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One thing Guderian points out that I think is likely true is that the Germans tanks had worn out their treads (and their engines were about shot) by August 1941.  Tanks aren't usually meant to traverse such distances on their own, they are meant to travel on rail cars.  So, they aren't designed to operate on "Russian distances".  This is true with modern tanks as well.

So, by August, with great weather, the German Panzer units were highly depleted of usable tanks.  I think the ToE for a Panzer division was 400 tanks (panzers) and most were under 100 by then that were operable.  That's another form of logistics they didn't seem to consider.

So imagine you are the guy in charge of supply:

Barbarossa starts with ~3.8 MILLION troops.  

Just for discussion, ignore the actual war part of it for a minute.  Simply feeding 3.8 Million men most of whom are young with the high metabolism that young guys have.  Remember how much food you ate at 18-22?  Now remember that these guys are walking and fighting then multiply it by 3.8 Million.  

Just feeding the guys is a staggering task.  

Then, for every mile that the front line advances into Russia the Railroad Round Trip necessary to deliver the food increases by two miles.  

Now add fuel then more fuel in winter due to the need to keep vehicles running to prevent the oil from freezing.  

Now add ammunition.  

Now add replacement tank treads.  

Now add replacement tank engines.  

Now add other random tank and other vehicle parts.  

Now add winter clothing.  

Then remember that by early December of 1941 the Germans were in the Crimea, they were at the gates of Moscow, and they had Leningrad surrounded.  This line is hundreds of miles from where they started and even farther from Germany itself.  Every train carrying supplies to the troops at this line has to make that trip both ways for each delivery.  

They simply couldn't do it.  

Kind of pertinent to the Germans attacking Russia in a way.

I always found it ....weird...that the Germans were "unprepared" for the cold of Russia.  

They were unprepared because they thought the war would be over before winter.  And as discussed above, it was a major hurdle to gets beans and bullets to front line troops.

The German motorized and Panzer divisions needed a lot of oil and gas to keep them "mobile", and their engines weren't designed for -40°C weather.

Quite a bit of German supplies were delivered using horses.

The "V2" doesn't stand for version 2 rocket, it is "Vengeance Weapon 2".  Vengeance Weapon 1 was a jet powered missile. 

The V1 was fast but the allies had fighters fast enough that they could and sometimes did shoot them down in flight.  Literally it's ONLY defense was speed.  It didn't evade at all because it wasn't piloted so if you could get into the right place to intercept it, it could be shot down.  The main counter argument to this is that it really made no difference.  Once the USSR survived the initial onslaught and the US got involved, the Germans simply had no chance.  If you look at production figures the British more-or-less matched German production.  Soviet production was substantially higher than German/British and US Production dwarfed all of that.  Nothing the Germans could have done would have been enough to dig them out of that hole.  Blitzkreig didn't stop working.  Essentially it is modern mechanized warfare as it is still practiced today.  The problem for the Germans wasn't that it stopped working it was two things:

• Everybody else caught up, and
• Scale. 

The scale issue is the most fascinating thing about WWII to me.  When Germany invaded France in 1940 they had ~2,500 tanks.  Three years later they had ~3,000 tanks at the Battle of Kursk and that was just one battle on the Eastern Front and they were easily outnumbered by superior Soviet Tanks.  Two years after that the Soviets hit Berlin with more than 6,000 tanks.  Ie, the Soviets had more tanks facing just the City of Berlin in 1945 than the Germans had facing the entire nation of France five years earlier. 

The Germans simply couldn't keep up with the expansion in scale. 


One thing about the German army of WWII that most people don't realize is that it wasn't all that mechanized.  They had highly mechanized units at the tip of the spear but the vast majority of the German troops that went into the Soviet Union walked and most of their gear was carried by wagons pulled by animals.  In the US, UK, and USSR armies of 1945 not only was the tip of the spear mechanized, the entire army was mechanized with Studebaker Trucks (including for the Soviets) handling the logistics. 

I forgot it was called Vengeance weapon, but my point stands.  V2 rocket was the first one, it was the precursor to modern ICBM's.  It was mentioned how the range was limited by only being a single stage, there was no launch tower like modern rockets have and you'd need all that infrastructure to fuel and load a rocket of larger size.  

V1 was basically a cruise missile, they called it the buzz bomb.  


Agree on Blitzkreig, it's not that it stopped working, it's that the rest of the world figured out how to defend it.  
Agree on everything else, it's just interesting the way it worked out.  

One more thing, the Russians/Soviets can and did sacrifice millions more soldiers than any other Army willingly would.  They basically used their soldiers as sacrificial lambs, there is a video somewhere that drastically illustrates the losses the Red Army endured.  Off memory, the US suffered something like 200,000 casualties in WWII (I may be thinking total casualties, not deaths).  Germans were like 2 million, Britain 500,000.  It's been awhile, so forgive me if I'm misremembering.  
Soviets lost like 30,000,000.  Many, many more times the number.  

The average low T in Berlin in january is 30°F or so, in Moscow it's 15°F.  It was unusually cold in early 1942 near Moscow.

The 1941-1942 winter in Moscow was exceptionally cold, known as the coldest European winter of the 20th century. Minimum temperatures in the Moscow area during late 1941 were reported as -8.2°C (17°F) in October, -17.3°C (1°F) in November, and -28.8°C (-20°F) in December. General Fedor von Bock reported a temperature of -45°C (-49°F) on November 30, 1941, according to Wikipedia. The winter was characterized by below-average temperatures from early January to late March 1942. 

I always found it ....weird...that the Germans were "unprepared" for the cold of Russia.  As if Germany was some sort of tropical paradise itself.  As a fairly untraveled American imagine my surprise one day when I was looking at a projection of the globe and compared the latitudes of most of Europe with that of America.  Spain and Italy being the southernmost country.  Germany is basically equivalent to Canada, I guess Russia would be equivalent to very northern Canada.  Being a southern Texas guy, it's easy to just brush off the differences in cold, because it so rarely gets very cold here, it all seems the same. 
[img width=500 height=257.997]https://i.imgur.com/On4Pi4k.png[/img]

The Gulf Stream coming from the newly renamed Gulf of America causes temperatures in Western Europe to be considerably warmer than temperatures at the same Latitude in Eastern North America.  I'm just eyeballing here but Berlin appears to be at roughly the same Latitude as Saskatoon, Alberta.  But if you look at Wiki's climate section (I just did three months here):
January mean daily high (F):

• 37.8 Berlin
• 14.9 Saskatoon

May mean daily high:

• 67.3 Berlin
• 65.3 Saskatoon

September mean daily high:

• 67.6 Berlin
• 66.9 Saskatoon

The all-time record low in Berlin is -13.5.  The record in Saskatoon . . .-51.