Chapter 1340: Chapter 968: Bombing the Ruhr District Chapter 1340: Chapter 968: Bombing the Ruhr District “Chief of Staff, how well are our soldiers trained?”

In the meeting room of the German government, the German Chancellor asked wearily.

“The new army has completed basic training. Are we going to send them to the Russia Nation battlefield?” Kurt Zeitzler, the German Chief of General Staff, replied respectfully.

Kurt Zeitzler was not particularly famous in the German military.

Even before his promotion to Chief of Staff, Kurt Zeitzler was just the Chief of Staff for the first tank army group, holding the rank of Brigadier.

It was only because of the German Army’s failure in the Moscow campaign that the German Chancellor had the opportunity to promote his confidant, the relatively unknown Kurt Zeitzler, to the new German Chief of General Staff.

Although Kurt Zeitzler was not well-known, when it came to loyalty to the German Chancellor, he was undoubtedly in the top five of the military’s upper echelons.

More importantly, promoting someone with little foundation in the military to Chief of General Staff was bound to make the Junker nobility despise and be hostile to the new Chief of Staff.

This meant that the Chief of Staff appointed by the German Chancellor had only one path to follow, which was to continuously seek the trust of the Chancellor in order to secure his position of Chief of General Staff.

Hearing the inquiry from Kurt Zeitzler, the German Chancellor rubbed his brow and asked wearily, “What’s the situation on the Russian battlefield now?”

“Our central and southern Army Groups have built defensive positions from Bryansk to Kharkov and have assembled the troops that retreated from Stalingrad.

The number of troops currently deployed on the front lines is about 850,000, while the Russian soldiers attacking our lines number at least 2 million.”

“Damn it, the bunch of good-for-nothings in the southern Army Group, how did a force of over 3 million end up retreating to less than half of that?” The German Chancellor could not help but feel angry when he mentioned the recent defeat of the southern Army Group at Stalingrad.

The southern Army Group had gathered Germany’s elite, including two armored army groups and a significant number of firearm units, with infantry numbers at its peak exceeding 3.5 million.

But currently, the number of soldiers in the southern Army Group that have retreated and are forming a defensive line near Kharkov is just over 800,000, and even if you include the German Army units in places like Rostov and Frolovsk, the remaining number of soldiers in the southern Army Group still hasn’t exceeded 1.5 million.

This is quite exaggerated and suggests that a large part of the remaining nearly 2 million German soldiers are likely to be captured or annihilated by Russia.

The loss of these over 2 million elite soldiers is a severe blow to Germany on the Eastern Front, and a heavy blow to German morale and public sentiment.

Not to mention, the German government now cannot manage to gather 2 million soldiers to deploy on the battlefield in a short time.

The formation of an army requires lengthy training; millions of soldiers also need a significant amount of military uniforms and weapons and equipment, which cannot be produced in a short span of time.

Moreover, there is now a manpower shortage in Germany. Although there are tens of millions of people from other nations in the German-occupied territories, these populations can be used as labor, but the German government dares not even think of organizing them into an army.

Because the German government simply cannot guarantee the loyalty of these people from the occupied territories; if they were given guns and sent to the battlefield, it is uncertain whom they would actually aim at.

This also means that the only populations Germany can truly mobilize for the military are those from the Native Land, and perhaps those from the Austrian Empire who support Germany.

The combined population of these groups is just over 80 million, which necessarily limits the scale of the military Germany can arm; it certainly cannot reach the levels of 20 to 30 million.

Unfortunately, among Germany’s many enemies, there is a nation that has already been able to arm a military force on the scale of 20 to 30 million thanks to its vast population.

Although it’s unclear what the exact population of Russia Country was before the war, the population of Russia Country is at least 1.4 billion and very likely has already exceeded 1.5 billion.

This means that the population of Russia Country is already about twice that of Germany. If Germany can arm millions of soldiers, then Russia Country can arm 20 million soldiers.

It is quite evident that so far, Germany has mobilized an army of over 8 million in total, and its mobilization agencies across the country are still operating continuously, expected to provide at least another 1.5 million soldiers this year.

This is about the limit of what Germany can muster. The 8 million troops mobilized have been depleted through several wars, and the number of remaining German soldiers is now less than 5 million.

This means that, so far in this war, the total number of German soldiers who have died has already exceeded 3 million. If you include the civilians who have died, the death toll in Germany during the war now constitutes about one-twentieth of the total population, which is quite staggering.

And this is also why it is very difficult for Germany to mobilize new troops. With the population continually decreasing, it’s not like they can just send every man, woman, child, and elder into battle.

“How many people do we have in our third reserve army group?” the German Chancellor asked.

The reserve army group is the reserve force established by Germany, comprising those common people who have just been mobilized to enlist.

The third reserve army group is, in fact, the third large-scale mobilization by Germany that has equipped the reserve forces.