than everything the germans had the russians had the best tanks in 41 and 42. this tank on the bottom is the dreaded kv-1 it was even superior to the t-34 the germans had nothing could knock out a tick a kv a kv-1 it was the absolute master of the battlefield which is hilarious because the germans kick the russians asses with the sucky tanks just like they did in poland by the way the french and the british had better tanks than the germans there is a rule in world war ii decide what the better tanks will lose so you know how you're always touting technology technology will solve everything technology this technology that you should read more history the side with the better tank will lose in world war ii um the tank in the middle is a kv-1 inside the barikitty gun factory they're they're actually repairing it i believe i don't think they were assembling it i think it had been pulled in for repairs uh in stalingrad so keep that image in mind uh that factory was gigantic just huge structure insanely big all right now let's go let's find those siberians but i don't know why i did it in the sequence probably too much vodka while i was making the slides one more all right okay so this is the russian counterattack they bring all those guys from siberia and they do a massive counterattack and you can see they managed to actually drive the germans it's still winter it's december 41 they managed to drive the germans back away from moscow and that's it that was the closest they got they'll never get there again all right next slide ah that's what the siberians look like isn't that cool uh i'm pretty sure those are t-40s um those russian tanks are t-40s like sometimes i i'm a little fuzzy on my tanks but anyway they weren't really good tanks t-34 that was the thing or kv-1 like if you got to pick your tank totally getting the kv one i love those things anyway all right next keep going more prezi's going back that i need to stop that next time all right now let's do stalling brad so again so i i like this quote a lot this quote was actually done during barbarossa it was done by a german colonel the german army in fighting russia is like an elephant attacking a host of ants the elephant will kill thousands perhaps even millions of ants but in the end their numbers will overcome him and he will be eaten to the bone one of the things that absolutely drove the germans bonkers was the massive expanse of the soviet union just miles and miles and miles of flat grain grain everywhere and occasional trees and then these really obnoxious gullies so russia looks flat and then you're driving along and all of a sudden you run into a gully and the roads are dirt so there's dust everywhere and you just go for miles miles miles it was demoralizing the german military on top of it all there was something really fascinating so war movies are zombie movies i don't know if you've ever noticed this right the enemy there's always one side that's evil zombies and they're always dumb and they don't really talk much and if they do it's in german and they say something that sounds terrible they probably said schmidt and it just means butterfly and you're like oh it's horrible i know they said something terrible and right and that's how we cast them and they're they just keep coming and you shoot them and you shoot them and you shoot them and they just keep coming and they're always the attackers the the bad guys are always the attackers and you're the defender and you're fighting for your life and liberty and you're there heroically and they've they've got all this background on you and one of the things that's really interesting in hollywood movies no watch for this the enemy rarely shouts out when you shoot them they just sort of they just sort of die and by the way one bullet will always kill them but the good guy will get shot like 20 times and somehow survive it's really really fascinating i guess god just really likes good guys and hates bad guys the germans discovered something really interesting the russians wouldn't cry out when they were shot i mean some of them would obviously but as a general rule they wouldn't cry out in hollywood movies they don't have the bad guys cry out because they want to dehumanize them and they don't want you to feel sympathy for them but in combat when soldiers don't cry out when they're shot that's eerie because a normal human being when they feel that kind of pain and shock might cry out they might not because you're that much shock you might even not you might not even know you've been shot right i mean shock is a really weird thing we're we've never really pinned down exactly the mechanics of shock but german soldiers on the regular basis cried out when they were shot and the russians wouldn't and so instead of seeing the russians as sub-human as they're killing them 11-1 in the 11-1 ratios over time the germans started to see the russians as maybe super human because they wouldn't cry out when they were shot the reason they didn't cry out was they knew they were dead it was hopeless when you're that crush you're just like ah it's done anyway all right dunk next one all right this is happening winkler all right so at some level my my lecture tonight is a little bit of a plug for a friend of mine he's an australian uh his name is jason mark he wrote both of these books and uh they're they're fantastic if you like this stuff you most people will probably be just really bored because they're not they're not really like novels they're uh detailed historical accounts i happen to have edited both these books so uh anyway this one is about stalingrad and so some of the material i'm actually going to bring in tonight is stuff that i've gotten from jason mark's book i should just show you two for full disclosure purposes not only did i edit the book and i mentioned in the book he signed it for me in stalingrad that's how bad my mental illness around world war ii is so just for grins and giggles um he and i went on a trip to stalingrad a friend of mine named michael halash took us so i want to plug him too just so that he gets full credit anyway um vincler is in that book in fact jason mark is the guy who figured out his name so for years he had become the symbol of the futility of the fight in stalingrad um he has a badge next to his cross of iron the badge that's on the left side of the cross of iron that's a assault badge a combat still not psyching a combat assault badge um it's broken and for years people have assumed he broke it on purpose so that he could show the futility of the fight so his attitude was we can't win we're all gonna die i'm gonna do my duty i'm gonna die with my men but i'm gonna show my my understanding of the futility and he broke his badge on purpose we don't really know i think i think there's a little bit of speculation but there's a little bit of a forlorn look in his face i think at least that's what i see and so he sort of became the symbol of the futility the way jason mark figured out who he was is he would go onto ebay and buy boxes of pictures people would find pictures from world war ii in their attic and they'd sell them on ebay next and he jason mark by random bought hopf martin vinckler's wedding photo and then figured out who he was he recognizes him in the picture he's like oh my god i know who this guy and that's him when he was a lieutenant i i did this because i think it's important to remember that even the germans were human all right we can be really clear they were they did really evil [ __ ] holocaust done right the conversation's over there there's no there's nowhere to go what they did to poland was just absolutely evil but there were people just like you and me and let's be honest most of us love obeying orders we can't wait to be told what to do [Music] so anyway i just wanted to humanize some of the the germans just a little bit isn't that crazy he found his wedding photo just what are the odds all right max all right so uh i love this statue i i am emotionally very attached to the statue it is of course of children dancing around a crocodile it's in front of railway station number one in stalingrad today stalingrad is called volgograd of course during the battle it disappeared we have no idea what happened to it it was a big statue so i'm left with the only possible conclusion being like you know 120 meter millimeter shell or something landed on it something like that had to have happened like just something that big wouldn't just vanish um for years the people of volgograd the new name for stalingrad have been wanting to make a new one they just did it they just did it i think in 2016. so there is now a replica in front of the railway station of this statue and i really feel like it exemplifies stalingrad in such a really strange way children dancing around the crocodile like there's something really amazing about it um if you'll notice the city is in ruins the city is smashed to pieces in fact there's flames in the background