Hitler thought railroads and all the automobile stock of Europe would make the difference, plus the qualitative difference of his Germanic conquerors vs. Napoleon's rabble, not to forget his underestimation of "the Russian" -- and Stalin.

Problem for him was trucks can't forage and Soviet Russia was a different military problem compared to Czarist Russia.

Both Napoleon and Hitler set off on June 22/23 -- but Hitler's armies embarked on 3 divergent attacks into the Soviet Union, towards Leningrad, Smolensk, and Kiev, while per this map Napoleon only focused on the central axis through Smolensk.

Railroads, or relative lack thereof, dictated these axes of attack, as each independent Army Group (North, Center, South) needed dozens of trains a day, and tracks were limited!

By mid-September, Moscow had fallen in 1812, but in 1941, Hitler had directed the Army Group Center's mobile corps AWAY from Moscow -- on September 14 one of Hoth's panzer corps was mucking around in the Valdai Hills, and Guderian was down in Konotop, 500km SOUTH OF where he was the previous month after the battle of Smolensk was won.

Guderian's move southward produced the single biggest battle victory in history, the envelopment of the defenses of Kiev.

But it was a strike south, and to win the war, the Germans had to drive East, to the Urals.

The Germans ran out of dry summer weather in mid-October, and while they were at the gates of Moscow then, like Napoleon's army, they were running on their last legs, while Stalin's communist dictatorship was able to mobilize millions more troops.

Under-trained, under-equipped, but they proved to be enough to hold the line in the critical days of December 1941, when the Battle of Moscow was decided.