Operation Barbarossa (1941): Germany Invades the Soviet Union

Operation Barbarossa was Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, launched before dawn on 22 June 1941. With around 3.8 million German and allied troops attacking along a front of almost 3,000 kilometres, it was the largest invasion in history. It opened the Eastern Front, where most of the fighting and dying of the European war would take place, and turned the Second World War into a struggle of annihilation.

Background

In August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Its secret protocol divided eastern Europe between them, and both states took part in the invasion of Poland. For almost two years the Soviet Union supplied Germany with grain, oil and raw materials.

Hitler, however, had long written of conquering “living space” in the east. He regarded the Soviet state as the centre of “Jewish Bolshevism” and Slavic peoples as racially inferior. After the fall of France in 1940 and the failure to defeat Britain in the air, he decided that crushing the Soviet Union quickly would secure Germany’s resources and leave Britain without hope of a continental ally.

On 18 December 1940 Hitler issued Directive No. 21, “Case Barbarossa”, named after the medieval emperor Frederick Barbarossa. German planners expected to destroy the Red Army in western Russia within a few months, before the autumn rains, and reach a line from Arkhangelsk to the Volga.

Plans and forces

The Germans divided their forces into three army groups:

• Army Group North under Wilhelm von Leeb, advancing through the Baltic states towards Leningrad.
• Army Group Centre under Fedor von Bock, the strongest, driving towards Smolensk and Moscow.
• Army Group South under Gerd von Rundstedt, attacking into Ukraine towards Kiev.

Germany committed about 3 million soldiers, joined by Romanian, Finnish and later Hungarian, Slovak and Italian forces. They had roughly 3,300 to 3,600 tanks, about 2,500 combat aircraft and some 600,000 horses, a reminder that most of the German army still moved on foot and by horse-drawn wagon.

The Red Army was large but poorly prepared. Stalin’s purges of 1937–1938 had removed thousands of experienced officers, and the army was in the middle of reorganising and re-equipping. Stalin dismissed numerous warnings, including from British intelligence and from the spy Richard Sorge, believing that Germany would not attack while Britain was undefeated, or that the warnings were provocations.

A war of annihilation

From the beginning, Barbarossa was planned as more than a military campaign. The Commissar Order instructed German troops to shoot captured Soviet political officers. Economic plans, sometimes called the Hunger Plan, assumed that millions of Soviet civilians would starve as food was taken for German use. Long-term schemes for the region, known as Generalplan Ost, envisaged deportation and death on a vast scale.

Behind the front, SS mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, together with police battalions, local collaborators and regular army units, shot Jewish men, women and children in town after town. At Babi Yar near Kiev, more than 33,000 Jews were murdered in two days at the end of September 1941. The killings of 1941 marked a decisive step towards the Holocaust.

Soviet prisoners of war were also treated with extreme brutality. Of about 5.7 million captured during the war, an estimated 3 million or more died in German hands, most of them in 1941–1942 from starvation, disease and exposure.

The early Soviet catastrophes

The attack achieved almost complete surprise. On the first day the Luftwaffe destroyed well over 1,000 Soviet aircraft, many of them on the ground. German armoured groups broke through the frontier defences and raced ahead, encircling whole Soviet armies.

In the battles around Białystok and Minsk in late June and early July, roughly 300,000 Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner. Stalin, who had appeared shaken in the first days, addressed the nation by radio on 3 July, calling for a scorched-earth defence and partisan warfare. The fighting around Smolensk in July and August cost the Red Army dearly but slowed Army Group Centre for several weeks.

In August Hitler diverted part of Army Group Centre’s armour south to help encircle Soviet forces around Kiev. The Battle of Kiev, ending in late September, was one of the largest encirclements in military history, with around 600,000 or more Soviet soldiers captured. In the north, German and Finnish forces cut off Leningrad by early September, beginning the Siege of Leningrad.

