1943-5-15
Stalin dissolves the Comintern: promoter of worldwide communism > .
Operation Barbarossa (
Unternehmen Barbarossa) also known as the German invasion of the Soviet Union was the
code name for the invasion of the
Soviet Union by
Nazi Germany and some of its
Axis allies, which started on
Sunday, 22 June 1941, during
WW2. The operation put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union so as to repopulate it with
Germans. The German
Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered people as
slave labour for the Axis war effort while acquiring the oil reserves of the
Caucasus as well as the agricultural resources of various Soviet territories. Their ultimate goal included the eventual extermination, enslavement,
Germanization and mass deportation to
Siberia of the
Slavic peoples, and to create more
Lebensraum (living space) for Germany.
In the two years leading up to the invasion, Germany and the Soviet Union
signed political and
economic pacts for strategic purposes. Following the
Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the
German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the codename
Operation Otto), which
Adolf Hitler authorized on 18 December 1940. Over the course of the operation, about three million personnel of the
Axis powers—the largest invasion force in the
history of warfare—invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front, with 600,000 motor vehicles and over 600,000 horses for non-combat operations. The offensive marked a massive escalation of World War II, both geographically and in the formation of the
Allied coalition including the Soviet Union.
The operation opened up the
Eastern Front, in which more forces were committed than in any other
theater of war in history. The area saw some of the world's largest battles, most horrific
atrocities, and highest
casualties (for Soviet and Axis forces alike), all of which influenced the course of World War II and the subsequent
history of the 20th century. The German armies eventually captured some five million Soviet
Red Army troops. The Nazis deliberately
starved to death or otherwise killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, and a vast number of civilians, as the "
Hunger Plan" worked to solve German food shortages and
exterminate the Slavic population through starvation.
[27]Mass shootings and gassing operations, carried out by the Nazis or willing collaborators,
[h] murdered over a million
Soviet Jews as part of
the Holocaust.
The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of the
Third Reich. Operationally, German forces achieved significant victories and occupied some of the most important economic areas of the Soviet Union (mainly in
Ukraine) and inflicted, as well as sustained, heavy casualties. Despite these early successes, the German offensive stalled in the
Battle of Moscow at the end of 1941, and the subsequent
Soviet winter counteroffensive pushed German troops back. The Germans had confidently expected a quick collapse of Soviet resistance as in
Poland, but the Red Army absorbed the German
Wehrmacht's strongest blows and bogged it down in a
war of attrition for which the Germans were unprepared. The Wehrmacht's diminished forces could no longer attack along the entire Eastern Front, and subsequent operations to retake the initiative and drive deep into Soviet territory—such as
Case Blue in 1942 and
Operation Citadel in 1943—eventually
failed, which resulted in the
Wehrmacht's retreat and collapse.
