I believe I illustrated that in my argument quite well. The fact that Germany lived and died by the success or failure of its more effective divisions. Particularly mobile armored divisions which Germany needed to launch offensives, and their paratrooper formations which were their best troops to throw off an invasion from the sea. The fact that Germany had most of their better divisions on the Western Front was no accident. There were many examples in the West, like the Falaise Pocket, which demonstrated absolutely brilliant battlefield command, for the US Army maneuvered and had a better understanding of strategy than any other participant in the War.
Many of the Axis units that were based around logistics, medical and construction were static divisions, only designed to occupy. I would also surmise that they were likely conscripts recruited from German campaigns in the East. In the East, half the time you had no idea who was fighting who, and many countries in the Eastern block may have favored a Nazi Government over a Soviet one. The fact is is that Germany was fighting battles in the East, thousands of miles away from supplies and the home front. There is no way Germany was going to bring their full force to bear for battles in the outer recesses of the European continent.
Germany had far more to lose than what they had to gain in the East. What is so imperative about driving deeper into Soviet territory? Where were they going to go, Siberia? Or were there other Axis command structures in the East besides Germans? I think you'll find the answer to that question is YES.
It's very true that the mobile divisions, especially the armored divisions and the SS
Panzer formations, were the "apex of the inverted pyramid" (Showalter) and the
sine qua non of Axis military success. The two-tiered military that the German military expansion of the 1930s created meant that straight-leg infantry, the vast majority of the army, were undersupported, underequipped, and undermanned. Even though the proliferation of squad weapons, anti-tank rockets, and, eventually, personal assault weapons and battle rifles, gave German infantrymen a great deal of firepower, that didn't make up for a lack of
trained manpower, artillery, and integrated armor support. I don't think anybody seriously disagrees that Hitler had his generals deploy the mobile forces to the places that were prioritized most. So: follow the mobile divisions, and you find German military priorities. Well and good.
The problem is that the Germans did not consistently deploy the balance of these forces in the West. Even when it was an active front between June 1944 and May 1945, the West did not absorb a disproportionate amount of high-quality German units.
For one thing, the dilution of German military power by the last two years of the war meant that even newly organized mobile formations were often borderline useless from a military standpoint. The September counterattack at Arracourt by Fifth Panzer Army, the largest single armored engagement in the West, was spearheaded by the new "
Panzer brigades" that lacked the staying power of the combined-arms divisions from earlier in the war. They were staffed in large part by troops that had not been well trained, especially by comparison with the Americans they fought. They also suffered from leadership problems and decision-making errors, of course, and the Americans' ability to call in rapidly available tactical airpower made the battle a turkey shoot as soon as the fog lifted. (Of course, one could say the same about the advantages the
Luftwaffe conferred on the mobile divisions in 1940 in France.) As a result, the Americans shattered the German forces in one of the most lopsided battles of the entire war. The brigades that Fifth Panzer Army lost at Arracourt were part of the mobile forces, sure...but they were not qualitatively elite units, even if they were led by one of the outstanding armored commanders of the war. A similar hodgepodge prevailed across the rest of the front. The vaunted
Lehrdivision might have been a crack unit in June and July 1944, but afterwards it was a shadow of its former self with little other than a name and a CO to recommend it. In the fighting around Aachen in the fall, the Germans had the service of
Panzer and
Panzergrenadier units that had neither name nor CO - high numerical designations, poorly trained conscripts, a few veterans for 'leavening', and fresh-off-the-production-lines
Panthers and
Tigers.
If we can agree that the fact that a unit was a "mobile unit" does not mean that it was a unit of high quality, we can begin to see that the proliferation of units with
Panzer or
Panzergrenadier or even
Fallschirmjäger in their name on the Western front does not necessarily mean that the Germans were sending a disproportionate amount of elite units to fight there.
