Operation Barbarossa was the 1941 German invasion of Russia. It was launched on June 22, 1941, with three Army Groups, which swept across the Russian plains eastwards towards their objectives. It was the largest military campaign of World War II. For this massive military offensive, Germany employed 119 divisions organized in three Army Groups, totaling more than four million men.
Army Group North (AGN), under Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, would advance eastwards towards Leningrad on the Baltic Sea. Army Group Center (AGC), under the command of Fedor von Bock, would sweep across the central plain in the direction of Moscow. Meanwhile, Army Group South, led by Gerd von Rundstedt, would march southeastward across Ukraine towards the Volga, securing the southern flank of the offensive.
The German invasion of Russia began at 05:10 hours, on June 22, 1941, when mechanized infantry and armored divisions of the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center crossed the Bug River into Soviet-occupied Polish territory. The military plan to invade Russia had carefully been designed by field marshal Franz Halder and Hitler himself in December 1940 and it would be executed in the same manner as Fall Weiss and Fall Gelb, which means through a Blitzkrieg surprise attack.
The initial advance was fast and impressive, using Blitzkrieg tactics, with massive employment of both armored divisions and dive-bombers, with synchronized maneuvers. When AGN approached Leningrad, the Germans proceeded to lay siege to that city. Meanwhile, AGC achieved spectacular success, encircling and trapping hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops in pincers movements at Bialystok and Minsk, in July, and at the Battle of Smolensk in September. However, the advance of AGC would be temporarily delayed after Smolensk as Hitler ordered Fedor von Bock to divert his 2nd Panzer Group to the south to assist AGS to take Kiev in Ukraine.
At the end of September, the advance of AGC divisions resumed. By mid October, the Germans had started to close in on Moscow. Nevertheless, the Russian winter had also begun to set in, with temperature dropping below 0 degrees Celcius. By December 10, AGC spearhead units had already reached the gates of the Soviet Union's capital. Just as the German armored vehicles diesel fuel and howitzer breeches had gotten frozen, the Soviet Siberian armored divisions launched a massive counter-attack, using the new Russian T-34 tank. The German troops were pushed back 100 miles. Then they were able to stabilize the front line. That was the end of Operation Barbarossa. Thus the German had failed to capture Moscow and force an unconditional surrender.
Reasons for attacking Russia
The rationale to invade the Soviet Union was three-fold: 1) ideological: it was necessary to oust Stalin and the communist regime from power to eliminate a dormant threat of a communist expansion towards Western Europe in the form of political influence (indoctrination of young people at university centers) or militarily; 2) geopolitical: by expanding towards the east, Hitler would ensure that the whole of Eastern Europe and Asia would be under Nazi Germany's sphere of influence; 3) economically: Adolf Hitler would have a large and permanent flow of raw material and natural resources for a growing mighty Germany, enabling the Third Reich even to export commodities and manufactured products. This territorial expansion of Germany was called Lebensraum (living space in German).
Hitler had always wanted to expand eastwards, not westwards, for it had never been his intention to engage Great Britain or the United States of America in a war. He had invaded and conquered France the year before only to secure Germany's back, avoiding a two-front armed conflict, and, at the same time, recover Alsace and Loraine, which had been wrenched away from Germany at the end of the Thirty Year War and then again at the end of World War I, with the Treaty of Versailles.
Below, German Soldier in a Russian village during Operation Barbarossa.
Below, map showing the directions of the German attacks in the Russian Campaign according to the Operation Barbarossa's plan designed on December 18, 1940.
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| Map of Eastern Europe, with the plan of attack on the Soviet Union. |
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| Above, deployment of the three German Army Groups right before Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941. Operation Barbarossa (video - historical footage) |