Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Fortunately, we’re not going to run the experiment again, but one could argue that, had they concentrated as the generals wanted to do, in going straight from Moscow, that they would’ve won. I mean, what Hitler wanted to do is, he wanted to go into the Ukraine. I mean, Hitler thought that the main Axis… There were three Axes. The northern Axis went towards Leningrad, the central Axis of course, went to Moscow, and then the Southern Axis, Army Group South, headed towards Ukraine and deep into the caucuses. And Hitler believed that that should have been the main Axis. And in fact, in 1942, the Soviets, excuse me, the Germans go back on the offensive in 1942. This is Operation Blue, and the main Axis in ’42 is deep into the Ukraine and into the caucuses, and that fails. But one could argue that, had they done that in ’41, had they not gone to Moscow, had they gone, had they concentrated on going deep into Ukraine and into the caucuses, they could have knocked the Soviets out that way. I’m not sure that in the end I believe that. I think in the end the Soviets would’ve won no matter what, but I’m not a hundred percent sure of that. Sometimes, maybe you can educate me, but sometimes they say, just like with Napoleon, winter defeated Hitler in Russia. I think not often enough people tell the story of the soldiers and the motivation and how hard they fight. So it turns out that Ukrainians and Russians are not easy to conquer. They’re the kinds of people that don’t roll over and fight bravely. There seems to be a difference in certain peoples, in how they see war, how they approach war, how proud they are to fight for their country, to die for their country, these kinds of things. So I think Battle of Stalingrad tells, at least to me, a story of extremely brave fighting on the Soviet side, and that, it’s a component of war too. It’s not just structural, it’s not just military strategy, it’s also the humans involved, but maybe that’s a romantic notion of war. No, I think there’s a great deal of truth in that, but let’s just unpack it a bit in the case of the Soviet Union in World War II. The counterargument to that is that in World War I, the Russian Army disintegrated. And if you look at what happened when Napoleon invaded in 1812, and you look at what happened in 1917, and then you look at what happened between ’41 and ’45, the Napoleon case looks a lot like the Hitler case, and it fits neatly with your argument. But World War I does not fit neatly with your argument because the Russians lost and surrendered, and you had the infamous treaty of Brest-Litovsk, where the Soviet Union then, because it went from Russia to the Soviet Union in October 1917, the Soviet Union surrendered large amounts of Soviet territory because it had suffered a humiliating defeat. My argument for why the Russians, let me take that back, why the Soviets fought like wild dogs in World War II is that they were up against a genocidal adversary. You want to understand that the Germans murdered huge numbers of Soviet POWs. The overall total was 3.7 million. And by December, December of 1941, remember the invasion is June ’41, by December of 1941, the Germans have murdered 2 million Soviet POWs. At that point in time, they had murdered many more POWs than they had murdered Jews. And this is not to deny for one second that they were on a murderous rampage when it came to Jews, but they were also on a murderous rampage when it came to Soviet citizens and Soviet soldiers. So those Soviet soldiers quickly came to understand they were fighting for their lives. If they were taken prisoner, they would die. So they fought like wild dogs.…

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