re: Did Operation Barbarossa ever actually have a realistic chance of succeeding?

bingo.

take Moscow and Stalin falls. Hitler makes deals with opposition and gains control of the southern oil fields....war could have been very different.

instead, Russia is allowed to recover from the opening blows.

Y'all make good points. I just feel like the Soviets were never going to give up and would throw wave after wave of millions of soldiers at the Nazis until they finally overran them. They gave no value to life and that's the main reason they won the war while losing so many millions of men.

No.

I don't think taking Moscow would have done it. Napoleon took Moscow and his invasion was just as big a failure as Hitler's.

Russia was too big and the roads were too primitive for Hitler's tank and truck blitzkrieg. The technology wasn't there yet. He could have used a few thousand helicopters.

I think he lost too many planes and pilots over England. I think they could have made a real difference in Russia.

To the OP, yes it did have a chance to succeed but luckily some strategic mistakes by the Germans, Soviet resistance, random chance events and weather conspired to defeat it.

Sidebar-To a couple of earlier posters here, don't say "THE Ukraine", there's no such thing. It used to be incorrectly used that way, it's much rarer to see it done now. It'd be like saying "the America".

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Would have been a hard fricking sell after raping, murdering and pillaging for thousands of miles on the way to Moscow. Why on Earth would the Soviet people have believed that shite for a second?

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Well in the early stages of Barbarossa, there were a great number of peoples who viewed the Germans as liberators. The "Soviet people" were a hodgepodge of many different ethnic nationalities that didn't necessarily relish being ruled by the Soviet Union. And btw, the Soviets had brutalized and murdered a tremendous number of people both in peace time and especially during their invasions of Poland and the Baltic states.

The widespread German campaign of harshness really didn't begin until things began turning badly and the partisan war began wreaking havoc behind the front lines. Prior to that the extrajudicial, nonmilitary killings of civilians were generally relegated to Einsatzgruppen operations targeting Jews and political enemies. This was not a major impediment to winning over the support of local populations against the Soviets. In fact, had Alfred Rosenberg been able to convince Hitler to adopt his policies of treatment regarding the Eastern peoples, the Germans may well have had much greater success on that front, though again, the partisan fighting made things very difficult in the vast occupation areas.