Glantz, David M. Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941. Tempus Publishing Inc. Charleston. 2001.

Conclusions

When Hitler unleashed his Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, neither the Red Army nor the Soviet State were prepared for Blitzkrieg or perhaps any other sort of war. The Red Army was beset with a host of problems, most of which were products of misguided state policy. Internally, the army had experienced and was still experiencing brutal waves of purges, ruthless and often indiscriminate repression, inflicted by Stalin in the name of cleansing the military of any disloyal elements, real or imagined. The purges physically tore the heart and brain from the army by eliminating the best, brightest and most capable military theorists and leaders at virtually every level of command. Stark intimidation deadened initiative and original thought among those who survived. Tangentially, the purges also struck Soviet defence industries, liquidating weapons designers and developers and inhibiting the design, production and fielding of new weaponry. This, coupled with the Red Army's massive expansion from 1937 to 1941, which was a byproduct of Stalin's concern with the deteriorating international situation in Europe and the Far East, thrust thousands of officers into command positions for which they were clearly unqualified.
Externally, the Red Army's dismal military performance in the 1939-1940 Russo-Finnish War and in its clumsy occupation of eastern Poland, prompted Stalin to reform, reorganize and reequip the Red Army, an ambitious program that was only partially complete when Barbarossa commenced. As a result, although massive, in June 1941 the Red Army was a Colossus with feet of clay. With few exceptions, its five million troops were poorly trained, badly led, inadequately supplied and equipped and mal-deployed. Worse still, echoing the situation in 1914, the cumbersome Soviet mobilization system did not meet the requirements of modern war. As a result, rather than losing 2 armies and 245,000 men as the Tsarist Army had done in one month of battle at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes in 1914, the Red Army lost 3 armies and 747,850 men during the first two weeks of Operation Barbarossa.1 In 1914 A.V. General Samsonov, the commander of the defeated Russian 2nd Army, committed suicide on the battlefield. In 1941 Stalin had General Pavlov, his defeated front commander, shot for treason.
The Red Army's occupation of Poland, Bessarabia and the Baltic States in 1939 and 1940 undermined the coherence of Soviet strategic defences, and new defences were incomplete when the German Army struck. Finally, Stalin's policy of accommodation with Germany, whether or not it was designed to gain time to prepare the country for war, provided the prerequisites for the Wehrmacht's achievement of strategic, operational and tactical surprise. Even though Stalin was cautious enough to mobilize the Red Army partially in April 1941, the tyrant in him never allowed for the possibility that Hitler, his brother tyrant, might betray him: Believing completely in the correctness of his estimate of the political situation, Stalin was in no position to assess objectively the conditions in the prewar months and neither managed to exploit those possibilities accorded him by the non-aggression pact nor was able to turn the state's control rudder suddenly enough to repulse Fascists aggression in timely fashion, which, in turn, led to false conclusions and incorrect diplomatic actions.2
In June 1941 Stalin was clever to a fault, but his cleverness nearly undid both him and the Soviet Union.
As a result, the Red Army that the Wehrmacht encountered when it attacked in June 1941 was a peacetime army - and it showed. The Wehrmacht's subsequent Barbarossa victories were, by every possible measure, as unprecedented as they were massive. While the Red Army struggled desperately to save itself from utter destruction, for weeks Stalin and the Stavka adhered slavishly to an ill-advised and inappropriate strategy of 'offensiveness.' They ordered their increasingly threadbare and disorganized forces to undertake repeated counterattacks, counterstrokes and counteroffensives in an attempt to fulfill the unrealistic demands of Soviet war plans. Most of these actions were simply suicidal. At Raseinai, Brody, Dubno, Sol'tsy, Staraia Russa, Siniavino, Smolensk, Korosten', Dukhovshchina, Novozybkov, El'nia and countless other battlefields, loyal officers and brave troop sacrificed themselves in search of illusive victories against the most efficient killing machine modern Europe had yet produced.
On the positive side of the ledger, the incessant, seemingly irrational and usually futile Soviet attacks imperceptibly eroded German combat strength, exacting a toll that prompted Hitler to alter his strategy and, ultimately, conditioned the Wehrmacht for defeat at Moscow. Those Soviet officers and soldiers who survived their severe and costly baptism of fire eventually exploited their harsh education to exact a terrible toll on their tormentors.
