Issued on: 21/06/2021
Picture released on June 22, 1941 of Soviet rocket launchers as Nazis attacked the USSR. © AFP Archives
Text by:Stéphanie TROUILLARD|Tom WHEELDON
Perhaps the most pivotal moment in the Second World War took place on June 22, 1941 when Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union – shocking the world and striking fear into Joseph Stalin’s heart, but sowing the seeds of Adolf Hitler’s downfall. FRANCE 24 looks back at Operation Barbarossa, 80 years on.
One of the most striking eyewitness testimonies from this extraordinary outburst of militarised violence – in which some five million people were killed in 200 days – comes from German soldier Alexander Cohrs: “Two villages were burning in front of us. Civilians were completely taken by surprise; they didn’t have time to flee. The most horrific images was a three-year-old child lying in the middle of the road with half its head missing.” *
Barbarossa shattered the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR signed in August 1939. Stalin was shocked; he had received a plethora of warnings of an imminent invasion – notably from Winston Churchill, informed by British intelligence briefings. The communist dictator had refused to believe them.
“It’s got to be a provocation from the German generals,” he told senior Soviet officials in the early hours of June 22. “I’m sure Hitler isn’t aware of this.” *
Hitler felt the need to act one year to the day after the French Armistice because his previous strategy – to knock the UK out of the war – had failed. After the Royal Air Force defeated the Luftwaffe in the 1940 Battle of Britain and Churchill had made it clear that the UK would remain a thorn in Hitler’s side, the Nazi dictator turned his attention to the USSR.
“Britain remaining in the war after the Fall of France effectively tore up Hitler’s strategy, so he had to devise a new plan – conquering the USSR to achieve his dream of German Lebensraum,” explained Jean Lopez, co-author of Barbarossa : 1941, La Guerre Absolue.
Some people in occupied territories greeted the Wehrmacht as liberators from Soviet oppression. But this was soon revealed to be an illusion. German forces’ brutality against civilians became part of daily life. Millions of Soviet prisoners of war died because of horrific conditions in death marches from the frontline and in forced labour camps.
“Hitler launched a war of annihilation,” said Marie Moutier-Bitan, a historian specialising in the Holocaust and author of Les Champs de la Shoah. “Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command Wilhelm Keitel signed a decree on May 13, 1941 granting preventive amnesty for any crimes allegedly committed by German soldiers against civilians in Soviet territory. This decree also gave army officers the freedom to launch campaigns of reprisal and repression against civilians in response to the slightest suspicion, without any prior investigation.”
Operation Barbarossa marked a new stage in the Holocaust, as Jews were the prime target for German soldiers’ mass killings. “Pogroms and the Holocaust by bullets gathered pace during the invasion,” Moutier-Bitan recounted. “The SS Einsatzgruppen were tasked with eliminating the Nazis’ political opponents and Jews suspected of supporting the Soviet regime – but soon they started shooting large sections of the Jewish population.” More than 500,000 Jews were murdered between June 22 and the end of 1941 on territory captured in Operation Barbarossa.
Invading the USSR was just the very beginning of the end for Hitler. While Barbarossa was the act of hubris leading to the nemesis that brought down Nazism, the tide only turned decisively against Hitler when the USSR triumphed at Stalingrad amid unspeakable conditions and the British smashed Erwin Rommel’s forces at El Alamein in November 1942. Even after those Allied victories, it was more than two and a half years of death and suffering before the Soviet soldiers raised the red flag over the Reichstag, surrounded by the smoke and ruins of an exhausted, defeated Berlin.
* Quoted in Barbarossa : 1941, La Guerre Absolue by Jean Lopez and Lasha Otkhmezuri.
80 years ago, Hitler picked a fight that may have cost him World War II
Benjamin Brimelow
Tue, June 22, 2021
German troops in the Soviet Union in 1941. US National Archives
Early on June 22, 1941, the largest invasion in the history of warfare kicked off.
Millions of Axis troops crossed into the Soviet Union, marking the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.
Germans troops made it to the gates of Moscow, but the invasion was ultimately Adolf Hitler's undoing.
Just after 3 a.m. on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in the history of warfare.
Over 3.5 million Axis troops, along with more than 3,400 tanks and 2,700 aircraft, blitzed across the 1,800-mile border separating the Axis powers from the Soviet Union.
Believing the Red Army to be weak because of its failures in Poland and Finland and because Josef Stalin's purges had largely rid it of competent leaders, Adolf Hitler reportedly told his generals, "We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."