on smoke so on august 23rd the germans bombed stalingrad august 23rd 1942 the german military after they recovered from the stinging battle of moscow where they were effectively defeated by the siberians sort of hunkered down waited the winter out in the spring they started fighting again and their goal was to get to the caucasus mountains and the reason they wanted to get to the caucasus mountains is because that's where the soviets had their oil reserves and what is today well what was then too azerbaijan baku was the big oil refinery center for the russians but also uh chechnya grosnea had a massive refinery and there were oil fields all around in chechnya so the germans wanted to get to that the reason the germans wanted to get to that is germany had one oil field and i don't know if you know this but aviation fuel and gasoline really pretty much only come from oil fields and so germany was completely reliant on this one field and it was in romania and the united states military from early on figured that out and we began doing raids against plueste the oil fields and plosty and the oil refinery there um our first rate i think we lost 25 of our aircraft is it a suicide mission when one in four of you aren't coming back i kind of feel like that's at least close to the threshold so does that mean they were suicide bombers i kind of feel like that's at that point the bombing campaign that we did in world war ii was an act of nonstop pure terrorism by definition terrorism is when you target the civilian population war is when you target military assets now you go well but the factories were military assets okay but if you have a bomb that has a 1 in 100 chance of hitting a factory and you want to drop 10 bombs on that factory to take it out right you're going to drop 990 bombs on the civilians in the surrounding area that's the very definition of terrorism plain parent simple the war was actually prolonged by our bombing campaign and the reason is is because germany didn't go to total war until 43 and even after it went to total war it was probably too late they probably should have done it earlier they didn't pull the trigger and taught when you bomb a city you now terminate the desire and the ability of the civilian population to carry on with their normal civilian life because their job is gone the factory they worked at is gone their business is gone their home is gone the school for their kids is gone you know what i'm saying and so what then happened was those german civilians would then go into the factories and they would start to repair them and then put them back online and get them producing and they would produce at a faster rate because now those germans are now volunteering to make that war material there is an exception the the allied campaign against nazi oil assets that was crippling to the german costs every time a bomb dropped on a refinery or dropped on a oil field took out a rig it set the germans back and they felt like okay we've got to figure out a way to protect our oil assets maybe we can get russian oil so they they charged towards the caucasus mountains for the record they captured the oil fields in case you were wondering um but the russians had blown up the rigs before the jobs arrived so the germans did extract some oil because they repaired the rigs pulled some oil out of the ground some estimates suggest they may have broken eve that the oil they spent to get to the oil fields was compensated by the oil they pulled out of the oil fields i'm dubious the men that they lost in the equipment that they lost getting the oil fields make it a defeat for germany for sure stalingrad was on the northern flank of the german assault to capture the oil fields it was so if you think of them as they're charged in this way it's on this side it's on the left-hand side the german military had decided there was no strategic purpose in capturing stalingrad they could just bypass it they didn't need it it didn't serve any purpose to take it so fon richtofen the commander of the southern uh southern front the luftwaffe commander in the southern front the in the soviet union bombed the city on august 23rd it turns out that was another catastrophic mistake for the german military this is going to sound completely counterintuitive if you want to capture a city don't bomb it terrible idea cities work great for driving vehicles through and marching through when the streets aren't filled with rubble if you're a defender and you need building materials to four to five buildings it's really awesome when somebody bombs your city first and loosens all the bricks up because now you have a bunch of building materials if you're the defender and you want to be able to fire mortar rounds you can't do it from inside a building right because they shoot up but if the roof is gone you can now fire mortar rounds from inside a building and use the protection of the building in other words literally every reason why you shouldn't bomb a city was ignored when the germans bombed stalingrad and that's why the city is all torn up to make things more interesting stalin ordered that the city not be evacuated so there's a civilian population stuck in a bombed out city and then hitler gets involved and he made a speech and i heard his speech and he says so i was looking at the map i'm paraphrasing so i was looking at the map and i saw his name there staring at me and i realized we had to take the city named after in other words the only reason the largest battle in human history lasted over five months there were more than two million people engaged and they did people not men on purpose there were over 2 million people engaged happened entirely because hitler couldn't stand the idea that stalin would keep the city named after him and for no other reason well there is another reason when stalin realized the germans were going to take it he panicked because he couldn't stand the idea that germany was going to capture the city names because he could have also said because the russian original position was if the germans go for stalingrad let him take it we don't need it and then stalin changed his mind and his ego kicked in and the narcissist this is why you shouldn't allow narcissists to become the ruler of your country it's just politics 101 stay away from them they're very charming everybody gets snowed by narcissists if you've ever been on a hiring committee you've probably a guy walked in and charmed you and you're like oh yeah that's the guy they're so full of [ __ ] don't hire them but we're humans we love being charmed six months later you'll hate their guts they'll they'll teach you eventually you'll figure this out in any case uh that's why the battle of sangha is going to happen it's just an ego trip next slide all right do it again so this is the offensive i was telling you where they try to get to the oil fields grozny is the target they didn't actually get to grozny but where you see where it says my cop just to the south of it that was the caucasus mountains they actually climbed uh mount albress which is the la the tallest mountain in the caucasus and the german military put a plaque up there and said we climbed this mountain on the furthest extent uh that they got in the war it's insane the distance is just mind-bogglingly insane at that point and you can see they've come right up on stalingrad and they don't need it they can just ignore it but they're not gonna do it so another thing that you should learn is if there's a city that's especially difficult to defend name it after your leader so that you can bait the other side that's i think that's that's just like if there was not a lesson you were going to learn that's the one you want to learn all right next again all right so this is what stalingrad looks like it is an extremely long extremely skinny city there's the width is insane but actually austin is really skinny too this is skinnier and longer so think austin but then take it up a notch for whatever reason there's a really bizarre feature to uh russian geography the cities and sorry the rivers the rivers in russia either flow north or south right russia is the long state it makes sense they're going to flow north or south in the south they flow south in the north they float off so that's easy to remember in the south i don't know if this is true in the north for whatever reason the west bank is always higher than the east bank if it was the other way around it would have given the russians the advantage because the germans would have had to cross the river and then climb a hill and then the russians would have had the artillery on the high ground but i guess god really wanted the russians to suffer they made it go the other way so when the russians would approach the river they had the high ground they could then deploy their artillery and suppress the russian artillery on the other side and then affect the crossing of the river and that's true also installing growth songground