Pictured: An Axis soldier surrendering to the Soviets in December 1941.

Quoting Jacques R. Pauwels’s The Myth of the Good War, pages 69–71:

The Wehrmacht continued to advance, albeit very slowly, and by mid‐November some units found themselves only thirty kilometres from the capital. But the troops were now totally exhausted and running out of supplies. Their commanders knew that it was simply impossible to take Moscow, tantalizingly close as the city may have been, and that even doing so would not bring them victory. On December 3, a number of units abandoned the offensive on their own initiative.

Within days, however, the entire [Wehrmacht] in front of Moscow was simply forced on the defensive. Indeed, on December 5, at three in the morning, in cold and snowy conditions, the Red Army suddenly launched a major, well‐prepared counterattack. The Wehrmacht’s lines were pierced in many places, and the [Western Axis was] thrown back between 100 and 280 kilometres with heavy losses of men and equipment. It was only with great difficulty that a catastrophic encirclement could be avoided.

On December 8, Hitler ordered his army to abandon the offensive and to move into defensive positions. He blamed this setback on the supposedly unexpected early arrival of winter, refused to pull back further to the rear, as some of his generals suggested, and proposed to attack again in the spring.¹⁹

Thus ended Hitler’s blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union, the war that, had it been victorious, would have realized the great ambition of his life, the destruction of the Soviet Union. More importantly, such a victory would also have provided [the Third Reich] with sufficient oil and other resources to make it a virtually invulnerable world power. As such, [the Axis] would very likely have been capable of finishing off stubborn Great Britain, even if the U.S. would have rushed to help its Anglo‐Saxon cousin, which, in early December of 1941, was not yet in the cards.

A blitzsieg, that is, a rapid victory against the Soviet Union, then, was supposed to have made [an Axis] defeat impossible, and would in all likelihood have done so. (It is probably fair to say that if [the Axis] had defeated the Soviet Union in 1941, Germany would today still be the hegemon of Europe, and possibly of the Middle East and North Africa as well.) However, defeat in the Battle of Moscow in December 1941 meant that [the Axis’s] blitzkrieg did not produce the hoped‐for blitzsieg.

In the new “Battle of the Marne” just to the west of Moscow, [the Axis] suffered the defeat that made victory impossible, not only victory against the Soviet Union itself, but also victory against Great Britain and victory in the war in general. It ought to be noted that the United States was not yet involved in the war against [the Axis].

Bearing in mind the lessons of World War I, Hitler and his generals had known from the start that, in order to win the new Great War they had unleashed, [the Axis] had to win fast, lightning‐fast. But on December 5, 1941, it became evident to everyone present in Hitler’s headquarters that a blitzsieg against the Soviet Union would not be forthcoming, and that [the Axis] was doomed to lose the war, if not sooner, then later. According to General Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff of the OKW, Hitler then realized that he could no longer win the war.²⁰

And so it can be argued, as a German historian, an expert on the war against the Soviet Union, has done, that the success of the Red Army in front of Moscow was unquestionably the “major break” (Zäsur) of the entire world war.²¹

In other words, the tide of World War II can be said to have turned on December 5, 1941. However, as real tides turn not suddenly but rather gradually and imperceptibly, the tide of the war turned not on a single day, but over a period of days, weeks, and even months, in the period of approximately three months that elapsed between the (late) summer of 1941 and early December of that same year. The tide of the war in the east turned gradually, but it did not do so imperceptibly.

Already in August 1941, astute observers had started to doubt that [an Axis] victory, not only in the Soviet Union but in the war in general, still belonged to the realm of possibilities. The well‐informed Vatican, for example, initially very enthusiastic about [the Axis’s] “crusade” against the Soviet homeland of “godless” Bolshevism, started to express grave concerns about the situation in the east in late summer 1941; by mid‐October, it came to the conclusion that [the Third Reich] would lose the war.²²

Likewise in mid‐October, the Swiss secret services reported that “the Germans can no longer win the war.”²³ By late November, a defeatism of sorts had started to infect the higher ranks of the Wehrmacht and of the [NSDAP].

Even as they were urging their troops forward toward Moscow, some generals opined that it would be preferable to make peace overtures and wind down the war without achieving the great victory that had seemed so certain at the start of Operation Barbarossa.²⁴

When the Red Army launched its devastating counteroffensive on December 5, Hitler himself realized that he would lose the war. But he was not prepared to let the German public know that.

The nasty tidings from the front near Moscow were presented to the public as a temporary setback, blamed on the supposedly unexpectedly early arrival of winter or on the incompetence or cowardice of certain commanders. (It was only a good year later, after the catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–43, that the German public, and the entire world, would realize that [the Axis] was doomed; which is why even today many historians believe that the tide turned in Stalingrad.)

(Emphasis added.)

Thus, I would like to submit that I made a mistake when I said that Stalingrad was the turning point for the Axis. It was not. It was the Battle of Moscow that was, one could say, the Axis’s Waterloo.