German troops with an infantry support gun crossing the Soviet border during Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. Johannes Hähle
The Germans divided their forces into three Army Groups.
The immediate objectives were for Army Group North to drive through the Baltic and take Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), while Army Group South would attack into Ukraine and take Kyiv and the Donets Basin.
Army Group Center, the largest of the three, would push through Minsk and Smolensk to take Moscow.
The ultimate goal was to conquer everything west of the A-A Line, a boundary between the cities of Arkhangelsk, on the White Sea near Russia's present-day border with Finland, and Astrakhan, on the Volga River near the Caspian Sea.
The area west of this line held the majority of the Soviet Union's population, infrastructure, and factories, which meant controlling it was tantamount to conquering the Soviet Union. German planners believed the entire operation would take only three months.
Stalin was warned repeatedly by military and intelligence officials that a German invasion appeared imminent in 1941, but he refused to act for fear of provoking the Germans.
Soviet and German planes destroyed on the ground during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Polish Archives
On the first day of the invasion, the Soviet air force lost more than 1,200 planes, most destroyed before they could get off the ground.
The damage was so severe that Maj. Gen. Ivan Kopets, commander of Soviet air forces on the Western Front, killed himself after observing the damage to his airfields.
The situation was just as bad for the Red Army. Its roughly 10,000 mostly outdated T-26 and BT-7 tanks were largely ineffective. German panzer groups punched through unprepared and weak Soviet lines, surrounding entire armies.
In little more than a week, Army Group Center had advanced 200 miles and had captured 300,000 Soviet soldiers in the Bialystock-Minsk pocket. By the end of July, it took Smolensk and captured another 300,000 Soviet soldiers.
Gen. Franz Halder, the chief of staff for the German Army High Command, wrote in his diary, "I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign against Russia has been won in fourteen days."
'Resistance, permanent resistance'
Heinrich Himmler inspecting a prisoner-of-war camp in the Soviet Union in 1941. US National Archives
The Soviets launched desperate counterattacks to halt the German onslaught.
On its way to Kyiv, Army Group South ran into a massive force of more than 3,000 tanks near the Ukrainian city of Brody. But after a week of fighting, the Soviet force was virtually destroyed.
Army Group North was also running into counterattacks. At the Lithuanian town of Raseiniai, one lone Soviet heavy tank managed to slow the Wehrmacht's progress for a few days before being destroyed with almost all its crew.
The Soviets did have more modern tanks like the T-34 medium and KV-1 and KV-2 heavy tanks that proved to be almost impossible to kill. But they were few, and the Luftwaffe, with almost complete air superiority, methodically destroyed the Soviet supply lines needed to keep them running.
A German tracked vehicle crossing a stream in a Soviet village in 1941. Bundesarchiv/Bild 146-1982-184-32/CC-BY-SA 3.0
The Wehrmacht kept up its advance. In the south, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt encircled two Soviet armies in the Uman pocket, capturing 103,000 more prisoners by August 8. The Romanians and Germans also started laying siege to Odessa.
Though Soviet counterattacks were largely futile, with thousands of tanks destroyed or abandoned and even more soldiers killed, captured, or wounded, they drained Germany's reserves and strained supply lines.
One German soldier reportedly wrote, "We have no sensation of entering a defeated country, as we had in France. Instead we have resistance, permanent resistance, no matter how hopeless it is."
German infantry and armored vehicles during street fighting in Kharkov on October 25, 1941. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-L20582/Schmidt/CC-BY-SA 3.0
By mid-July, a nervous Hitler was worried that Army Group Center was overextending itself and was out of sync with Army Groups North and South.
As a result, Hitler issued Directive Number 33, changing the objectives of the operation. Instead of pushing to Moscow, Army Group Center's panzer groups were diverted to Army Groups North and South to help capture Leningrad and Kiev, respectively.
The generals of Army Group Center were furious. They were less than 200 miles from Moscow and believed delaying the assault would drag the operation into the dreaded Russian winter. But Hitler was adamant, and the panzers were diverted.
Soviet planes flying over Nazi positions near Moscow in December 1941. RIA Novosti archive, image #2564/Samaryi Guraryi/CC-BY-SA 3.0
While Army Group Center fended off multiple counterattacks, Gen. Heinz Guderian's 2nd Panzer Group, along with Army Group South's 1st Panzer Group, attacked the area around Kyiv, trapping almost the entire Soviet Southwestern Front.