itself one of the reasons why it's so skinny is there's a big hill to the west of the city and it nestles up against the hill and so that sort of became like the the ending point of the width of the city when the when the germans attacked so the the germans bombed the city on august 23rd in the in the weeks that follow they change their mind and decide to go after the city they actually invade the city on september 14 1942 and they come in i really i need a pointer um so see how there's a there's a river right there they're coming to the north of that there's a railway and that's basically the center of the city they're coming right into the center city the german goal is to just rush into the city and capture it the mango is creating right they're just going to go right in get it they're just going to rush they're going to leave stuff it's going to be messy who knows what they capture who knows what they don't capture they don't care they just need to do it quickly the russians freak out and then try to stop it from happening there were two retreating russian divisions that take positions in the city the nkvd the nkvd was the i guess it's equivalently fbi yeah we did call intel pro yeah the equivalent of the fbi right equally amoral uh ignore constitutions and law just do whatever you want but whatever that is the nkvd went and they rounded up civilians and they were just like here you go here's we gotta stop them and so there's a portion of civilians there were women [Music] who are in combat at this point um most of the anti-aircraft units the guns were manned by women sorry let's try that again most of the guns were women by women since manned by women seems really weird and inappropriate somehow um and in fact as the in the north as the germans were approaching as the german tanks were approaching the women took their anti-aircraft guns and aimed them across the landscape and were actually fighting the german tanks with their anti-aircraft guns and it was a total knockdown drag out battle uh the women are eventually overrun their artillery units are overrun but it drove the germans bonkers especially when they got there and they're looking at all these dead russian women like my god we were fighting what the hell is this that's not right so so there are women also joining these militias and they're trying desperately to hold but you know untrained soldiers um you're probably really mostly just arming the other side at that point you know what i mean because they're probably gonna die so the russians did a desperate stop gap measure they took the 13th guard rifle division which was an elite division a russian elite division and it was on the east bank of the river because again they weren't planning to defend the city so they didn't deploy enough units into the city and they rushed it across the river in the daytime and so the german the luftwaffe shows up and they just brought in stukas and they just went up and down the river mowing down the russian soldiers in the river and they just kept sending them they just kept sending them and when they hit the shore they would just run towards the railway station in the middle of the city and then there's a circle up there that's mommy of kurgan it's a big hill and they would run soldiers as fast as they could to mommy of kurgan the estimate is of the 10 000 men in the 13th guard rifle division guards rifle division 3 000 died in the first day of fighting the germans captured the railway station the 13th garden rifle division recaptures the railway station the germans counter attack they counter attack again they the railway station will change hands six times that day just back and forth back and forth and it is brutal but the russians are climbing through the rafters they're they're busting holes in the buildings in the side of the walls they uh they would they would fight for a like there's a wall in between the germans and the russians they would fight for a room they'd abandon the room and they'd come running around the backside and counter attack and they'd just do this for hours by the next day the 13th guards rifle division is essentially gone it had taken so many casualties that it lost cohesion after two days of fighting the estimate is 300 of the 10 000 men survived the war had they not done this the germans would have captured the city quicker as a result they delayed the germans just long enough they could bring in more reinforcements and after this they start they only send the ferries at night and then the russians decide to employ a really interesting tactic the germans hated fighting at night it's disorganized it's chaotic in part because you don't always know if the guy that's shooting at you is your side or the other side your best way to know is to hear the the sound of the weapons right because german machine guns sound different from russian machine guns but that's not always great so it's chaotic so the russians realized okay we should do counter-attacks at night and they would and in part because it would just disrupt the germans you're going to take heavy casualties but it'll keep them off balance on top of that the russians began using old planes that they didn't know what to do with and they put women pilots in them and then they would fly them over the german positions at night and they would just chuck hand grenades off the cockpit and a lot of them were actually world war one biplanes and so we were flying around at night by the way no no air force in world war ii flew at night except for the except for the night witches that's what the germans called them they called them the night witches they also called their planes the sewing machines because they thought it sounded like a flying sewing machine not many men are going to die from the hand grenades being tossed out of the cockpits of these planes you don't know even where you're throwing it it's dark you can't see anything the idea was to keep the germans up to keep them freaked out to keep them nervous to keep the stress levels hot and so the germans just hated and dreaded the night witches the russians also realized you could create a lot of chaos with snipers and the first video we showed was miss pavlovenko is a woody guthrie song acknowledging a russian sniper a woman who killed over 300 german men um the russians totally employed women's snipers during world war ii it is true that the top snipers the ones with the highest numbers were men but there were so many women snipers that they more than carried their weight that miss pavlochenko is the top woman sniper um one of the things that they discovered about women was that they tended to be better marksmen than men um one of the problems that you have in warfare all the time is you you don't want you don't you don't just want the soldier to shoot you want the bullet to hit its target you know what i mean it's not enough to have the soldier shoot the rifle in the general direction you kind of want somebody to be dead on the other end and so the german military's response to this was to train their soldiers for about a year they did about a year worth of training before they sent their men into battle you know we'd do weeks of training not not 12 months of training one of the things that germans found was yeah the dude can hit a target at really long range but that doesn't really prepare you for combat when somebody's shooting back when things are chaotic and what the what the russians discovered was women can control those fear anger emotions better than men and so women as a general rule tended to make better snipers because you could stick them in a building and just tell them you're just gonna sit there for hours days you're gonna have a little bit of water a little bit of food you're gonna pee yourself and poop yourself because you can't move you'll die and you're just going to wait until you see a high quality target an officer walk by and then shoot that guy in the goddamn head and if you're safe stay if you're you feel like your position is compromised you got to get out of there and that's what they did and that was their philosophy and they drove the germans bonkers if you've seen the movie enemy at the gates it's it's a good movie um they they mess stuff up but it's okay it's a movie like it's not going to be perfect um it's about vasilis the top russian sniper at at the battle of sangra he had i think 255 kills confirmed kills that's number in my head it's probably wrong um and it you know like it's a good it's a good drama they they always i hate the canned good versus evil [ __ ] that they always do and then they have one of the russians be evil and i'm just gonna say it because it bugs me so much he was the jewish russian and i felt like really he didn't have to do that now he does redeem himself a little bit but i'm really sensitive about stuff like that yeah you didn't have to do that anyway um you could have written the script a little bit differently it's fiction it's fiction it's