German soldiers depicted as humans, flaws and all

You keep repeating this nonsense in every thread. Stop reciting Victor Rezun (Suvorov is a pseudonym) and your roommate, they were just trying to make money and be original by producing cheap tabloid-style sensations.

Stalin encouraging a European world war? Come on, read real stuff. Start with info on Munich Agreement (though those who know about it prefer to call it Munich Betrayal).

the person above pointed out some of the biggest problems with the icebreaker idea, that yes the nazi soviet pact was a stalling tactic to allow the soviets to build a military that might at least hold back or deter a nazi invasion, in fact the soviets came first to britain looking for an alliance against the nazis and when they did not get it they made a deal with the nazis in an attempt to save themselves from being on the menu when they inevitably went on the rampage. yes hitler wanted to avoid invading britain whom he admired and believed would sue for peace and join in a war against communism, no stalin did not try to strengthen the nazis so that they could take over europe but because both regimes needed each other at the time and it was a way of trying to buy russias safety until they could strengthen, many countrys traded as little as possible with the soviets for political reasons and the nazis were restricted militarily under versailles, so the nazis basically bought the right to try out their strategys in russia with soviet troops so that the germans were prepared and knew what ratio of different troop types they needed once they broke versailles as they needed to quickly build their forces and act before france or britain could stop them, so they needed to already know what to order up, they didnt have time for trial and error. it was not the soviets trying to prop up nazis but simply a need for resources no one else would give them, not only were russia and germany historic enemies, but stalinism and nazism both preached against each other as the big bad enemy that made the harsher policies necessary, not to mention stalin and hitler hated each other personally, as you yourself said, hitler was determined to take on the russians no matter how suicidal it could turn out to be, stalin was aware of this desire, unfortunately because of how poorly russia did in ww1 hitler was convinced that they were an inferior people and could be defeated.

you said at one point that the german desire for living space was not directed at russia, but in fact it was. look at the way the nazis operated in the east and it makes what they did in france look utterly polite, when the war between them began stalin, butcher that he was, actually offered to treat each other as if both had signed up to the geneva convention, to treat prisoners well etc, hitler refused as the whole point of the war was to depopulate the east so that those few slavs that remained could be labourers for german overseers. compare the pow camps in the east and west, in the west there were red cross parcels, medical care, hot showers, in the east there were often thousands of men just in open field surrounded by barbed wire, dying of disease, starvation and exposure. look at collective punishment for sabotage in the east and west, one involved executing people at random but leaving some alive, the other involved eliminating the entire local population. look at the siege of leningrad, when the nazis could have taken the city but chose to starve it out instead as the point was to have as few people left after the war anyway. the slavs were always to become a slave peoples to 'superior germans'.

there are a bunch of other reasons that the idea is crazy, yes every military makes some plans for every possibility, the pentagon has plans for invasions of the uk and france just in case some unforeseen turn of events makes them rivals, even now russia would be insane not to have at least a rough idea of how to fight nato, or any large country would be to not have plans for how to fight even currently allied countrys in their region. that does not mean the us military could be said to be preparing to carry those plans out. the soviets were really far behind militarily, they needed to reorganise and rebuild their officer corps after the purges, they had a lot of tanks but most were very out of date and it was known they would not last long, not to mention more than half were in need of maintenance in 1941, the air force was far behind other nations, they were still using biplanes in some cases during 'the great patriotic war', there was just no way russia could even imagine doing better than they had in the first world war when germany had butchered them, there is no mystery to why russia did so poorly, it is not because they were caught preparing to invade, its simply they were outclassed. i mean if they were planning to invade, they had half their tanks out of action, they had inferior training and equipment and what is more they knew this and they were in the middle of a major reshuffle, plus they had their forces spread out along the border in garrisons rather than gathered together ready to push forwards, they had no stockpiles of ammunition or fuel near the front, they just did not show any sign of being ready to invade a country anytime in the near future even if stalin had been too insane to realise he didnt match the germans. speaking of stalin, the soviets had probably the best spy network of the time and had reports coming in that the nazis were planning to invade but he refused to listen to them thinking he was being fed false information by britain, but also because there was nothing he could do if it was true, he didnt want to make the germans see him doing anything aggressive in case it caused the germans to invade, when the invasion did begin he went missing for days, maybe on a drinking binge. that is a guy who lived in terror and denial of the nazi threat.

you must remember the guy who wrote that book was a soviet defector with an axe to grind and was writing at a time when germans and soon after, warsaw pact countries, wanted to demonise the soviet union in every way possible. he even admits ignoring the archives in germany and russia and cherry picking data from the sources he did use. his excuse is that if 100 agents think one thing and 1 person thinks something crazy they might be the one to listen to. ie yes there is no evidence and everyone who studies this disagrees, but what the hell, i will say it anyway. not much of a case.

"Incredibly, no one else was eager to invade. Even Luftwaffee Field Marshall Goering tried his best to dissuade Hitler. The top brass of the German Wehrmacht was against the invasion idea and tried to dissuade Hitler."

Thats a bit overexaggerating. After the victory over France, direct opposition against Hitler was weak if non-existent. Sure, there were quite a lot - especially in the marine - who voted for more action against Great Britain. On the surface, they seemed to have the upper hand when the air war against England started. But, parallel to that, the first drafts of attack plans against the soviet union were made. And even some of the top brass who were skeptical against Hitler, like Franz Halder, did willingly the preparations and kind of told themselves in the idea that it was easy to pull off. Though maybe there was not a big enthusiasm to do that campaign, there were only a few critical voices in the military to vote against it.

Actually the Luftwaffe was not as happy with the Nazi party. While the Nazis held the key postions it was Adolph Galland who was on the outs with Goering that lead the most successful air unit in the war. Jagdverband 44 was a collection of pilots that did not enjoy the Nazi ideals and were shunned for this sin(In the eyes of Goering).

This film was great since it did depict Germans as human. Unlike other movies where they depicted them as monsters and such.

If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.
Aaron the Moor