What If… Hitler Had Taken Moscow In 1941?

The seizure of the Soviet capital might have prevented the attack on Pearl Harbour and sealedthe fate of Western Europe.

- Dom Reseigh-Lincoln

What if Hitler had taken Moscow as part of Operation Barbarossa?

Hitler, of course, had hoped to knock out the whole of the USSR in a campaign of six to ten weeks. Now, in retrospect, that was ridiculously overambitious.

The intelligence was wrong about the number of Soviet reserves and so on. However, if by some miracle they had been able to knock out the USSR, then you’re left in a situation very similar to that which occurred in 1917-18 in World War I, where Germany managed to win on the Eastern Front.

The Bolshevik Revolution started, the Bolsheviks made peace with Imperial Germany and the Germans were able to concentrate on the Western Front. So you have that sort of situation and it really throws the future course of the war into doubt.

So what would Germany have needed to do in order to successfully invade the Soviet Union at the time?

There’s a big debate about whether a victory was ever actually within Hitler’s grasp. The debate is centred around the role of Moscow. There are those such as RHS Stolfi who have said that Operation Barbarossa was the turning point of the war, and that Germany would have been able to destroy the Soviet Union had they gone straight for Moscow in August 1941 (rather than diverting and focusing on taking the Ukraine and besieging Leningrad, and only later going against Moscow – by which point the weather was turning against them). Effectively, the question becomes ‘What is enough to make the Soviet regime fall apart?’