I Became Stalin?!

Chapter 12: (July 21, 1941)

Chapter 12 (July 21, 1941)

How did the Nazis win?

That was what I was most curious about. 

How did they do it? 

Did the British all take some drugs? 

Or did Germany do something better? 

In Operation Barbarossa, I didn’t feel that the German army’s actions had changed much. 

They were just as recorded in history…

Suddenly, something came to my mind.

“Ah, why can’t I find it when I look for it? The Fasho army… organization…”

I hurriedly started to rummage through the pile of documents to find the papers. 

Damn, why are there so many? 

This era was so backward that there were no computers or phones, let alone electronic documents. 

I had to make such a fuss to find something that I could have found with Ctrl+F… I felt ashamed.

The pile of documents that filled the desk collapsed and the office became a mess, but that was not important right now.

“Walter… Walter Model… M…”

There it was. 

His name.

The Lion of Defense, the Firefighter of the Führer, the Apprentice of the Magician, the Greatest Commander of the Eastern Front. 

He had many nicknames that suited him. 

Zhukov, Konev, Rokossovsky and other Soviet generals had all lost to him at least once and added another letter to his many nicknames.

He had defended the salient in front of Moscow for a year and literally ground up 2.3 million Soviet troops like a meat grinder. 

He had also inflicted the biggest defeat of his life on Zhukov, the rising star general. 

He fought well until he retreated with Operation Winter Storm and mocked the Soviet army until the end. 

That was truly worthy of the name ‘Apprentice of the Magician’.

After Germany’s downfall began, he took command of the Central Army Group and defended against the Soviet offensive that started with Operation Bagration, delaying Germany’s collapse by several months. 

After he became the commander-in-chief of the Western Front, he also gave a big fuck-you to the Allied forces who launched Operation Market Garden.

He was not well known in Korea, but Walter Model was truly the best defensive commander in Germany. Hitler’s ‘best field enemy’.

But at this point, he should have been the commander of the 3rd Panzer Division, but he was the commander of the 24th Panzer Corps. 

His rank was also one rank higher than at this point in history.

Something had changed.

I decided to look up other German generals as well. 

Rommel… Rommel was already leading the Afrika Korps and commanding all over North Africa. 

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What? 

They already gave him a field marshal’s baton? 

What happened in Africa?

Manstein was still commanding the 56th Panzer Corps as in real history, but his rank was also one rank higher like Model’s. 

Ferdinand Schörner, Lothar Rendulic, Paul Hausser and other famous German commanders were mostly in key frontline corps positions, one rank higher than usual.

It was not a big departure from Operation Barbarossa in real history. 

The old veterans like Rundstedt or Bock were still commanding army groups and the most important positions like panzer group commanders were unchanged from history. 

That’s why I didn’t notice…

But since they had achieved great feats from early on and rose quickly in rank – like I did with Soviet generals – they would soon be promoted to top commanders!

The German elite officer corps who had been recognized for their abilities since World War I and stayed in the 100,000-strong Weimar Republic army and continued to rise afterwards, and the Soviet generals who started as soldiers or junior officers at the end of World War I and rose rapidly to their current positions through purges… Their abilities were bound to be different. 

They had spread their wings now… And we were just chicks who had just hatched from our eggs.

“Uh… This is bad…”

It might not be so.

The ‘snowball’ was already rolling. 

In 1941 and 1942, the Soviet Union lost millions of troops without inflicting much damage on Germany. 

At Bialystok and Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, they lost nearly a million troops at each of these four places due to Stalin’s order to defend at all costs.

The Soviet Union deployed about 2.9 million troops on the front line before Operation Barbarossa. 

But in six months after the start of war in 1941, they lost 5 million. 

They lost all their existing army and also lost millions more from newly formed troops.

But in this world, in this timeline where I am now… There was no such victory except for the first few days – which was more like the effect of surprise than the order to defend -!

If they lost 300,000 at Bialystok and Minsk… That was nothing compared to the total casualties of the toxin war.

No matter how powerful the German elite officer corps was, they couldn’t create something out of nothing. 

The Soviet population was still three times larger than Germany’s. 

The industrial capacity was also not lost in the beginning, as they did not lose their core industrial areas with their eyes open, and they did not have to move everything to the Urals. 

The factories were still running in their original places.

They were still holding more than half of Western Ukraine, which had a population of 20 million! 

They lost only 10 million people in the Baltics and Belarus, which they took with their eyes open. 

The Ukrainian SSR had 30 million people, the Belarusian SSR had 5 million, and the Baltic three countries (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) had another 5 million combined. 

The two were incomparable in terms of manpower.

In contrast, Germany’s industrial capacity did not seem to have improved much. 

Not to mention the population.

The estimated size of the troops seemed to be not much different from real history, even considering the errors that could occur from the spies or frontline soldiers. 

If I could only notice it now… They might be making something like super-heavy tanks.

But such nonsense would not affect the war, and the 3rd or 4th tanks that were captured and sent up for analysis were exactly the same as the ones that the German army should have been using at this point.

I don’t know if Hitler was possessed like me… But anyway, I had the advantage. 

At least on the Eastern Front.

Bingler, there was no rule that Hitler had to be possessed by a future person… 

Anyway, Bingler could use his knowledge to beat Britain.

But the Soviet Union that had changed because of ‘me’ would have been beyond his prediction. 

My future knowledge was already strengthening the Soviet Union.