More than 450,000 Soviets were taken prisoner in what became the largest encirclement in history.
With the northern and southern flanks deemed secure, the Germans finally attacked Moscow. They had initial success, encircling Soviet forces in the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets, capturing more than 500,000 prisoners.
But by the time the Germans began their drive to Moscow in October, the seasons had caught up with them. Rains turned roads and battlefields into vast stretches of mud.
Supplies were having difficulty reaching the front. German losses - especially among critical panzer groups - were mounting. With November came the winter.
'We underestimated the Russian colossus'
German infantry in winter camouflage, some carrying MP-40 submachine gun, in a village east of Volkhov in the Soviet Union in November 1941. Polish National Digital Archives
Operation Barbarossa was now five months into what was supposed to be a three-month campaign. By their own calculations, the Germans should have reached the A-A Line and destroyed the Red Army.
But despite unparalleled losses, the Red Army was actually growing. At the start of the war, it was 5 million men. By the end of December, it had grown to 8 million.
This was unexpected. Halder even wrote, "It stands out more and more clearly that we underestimated the Russian colossus." If the Germans destroyed a dozen Russian divisions, Halder wrote, "then the Russians put another dozen in their place."
It was clear that this was a war of attrition and that taking Moscow wasn't possible. On December 2, three days before the end of offensive operations, a German reconnaissance unit reached the suburb of Khimki, just 8 miles from Moscow and less than 20 miles from the Kremlin.
German soldiers digging out a panzer stuck in the snow somewhere in the Soviet Union in December 1941. Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-215-0354-14/Gebauer/CC-BY-SA 3.0
Operation Barbarossa had failed. Hitler's prediction of a Soviet collapse proved grossly incorrect. Almost 200,000 of his best soldiers were killed and more than 500,000 wounded. The Germans lost more than 2,500 tanks and almost 3,000 aircraft.
Soviet casualties were appalling; well over 500,000 soldiers had been killed in action alone. Millions more were wounded or sick, and tens of thousands of planes and tanks had been destroyed.
The Germans captured 3.3 million soldiers, and by February 1942, 60% of them had died in camps - the first Soviet victims in an extermination campaign unleashed by Hitler.
The Red Army's continued counterattacks and offensives meant the Germany military never had less than 75% of its forces stationed on the Eastern Front. Hitler had led Germany into a two-front war that it did not have the resources or manpower to win.
Read the original article on Business Insider
Text by:Stéphanie TROUILLARD|Tom WHEELDON
Perhaps the most pivotal moment in the Second World War took place on June 22, 1941 when Nazi Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union – shocking the world and striking fear into Joseph Stalin’s heart, but sowing the seeds of Adolf Hitler’s downfall. FRANCE 24 looks back at Operation Barbarossa, 80 years on.
One of the most striking eyewitness testimonies from this extraordinary outburst of militarised violence – in which some five million people were killed in 200 days – comes from German soldier Alexander Cohrs: “Two villages were burning in front of us. Civilians were completely taken by surprise; they didn’t have time to flee. The most horrific images was a three-year-old child lying in the middle of the road with half its head missing.” *
Barbarossa shattered the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR signed in August 1939. Stalin was shocked; he had received a plethora of warnings of an imminent invasion – notably from Winston Churchill, informed by British intelligence briefings. The communist dictator had refused to believe them.
“It’s got to be a provocation from the German generals,” he told senior Soviet officials in the early hours of June 22. “I’m sure Hitler isn’t aware of this.” *
Hitler felt the need to act one year to the day after the French Armistice because his previous strategy – to knock the UK out of the war – had failed. After the Royal Air Force defeated the Luftwaffe in the 1940 Battle of Britain and Churchill had made it clear that the UK would remain a thorn in Hitler’s side, the Nazi dictator turned his attention to the USSR.
“Britain remaining in the war after the Fall of France effectively tore up Hitler’s strategy, so he had to devise a new plan – conquering the USSR to achieve his dream of German Lebensraum,” explained Jean Lopez, co-author of Barbarossa : 1941, La Guerre Absolue.
Wehrmacht Panzer III tanks in Poland ahead of Operation Barbarossa. © Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia
A shocked Stalin hesitates
Hitler had already expounded upon this concept of German “living space” carved out in Eastern Europe in Mein Kampf – but his failure to defeat Britain gave it a new impetus. “He wanted to use Lebensraum so he could successfully wage a long war against the UK and the US, because the Third Reich did not have enough resources without seizing those of the USSR,” Lopez put it.
