Germany may have been woefully unready, but the thing is that the Soviets were even more so, and that Germany wasted some -- far, far, too much -- of what little readiness it had on the Western front, allowing Stalin to catch up in relative terms. The Great Purge was already done; there was no more use for the Germans to extract from that between April 1940 and June/July 1941. Had they skipped the whole invasion of Western Europe, my hypothesis goes, the "Phony War" on the Western front -- with Britain having *declared* war on Germany after the invsion of Poland, but not actually *doing* anything warlike against it -- might have continued indefinitely.

Which would have left Germany free to concentrate all its resources on the Eastern Front, and to start the attack early in the spring -- almost before the roads would bear their traffic -- in stead of far into summer, delaying the later stages of the attack far too late into autumn and, eventually, winter, because they'd opened up a lot of ultimately useless and power-draining fronts in the Mediterranean and North Africa to cover up for Mussolinis fuck-ups in Egypt and Greece.

Had they skipped the whole Holland-Belgium-France and Denmark-Norway bit, they'd have been *more than a year* ahead of what they actually were; Benito wouldn't even have *started* his clusterfuck, so he couldn't have been in need of being bailed out, and the Krasnaja Armija, far from being building supply routes and bases behind the Urals, would actually have just been moved up *westwards for the slaughter*, invading the Eastern half of Poland. Germany wouldn't have had anthing bound up elsewhere, as it eventually did when the actual Operation Barbarossa started (far, far too late.) See whjat I mean?