Operation Barbarossa

On 22 June 1941 Nazi Germany and several of its allies attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. More than 3.8 million Axis troops attacked along a front of some 2,900 kilometres, opening the Eastern Front, which became the biggest and bloodiest land theatre of the Second World War. The offensive conquered vast territory but failed to destroy the Soviet state, and it was halted before Moscow in December 1941.

For Adolf Hitler, war against the Soviet Union had ideological as well as strategic goals. As early as Mein Kampf in 1925 he had written of seizing "living space" in the east. Nazi plans, set out in the Generalplan Ost, foresaw destroying communism and resettling the western Soviet Union with Germans, while removing its Slavic population through deportation, enslavement and genocide. The invasion also aimed to seize the farmland and minerals of Ukraine and Byelorussia and the oil of the Caucasus. The German goal was a line running from Arkhangelsk to Astrakhan. The operation was named after the medieval emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

In 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact and economic agreements, and they divided Poland between them. After the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in mid-1940, the German high command began planning an attack, and Hitler approved it in December. In early 1941 the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin received warnings of an imminent invasion but refused to mobilise the Red Army fully, fearing to provoke Germany. When the blow fell, many Soviet units were badly placed and under strength.

The attack began at around 03:15 on Sunday 22 June 1941 with bombing raids and an artillery barrage along the whole front, joined by Finnish and Romanian units and soon afterwards by Italian, Hungarian and other forces. The Soviets had more tanks and aircraft on paper, but the Luftwaffe reportedly destroyed more than 3,000 Soviet aircraft in the first three days, and large Soviet forces were encircled. Army Group North overran the Baltic states and, with Finnish forces, began the siege of Leningrad on 8 September, a siege that lasted until 1944. Army Group Centre took Smolensk in late July. Army Group South captured Kiev on 19 September after encircling the Soviet armies defending it, then took Kharkov in October and Rostov-on-Don in November, while most of Crimea fell and Sevastopol was besieged.

On 2 October Army Group Centre began its offensive towards Moscow. Autumn rains turned roads to mud, supply lines were stretched to breaking point, German troops lacked winter equipment, and Soviet resistance stiffened. By 5 December the attack had stalled on the outskirts of the capital, and the Red Army launched a major counter-offensive.

The invasion was accompanied by mass atrocities. Over the course of the war the Axis captured some five million Soviet soldiers, of whom about 3.3 million were deliberately starved to death or otherwise killed. German death squads and local collaborators carried out mass shootings and gassings that murdered more than a million Soviet Jews in the Holocaust, and millions of other civilians also died. Figures for the operation itself are estimates: Axis military casualties exceeded one million, while Soviet military losses during the operation are put at around 4.5 million, including more than two million missing or captured.

Barbarossa brought the Soviet Union into the Allied coalition and turned the war into a long struggle of attrition that Germany was not equipped to win. Later German offensives were made on narrower fronts and also failed, including the 1942 campaign that ended in defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad. The failure of Barbarossa marked a reversal of Germany's fortunes in the war.

Our 1938 map shows the Soviet Union and Germany before the war, and the 1945 map shows Europe after Germany's defeat.