In his excellent The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (first published 2006) Adam J. Tooze proposes a somewhat different interpretation to the German defeat at the Eastern Front. I will summarize his account here:

If we wish to understand what the Germans were doing in advance of operation Barbarossa, what we must concentrate on is Germany’s strategic situation. The defeat of France had not won the war for Germany. Britain had not been defeated. From the spring of 1941 onwards Britain could count on massive support from the United States and, given the economic vulnerability of Germany’s new empire, the strategic outlook of the Third Reich was set to deteriorate from 1942 onwards. In this situation, the conquest of the Soviet Union could not be viewed in isolation. It was a means to the end of consolidating Germany’s position for the ultimate confrontation with the Western powers. And this in turn explains why the German war effort could not be geared exclusively towards defeating the Red Army or indeed towards the immediate production of armaments.

In line with their confident expectation of a speedy and decisive victory, the Third Reich calibrated its attack on the Soviet Union so that as many resources as possible could be freed at the earliest possible opportunity for the ongoing struggle with Britain and its backers in the United States. The conquest of the oilfields of the Caucasus, 2,000 kilometres deep in the Soviet Union, was not treated as the awesome military-industrial undertaking that it was. It was inserted as a precondition into another gargantuan industrial plan designed to allow the Luftwaffe to fight an air war, not against the Soviet Union, but against the looming air fleet of Britain and the United States.

Barbarossa was a Blitzkrieg campaign in this sense. The best available manpower was fully committed to the initial assault. There was little or nothing held in reserve. This was on the assumption that the Barbarossa campaign would be brief. Though the German army that invaded the Soviet Union probably outnumbered the Red Army troops stationed in the western sectors, the Germans had already conscripted virtually all their prime manpower. By contrast, the Red Army could call up millions of reservists. From the outset, therefore, it was clear that the Wehrmacht must not be sucked into a battle of attrition. And this imbalance of manpower was compounded by the enormous expanse of Soviet territory and the sheer impassability of the terrain.

If the Red Army were able to withdraw in good order this would present Germany with insuperable problems. Everything depended on deciding the battle, as in France, in the first weeks of the campaign. This was the assumption on which Barbarossa was premised. A massive central thrust towards Moscow, accompanied by flanking encirclements of the Soviet forces trapped in the north and south, would allow the Red Army to be broken on the Dnieper– Dvina river line within 500 kilometres of the Polish-German border.

On the basis of their experience in France, the Wehrmacht’s logistical staff calculated that the efficient total range for trucks was 600 kilometres, giving an operational depth of 300. Beyond that point the trucks themselves used up so much of the fuel they were carrying that they became inefficient as a means of transport. To extend the range of the logistical system, the Wehrmacht therefore split its motor pool into two segments. One set of trucks would move forward with the Panzer units and would ferry fuel and ammunition. By this expedient, it was hoped that the initial logistical range could be extended to 500 kilometres. By happy chance, this coincided exactly with the Dnieper– Dvina line.

If the Red Army escaped destruction on the Dnieper– Dvina river line, the Wehrmacht would not be able to engage in hot pursuit, because it would first need to replenish its supply bases closer to the front line. After that, all operations would ultimately depend on the capacity of the Soviet railway system and the speed with which the Wehrmacht could build up forward supply bases to support a second 500 kilometre advance. However, the problems were more fundamental than this and were evident already at the planning stage. The existing Russian rail infrastructure, even if it had been captured intact (which it wasn’t because the retreating Red Army became extremely proficient at sabotaging bridges, tracks and other railways), was insufficient to support the German army. As a rule of thumb, German logistical experts liked to assign at least one high-capacity railway line to each army-sized unit. But for the ten armies with which they invaded the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht was able to assign only three main railway lines, one for each army group. Everything therefore depended on the assumption that the Red Army would crack under the impact of the first decisive blow. It was hoped that, like the French, the Soviet forces would disintegrate, allowing them to be finished off in a series of encirclement battles. In the second phase of the operation, the German army would advance towards Moscow against disorganized opposition, precipitating the political collapse of Stalin’s regime.

Hitler consistently prioritized the need to secure the industrial and economic resources of the western Soviet Union at the earliest possible opportunity. For this purpose he envisioned the possibility that large elements of Bock’s Army Group Centre might have to be diverted both north to secure the Baltic coastline and south into the Ukraine. Only after these essential economic objectives were achieved would the main body of the German army turn eastwards towards Moscow. Prioritizing economic objectives, however, was seriously at odds with the plan of the campaign as envisioned by Halder. For Halder, the priority of Moscow was absolute. Only by concentrating all forces on this objective, he believed, could the Red Army be brought to battle and decisively defeated. So fundamental an issue was this for Halder that Hitler’s decision to water down the priority of Moscow caused him to question the rationale of the entire campaign.