not like you're doing a real account the silly sidestep was a real person but the rest of the story was fiction um in any case part of the whole strategy is going to be chaos driven when those russians are charging stalin had put an order that those russians could not under any circumstance stop turn around and go back if they did they would be shocked so what they did was they had commissars commissars were political officers in the military and the commissars had russian media machine guns by the way one of the worst designed weapons in human history just i i don't know what the russians were thinking with those stupid mediums they were terrible they were these giant things that were water cooled and you had to lug the water around with you everywhere just oh my god stop just steal german machine guns and use those instead but anyway that's what they did so they bring these giant ugly ass heavy uh machine guns and they park them they tell the russians to charge and by the way the russians also were low on on weapons and boots and so they would tell they would hand a rifle and boots to one russian and then the next one would come up and they'd go what's your shoe size oh he's a 10 and a half follow him too and then when he dies take his boots and his rifle here's some ammo and you're like you mean i'm running into battle without a rifle and boots good luck see you later at the end of the charge if anybody turned around the commissars would crank up the machine gun and gun them down as they're coming back as the russians are coming back the russians would shoot them so you knew you were going to die so you might as well complete the charge at least you'll be killed by a german instead of your own people um that's going to actually change in stalingrad and it's because of a guy named nikita khrushchev so you you've probably heard of khush jeff cuban missile crisis that guy he was the the head of the commissars in stalingrad and he he decides this is a terrible idea you should stop having russians shoot russians it's not good for morale and so uh by november he completely ends the practice in stalingrad and the russian military goes you know what that was actually a really good idea let's let's just do that in general all right let's do the next slide all right so this is the southern approach this is a german map um i just like the idea that we're bringing in what they were looking at and this is just the southern part of the city because the city shoots up really far north and you can see where the russian units were deployed according to german intel german reconnaissance they were just flying over stalingrad and taking photographs and they could they could mark all the positions um that spot right there the there was a russian tank unit and uh they got overrun just unit after unit was overrun and the germans poured into the city and well let's do the next one all right this is the north this is a german aerial photograph of the north um the what's labeled number one is the jersinsky uh oh really yeah cool oh cool and it works hmm i don't see anything am i am i doing something wrong it's your cat toy oh yeah oh that's what it is all right that's cool it's labeled it i got a one over where i need it that's the gerzinski tractor works they make tractors there just they have like treads and turrets on them you know you know you're out farming and then you just need to rotate the turret um number two is the krasney barakidi gun factory they make guns there not handguns guns guns are the big things they i think most people call them cannons um and you like those are really great to mount on tractors so that's that's what that's about and then the number three is kresni aktiyaba red october factory um number four is the tennis racket it's where the trains have this big turnaround and it looks like a tennis racket hence the name tennis record and that's the volga river um so the initial battle that i told you about where the railroad station that was september 14 when that happened the germans decide in october that they need to now take the factory district of stalingrad and so on october 14 they attack the factory district and they they overrun gerzinski tractor factory really fast it goes it goes down hard but the the vericity number two that's gonna be a fight as the germans are attacking the factory they the russians actually literally had tanks that were in the process of being built and so the russians are actually churning the tanks out and putting them right into battle so the crews have no experience of just jumping into these things and in fact in some cases the workers in the factories were trying to man the tanks and on multiple occasions women ended up womening the tanks i know of three women who received medals for their service as tank crews in the battle of stalingrad by the russians there was more than three but three got a medal for it um in any case the workers at the factory men and women also armed up and they fought and they fought as hard as they could to hold on to the factories it takes the germans one month to capture the factory at the bariquity it's this big giant massive assembly line and the russians fight roomed a room like it is they are fighting inch by inch per day it's a crawling nasty knockdown drag out battle next so this is what the factory rounds look like uh we've got the scale in meters so you can see number four uh looks like it's about 300 meters long it's about it's closing in on the kilometer line that's how big these factories are they're gigantic they're insane so the the big factories the the big black buildings that's what took a month to capture basically um not quite a month they basically were september 27th so so i guess that's only two weeks it feels like a month um but they're but they're going room to room with room by the time they get to september 27th i'm sorry i'm mixing up my months uh october 27th no no they went they went into november it is a month they fought for a month by the time they get through that month and they get into november the german units are completely exhausted they've really got nothing left their morale is shot they're they're just broken they they've been fighting for days non-stop i mean i shouldn't say non-stop i think there's this concept that you're constantly shooting they would totally take breaks in the middle of the day and be like [ __ ] let's go eat they they they get the bodies right they'd hold up white flags and go get the dead and the wounded they they did take breaks it's just it's day after day after day and it's just getting ground so um hitler gets involved i feel like every time i say hitler gets involved you need to know this is going to be stupid so if you haven't figured that out let's just just just put that into your head it's actually not stupid stupid it's just it's maybe ill-advised hitler has this great idea why not create just pure elite units just units with the best of the best and so what he what they create is they create pioneers now they had had assault engineers long before this this is not exactly the same thing but it is essentially the same thing what hitler does is he goes through he orders the military to go through and find the best soldiers in each company and then they make new elite units out of those and the thing the thinking is you can have a shock force attack in a point and it'll tear the other side up and you can prevail the problem is you're taking all these good experienced soldiers out of the other units so you're dramatically lowering the quality so if you have in a company of 120 men if 12 of them are amazing soldiers those 12 men will help carry the remaining 108 men but if you take those 12 men and you put them into their own unit there's nobody carrying the other underneath men and so there was a severe quality loss for the remaining units but this is what they did and they took these pioneer units once the factories were captured and the regular military was exhausted and they went after the remaining buildings because they they're trying to get to the volga which is at the bottom of this map that's all i need to do is get some building number four to the volga and then they'll have capture the factory and so on on november 11 they decide they've already captured some of the buildings see that u-shaped building right there that's the commissar's house uh this is actually a piece of it i know it seems like maybe sacrilege that i stole it uh the russians blew it up after the war and it's just a pile of rubble and it's still sitting there as a pile of rubble i didn't feel any guilt whatsoever they did take a piece of it and they put it in a museum so that's the commissar's house the germans decided to attack at night because they didn't want to be seen when they approached the building they couldn't figure out how to get into it and so what they did was they laid down in the shell holes that were surrounding the building and waited the sun came up