For another, it's not clear to me that the West
did have a disproportionate amount of German armor, with a sole exception. After D-Day, the German strategic reserve for both fronts was designated Sixth SS Panzer Army. The deployment of that formation determined German military priority: it was the sole large unengaged formation throughout the fall of 1944. In December, the Germans deployed it in the Ardennes, the single moment, post-1940, that we can reliably say that they put the bulk of their mobile forces in the West. After the failure of the Ardennes offensive, it was withdrawn and then
shipped to Hungary, where it took part in the attempted relief of Budapest and the Lake Balaton offensive. The Allies were aware of this, even if they didn't know about Sixth SS Panzer Army's actual name until early December. Patton, Hodges, and Simpson launched offensives in November to try to draw Sixth SS Panzer Army out of its lair west of the Rhine where the Americans could crush it. Those offensives failed; Hitler didn't dip into his strategic reserve at all before the Battle of the Bulge, with the sole exception of sending
Panzer Lehr on a suicide mission to try to stop the American and French attack in the Saverne Gap. (Devers, Patch, and de Lattre were able to crack the Nazi defenses, but they did it early in December, they didn't have that many troops, and Ike unaccountably shut down the offensive before it could cross the Rhine and achieve decisive results. The Ardennes counteroffensive rolled out days later.) Conversely, when the Soviet Third and Fourth Ukrainian Fronts encountered the SS in Hungary that spring, Tolbukhin and Malinovsky were well aware that they were facing the Nazis' strategic reserves - leaving Zhukov, Konev, and Rokossovsky a perfect opportunity to cross the Oder.
This reinforces what Mannerheim was pointing out earlier. Hitler and his high command shuttled troops between fronts as necessary. The Nazis sometimes shipped crack units west, either to refit (as in the case of the SS Panzer Corps in France in 1942) or to fight (as in the case of
Panzer Lehr, or the Sixth SS in December 1944). They also shipped low-quality formations west, like the high-numbered
Osttruppen formations that were annihilated by the American airborne infantry on D-Day. They sometimes put their best soldiers in the East, as they did for the Battle of Kursk (
Großdeutschland and the II SS Panzer Corps side-by-side). And they sometimes put very poor-quality soldiers in the East, like the Romanian and Italian armies that were swallowed up by the Soviet counteroffensive around Stalingrad.
I think it's very difficult to claim that the Soviets only had to fight against the rabble of the Axis war machine. In 1941, the Germans deployed almost everything they had to fight the Red Army; almost no mobile formations went anywhere other than the East. In 1942, they sent almost all of their mobile divisions hurtling into the Don-Kuban steppe. In 1943, they put the cream of both the
Wehrmacht and the
Waffen-SS in Army Group South for the Battle of Kursk: Soviet Guards Tank and Guards Airborne troops fought at Prokhorovka against
Leibstandarte and
Totenkopf, men that the Soviets correctly referred to as "Hitler's Guard", while Katukov's First Tank Army battled
Großdeutschland. The record is a bit more equivocal for 1944 and 1945, but the Red Army faced
at least its fair share of high quality Nazi troops. What helped the Soviets out was that Hitler and his generals employed these formations suboptimally. When
Panzer formations were sent in to salvage the defeat in Belorussia in the summer of 1944, or to try to stop the Soviet Vistula-Oder Strategic Offensive Operation, they were sent in piecemeal.
Großdeutschland attacked by itself in a driving snowstorm and was annihilated. Because the Nazis overrated the quality of their troops compared to the constantly-improving Red Army, and because they believed that releasing reserves piecemeal had worked in the past (e.g. in stopping the failed Soviet attacks in Belorussia from October 1943 to April 1944), they sent their best units into hopeless situations. When the Nazis were able to force themselves to wait, to marshal forces for an effective counterattack against the Soviet spearheads at the moment of culmination, they were often successful, as in front of Warsaw in August 1944 or in East Prussia the following month.
The Germans did not have to wait to assemble an effective counterattack force against the British and Americans because the Western Allies rapidly became overstretched. This was partially because of the automatic logistical pause they would've had to endure under any circumstances following the pursuit out of Normandy. It was also because the British and American commanders unwisely wasted their troops by spreading them out and sending them to the wrong places. Bradley sent V Corps off into the Ardennes by itself to no point or purpose, and mangled the VII/XIX Corps assault that might have cracked through the West Wall in September by poorly allocating logistical resources, then wasted lives and ammunition on the deeply flawed QUEEN offensive in November. Montgomery ignored the Scheldt estuary until it was too late (even though he had several days to try to
both open the Scheldt
and coil forces for a major assault in the Netherlands) and then prioritized the hopeless MARKET-GARDEN attack instead of following orders and doing his job. That rebounded on both the Commonwealth forces (who had to fight for several extra months to be able to use Antwerp) and the Americans (who were unable to mass for an effective assault until November because of logistical deficiencies brought on by the failure to open Antwerp, which Montgomery even admitted after the war was part of his objective in disobeying orders: if the Americans couldn't be supplied, everything would have to go to Twenty-first Army Group).