More immediate geostrategic considerations in Eastern Europe also motivated Hitler, noted Richard Overy, professor of history at Exeter University and the author of numerous books on the Second World War including Russia’s War.
“Soviet expansion into the Baltic States, Romania and Poland, followed by requests in November 1940 for influence in Bulgaria and the Turkish Straits made clear to Hitler that Stalin posed a serious strategic threat, which had to be eliminated,” Overy said.
“The Soviet Union was also the home of Jewish-Bolshevism [a conspiracist canard at the heart of Nazi ideology] so that defeating Soviet forces would also eliminate the threat from communism hanging over Germany and Europe,” Overy continued. Hitler used a “cocktail of motives” at various points to “convince himself of the necessity and justice of war”.
Surprising their enemy played to the Nazis’ advantage as a flabbergasted Stalin floundered. “He spent a few hours hesitating, wondering if it was a real invasion, an attempt to force negotiations, or a mere provocation,” Lopez recounted.
Consequently, Soviet forces suffered colossal losses while the Wehrmacht tore into the USSR. Millions of soldiers were surrounded, stripped of supplies and forced to surrender.
The Stalinist regime also menaced Soviet troops. The fearsome secret police, the NKVD, was ordered to shoot dead any soldier suspected of “cowardice” – while people suspected of lacking patriotism were sent away for forced labour.
A shocked Stalin hesitates
Hitler had already expounded upon this concept of German “living space” carved out in Eastern Europe in Mein Kampf – but his failure to defeat Britain gave it a new impetus. “He wanted to use Lebensraum so he could successfully wage a long war against the UK and the US, because the Third Reich did not have enough resources without seizing those of the USSR,” Lopez put it.
More immediate geostrategic considerations in Eastern Europe also motivated Hitler, noted Richard Overy, professor of history at Exeter University and the author of numerous books on the Second World War including Russia’s War.
“Soviet expansion into the Baltic States, Romania and Poland, followed by requests in November 1940 for influence in Bulgaria and the Turkish Straits made clear to Hitler that Stalin posed a serious strategic threat, which had to be eliminated,” Overy said.
“The Soviet Union was also the home of Jewish-Bolshevism [a conspiracist canard at the heart of Nazi ideology] so that defeating Soviet forces would also eliminate the threat from communism hanging over Germany and Europe,” Overy continued. Hitler used a “cocktail of motives” at various points to “convince himself of the necessity and justice of war”.
Surprising their enemy played to the Nazis’ advantage as a flabbergasted Stalin floundered. “He spent a few hours hesitating, wondering if it was a real invasion, an attempt to force negotiations, or a mere provocation,” Lopez recounted.
Consequently, Soviet forces suffered colossal losses while the Wehrmacht tore into the USSR. Millions of soldiers were surrounded, stripped of supplies and forced to surrender.
The Stalinist regime also menaced Soviet troops. The fearsome secret police, the NKVD, was ordered to shoot dead any soldier suspected of “cowardice” – while people suspected of lacking patriotism were sent away for forced labour.
German soldiers drive down a road near Proujany, Belarus, June 1941. © Wikimedia
Grinding Wehrmacht down
Conditions on the frontline were brutal as 10 million men, 30,000 planes and 25,000 tanks clashed in a gigantic fight to the death. “Fanatics would shoot at us until the roofs collapsed over their heads and buried them in rubble,” German soldier Hans Rother remembered the fighting in Ukraine.*
It is a myth that the Wehrmacht was rampantly successful until the famous turning point at Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943, Overy said: “The Red Army was poorly prepared at the frontier and it proved very difficult to establish a solid or co-ordinated line of defence. Important tactical and technical differences maximised the impact of the German attack – for example, Soviet aircraft and tanks lacked radio communication; infantry tactics were also inept in 1941 and improved only later.
“German forces, however, soon ran into logistical difficulties, had to spend much time clearing up pockets of resistance from by-passed Red Army soldiers, and suffered from strategic confusion at Hitler’s HQ,” Overy continued. “There was enough of a difference to bring big early victories, but by November/December the hope for victory in a few weeks or months was completely dashed, and the momentum was never recovered.”
“There wasn’t a turning point as such; rather, a continuing process of wear-and-tear ground the Wehrmacht down,” Lopez added.
