Operation Barbarossa — Invasion of the USSR
Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 with some three million men on a front of 2,900 kilometres. It was the largest invasion in history and it was planned for four months. The assumptions behind it were racial as much as military. Hitler's directive was to destroy the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign, and the accompanying orders — the commissar order, the jurisdiction decree removing German soldiers from prosecution for acts against civilians, and the hunger plan, which envisaged starving some thirty million people in the cities to feed the Reich — made it a war of extermination from the first day. Stalin had ignored some eighty warnings and forbidden his own commanders to respond to reconnaissance flights. The initial results were catastrophic for the Soviets. Some 1,200 aircraft were destroyed on the first day, whole armies were encircled at Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev, and around three million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner by December; over half of them died in captivity, most by deliberate starvation. The German army then discovered the country. Supply lines ran on 600,000 horses and railways of the wrong gauge, the roads dissolved in the autumn rain, and no winter clothing had been issued because the campaign was to be finished. The advance stopped some twenty kilometres from Moscow in December and was pushed back. The eastern front took about three-quarters of German military casualties for the rest of the war and killed some 27 million Soviet citizens. The invasion was also the point at which the killing of Jews became systematic. The Einsatzgruppen followed the army with lists and shot several hundred thousand people in the occupied territories before the end of 1941, and the extermination camps followed within months.
- Year: 1941 CE
- Category: Military