Meanwhile the Soviet Union carried out an enormous evacuation. Between July and December 1941 around 1,500 industrial plants and millions of workers were moved east to the Urals, Siberia and Central Asia, where they resumed production of tanks, aircraft and guns.

The drive on Moscow and the halt

At the end of September Germany launched Operation Typhoon, the attack on Moscow. In early October the twin encirclements at Vyazma and Bryansk trapped several Soviet armies, and hundreds of thousands more prisoners were taken. Panic briefly gripped Moscow in mid-October as government offices were evacuated to Kuibyshev, but Stalin remained in the capital.

Then the weather turned. Autumn rains, the rasputitsa, turned unpaved roads into mud, and supply lines stretching hundreds of kilometres back to Germany could not keep the armies fed, fuelled and supplied with ammunition. When the ground froze in November, the Germans resumed their advance, but their troops lacked winter clothing and their units were exhausted and badly under strength.

Georgy Zhukov, appointed to command the defence of Moscow, gathered fresh reserves, including divisions brought west from Siberia and the Far East once Stalin was confident that Japan would not attack. By early December German spearheads had come within about 30 kilometres of the city. On 5 and 6 December the Red Army launched a counteroffensive in temperatures far below freezing, pushing the Germans back and ending any hope of a quick victory. The struggle is described in the article on the Battle of Moscow.

Key people

Adolf Hitler set the goals of the campaign and repeatedly intervened in its conduct, most notably in diverting forces towards Kiev in August.

Joseph Stalin ignored warnings before the invasion but stayed in Moscow and directed a brutal, ultimately effective mobilisation of the Soviet state.

Fedor von Bock commanded Army Group Centre, the main force aimed at Moscow, while Heinz Guderian led one of its armoured groups and became one of the best-known German commanders of the campaign.

Georgy Zhukov emerged as the Soviet Union’s most important general, organising the defence of Leningrad briefly in September and then of Moscow.

Consequences

Barbarossa failed in its central goal: the Soviet Union did not collapse. Germany now faced a long war on two fronts against an enemy with far greater manpower, and from December 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, against the world’s largest industrial power as well.

The cost of 1941 was staggering. Soviet military losses by the end of the year are estimated at roughly 4 to 4.5 million killed, wounded or captured. German casualties reached around 800,000 to 900,000 by early December, losses the army could not easily replace. Millions of Soviet civilians came under a brutal occupation.

The Eastern Front would remain the largest theatre of the war until 1945, through the turning points at Stalingrad and Kursk to the final assault on Berlin.

Myths and facts

“Winter alone stopped the Germans.” The cold of late 1941 was severe, but the German advance was already faltering because of losses, supply problems and Soviet resistance. Winter worsened a crisis that had begun earlier.

“The Balkan campaign fatally delayed the invasion.” The attack on Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941 is often blamed for pushing the start date from May to June. Many historians argue that a wet spring and incomplete preparations would have delayed it anyway.

“The Soviet Union was planning to strike first.” Claims that Germany launched a pre-emptive war are not supported by the evidence. Soviet war planning existed, as in all armies, but there is no proof of an imminent Soviet attack in June 1941.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1939, 23 August: Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
• 1940, 18 December: Hitler issues Directive No. 21 for Operation Barbarossa.
• 1941, 22 June: Germany and its allies invade the Soviet Union.
• 1941, 3 July: Stalin makes his first wartime radio address.
• 1941, 8 September: Leningrad is cut off by land.
• 1941, 19 September: German forces capture Kiev.
• 1941, 30 September – 2 October: Operation Typhoon, the offensive against Moscow, begins.
• 1941, 5–6 December: The Red Army launches its counteroffensive before Moscow.

Why it matters

Operation Barbarossa turned the Second World War into a global war of attrition that Germany could not win. It caused suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, opened the way to the Holocaust’s mass killings, and made the Soviet Union one of the two superpowers that would shape the post-war world.