Despite the congenital 'spirit of offensiveness' that permeated Soviet military theory in the 1930s and dominated Stavka actions during the first several months of war, the Wehrmacht forced the Red Army to conduct a strategic defence throughout the entire summer-fall campaign. The Germans seized and maintained the initiative along all three strategic axes, compelling the Stavka to find ways to alter the course of war. Throughout most of this period, in every respect, the Red Army was ill suited and unable to do so. To a considerable degree, Stalin and his Stavka associates were responsible for the Red Army's defensive disasters. They failed to order the Red Army over the defence at the appropriate time and place, and their numerous attempts to halt the German Army and regain the strategic initiative failed miserably, often with catastrophic results.
Only at Smolensk in late July and August 1941 did the Red Army successfully halt the German advance and force Hitler to alter his strategic offensive plan. Even in this case, however, Soviet success was only fleeting. Hitler's decision to turn Guderian's forces south led directly to the loss of the entire Southwestern Front at Kiev. At the same time, the Smolensk counteroffensives weakened Red Army forces defending the Moscow axis and paved the way for the subsequent disasters at Viaz'ma and Briansk, which decimated the Western, Reserve and Briansk Fronts and left Moscow vulnerable and nearly defenceless in November.
Clearly, the Red Army was not capable of organizing and conducting a deep strategic defence in summer 1941. Exploiting its superior command and control, firepower and mobility, the Wehrmacht conducted Blitzkrieg in ruthlessly efficient fashion, repeatedly penetrating, enveloping, encircling and destroying large Soviet forces and creating immense gaps in the front that the Stavka could close only by committing large numbers of hastily raised strategic reserves.
Nevertheless, even in these extremely unfavorable circumstances, operationally at least, the Red Army was able to erect sound defences along selected axes for brief periods. In addition to doing so at Smolensk in August and September, it slowed German forward momentum at Sol'tsy and Staraia Russa along the Leningrad axis and on the approaches to Kiev in July and August and, for brief periods, successfully defended the cities of Odessa and Sevastopol'.3 In a strategic sense, however, even these operational successes proved inexpedient given the Red Army's heavy losses. Stalin's tardy decision to withdraw his forces from Belorussia in June, from the western Ukraine in July and from Kiev in September led directly to the encirclement and destruction of entire fronts and the loss of immense territories with large populations and valuable industrial and agricultural resources. Similar catastrophes on a smaller scale occurred at Uman', Luga and in the Donbas region.
Only during the Moscow defence in late fall was the Red Army able to seize and hold the strategic initiative. When it finally did so in December, it was due primarily to German strategic errors, the greatest of which was Hitler's insatiable appetite for victory and congenital over optimism that impelled him to commit Wchrmacht forces too far along too many strategic axes. The successful Red Army counteroffensives at Tikhvin and Rostov accentuated Hitler's errors and signaled the sharp turn about to take place in the fortunes of war. The twin victories in both north and south played a vital role in the defence of Moscow and created the necessary prerequisites for the Red Army to conduct its decisive Moscow counteroffensive.
In conjunction with the continuing counteroffensive at Tikhvin, the Moscow counteroffensive soon developed into a general offensive along the entire Soviet-German front. With it, the Red Army seized and maintained the strategic initiative for more than five months and, in retrospect at least, created the first great turning point in the war. Thereafter, it was clear that Germany could not destroy the Soviet Union. Operation Barbarossa failed at Moscow and with that failure, Hitler's hope of destroying the Soviet Union forever faded.
The Moscow counteroffensive proved to be a turning point in several other respects, particularly in the realm that the Soviets termed 'military art' [voennoe iskusstva]. For the first time in the war, at Moscow the Stavka managed to raise, assemble, deploy and commit strategic reserves into combat secretly and successfully.4 It selected the proper time to conduct its counteroffensive, at that critical juncture when the Wehrmacht's offensive momentum had ebbed but before it occupied well-prepared defences, and it chose appropriate axes along which to concentrate its main attacks. The counteroffensive surprised German forces and denied them the opportunity to regroup and counter the Soviet attacks. Thus, 'The fact that the German command was caught unaware bore witness to the skillful Russian deployment of their forces and their correct selection of the time for the counteroffensive.'3
A recent Russian assessment of the Moscow counteroffensive correctly notes:

The Battle for Moscow completed the failure of Hitler's Blitzkrieg. It signified the ruin of all of the Nazi leadership's military-political and strategic plans and doomed Germany to a prolonged war, which it could not successfully conduct. The Red Army's operations in the Battle for Moscow, which influenced the further course of the Second World War and peaceful coexistence, was regarded as an outstanding victory that facilitated the strengthening of the anti-Fascist struggle in the entire world. Certainly, it also produced tremendous moral and political elan in the USSR, both in the rear and at the front.6

The numerous disasters the Red Army experienced during the first six months of the war resulted from many factors, some of which the Soviet leadership had begun correcting by the fall of 1941. These included incompetent leadership within the army and navy, poor trained command cadre and soldiers, inadequate mastery of modern weaponry and hasty commitment to combat of poorly trained and equipped reserves. In short, the Red Army was not prepared to fight a modern war against a strong and well-trained enemy that was constantly on the attack. Excessive turbulence in command assignments, continuing repression by the state and the state's resort to unfounded propaganda to inspire its soldiers only compounded these difficulties.
Frequent breakdowns in command, control and communications led to poor and often tardy command decisions, which, in turn, resulted in many costly encirclements and massive personnel and equipment losses. Severe command turbulence forced newly assigned commanders to reach hurried and often incorrect decisions. For example, the Western Front had four commanders (Pavlov, Timoshenko, Konev and Zhukov) in less than six months and the Briansk Front three (Eremenko, Zakharov and Cherevichenko). To a lesser extent, the Leningrad, Northwestern and Southern Fronts experienced the same turbulence, which utterly shattered command continuity and the sound planning and conduct of operations.
Throughout the entire period, Stalin 'turned the screws' on Red Army troops, issuing directives that demanded absolute obedience to orders under threat of censure, arrest and even execution. The Stavka authorized the establishment and employment of blocking detachments to enforce discipline by brute force and Stalin often accused and prosecuted unsuccessful commanders for treason, unleashing against them the full power of state security organs. The raw fear that had kept the Red Army obedient in the late 1930s did not improve Red Army combat performance during wartime.
The Red Army's poor combat performance was also the result of faulty force organization, which was only exacerbated by the Stavka's and NKO's 'extraordinary fascination with the quantity of formations.'7 To its credit, the NKO quickly abolished the rifle corps and repeatedly restructured its rifle and cavalry divisions to make them lighter and easier to command and control. However, it did so primarily because the Wehrmacht had already demolished these forces in combat. In addition, while it dramatically increased the quantity of rifle and cavalry divisions and rifle, virtually all of these new formations lacked adequate armour, artillery and other means of combat and combat service support. Simultaneously, the NKO disbanded its cumbersome mechanized corps (most of which the Wehrmacht had already destroyed) and replaced them with numerous tank brigades and battalions that it also lacked the means to equip adequately.
Both prior to the war and throughout its initial period, the NKO and Stavka also woefully underestimated the role and importance of artillery, engineers and communications forces throughout the force structure and this, too, significantly decreased the resilience of the army's strategic, operational and tactical defences. Making matters worse, the number of available combat aircraft decreased dramatically from 5,952 planes in June 1941 to 2,436 on 31 December.8 Consequently, while the force restructuring the Stavka mandated in 1941 did facilitate the training of command cadre in the conduct of modern war, it also contributed to the Red Army's many catastrophic defeats and tragic personnel and equipment losses. It was no coincidence, therefore, that, in early 1942, the Stavka and NKO began hastily restructuring its forces to create an army that could fight and win against the Wehrmacht.
The effects of the Red Army's defeats in 1941 were appalling. In six months of war, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 1,200km (720 miles) along a 1,000km (600-mile) front.9 The precipitous advance deprived the Soviet Union of up to 40 percent of its population and 35 percent of its productive capacity and inflicted a minimum of 4.5 million military casualties, including over 3.1 million dead, captured, or missing.'"At the same time, the Red Army lost 20,500 tanks, 101,100 guns and mortars, 17,900 aircraft and 6,290,000 rifle weapons.1' To the GKO's credit, its evacuation of industry eastward and the extraordinary measures it took to continue production, combined with Lend-Lease aid from its Allies, permitted the Red Army and Soviet State to survive.
During 1941 a combination of factors converted the State-against-State war into a people's war, a struggle that also ultimately undermined Operation Barbarossa. The heavy-handed treatment by the Wehrmacht and German occupation authorities of the populations in German-occupied territory undercut frequent popular enthusiasm over the demise of Communist authority and impelled the population to take up arms. Although it would take over a year to fully mature and those who fought often did so against both Soviet and Nazi, the ensuing partisan war added a new dimension to the war overall and, ultimately, kindled a partisan struggle that would reach unprecedented proportions.
The evolving people's war reflected another reality that sharply differentiated the Soviet-German War from warfare in other theatres; namely, the sheer brutality of the struggle. Hitler had set the tone as early as the 1920s when he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf. In Hitler's perspective, the war against the Soviet Union was also a crusade, a 'culture war' [kulturkampf] designed to subjugate or eradicate an entire people (or race) aimed at obtaining 'living space' [lebensraum] for the German nation. These attitudes fostered a 'no holds barred' approach to the war, which was only reinforced by such pronouncements as his 'Commissar Order,' the brutal behavior of the SS toward the Soviet population and a host of other harsh and repressive measures. Within months, to much of the Soviet population the Soviet-German War became the 'Great Patriotic War,' a term that would endure.
Understandably, the Soviets reciprocated. As evidenced by his treatment of Polish Army officers at Katyn before the war and the treatment of his own population during the 1930s, Stalin was not a reluctant participant in this struggle. In fact, his security, intelligence and counterintelligence organs (such as the NKVD and 'SMERSH') worked feverishly to foster intense hatred of the German invaders. German repression and atrocities made it easier for the Red Army and the population as a whole (in the form of partisans and the underground) to join the effort. What resulted was a struggle where no quarter was asked for or expected, and atrocities on both sides became routine. Unlike other theatres of war, where German officers referred to combat as sport, in Russia it was not.
The Wehrmacht did not emerge from the first six months of war unscathed. During this period it suffered over one million military casualties, an unprecedented number for an army that had never before tasted defeat.12 Worse still, despite its spectacular string of victories, the Red Army survived and was able to inflict an equally unprecedented defeat on the Wehrmacht at Moscow. Once defeated, the Wehrmacht began experiencing the same command turbulence that had plagued the Red Army. The sad fact for the Germans was that Hitler and the German Army had embarked on its Barbarossa crusade employing forces, military techniques and a logistical structure perfected to prosecute war in western and central Europe. The German Army was not suited to wage war in the vast 'peasant rear' of the eastern theatre, militarily or psychologically.
General Gotthard Heinrici, the commander of German Fourth Army's XXXXIII Army Corps at Moscow and, by war's end, the Wehrmacht's premier defensive specialist, cogently assessed the reasons for the German failure even before the Red Army's Moscow counteroffensive began, stating:

