If Germany can gain a firm foothold in the Middle East, then the problem of the bloody defeat of Britain, which has always haunted Hitler, will be solved to a large extent. From this foundation, Germany could advance eastward to India, retreat to Iran and Turkey, and it would not be long before a "German India" even more magnificent than the blueprint dreamed of by Kaiser Wilhelm would be established in the vast Middle East.

Although the population and fertility of this land are not comparable to that of India, the richness of its oil resources began to emerge in the early 30s, when the Kirkuk oil field in Iraq, with proven reserves of more than 2.4 billion tons, was officially exploited in 1933, and today it has produced more than 3 million tons a year. As a traverser, Fang Yan knows that these oils are only a drop in the ocean compared to the total reserves of the Middle East; This will not only free Germany from its dependence on Romania and Italy for oil, but will also provide an unrivalled impetus for economic take-off for the next 100 years!

Thinking of this, Fang Yan suddenly breathed a sigh of relief in his heart. The fact that Hitler was able to choose the Middle East as his next strategic target is enough to prove that he still has extraordinary vision and wisdom; In the current political environment, Hitler, the supreme commander of the constitution, was able to keep a clear head, and his importance to Germany is obviously self-evident. Now that Germany's war journey has only been completed for a small time, and then there are far more powerful and stubborn enemies than Britain and France, before Fang Yan completes the layout, the giant ship of Germany can only rely on Hitler to take the helm and move forward in the storm!

Brauchitsch stared carefully at the map on the wall, and after a long moment of contemplation, his frown gradually began to relax.

For hundreds of years, the Prussian military had never taken their eyes off the chessboard of Europe, and the Middle East was undoubtedly another unknown world for Brauchitsch, which made him instinctively want to resist. However, Brauchitsch was, after all, a man worthy of being the commander of an army. Analyzing the situation, he quickly grasped the essence of Hitler's actions. Brauchitsch had only sincere admiration for this decision: his own consciousness was trapped by inertia and remained on the European continent, while Hitler looked down on the whole situation and pointed out a brilliant path with great prospects.

"Although the Middle East was several times larger than Germany, Britain had only enough power there to suppress indigenous rebellions. Our army only needs a small number of troops to achieve its strategic objectives. Hitler spoke again, and a bit of sharpness quietly flashed in his gray-brown eyes, "The real future of Germany is in the East, where the Germanic people will live for the next thousand years, and we need to swing our long swords to plow." By the time next spring arrives, the Army must be ready for a full-scale war with Russia. The sooner the war breaks out on the Eastern Front, the better it will be for us. ”

Both Raeder and Milch looked stunned at these words, but the rest of the office had calm faces, apparently aware of Hitler's intentions. Brauchitsch nodded slowly, Keitel's eyes were determined, and Army Chief of Staff Halder even seemed eager to try, as if a powerful professional soul had burst out in the face of this unprecedented grand and challenging goal, vowing to complete this great cause.

For Germany and Hitler today, the Soviet Union had too many reasons to be eradicated. Among the ideologies on which the National Socialist Party rests in power, the Slavs, the main ethnic group of the Soviet Union, are the lowest waste after the Jews; They were not even worthy of being slaves to the Germans like the Poles, and only the complete elimination from the face of the earth was the "heavenly principle" that needed to be implemented. Hitler's wish was to wipe out the "inferior waste" of the entire Eastern Europe west of the Ural Mountains, so that the Germans would completely dominate this unprecedentedly vast fantasy territory.

Politically, the communist revolution exported by the Soviet Union to the world was also an out-and-out mortal enemy of Hitler's National Socialism. Although Hitler's party had the red-hot "socialism" in its name, its program contained only narrow, illiberal capitalism; The National Socialist Party firmly regarded the workers' movement as the most unforgivable form of treason, and its zero-tolerance attitude far surpassed that of any monarchical or bourgeois regime. It is precisely because of this that Britain and France continued to compromise with Hitler's gains - in the eyes of the Allied high-level leaders, this sharp confrontation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in terms of national ideas and political positions was bound to be a bloody fight!

At the military level, the Soviet Union today is the most immediate and, at the same time, the only external threat to Germany on land. Since 1932, the Red Empire has embarked on a massive expansion of its armed forces on the surging tide of heavy industry. By the time Germany blitzed Poland, the Soviet Army was already the top war force in Europe, and this "European steamroller" that had been silent for many years once again revealed its hideous features of dominating the world. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was ambitious and determined to bring the Communist Revolution across Europe. With the annexation of Poland in the east, the three Baltic states, Bessarabia and other regions one after another, the collision between the Soviet Union and Germany was already in sight.

