Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II (1939–1945). Launched on June 22, 1941, the invasion saw the German army, with assistance from Romania and Finland, attack the Soviet Union with about 4 million soldiers across a nearly 2,000-mile battlefront. This was the largest military offensive ever undertaken in world history. Germany's objective was to take over the massive Soviet Union to create more German living space as Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler expanded his forces throughout Europe.

The Germans initially advanced through Soviet territory easily, destroying land, infrastructure, and people as they went. The Soviet Union's Red Army, however, fiercely resisted the invasion. By December of 1941, the Soviets' overwhelming number of soldiers, combined with the severe Russian winter, had driven Germany almost entirely out of the Soviet Union.

Operation Barbarossa was a colossal failure for Germany. It resulted in about 775,000 German casualties and more than 800,000 Soviet casualties, with millions of other Soviets taken prisoner. The invasion opened the eastern front of World War II, forcing Nazi Germany to spread its forces throughout Eastern and Western Europe. The demands of fighting a two-front war ultimately led to Germany's defeat in 1945.

Background

World War II began in 1939 with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. Around the war's start, Hitler began allying himself with various nations that he believed would be strategically valuable to Germany. One of these was the Soviet Union, an enormous Eastern European country. Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which allowed Hitler to expand across Western Europe without Soviet interference.

Hitler, however, never intended for the German-Soviet peace to be permanent. The Soviet Union was a large nation with many natural resources. Hitler saw it as a perfect location to create more Lebensraum, or living space, for the German people as he aggressively grew Germany's boundaries throughout Europe. To Hitler, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was always meant to be only a temporary check on Soviet hostility until Germany could attack the country at its own chosen time.

By the spring of 1940, Germany had invaded and overrun most of Western Europe. That summer, Hitler turned his attention east to begin planning an invasion of the Soviet Union. In addition to securing more land for the German people, Hitler also wanted to destroy the country's political ideology of communism, which he perceived as a threat to the German way of life, and the entire Soviet Jewish population, whom he saw as racially inferior to Germans. Nazi death squads eventually killed large numbers of Soviet Jews.

Hitler had finalized plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union by December of 1940. The assault called for the German army to split into three divisions, each of which would attack from a different position in the country's western region. One division was to attack Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg) in the north, another would attack Kiev (in present-day Ukraine) in the south, and the third would attack Smolensk in the middle and move eastward to capture the Soviet capital of Moscow. The German soldiers were directed to defeat the Red Army forces they encountered as quickly as possible so they could not retreat farther into the Soviet Union and construct more robust defenses.

Hitler named the invasion Operation Barbarossa after the Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who had participated in the Third Crusade to take control of the Holy Land in the 1190s. The Nazi assault was initially set to launch on May 15, 1941, but organizational problems delayed this for more than a month. The invasion began on June 22.

Overview

Germany devoted more than 3.5 million soldiers to the invasion effort. This force was joined by about 650,000 troops from the German allies of Romania and Finland. Also part of the attack were more than 3,000 tanks, nearly 3,000 aircraft, 7,000 artillery weapons, 600,000 vehicles, and more than 600,000 horses.

Operation Barbarossa began at 4:15 on the morning of June 22 with bombing runs by the Luftwaffe, the German air force, against Soviet naval and air bases. By the end of the day, about 1,800 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed on the ground. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin knew Germany had been planning an attack on the Soviet Union, but he had not expected it so soon. Therefore, although Stalin had 5 million soldiers ready to repel the invading Germans, the Red Army was caught almost totally by surprise.

The Germans progressed swiftly at first. The disorganized soldiers of the Red Army were quickly killed by German forces or taken as prisoners of war. Within a week, the German army had advanced 200 miles into the Soviet Union and killed or captured about 600,000 Soviet soldiers. By later in the summer, the three German divisions were nearing the cities they had been assigned to capture. Pockets of Red Army soldiers resisted intensely, but most of them were soon killed or captured.

By August of 1941, Hitler had ordered the advance on Moscow to halt so German forces could focus on taking Kiev and other cities in Ukraine. The Germans did this, but by October, they were simply fatigued and in need of fresh supplies. Hitler commanded the German army to resume the push to Moscow that October, but increasing rain and muddy conditions slowed progress.

The Germans finally reached the fringes of Moscow in December, but their delays had allowed the Red Army to gather reinforcements. Early that month, about 1 million Soviet soldiers launched a sudden counteroffensive to drive the German army away from Moscow. Both sides suffered heavy casualties in the fighting.

By the end of the first week of December, the Germans had been forced back to the outskirts of Soviet territory. Operation Barbarossa was later regarded as one of Hitler's costliest military failures. In total, about 775,000 German soldiers and 800,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed in the invasion. Approximately 6 million other Soviets had been wounded or captured.

With the powerful Soviet Union now on the offensive in Eastern Europe, Nazi Germany had to fight two fronts in the war. Operation Barbarossa is considered a turning point of World War II, after which Germany gradually began losing more battles to its overpowering foes. By 1945, the Soviet Union and the other Allied powers had summarily defeated Germany.

Bibliography

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