The goal set for the Eastern Campaign was not achieved. The enemy's armed forces were defeated, but the Russian State structure did not collapse. The threat of a two-front war stood at the door. The attack on Russia did not prevent this from happening; on the contrary, it conjured up its possibility.
The basis of this failure rested on the following:

1. Politically, Hitler had underestimated the inner stability of the Bolshevik system. It proved to be tenacious and consolidated. The spirit within the Russians to defend 'Mother Russia' was stronger than their rejection of the Communist dictatorship. The improper treatment of the population in the occupied areas, above all, in the Ukraine and the Baltic States, only increased this feeling.
2. Economically, Russia was also better established than Hitler was willing to admit.
3. Militarily, the Russian armed forces were surprisingly capable. They often defended with a stubborn tenacity, and they had an astounding ability to improvise, even in the technical arena. These qualities consistently made up for the inability of the senior Russian leadership. However, all of this does not explain away the failure. German negligence and omission may make it easier to understand.
4. Most decisive was the operational decision of August 1941, which shifted the main emphasis of the operation from Army Group Centre to Army Group South and, in part, to the north. This forfeited the best chance to conduct a decisive battle with the enemy during a direct attack on Moscow. I stress 'best chance,' because there has been no evidence to the contrary.
5. The motorized problem must also be considered. The German Army did not have the necessary motorized units and air transport formations or the required fuel reserves for a campaign in an area with the depth of Russia. The result was the necessity of having to stop the panzer formations until the infantry could catch up, instead of exploiting the opportunity to attack into the depth. Secondly, complete dependence on the railroads for supply, with all of the ensuing problems, was no way to tackle the East.
6. The width and depth of Russia had a decisive significance. After the rapid defeat of the Russian armed forces was not accomplished, the German Army was still faced by these two factors, and they did not have the means to overcome them.
7. The Russian climate and terrain also complicated matters. The effect of the mud period was surprising in its significance. The coming of the Russian winter did not correspond with German expectations. And the difficulty of the terrain, with its wide marshes and impassible regions, the great primeval-like forests complexes, the few good roads and the wide, unregulated river courses may not have stopped the offensive, but they did cause considerable delays.
8. Therefore, the Germans had to fight a constant battle with time. The end of June start time, in conjunction with the time lost during the battle of Kiev, took bitter revenge upon the Germans. If the incorrect decision of August 1941 were not made, the time left before the beginning of the mud period would have been sufficient for a decisive success. However, it would still have been very close.