Because of superior Western tactical airpower, the Americans and British actually
wanted the Germans to use their strategic reserve to counterattack. Instead of stopping the Western push, a German attack would expose their own mobile formations to the ravages of American
Jabos: a danger that was rarely present over the Eastern Front. Once Sixth SS was out of the way, the Western Allies could safely hop the Rhine. This was the primary objective of the plan Eisenhower and SHAEF assembled in 1944 - fight and destroy the German strategic reserve west of the Rhine. Montgomery and Bradley ruined the plan, and Ike lacked the political capability (and, arguably, the will) to force them to follow orders. Instead, the Western attacks from September to December were pinpricks that OB West could contain with local reserves and
Volksgrenadier troops. When the German strategic reserve attacked, it did so under cover of darkness and winter in the forest, and did an unconscionable amount of damage before Allied reserves and airpower could eventually fight it off.
Anyway.
Like I said, I don't think that the Germans prioritized the West over the East. The East was somewhat more important for their ultimate dream of
Lebensraum, but
Lebensraum was long gone in 1944. The German high command understood the obvious - that the Soviet military was much larger than the Western Allies' - and therefore deployed the bulk of their troops to fight the bulk of their enemies' troops, i.e. the Red Army. It also understood that both the West and the USSR were dangerous opponents, and seized short-term opportunities to mass against one or the other to try to score some kind of victory. It used high-quality assets both to protect important territory and to try to seize some sort of military advantage - on
both fronts.
It's true that Western Europe was highly industrialized for its relatively small geographical size. That did not make it unusually valuable to Nazi Germany. Ajidica has already mentioned the work of Adam Tooze, which is particularly important here because Tooze addressed this specific problem. If the Germans were able to maintain the industry of Western Europe at its prewar production rate, they would have had an unstoppable colossus capable potentially of challenging even
American production. That is not what happened. Instead, the Germans found that they lacked the
raw material inputs and
labor availability to service the factories. France had garnered many of its raw materials from overseas trading partners, from both its own empire and from the British and Americans. They needed coal to keep the factories going, maintain iron ore and steel output, and move materials between point sources, factories, and end users. They also needed locomotives. Germany was desperately short of locomotives and its coal production had just about peaked. The Nazis needed alternative sources of coal and looked to find them in the USSR, especially the Donets Basin. It's no coincidence that German armaments production fluctuated based on coal availability (with the appropriate time-lag for using coal to convert iron ore to steel, and then steel to armaments), and when the Germans gained new sources of coal they were able to increase production (whether by draconian rationing measures, as late in the war, or by seizing new coal fields, as in 1941). In addition, the Germans had severe problems populating the factories of Western Europe; they began to solve it late in the war by using slave labor, but the production increases of 1943 and 1944 came too late to prevent the failures before Moscow and Stalingrad...and the Soviet liberation of the Donbas. Without raw materials
seized from the Soviet Union in lieu of taking them from inaccessible overseas empires, the Nazi conquest of Western Europe was not nearly as valuable as you've alleged.
So, in that case, can we reasonably postulate that the Germans would've prioritized Western Europe over Eastern Europe? I don't think so. Certainly not for its industrial zones.
