Roger Moorhouse responds:

I suspect my point has been a little misconstrued here. I was not suggesting that the Soviets and Anglo-Americans would necessarily have come to blows in the event of a German collapse in 1944 – though that was a possibility. Rather I was contending that, in the event that German armies had surrendered in July 1944, it would have been the Soviets who would have been best-placed to benefit, given that the western Allies were still (at that time) largely confined to Normandy and still lacked the infrastructure necessary to rapidly expand to fill the German vacuum. Given that the Red Army tended to impose communism wherever it went, this would almost certainly have meant all of Germany being lost to Stalin.