and the russians so that there's a ground floor first floor on the second floor i'm doing it that way because that's how europeans do it in the united states right we do first four second floor third floor but i want to keep it consistent there were russians in the in the second floor there were russians in the third floor and those russians saw the germans in the shell halls and just opened fire on them and so the germans were forced to run away so on november 11 they i'm sorry on november 12th the next day they decide to do a counter-attack the germans do to try to take commissar's house and i'm giving you the commissar's house as an example of just kind of how nasty this gets so um they they decide to start the attack by pulling up uh tanks like storm gestures that i showed you earlier with the stubby little gun they bring those things up and then they they set up machine guns and they just opened fire on the top floor with the tanks and the machine guns they just blast them and then once they do that the pioneer units decide to run right into the u right into that courtyard just straight in well the russian defenders thought nobody would be stupid enough to run into the u right imagine that this is it there's windows so as you're running through here if you had defenders they would just blast you with crossfire as you're running through the main courtyard because the door is on the other end so the russians are like yeah nobody's that stupid nobody will do that and so they didn't bother to defend it so that's not a good idea like it if there's a stupid thing somebody could do definitely prepare for it so the germans run through the courtyard they get to the door they're like what happened why didn't they shoot at us they go to the door expecting to find the door barricaded they had brought uh satchels full of explosives they were going to just blast the doors open they couldn't bother to barricade the door so the germans opened the door they walk into the foyer of the commissar's house and they're like wow this is bizarre it's too eerie so then they they decide okay they barricade they decide america they barricade the flanks so that if the russians come up because they know the russians are in the basement and they figure the russians are on the second floor on the third floor the top floor so um but they thought there would be russians on the ground level too because to prevent the germans from entering the building but that didn't happen so they barricade up to prevent the russians and the sellers from coming up and then they send men to the top floor the russians up there were all already dead from the machine gun fire and the tank fire so now the germans are like all right all i got to do is dig these guys out of the basement so uh when the russians found out what happened they actually made attempted a counter-attack but because the germans had barricaded uh they managed to push the russians back into the basement they got him off the ground floor the germans then went to the staircase and were trying to shoot at the russians underneath but they couldn't because the russians had backed up in the basement and the germans had flamethrowers i love flamethrowers by the way like some at some point in human history there was a dude who's like you know what would make my day if i could put flame on that guy over there i would just i would just really bring cheer and joy to me i'm going to invent a flamethrower actually for the record it was a syrian refugee who created the world's first flamethrower he did it for the roman empire there was a contest on how to prevent the arabs from capturing constantinople and a syrian refugee went i have an idea and he put heated compressed oil in a copper uh container and then had a nozzle on the end and they just lit it on fire as the compressed eyelids come squirting out and they set the arab fleet on fire and kept constantinople in the fight for a few more centuries so next time you're rejecting a syrian refugee you might want to rethink that like the germans they figured it out they're like oh yeah history tells us you should always let syrian refugees in um anyway the germans had flamethrowers and they're they're trying to hook the flamethrower through the staircase to get the russians in the back of the in the back of the basement and they can't reach them so the germans like what the hell should we do somebody comes up with a genius idea they went and they got a jerry can which since the germans invented it i'm assuming is jerry as in german but i don't know they got a jerry can you know a gas can that you you know the kind that you put on a vehicle so you have a spare spare supply of gasoline they went and they got jerry cans and uh they they took satchel charges and they put them on the floor in places around the the commissar's house and then they detonated the satchel charges making holes in the floor and then they took the jerry cans and they dropped them down and they detonated them and so there's giant fireballs and it just murders a bunch of the russians down below and then to add insult to injury they took these glass uh chemical weapons that they had they weren't they didn't kill you they just made you sick and they were designed specifically for use against tanks you would drop them underneath the tank and then the chemicals would go into the tank and the crew would just get really sick and so they'd evacuate their tank um so they they dropped those down there thinking that the russians will come come out and after a couple of days of fighting uh 10 of the russians who are still alive escaped through a window and and got back to the rest of the russian forces and they continued to fight that's an example tiny itty-bitty little example of the kind of fighting they were doing in the factory um for the record those rectangular buildings the smaller ones in between the commissar's house and the factory that was housing that's where the workers and the management lived that means all right next so this is what the inside of the factories look like uh not in great shape look at how small that german soldier looks compared to that factory i mean the the scale of this stuff was just insane and i and it just demoralized the germans they look at this and they go oh my god what the hell doing next again all right so uh um so you can see the commissar's house in more detail here but uh i want to add a couple more details to the struggle so this gully right here rolex gully there were three russians the german front line actually came right up to that gully the the germans actually built trenches on top of the gully there were three russians who had dug a cave into the gully and what they were is they were forward artillery observers and so they would they would spot the artillery rounds they would come in and at first the germans had no idea how the russians had such accurate artillery they're like how are they spotting this because the artillery pieces are on the other side of the river and so the germans are like what's going on eventually they figure out there's three guys down there and they start trying to hunt them and dig them out and they never got them they just managed to get through the whole battle hunker down in this game they'd pop up to spot the artillery rounds and then go back into hiding the germans couldn't dig them out the thing that says rota house it's labeled as 87 and 67. that is ludnikov's headquarters ludnikov was the colonel in charge of holding on to the brickety um he that was his forward observing headquarters and the germans goal was to take that building and they never did they never captured it um next so again that's ludenkov um and then i i put in g.a sharovar she was a woman of course women were used as phone operators they were used as med med techs they would they were the guy they would run into battle and they pull the wounded soldiers they drive them back to to tend to them um women took huge casualties at stalingrad and it's because they played a front line role they played a major role anyway uh this is libnikov in that building that i pointed out earlier though the rota house again this is it that's that's what's left of it today and that was a younger me in the white um when we were there it's in 2007 there this woman walks up to us and um she says so why are you here she was really curious and we said oh we're doing a battlefield tour and she goes oh i was a kid right here and we go oh do you mind telling us your story because we were like anytime we met anybody who had been alive during the battle we wanted to talk to him and she said yeah so um i'm not i wasn't actually living here she she had gotten separated from her family at some point and end up wandering into the to the brickety she ends up in the factory district and as the germans overran the russian position she just was hiding and she was like i want to say she said she was like five or six and the germans just adopted her and she