From small infantry weapons like automatic rifles and grenade launchers to design concepts for IS heavy tanks, I had already given them to Soviet scientists. 

I just knew the valuable military and engineering concepts that they had obtained by shedding tens of millions of blood in World War II!

My vast military and scientific knowledge was passed on to tens of thousands of engineers and scientists who were working on research in secret cities in the Urals, while being ‘canned’. 

Along with the secretary-general’s stern order.

“Every hour you work will be used to reduce the blood our soldiers will shed. Devote yourself more to research!”

Now the scientists and engineers would refine and realize the designs I had given them…! 

Or they would suffer from the horror of being sent from a special gulag for scientists to a regular gulag. 

They were not that far apart anyway. Hehehe.

Unlike ‘me’ who had absolute power that Stalin had created, and who could control the military and technology development perfectly, Hitler could not fully control the German military. 

He also could not properly control the high-ranking Nazis who competed for loyalty and fought for territory. 

Even if he was a future person who was possessed like me… Could he really break through the complex power dynamics and take over the party as ‘just an ordinary person’?

Factional fights and power struggles made the German army inefficient. 

The otaku pig Göring insisted that everything with wings should be under his command and made it impossible to establish a naval air force. 

The Graf Zeppelin, which could have been Kriegsmarine’s joker, was stuck in dry dock until the end of the war.

Himmler, who controlled SS, wanted to have an armed force to counter the Wehrmacht and expanded the Waffen-SS to hundreds of thousands. 

It was an organization that was not an army, but did military things with a military structure. 

They needed separate administrative and supply systems for them. 

Imagine an army that had panzer divisions for the army, Waffen-SS, and air force! 

That was the German army.

The Nazi leadership did such things but refused to enter a total war posture, which was essential for modern warfare. 

It was only in 1943 that Goebbels started to talk about ‘total war’.

Hitler himself was a World War I veteran who had experienced the nightmare of total war and most Germans who remembered World War I had a conscious or unconscious aversion to such a war.

Hitler himself had enough understanding of total war to order targeting Ukraine and Caucasus, where Soviet industrial capacity and oil were concentrated, in 1942… But he could not overcome his own limits.

And history had already changed a little bit. But it was not like the world had turned upside down.

Even if Hitler ordered a total war posture and turned Germany into a killing machine that ran through the fire of war… The German people would not follow him obediently. 

Would they obey the German government that suddenly ordered three shifts? 

Or would they resent the regime?

Would they want to be consumed in a futile war when only news of terrible defeats came from the Eastern Front? 

Of course not. 

In real history, as Germany’s downfall approached, Germans began to rebel one by one against the iron fist rule.

The White Rose group, Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on Hitler, Confessing Church and Catholic resistance groups… Those who followed Hitler saw millions die, become disabled or never return and turned away from him. 

The German regime had to crush them one by one, and revealed their own defeat by resisting.

The Soviet Union just had to fight and win. We won even in real history’s horror.

If Hitler was more sane than I thought and suggested negotiations, that wouldn’t be bad either. 

The beauty of war is only in a quick end. 

Nothing could be better than less bloodshed.

“Comrade Secretary-General? Comrade Beria, the head of the NKVD, wants to see you.”

“Ah, let him in.”

Beria bowed deeply to me with a disgusting smile. 

Ugh, I hated Beria, maybe because of prejudice.

He was rumored to be a pedophile and a sadist, and that he raped his wife and married her. 

The rape thing was officially refuted, but… I don’t know about the rest. Even without that, he was clearly cruel as he led the purges.

And there was something else that was important. 

In the power struggle after Stalin’s death, Beria became a powerful figure as the head of the intelligence agency, and formed a troika with Malenkov and Khrushchev. 

In this collective leadership, Beria advocated a conciliatory policy with the West and a thawing stance internally.

He ordered to suppress spies and liberals from the West, but when power came to his eyes, he changed his position? 

He was driven by power and could do anything for power. 

That attitude contributed to my alertness. Stalin seemed to trust him quite a bit, but…

“Comrade Secretary-General, I came to report that the facility you ordered has started construction.”

Beria, who didn’t know what I was thinking, talked to me with a fawning smile. 

Anyway, Beria was competent. 

Certainly more than Himmler, his counterpart. 

He was responsible for the Soviet intelligence network and extracted useful information, contributing to the victory of the war.

And now… He had done what I ordered in no time.

“Good. You must strictly supervise the technicians and the prisoner laborers. We can’t let anyone know that we are building this facility.”

“Yes! I will do my best.”

“‘Copper’ is almost confirmed to be obtained by Molotov from the United States… So we need to produce and refine ‘silver’ as soon as possible.”

“I will also devote my body and soul to prepare for that!”

It’s not your body, but the prisoner laborers’ bodies. 

Where are you selling drugs? 

Anyway, I didn’t expect it to be ready so soon. 

The work of moving factories to the Ural Mountains must have been a great history… But could they do it with just people and equipment?

Because there was no initial defeat, the Soviet Union did not have to send everything they had to the front line as they did in real history. 

They had some room for other things.

Most of that room was invested in improving and increasing weapons. 

The upgrade of T-34, the early introduction of IS heavy tanks, the development of decent fighters/attackers, etc. 

The People’s Commissariat of Defense was in charge of those areas.

But if you wanted to keep it secret, the counterintelligence agency was always the best.

They should not know about ‘silver’.