Grinding Wehrmacht down
Conditions on the frontline were brutal as 10 million men, 30,000 planes and 25,000 tanks clashed in a gigantic fight to the death. “Fanatics would shoot at us until the roofs collapsed over their heads and buried them in rubble,” German soldier Hans Rother remembered the fighting in Ukraine.*
It is a myth that the Wehrmacht was rampantly successful until the famous turning point at Stalingrad from August 1942 to February 1943, Overy said: “The Red Army was poorly prepared at the frontier and it proved very difficult to establish a solid or co-ordinated line of defence. Important tactical and technical differences maximised the impact of the German attack – for example, Soviet aircraft and tanks lacked radio communication; infantry tactics were also inept in 1941 and improved only later.
“German forces, however, soon ran into logistical difficulties, had to spend much time clearing up pockets of resistance from by-passed Red Army soldiers, and suffered from strategic confusion at Hitler’s HQ,” Overy continued. “There was enough of a difference to bring big early victories, but by November/December the hope for victory in a few weeks or months was completely dashed, and the momentum was never recovered.”
“There wasn’t a turning point as such; rather, a continuing process of wear-and-tear ground the Wehrmacht down,” Lopez added.
Masha Bruskina, a nurse and member of the Soviet resistance, is led through the streets of Minsk, Belarus, before she is hung on October 26, 1941. She was made carry a sign bearing the inscription "We are the partisans who shoot German soldiers". © Bundesarchiv, Wikimedia
A new stage in the Holocaust
Barbarossa failed because of fierce resistance from an enemy Nazi ideology had misleadingly cast as inherently weaker – as well as the logistical difficulties of invading Russia’s vast territories, especially in winter (the same problem that had cursed Napoléon Bonaparte’s invasion in 1812). But the Nazis’ cruelty to local populations also undermined Barbarossa.
A new stage in the Holocaust
Barbarossa failed because of fierce resistance from an enemy Nazi ideology had misleadingly cast as inherently weaker – as well as the logistical difficulties of invading Russia’s vast territories, especially in winter (the same problem that had cursed Napoléon Bonaparte’s invasion in 1812). But the Nazis’ cruelty to local populations also undermined Barbarossa.
Some people in occupied territories greeted the Wehrmacht as liberators from Soviet oppression. But this was soon revealed to be an illusion. German forces’ brutality against civilians became part of daily life. Millions of Soviet prisoners of war died because of horrific conditions in death marches from the frontline and in forced labour camps.
“Hitler launched a war of annihilation,” said Marie Moutier-Bitan, a historian specialising in the Holocaust and author of Les Champs de la Shoah. “Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command Wilhelm Keitel signed a decree on May 13, 1941 granting preventive amnesty for any crimes allegedly committed by German soldiers against civilians in Soviet territory. This decree also gave army officers the freedom to launch campaigns of reprisal and repression against civilians in response to the slightest suspicion, without any prior investigation.”
Operation Barbarossa marked a new stage in the Holocaust, as Jews were the prime target for German soldiers’ mass killings. “Pogroms and the Holocaust by bullets gathered pace during the invasion,” Moutier-Bitan recounted. “The SS Einsatzgruppen were tasked with eliminating the Nazis’ political opponents and Jews suspected of supporting the Soviet regime – but soon they started shooting large sections of the Jewish population.” More than 500,000 Jews were murdered between June 22 and the end of 1941 on territory captured in Operation Barbarossa.
Invading the USSR was just the very beginning of the end for Hitler. While Barbarossa was the act of hubris leading to the nemesis that brought down Nazism, the tide only turned decisively against Hitler when the USSR triumphed at Stalingrad amid unspeakable conditions and the British smashed Erwin Rommel’s forces at El Alamein in November 1942. Even after those Allied victories, it was more than two and a half years of death and suffering before the Soviet soldiers raised the red flag over the Reichstag, surrounded by the smoke and ruins of an exhausted, defeated Berlin.
* Quoted in Barbarossa : 1941, La Guerre Absolue by Jean Lopez and Lasha Otkhmezuri.
80 years ago, Hitler picked a fight that may have cost him World War II
Benjamin Brimelow
Tue, June 22, 2021
German troops in the Soviet Union in 1941. US National Archives
Early on June 22, 1941, the largest invasion in the history of warfare kicked off.
Millions of Axis troops crossed into the Soviet Union, marking the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.
Germans troops made it to the gates of Moscow, but the invasion was ultimately Adolf Hitler's undoing.