That doesn't mean that either the West or the USSR had to fight "harder", or whatever. I'm not sure what that means. No Western soldier had to endure anything like the hell of Rzhev, Stalingrad, or Leningrad. No Western victory came close to the magnitude of the destruction of Army Group Center in 1944 by Soviet forces in Belorussia. But the Soviets never crushed German
Panzers as completely as the Americans did at Arracourt. They never had a single unit rack up the kind of battle honors accumulated by, say, the American 82nd Airborne or 442nd RCT. They never had to try to manage a global war across several oceans and thousands upon thousands of miles. The two sides were good at doing different things in different ways. It also doesn't mean that either side had a monopoly on military competence. Both West and East were well capable of producing brilliant strategists (Vasilevsky, King, Marshall) or operational geniuses (Rokossovsky, Malinovsky, Horrocks, Simonds, Devers, Collins) and, naturally, thousands upon thousands of dedicated, skilled fighting men and women. They were also capable of producing leaders who were total military disasters, leaders who were unimaginative and promoted way over their pay grades (like Bradley), and leaders like Zhukov or Patton or Montgomery who alternated between fits of brilliance and frustrating stupidity in situations of unimaginable stress. It also doesn't mean that any Great Power contribution to the fight against Nazism was superfluous. It's hard to see the Western Allies fighting alone against the entire
Wehrmacht without the Red Army. That doesn't require much elaboration, I think. And it's also hard to see the Red Army successfully recapturing the western USSR and fighting all the way to Berlin without the Western Allies' destruction of the
Luftwaffe, Western Lend-Lease logistical support fueling their offensives, or Western food to allow Soviet agriculture to release workers to industry and the military.
This is not just my opinion: it is the reasoned and developed opinion of virtually all of modern historical scholarship on the subject. It has been most famously articulated by David Glantz, the best living American historian of the Great Patriotic War. It's odd to me that you suggested that he's a clearly biased author, since his best work is about Zhukov's "greatest defeat" and most of his publications have been based on revising Soviet-era historical triumphalist narratives by opening the archives and going over formerly-classified sources. He's also a retired colonel in the US Army - not exactly the sort of person who'd slobber Stalin's knob, so to speak. Dennis Showalter, the best living American historian of
German warfare, would undoubtedly agree, as would Rob Citino, the scholar who has done outstanding work on the "German way of war". Recent analyses of specific subjects by
non-academics like John Adams and Charles Dick hardly disagree, either (Adams focuses on the West and Dick is a bit more favorable to the Red Army's working methods while giving short shrift to their very serious drawbacks, but their works are essentially congruent in other respects).
If I were to say something about the thread topic, the performance of the British Army, I would say that it ran the gamut, from embarrassing disasters to outstanding successes (often in the same campaign). After 1941-42 or so, the British Army's quality, on an individual level, is hard to impugn. As an organization, it did a reasonable job of learning from its mistakes. Its formations lacked staying power compared to the Americans or Soviets, partially because of manpower shortages and partially because of organizational peccadilloes. But since its units were so armor-heavy, the British could move out smartly when they wanted to and when they had the opportunity: even Patton admitted that he admired the Commonwealth pursuit in August 1944 up the Channel coast. There were persistent British problems with combined-arms cooperation, even into 1945; frequently, the artillery or RAF would prepare an offensive and the armor would take forever to get moving, for example. But sometimes they had flashes of brilliant combined-arms improvisation, like Operation INFATUATE on Walcheren Island. Commonwealth troops, especially the Canadians (who came up with the plan for INFATUATE), were outstanding. As far as their command structure went, by 1944-45 Monty had effectively imprinted himself on the entire British Army in northwest Europe, from generals to subalterns. Many of their command failures can be attributed to him, like the MARKET-GARDEN disaster. When Miles Dempsey got orders from his boss that he thought were dumb, he still did his best to carry them out, even when there was no salvaging the fundamental errors of something like MARKET-GARDEN. That said, Monty's leadership had an incredible impact on morale, both in the army and across the country, that is difficult to quantify. He possessed military brilliance and sometimes he even used it, to remarkable effect: he was, after all, the overall ground commander for the Normandy invasion, the largest, most complex, most risky, and most successful amphibious operation in military history. He was obnoxious and self-absorbed and impossible to work with, all of which were serious problems in a coalition war effort...and none of which prevented the ultimate downfall of Nazi Germany.
...Which is probably the most important part. The US, UK, and USSR all worked together to defeat Hitlerism and won. Who cares about who did it most or best?
Erratum: Initially described Devers' offensive as "late in December [1944]". Meant to convey that it was late in the Allies' window for crushing the Sixth SS Panzer Army. The Allies reached the Rhine in early December.
Fixed some word-choice problems. Didn't catch them all.