If Germany and the Soviet Union each have a traverser in power, then the two locomotives speeding in opposite directions still have a chance to avoid colliding - both sides can understand that the opponent is not a fuel-efficient lamp, and instead of killing the world upside down, it is better for everyone to exercise restraint so that they can concentrate their forces in the future and jointly deal with the ultimate boss of the United States.

However, this is an unlikely scenario. After so many years of hard work, Fang Yan has only achieved a certain right to speak in the German Navy, and it is simply impossible to completely reverse the established national policy that Hitler has conceived for many years. What's more, today, all members of the German command, including Hitler, are full of confidence in the combat effectiveness of their army: the Soviet Union, a behemoth, is no longer in their eyes at all.

For this situation, Fang Yan is also weak and lacks the ability to change. Because any German who lives in and has lived through this era will make this judgment that seems to be completely taken for granted. The war 25 years ago had already proved Russia's weakness with indisputable facts: the Germans had to take only about 30% of the participants to defeat Russia. In contrast, the French and British armies, who fought with Germany for 4 years on the Western Front, do not know how many Wallaces, Verdun, and Somme are higher than the Russian army...... These place names are symbols of the strength of the French and British armies!

Decades later, the imperial Russian regime, once cursed and denounced by the Western bourgeoisie, has now become a Red Bolshevik that makes them sleep, but they soon discover that the military power of this freak country still seems to be as strong as it was then. In the face of Finland, a small country with a population of only 3.5 million, the Soviet Union, with a population of 180 million, took six months and suffered almost 10 times the heavy losses of the other side in exchange for victory. At the same time, Germany won an epic victory on the Western Front: in just 6 weeks, 3 million Allied troops surrendered their guns and disarmed, and the whole world was deeply shocked by the brilliant victory of the German army, believing that Hitler's Germany was invincible!

In the face of such a trade-off situation, who would believe how much resistance the Soviet Union could have under the German front? Hitler's comparison of the Soviet Union to a dilapidated house that could be destroyed with just a few kicks on the door was already a sign of sobriety and left a lot of leeway. No one could have imagined that the Soviet Union under the Stalinist system could have such terrible resilience to war: not only did it not collapse in the initial catastrophe, but in the end it even consumed its opponent alive and dead.

Although Fang Yan knew better than anyone else the Soviet Union's war potential, he did not have much worry about Hitler's decision, which was indistinguishable from history. Because historically, the Soviet Union was able to turn the tables in a desperate situation, completely relying on the help of the United States and British allies. This help was not only reflected in the 16 million tons of urgently needed war materials that the United States sent to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease Act, but also in the containment of Allied forces on other battlefields.

In 1943, when the Soviet Union began a gradual counteroffensive, only about 70% of the German Army was concentrated on the Eastern Front. Germany needed to prevent a British counteroffensive in Norway, defend the "Atlantic barrier" on the northern coast of France, and in the Mediterranean, the incompetence of the Italian pig teammates allowed the Allies to fight through Sicily, forcing the Germans to draw capable forces to fill the gaps there. By June 1944, the Germans had deployed more than 60 divisions on the Western Front to prevent the Allied landing, which directly led to the crushing defeat of Bagration on the Eastern Front.

And that's just the most superficial troop figures. In terms of materials, the American and British allies also caused huge losses to Germany. The massive strategic bombing of 1943-1944 reduced the index of industrial production that Germany was able to achieve by at least a quarter; In order to resist the bombing of the Allies, Germany deployed more than 10,000 heavy anti-aircraft guns on the Western Front in late 1943, and the resulting huge waste of resources and manpower was simply incalculable. You must know that the heavy anti-aircraft gun is a more high-end and expensive weapon than the anti-tank gun, and its cost of construction and maintenance is staggering, if these resources and manpower can be invested on the Eastern Front, it will not be the turn of the Soviet Union to be the leader of the military in any case!

And to avoid these deplorable wastes, it is only necessary to uproot the bridgehead of Britain. At that time, even if the African theater would still exist due to the involvement of the United States, its containment of German power would not be comparable to that of the historical plane. Although Germany's maritime pressure would also increase at that time, and it would inevitably have to invest huge resources in building a large number of ships to compete with the United States for the oceans, Germany was not the only one to bear this pressure. Japan, as an ally of Germany, would greatly contain the actions of the American fleet in the Pacific, which would undoubtedly save Germany a lot of manpower and resources to ensure that the Soviet resistance was eliminated on land first.