sort of became their their little mascot and they would feed her and they'd take care of her and they just kept her around uh and then you know once the germans are forced out and the russians retake it she gets integrated back into russian society and she moved to there and she just has lived there ever since she can't leave the spot she's like emotionally so attached to the spot she's stuck trauma got everybody the german commander paulus ended up with a tick the commander for the russians for all of stalingrad was a guy named chukov took off ended up with so much eczema on his hands they had to have them bandaged up so that he could fight as they walked around with these bandaged hands because the stress levels were through the roof the russians complained that the german soldiers were too drunk you're you're in trouble when the russians think you drink too much like that's a whole new level of oh my god the russians the germans were running out of schnapps but they had captured a bunch of russian vodka and they were just hammered the whole time it was the way they got through the days next all right so this is the maximum extent that the german military got to in the burkitty uh gun factory area and you could see they actually came down they got to the shore uh you know somebody went and put their foot in the water just to say they did it but that's it they never actually actually fully completely captured the city uh ludnikov managed to just hold onto this tiny little spot they called it the island of fire and the the battle ends with linda cough in control of that little spot they also called it ludnikov's island the island of fire olympus island and they would just during the night they would bring supplies over the river and resupply them they bring in reinforcements over the river and they just kept going and they just kept going all right next keep going again i'm gonna have to kill that next time all right so one more so the russians are going to counter-attack it's called operation uranus as the germans are finishing off the brickety palos is calling up high command the va he's calling up the vermont and he's saying you got to let us retreat we can't hold the city there's no way the things are starting to crumble around us you've got to let us retreat hitler says absolutely not you are going to hold stalingrad you're going to keep it polish is on the phone saying we don't actually have the whole city the russians are just too tenacious we're never going to completely capture those last few inches and we're going to get surrounded by the russians and we're going to be destroyed if you don't let us retreat hitler said absolutely not under no circumstance are you to retreat and so paula stays in stalingrad even though he knows it's hopeless and so uranus the initial wave um is the yellow all the russians initially wanted to do is get behind the german sixth army in in stalingrad and cut it off and then from there they then did the orange where they made it impossible for the germans to ever get back to stalingrad and and eventually palace is gonna surrender um the spot that they meet at is on the river the it's really clustered i should say when they met the camera crews weren't there to film it so the russian army actually pulled apart they set up the camera crews and then they had them charged together and they refilmed it so they could film the moment when the russians encircled the germans that spot today there's a canal and it's the the don volga canal it connects the don river to the volga river it was built by german slave labor after the war so that's kind of nice that the germans helped connect the volga river to the black sea they volunteered for it um and this is how it ends paulus now is trapped he's begging for supplies the germans don't quite have enough transport aircraft because they lost so many in the battle crate he's begging for the right to turn around and bust out to take his units and break out of the city hitler's like no no we're gonna we're gonna come and we're gonna reconnect to you we're coming and eventually paulus realizes that's never going to happen on paulus moves his headquarters into the universe it was a shopping mall and he's basically hunkered down in the basement shopping mall uh the german military had a lot of it had ended up in our church and uh they spent christmas together in a church um let's i actually have a postcard that one of them made one of the german soldiers made but i don't remember where i put it so you can do next slide oh this is up close on uranus you can see the russian unit movements they look really happy in the movie where they meet each other they're like hugging and it must have been a great moment for them next all right so the picture on the left was artwork done by a german soldier in that in that church the church had basically become a hospital for the german military and they ended up burying their dead in the surrounding area that hospital actually has the original that's the hospital that church actually has the original and they've kept it the russians have kept it so i thought that was really sweet of them because you know i would have been inclined to tear it up and set it on fire so it's kind of nice that they felt sentimental about it this is another one of those forlorn germans uh this is a this is another one of the classic pictures of stalingrad like i'm not going to make it through this the guy on the bottom right is zhukov he was the commander of russian forces uh he was a total badass uh the guy in the middle is nikita khusha who will of course later be the leader of the soviet union he didn't play a major role in stalingrad i had to put him on there though because he's the guy who told the commissars to stop shooting their own soldiers i just feel like that's a real breakthrough you know i mean like you know we're losing so many of these guys to the germans maybe we shouldn't help the germans win the war let's stop shooting our man and then the guy at the top is uh the guy that had the bad eczema um another total badass paulus is the the forlorn looking german that's in the univer mag at the moment he's surrendering so that's why he's got that look on his face um right before he surrendered hitler promoted him to field marshall in the entire history of the german military no field marshal had ever surrendered what hitler wanted paulus to do is put a bullet in his own head and paula said screw you and surrendered instead palace will remain in the soviet union he served as a propaganda tool for the russians throughout the rest of the war he kept appealing to the german soldiers to quit the fight he himself stayed in the soviet union for eight years after the war and then ended up in east germany and uh worked for east germany as a civilian for the for the next three years and then died and the whole time he kept talking about how he hoped someday france and germany could reconcile and that at some point germany could reunify like he had that dream um anyway he didn't get to see it next so this is roger she's at the top of mommy have kurgan um she is roaring she is angry this statue is roughly the height of the statue of liberty but for those of you who've never seen the statue of liberty the statue of liberty is half pedestal half statue so if you take the pedestal away she's twice the heart of the statue of liberty you can see those itty bitty little ants at the bottom those are people uh if i remember correctly regina is the fourth largest statue on earth she's the largest statue of a woman um and she's actually because she's taller than the statue of liberty right so that's that's why um but anyway she's she's also a single poor concrete statue i don't even know how that's possible what do you mean single poor like ah anyway mommy of kurgan the hill was so covered in metal debris from the constant back and forth battling that the german and russian military did literally nothing grew on the hilltop it was a complete wasteland and so after the war russians went up with uh sifters and they just would scoop dirt into the sifters and they just pulled all the steel out of the soil and uh they they grasped it over and then set up a whole war memorial that's actually totally worth it if you end up in vulgar garage you should totally go um life in vulgar today is really interesting because they do not forget the war this is a they're constantly attached to the war there's a memorial for the august 23rd bombing and every newlywed couple goes and leaves the reach at the at the memorial and then from there they go to the center of town where they fire off fireworks to commemorate the battle in the victory and right where they're firing off the fireworks there's like an old tree that survived the war that's all mangled and torn up from all the boats and shell holes that went through it and that and they've left all the soviet propaganda stuff up there even though right the soviet union is gone because