In summary, it can be established that the decisive factor in the failure of the operation was the August 1941 decision. In addition, however, there was also the underestimation of the enemy, German weakness, above all in the realm of motorization, the depth of the area, the climate, the terrain and time factors. With this in mind, the efforts made by the German soldiers takes on special significance.13

Heinrici went on to say that the Red Army's successes during the first three weeks of their Moscow counteroffensive were only 'tactical' in nature. He admitted, however, that the next three weeks on the counteroffensive produced a clear 'operational' crisis.
While providing superb perspectives on the root causes for German defeat in Operation Barbarossa, Heinrici also highlights one of many controversies that have since dogged historians as they ponder how the Wehrmacht might have conducted the campaign differently. Discounting the fact that, 'What has been has been,' and 'Speculation must remain pure speculation,' new information now available casts considerably more light on this controversy.

The most heated controversy associated with Operation Barbarossa was the wisdom of Hitler's order to cease the advance on Moscow in August 1941 and turn Guderian's panzer group southward toward Kiev in September. Most German generals and many historians as well have sharply criticized Hitler's August decision, arguing that Gudenan's diversion into the Ukraine thwarted the German capture of Moscow in 1941 and, perhaps, also prevented German victory in the war. Significant new evidence now exists that contradicts their arguments and, at the least, supports Heinrici's judgment that the seizure of Moscow in 1941 'would still have been very close.'

It is now apparent that the Wehrmacht's best opportunity for capturing Moscow occurred in October 1941 rather than September. This was so because Red Army opposition to a German thrust toward Moscow in October was far weaker than it had been in September, for three basic reasons. First, the Western, Reserve and Briansk Fronts, which had halted the German juggernaut east of Smolensk in late July and early August, dissipated much of their strength during August and September by conducting numerous futile and costly assaults on German defences north and south of Smolensk. By late September, all three fronts were primed for sudden and irrevocable collapse. Second, the elimination of much of the Southwestern Front from the Red Army's order of battle in September meant that Guderian's panzer group faced only token resistance on its October lung through Orel to Tula. Third, by severely damaging the Central Front in August and, then, smashing the Briansk Front in September, Army Group Centre could attack toward Moscow in October with impunity and without concern for its right flank.

Had Army Group Centre advanced on Moscow in September, before clearing its flanks, it would have had to deal with far stronger Soviet forces protecting Moscow and significant forces positioned along its vastly over-extended northern and southern flanks. Although it is conceivable it could have captured the city, as was the case with Napoleon's army over a century before, it would have then faced the grim prospects of wintering in a devastated city with immense forces operating against its extended and exposed flanks and rear. If the German Army could not defend its relatively short flanks in December 1941 against a Red Army force of 4.1 million men, it would have found it far more difficult to defend vastly longer ones in November against one of at least 5 million men. Roughly the same argument applies to criticism of Bock for spreading his forces so far during his October advance toward Moscow. In this case, Bock well understood the necessity for anchoring his northern flank on the Volga and the critical city of Kalinin for largely the same reasons.

Finally, in the last analysis, the most significant factor in the Red Army's ability to defeat Operation Barbarossa was its ability to raise and field strategic reserves, a fact unknown to all those who postulated the 'what ifs' mentioned above. As slow and cumbersome as it was and as poorly trained and ill equipped the forces it generated were, the mobilization system produced a seemingly endless array of armies and divisions. Furthermore, it served as the trigger mechanism for mobilizing the full power of the massive multi-ethnic Soviet State. Inevitably, the dull bludgeon representing the mobilized mass Soviet Army blunted the surgically precise, deadly, but fragile rapier thrusts that the German Army relied on to power Blitzkrieg War.

In addition, unlike Hitler, Stalin realized that victory in a 'culture war' to the death required complete and ruthless total mobilization of the countries' entire resources. Stalin did so by December 1941; Hitler failed to do so until 1944. In these circumstances the defeat of Barbarossa was utterly understandable and, perhaps, even predictable.

Almost 800 years before 1941, Frederick Barbarossa's Third Crusade foundered in Asia Minor, before his armies reached and liberated Jerusalem from the infidels. Like his ancestral model, who drowned in the River Seleph (Calicadnus) on 10 June 1190, Hitler, too, failed, and perished in May 1945 in the crumbling ruins of Berlin.14

Glantz, 205-214.