Sun Tzu would like to remind his distinguished colleague Clausewitz that the mere fact that Germany felt compelled to attack the Soviet Union in the first place represents a failure of the first order. While Germany needed resources, there was nothing stopping her from trading for the resources. If the ability to trade for resources was insufficient to Germany's needs (and in many cases it was), then being forced into a war not at her time of choosing, on her own terms, or with the ability to put the entire economic and military might of the nation into the task, represents the worst in political and military failure.
Secret Master brings up several critical issues, matters that dominated discussion in Berlin after the fall of France. German leadership clearly recognized the looming Anglo-American industrial threat. Despite the confiscation of France's significant armaments industry and continental possessions, the Germans could derive little benefit from their sudden gains, owing to a crippling lack of resources, especially coal. The British blockade prevented Germany from supplying its industry with critical natural resources from the Americas and deprived the French armaments industry of its traditional cross-Channel supply of coal. Hitler saw the writing on the wall. He believed that without attaining continental autarky, he would have little prospect of defeating the combined might of Britain and the United States.
What, then, could Hitler have done? As Secret Master rightly points out, Germany could have bound itself ever more tightly to the Soviet Union. Only the USSR held reserves of grain, coal, iron, metal ores, and oil necessary for a long-term strategic war with Britain and America. Stalin, in fact, began what Heinrich Schwendemann has termed a "Soviet export offensive" designed to so completely fetter the German economy to the Soviet Union that Hitler would not dream of turning east and actualizing the odious geopolitical end-goals spelled out in Mein Kampf. Stalin succeeded insofar as many of those members of the German Foreign Office privy to the Barbarossa plan thought it insane in light of Germany's dependence on Soviet trade.
In Hitler's mind, however, this dependence was entirely the problem.
Hitler repeatedly referred to the Soviet Union as Britain's "dagger on the mainland," poised to stab the Germans in the back just as they were locked in a cataclysmic strategic war with the economic behemoth that was the Anglo-American war machine. Only by delivering a "swift kick" to the "rotten" Soviet state and seizing its resources could Germany rid itself of this paralyzing economic dependence and pave the way for victory in the war of attrition to come. One must admit that, irrational as the
Führerstaat often appears, there was a certain desperate logic in Hitler's assessment.