they they constantly remind themselves of it and where the ferry landing was where the 13th guard's rifle division was landing and being slaughtered in the water they have public uh concerts free public concerts there and so they're constantly re-engaging with the war they never let it out of their their system pretty much anywhere you are in vulgar grave you can see well the regional roaring i think she's amazing i was just blown away anyway all right next all right so i picked this picture to be the background because it just looks like marching soldiers it is um but if you look at it they look a little haggard they look a little tattered they are germans for those of you who thought they look like germans they are they're germans in spring of 1944 the soviet military thought it'd be really neat to let those germans who so desperately wanted to go to moscow go to moscow and they took 60 000 prisoners of war and they marched them through moscow and the russians just lined up to see the germans go by 60 000 soldiers um and what's really interesting i've seen the film footage of it the russians don't jeer they don't shout they just stand there and they just stare and they have completely blank faces as the germans march by i i think that's classy like i think if they had jeered and shouted it would have been gross but i also think there's something kind of profound about that whole experience and then after the uh german soldiers had finished marching through the city uh russian street cleaners showed up and they washed the streets which i thought was also kind of a nice classy touch i got to meet a colonel colonel kozlov when i was in russia in 2007 and we were having dinner together and one of the things that the germans had been doing is they had been paying the russians money to bury their debt the process for this had started i want to say in 98 99 the german government approached the russian government and they said look you have no reason to say yes to us we were awful we were terrible human beings we can't apologize enough but you are our number one trading partner and we have a pretty good relationship right now how about we pay you for the right to have a cemetery near stalingrad and for the right to go find our man and dig them up and bury them and the russians said yeah yeah and they set a price and if i remember correctly the german goal is to get 55 000 buried which is you know a fraction of the dead um the the estimates are that uh about a 1.1 million russians died that's dollar the initial forces were about 1.1 million but they brought in hundreds of thousands of reinforcements about 1.1 million russians died about 400 000 germans thought about um 100 115 000 italians died uh there's about a hundred and thirty thousand or so romanians died and about a hundred and twenty five thousand hungarians died you're like there are italians fighting in russia yeah how crazy is that uh so the italians the romanians and the hungarians were germany's allies they did send men the catastrophe of that was hitler was so intent on capturing stonegrad he pulled all the german units from the flanks and put them into the city and then sent the italians romanians and hungarians to defend the flanks but there just weren't enough of them there were there were literally instances where an entire kilometer of front line had one platoon to hold it a platoon is roughly about 30 men 30 men can't hold a kilometer or front line that's that's ridiculous and so that's one of the reasons why uranus was such a wild success for the russians when they finally launched it was there just wasn't anything meaningful there to stop them um but so the axis fatality rate was right about 800 000 maybe a little bit less maybe a little bit more and so to bury 55 000 out of 400 000 isn't isn't a lot but that's the goal and we went to the cemetery and one of the weird things about the way the two armies did this uh dog tags the russians didn't do dog tags they had a piece of paper and you were supposed to fill it up so that when you died we would you we would know who you were well one of the problems with that is paper doesn't last it it goes away over time another problem with that is you're making the soldier fill it out and the russians thought if they filled it out they would die for sure so the russians didn't fill them out and they thought it would jinx them and so they just didn't fill them out so most of the times when they find russians and by the way they found hundreds of thousands of russians at this point uh they we have no idea who they are so they're just put into mass graves but the germans had these oval-shaped dog tags that you would break in half and then i can't i can't do the full thing because i got a stupid mask in the face what they do is they open your eyes and they put it between the front teeth and then close it that way it's stuck right there so we know exactly who you are when we find you and then they take the other dog tag to report your death so when we find germans we know exactly who it is and so they so the germans have built this really humble memorial and they've put the names of all the people that have been identified so far there was a a russian woman who ran a youth group for troubled youth and what they would do is they would walk around the battlefield and they they had gotten so good at this they could kind of tell by what was growing if there was probably human remains and then they would dig up the human remains and if they were german they would turn them over to the germans if they were russian they turn them over the russian authorities and then they would get they were getting people buried that way also this is a piece of shrapnel so if you can imagine this thing flipping through the air aiming for your helmet and they come in all sorts of sizes it's another piece of shrapnel they're kind of fun you know what i mean this is from a canister that um it's a machine gun canister has bullets in it and you would plug it into the machine gun and mounted on a tank and so this is probably for an mg-42 it might have been an mg34 it was the german machine gun um when i found it it did have two bullets attached but i thought it was going to be hard to get it through airline security but then when i got this through airline security i realized that it's a junk and you could get anything through this is a bomb part this is the fuse that goes on the top of a mortar round and you turn it so that it you don't want a mortar to hit the ground you want it to blow up in the air because you want to send shrapnel flying through the air to hit soldiers especially in the head that's lots of fun and so i got this through airport security and they never made me open my luggage in russia the netherlands or new york i thought they would make me open it there's no explosive it's not a dangerous thing but it's a bomb part and i thought for sure they would see a bomb part when they x-rayed my my bag and they would make me open and i go yeah look there's nothing and then they'd let me keep it and they never made me open it so if they're not looking for bomb parts i wonder what they're looking for is it just toothpaste i don't understand a bayonet a spoon and i thought it was neat to have a belt buckle you could never have enough of those and the whole area is completely covered like this you're constantly running upon stuff at one point we found 275 millimeter high explosive rounds just laying on the ground um you know here we are 65 years later walking on the battlefield and there's just uh shells unexploded shells there um i used to live in germany like i said at the beginning every once in a while somebody would would step on something they'd step on a mine or they'd set off a shell and it'd blow up uh there's no part of europe that doesn't have world war ii constantly and it's and it's in the back of its head even if it's not always in the front but you know like germany got chopped up again after world war ii and is constantly living the reality of what they did and the guilt and the shame because unlike here they teach their people about the nasty they they did they don't whitewash and pretend like there wasn't a genocide of the native americans in slavery and and so they the germans are actually making an active effort to come to terms anyway so i'm at this dinner with this colonel this russian colonel who uh was in a battle tank battle at the germans when it before he became an officer and uh one of his friends is dying in his arms and he tells the man i'm gonna i'm gonna build a monument for us on this spot and he escapes and they did they they brought a tank they found an old tank and they brought it to the spot and they built they put a little plaque there they memorialized the spot and so we're at dinner with kozlov and somebody asked i don't know who did it it might have been me i'm a big mouth so i might ask i don't remember how do you feel about the germans burying their dead and