Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa
Part of World War II
Date June 22, 1941 Location Western Soviet Union Result Soviet victory
Belligerents
Nazi Germany Romania Finland Italy Hungary Slovakia	Soviet Union

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germany's genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union, launched on June 22, 1941 during the Second World War. It was the largest military invasion in history involving approximately four million German soldiers attacking along a front stretching 1,800 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It was the bloodiest armed conflict in human history as it murdered 27 million Soviet citizens before the Nazi war machine was crushed in May 1945.

They show that, essentially, British and French policy was not to unite the forces of the peace-loving states for a common struggle against aggression, but to isolate the U.S.S.R and direct Hitler aggression toward the East, against the Soviet Union, using Hitler as a tool for their own ends.

— Soviet Information Bureau, Falsifiers of History, Part II, Page 27

History

Operation Barbarossa was a genocidal invasion, its goal was the destruction of the Soviet Union, extermination of Marxism-Leninism and enslaving the Slavic people to a German colonial empire. Hitler since the beginning was fixated on his war against Jewish-Bolshevism and creating Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. The invasion was planned as a three-way assault as Army Group North would invade through the Baltic states toward Leningrad, Army Group Center would invade toward Moscow and Army Group South would occupy Ukraine and the Caucasus.

The German High Command placed 3 million German soldiers, 600,000 vehicles, 3,500 tanks, 7,000 artillery pieces, and 4,000 aircraft on the Soviet frontier. They were assisted by Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, and Finnish forces, as well as Spanish volunteers. Operation Barbarossa intentionally integrated mass murder into their planning. Four Einsatzgruppen, each with 3,000 nazis specially selected and trained under Reinhard Heydrich were ordered to systematically murder communists, partisans, Jews, and Roma on sight.

The Commissar Order of June 6, 1941 ordered that any captured Soviet political commissars must be murdered immediately. The Hunger Plan was the deliberate starvation of 30 million people in western and northwestern USSR. General Erich Hoepner told the 4th Panzer Group, "The struggle must aim at the annihilation of today's Russia and must therefore be waged with unparalleled harshness."

Nazi Germany struck at 3 a.m. on June 22, initially the Soviet air force was destroyed, thousands of tanks were lost. Up to a million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner in the first weeks. The nationalized property relations and planned economy was a massive advantage and unprecedented in history as about 80 percent of Soviet war industry was dismantled and moved east of the Urals between August and October 1941. Half a million rail-car loads of machinery shipped on the same trains carrying millions of soviet soldiers west to the front. Soviet arms production soon outmatched Germany's and by 1942 the USSR manufactured 25,436 aircraft to Germany's 15,409 and 24,446 tanks to Germany's 9,200.

By December 1941, the Red Army launched a counteroffensive that drove Nazi Germany back, which was the first time the Wehrmacht had been forced into retreat. With superior equipment and new forces transferred from Siberia. High-level Nazi general-staff accepted that the war was already lost and were frustrated that the Soviet system had not disintegrated since no society in history had survived the kind of invasion despite the destruction of hundreds of towns, thousands of villages, and millions of human beings in a matter of months.

The Third Reich’s defeat was the turning point towards their decline, although the war continued for three and a half years. They never recovered the initiative it lost before Moscow as circa eight of every ten German soldiers who died in the Second World War did on the Eastern Front. The Soviet working class and the Red Army broke the back of the Reich through the strength of the nationalized property relations and planned economy. Of the 27 million Soviet citizens who were murdered in the war, approximately 18 million were civilians. 3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war were killed in German captivity in the first year, Einsatzgruppen murdered 500,000 Soviet Jews in just the first six months.