Why was 1941 a turning point in ww2

Facing the most powerful military machine on earth, the Red Army predictably took a major beating but, as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels confided to his diary as early as July 2, also put up a tough resistance and hit back pretty hard on more than one occasion.

Some Soviet units went into hiding in the vast Pripet Marshes and elsewhere, organized deadly partisan warfare, and threatened the long and vulnerable German lines of communication.

Hitler was furious that his secret services had not been aware of the existence of some of this weaponry. The Soviets appeared to have carefully observed and analyzed the German Blitzkrieg successes of and and to have learned useful lessons. They must have noticed that in May the French had massed their forces right at the border as well as in Belgium, thus making it possible for the German war machine to encircle them in a major Kesselschlacht. British troops were also caught in this encirclement, but managed to escape via Dunkirk.

But — contrary to what is claimed by historians such as Richard Overy[16] — the bulk of the Red Army was held back in the rear, avoiding entrapment. This had been deemed sufficient, because it was expected that within two months the Soviet Union would be on its knees and its unlimited resources — industrial products as well as raw materials — would therefore be available to the Germans.

If the tanks managed to keep on rolling, though increasingly slowly, into the seemingly endless Russian and Ukrainian expanses, it was to a large extent by means of fuel and rubber imported, via Spain and occupied France, from the US. Hitler believed, or at least pretended to believe, that the end was now near for the Soviets.

In a public speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on October 3, he declared that the eastern war was virtually over. And the Wehrmacht was ordered to deliver the coup de grace by launching Operation Typhoon Unternehmen Taifun , an offensive aimed at taking Moscow. However, the odds for success looked increasingly slim, as the Soviets were busily bringing in reserve units from the Far East. To make things worse, the Germans no longer enjoyed superiority in the air, particularly over Moscow. Also, insufficient supplies of ammunition and food could be brought up from the rear to the front, since the long supply lines were severely hampered by partisan activity.

But the German high command, confident that their eastern Blitzkrieg would be over by the end of the summer, had failed to supply the troops with the equipment necessary to fight in the rain, mud, snow, and freezing temperatures of a Russian fall and winter. Taking Moscow loomed as an extremely important objective in the minds of Hitler and his generals. It also seemed important to avoid a repeat of the scenario of the summer of , when the seemingly unstoppable German advance had been halted in extremis on the eastern outskirts of Paris, during the Battle of the Marne.

Unlike Paris, Moscow would fall, history would not repeat itself, and Germany would end up being victorious. The Wehrmacht continued to advance, albeit very slowly, and by mid-November some units found themselves at only 30 kilometers from the capital.

But the troops were now totally exhausted, and running out of supplies. Their commanders knew that it was simply impossible to take Moscow, tantalizingly close as the city may have been, and that even doing so would not bring them victory. On December 3, a number of units abandoned the offensive on their own initiative.

Within days, however, the entire German army in front of Moscow was simply forced on the defensive. Russian generals Georgy Zhukov and Aleksandr Vasilevsky organized Russian troops in the mountains to the north and west of the city. From there, they launched a counterattack, famously known as Operation Uranus. Although they again sustained significant losses, Russian forces were able to form what in essence was a defensive ring around the city by late November , trapping the nearly , German and Axis troops in the 6th Army.

This effort became the subject of a propaganda film produced after the war, The Battle of Stalingrad. With the Russian blockade limiting access to supplies, German forces trapped in Stalingrad slowly starved.

The Russians would seize upon the resulting weakness during the cold, harsh winter months that followed. They began consolidating their positions around Stalingrad, choking off the German forces from vital supplies and essentially surrounding them in an ever-tightening noose. Thanks to Russian gains in nearby fighting, including in Rostov-on-Don, miles from Stalingrad, the Axis forces — mostly Germans and Italians — were stretched thin. Through Operation Little Saturn, the Russians began to break the lines of mostly Italian forces to the west of the city.

At this point, German generals abandoned all efforts to relieve their beleaguered forces trapped in Stalingrad. Still, Hitler refused to surrender even as his men slowly starved and ran out of ammunition. By February , Russian troops had retaken Stalingrad and captured nearly , German soldiers, though pockets of resistance continued to fight in the city until early March.

Most of the captured soldiers died in Russian prison camps, either as a result of disease or starvation. As Allied forces drew closer to Berlin, they began to discover the full horror of the Holocaust. They liberated multiple concentration camps,where hundreds of thousands of Jews were still being held.

For most, the rescue had come too late—an estimated six million of them had already been killed. When Nazi leaders at last signed the document of surrender, on May 7, , people around the world took to the streets to celebrate. In August, the United States military dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, one over of the city of Hiroshima, the other over Nagasaki.

They hoped the powerful new weapon would convince Japanese leaders to surrender quickly. It did. Emperor Hirohito made the announcement only a few days later over Japanese radio, and on September 2, , the war that had engaged nearly every country on earth was officially over. For those still in uniform, it was time to go home and begin the process of rebuilding. The war undoubtedly changed your ancestors—and in doing so, it changed you. How well do you know this story?

How well will the people who come after you know it? Now is as good a time as any to discover it. If one of these relatives is still living, consider interviewing him or her in person, figuring out the best way to record what is said, and then uploading those memories to FamilySearch.

Doing so would truly be a gift—both to your relative and to the generations who have and will come after. It is also the beginning of mass genocide. Of mass killing on a totally unprecedented scale. Nothing like that had happened even in Poland. David Reynolds, professor of international history at the University of Cambridge, agrees. If the Russians could hold on it was going to completely change the character of the war. I think that [Barbarossa] would not have happened in but for the really heady sense of victory that was generated by the events of , the fall of France and so on, that gave the sense that the Wehrmacht was invincible and that Hitler was a great leader.

Other historians argue that the trouble with picking Barbarossa as the turning point of the war is that implicit in the choice is the judgment that defeat was inevitable for Hitler and the Nazis from that moment onwards.

But, they maintain, this was not necessarily so. The majority of the historians I talked to—including American, British, German, and Japanese academics—agreed that the turning point of the war was to be found within the conflict in the Soviet Union. They just disagreed about when this moment occurred. Many felt that Stalingrad was too late as the instant when the course of the war in the east fundamentally changed, and that the launching of Operation Barbarossa was too early.

But it is significant that despite the chauvinistic interest in individual events in this history that exists in popular culture—like the British fascination with the Battle of Britain and the American focus on D-Day—so many of these professional historians see the war on the Eastern Front as inevitably providing the turning point of the whole conflict.

There have been no blockbuster Hollywood films on Barbarossa or Stalingrad, but nonetheless that is the arena in which most of the scholars I talked to think the war was ultimately decided. In terms of numbers alone the scale of the war in the Soviet Union was staggering. Take the comparative death toll between the west and the east, for example. The British and Americans lost no more than , dead between them during the war; the Soviets suffered the death of 27 million people.

Several historians, like professor Robert M. Citino of the University of North Texas, place the key moment of change towards the end of The first major setback which means that war is going to be prolonged indefinitely.

Kershaw also emphasized the importance of the entire month of December in the context of the war. Because even as the Soviets were fighting the Germans in the snow outside Moscow, the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor—an event which led inevitably to Germany declaring war on America on December I think that was the beginning of the end.

Of course the war had still a long way to go, and the Germans did actually recover to some extent in , but if you actually look for one point which is the turning point I think that was it. Hitler himself in one or two comments he made around then even seems obliquely to have recognized that [December ] was a really crucial juncture in the war. In fact, Hitler referred to events at the end of in contradictory ways—depending on which key epic moment he was discussing.