the reconciliation between germany and russia and he said the germans can go to hell they came here to kill me and my people i want nothing to do with reconciliation at that point i didn't admit i was part german i just left it alone but i kind of also got it because by the time you looked at all the carnage it was it's a big leap to be able to just go i forgive you i think it's probably a good thing to be able to do because then you're not carrying around all that anger anymore but i think it's a difficult thing to do anyway i wanna do we have time for i meant to give time for questions we don't really have time i'll i'll field a couple of questions but if you need to escape please feel free to do so i don't think you're rude oh i definitely okay so the question is is there basically the question is is there fate right that there was a historical path where on it had to turn out the way it did i totally don't believe that at all um i think at every step there was a decision that was made and had a different decision been made history would have turned out differently and and one of the things that i've always been fascinated by was you know like what if hitler had had a three-digit iq and i and i think at the end of the day there was a chance the germans could win even though it was a really small one um they had like i said at one point they had to do the perfect war to win and they made mistakes so that was off the table but but you know if they had had a brilliant leader that's that's the definition of genius right you pull off the nearly impossible and you make it happen napoleon captured moscow like it was within the realm of imaginable and there's just so many of these little decisions that he made along the way that i think he doomed himself five yeah what oh just the battle of stone oh i don't know once so the question was out of a hundred times if you did this as a battle simulation how many times did the germans win song so here's the weird thing in a way the germans did win stalingrad so this this is why i hesitated and answered because it's a it's a complicated question like ludnikov had this tiny little piece of territory left the russians had these little bits of the river left like so what if the germans had captured those last little bits what would what was the what was the consequence for the russians at that point i mean it was it was negligible especially because uranus was going to happen and the russian army is going to be behind the german army so so the i think that i don't know if it's a tragedy the the loss on the side of the germans was that victory wasn't enough at stalingrad the the the very attacking of stalingrad kind of doomed them had they not attacked stalingrad they might have had a chance losing the entire sixth army because it surrenders uh is a catastrophe right the germans had a million men there and 400 000 die that's that's a lot of prisoners it's kind of the equivalent of kiev but for the germans now tens of thousands escaped it wasn't quite that kind of dry also for the record 30 000 of the germans went into the sewers and tried to continue the fight and so the russians went into the sewers with what is that went into the sewers with flamethrowers and had to dig the germans out by by burning them out it was insane um so i think my answer would be the germans once fallen god and it was meaningless the way they the way to win the war was not to have done stalingrad in fact it would have been to capture moscow in the first round after that i think they're hoes [Music] didn't have any better i mean i think it would have been in a lot better position i i just think attacking stalingrad the way they did was just a terrible mistake um here's the thing so okay they they secure the oil they've got this incredibly unwieldy long front that that they didn't have the personnel to maintain their supply lines are extremely long getting the oil back to germany for for processing was going to be a pain it's not like there were a bunch of railroad trucks because the russians tore them up as they were retreating and the germans had a different gauge track to begin with so the germans are having to lay new truck as they go like there were just so many things wrong with it that i don't know how you you win in 42. i think in 41 you won because the japanese attacked siberia and you captured moscow and then the russians sue for peace because they're like screw this but after that i don't know if for sure after stalingrad there was no chance like that that was the end and then of course they do kursk which is a catastrophe uh and especially because the russians like what i know what they're going to do now just let's just wait for them to do what they do every time and the germans had become predictable and the vegans create became this thing that you could actually weaponize against the germans at that point so yeah i don't know maybe it's it's one of those really cool things to think about because there are so many variables involved it's a complex problem it's like solving a puzzle what do you think the outcome would have been so that almost happened um what so the question is what would have happened if the soviet union had rolled over in the in the opening moments the the stalin was so shaken he disappeared he like went into hiding and we now know that they had conversations with top soviet officials about surrendering um they they really didn't know if they could pull this thing off had the soviets surrendered yeah it would have been a completely different situation because then i mean think about this 7 million germans die 28 million russians die 600 000 brits and 400 000 americans die like we were not the war in europe the war in europe was germany versus the soviet union i don't know how he would ever dug germany out of france and italy without a soviet union smashing the germans and and a way to think of it is the battle of the bulge so the battle of the bulge of course is is germany's last ditch counter-attack which happens in december of 44. so as evil as hitler is one of the really remarkable things about the german military is how tenacious it is like by by december of 44 normal human beings would have been this is over there's no way we can win there's no point in even trying what do the germans do let's counter attack we're losing on every front there's no chance one more try one more and their whole goal was to split the british and u.s forces through belgium and they were going to try and get to the english channel and cut the british and u.s forces in the netherlands and belgium off from the u.s forces in france and then they thought we'll just grind that fourth down wipe them out and it'll wreck u.s morale so badly the u.s and britain will sue for peace and then what they thought in their naivete was that they were gonna then turn around and the brits and the americans would join them and then together they would go attack the soviet union and defeat it and of course that was outrageous the whole thing was outrageous what's crazy is how close they came to pulling it off like if it if the weather had held up for them which meant cloudy skies so our airplanes weren't flying if it had held out for longer and they hadn't run out of gasoline i think for sure they would have gotten to the english channel but they ran out of gasoline and eventually the weather turned on them and then our airplanes would have just torn their armor up but it didn't matter because they had already run on a gasoline so who cares the fact that we were having so much trouble with germany in december of 44 shows you how much work the russians had to do to put the germans down so the answer is had stalin gone with his panic and quit i don't know i think there were there would be a nazi empire um it would have probably collapsed on its own just because it was so incompetently ruled but it would have caused so much misery and suffering in the process the russians really at the end of the day with all that was wrong with them were the heroes of the story because there was so much wrong i mean stalin was a sociopath uh the communist party was not maybe the best institution the world had ever seen and and yet we owe a great deal of gratitude to them and one of the tragedies of history is we've written the russians out to a large degree and americans only think of normandy and we and that's one of the reasons why i wanted to do this talk is i want to we we need to talk about as humans the other gods because they were humans just like us just as capable of being sucked in by a narcissist and tricked into doing something really stupid and evil and it's important to approach this stuff with humility anyway you guys have been a fantastic audience i think i've talked your ears off um thanks

Channel: The Austin School

Views: 117,853

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Id: IXU6mHcBfIc

Length: 133min 51sec (8031 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021