Just after 3 a.m. on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in the history of warfare.
Over 3.5 million Axis troops, along with more than 3,400 tanks and 2,700 aircraft, blitzed across the 1,800-mile border separating the Axis powers from the Soviet Union.
Believing the Red Army to be weak because of its failures in Poland and Finland and because Josef Stalin's purges had largely rid it of competent leaders, Adolf Hitler reportedly told his generals, "We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."
German troops with an infantry support gun crossing the Soviet border during Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. Johannes Hähle
The Germans divided their forces into three Army Groups.
The immediate objectives were for Army Group North to drive through the Baltic and take Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), while Army Group South would attack into Ukraine and take Kyiv and the Donets Basin.
Army Group Center, the largest of the three, would push through Minsk and Smolensk to take Moscow.
The ultimate goal was to conquer everything west of the A-A Line, a boundary between the cities of Arkhangelsk, on the White Sea near Russia's present-day border with Finland, and Astrakhan, on the Volga River near the Caspian Sea.
The area west of this line held the majority of the Soviet Union's population, infrastructure, and factories, which meant controlling it was tantamount to conquering the Soviet Union. German planners believed the entire operation would take only three months.
Stalin was warned repeatedly by military and intelligence officials that a German invasion appeared imminent in 1941, but he refused to act for fear of provoking the Germans.
Soviet and German planes destroyed on the ground during Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Polish Archives
On the first day of the invasion, the Soviet air force lost more than 1,200 planes, most destroyed before they could get off the ground.
The damage was so severe that Maj. Gen. Ivan Kopets, commander of Soviet air forces on the Western Front, killed himself after observing the damage to his airfields.
The situation was just as bad for the Red Army. Its roughly 10,000 mostly outdated T-26 and BT-7 tanks were largely ineffective. German panzer groups punched through unprepared and weak Soviet lines, surrounding entire armies.
In little more than a week, Army Group Center had advanced 200 miles and had captured 300,000 Soviet soldiers in the Bialystock-Minsk pocket. By the end of July, it took Smolensk and captured another 300,000 Soviet soldiers.
Gen. Franz Halder, the chief of staff for the German Army High Command, wrote in his diary, "I think I am not exaggerating when I say that the campaign against Russia has been won in fourteen days."
'Resistance, permanent resistance'
Heinrich Himmler inspecting a prisoner-of-war camp in the Soviet Union in 1941. US National Archives
The Soviets launched desperate counterattacks to halt the German onslaught.
On its way to Kyiv, Army Group South ran into a massive force of more than 3,000 tanks near the Ukrainian city of Brody. But after a week of fighting, the Soviet force was virtually destroyed.
Army Group North was also running into counterattacks. At the Lithuanian town of Raseiniai, one lone Soviet heavy tank managed to slow the Wehrmacht's progress for a few days before being destroyed with almost all its crew.
The Soviets did have more modern tanks like the T-34 medium and KV-1 and KV-2 heavy tanks that proved to be almost impossible to kill. But they were few, and the Luftwaffe, with almost complete air superiority, methodically destroyed the Soviet supply lines needed to keep them running.
A German tracked vehicle crossing a stream in a Soviet village in 1941. Bundesarchiv/Bild 146-1982-184-32/CC-BY-SA 3.0
The Wehrmacht kept up its advance. In the south, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt encircled two Soviet armies in the Uman pocket, capturing 103,000 more prisoners by August 8. The Romanians and Germans also started laying siege to Odessa.
Though Soviet counterattacks were largely futile, with thousands of tanks destroyed or abandoned and even more soldiers killed, captured, or wounded, they drained Germany's reserves and strained supply lines.
One German soldier reportedly wrote, "We have no sensation of entering a defeated country, as we had in France. Instead we have resistance, permanent resistance, no matter how hopeless it is."
German infantry and armored vehicles during street fighting in Kharkov on October 25, 1941. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-L20582/Schmidt/CC-BY-SA 3.0
By mid-July, a nervous Hitler was worried that Army Group Center was overextending itself and was out of sync with Army Groups North and South.
As a result, Hitler issued Directive Number 33, changing the objectives of the operation. Instead of pushing to Moscow, Army Group Center's panzer groups were diverted to Army Groups North and South to help capture Leningrad and Kiev, respectively.
The generals of Army Group Center were furious. They were less than 200 miles from Moscow and believed delaying the assault would drag the operation into the dreaded Russian winter. But Hitler was adamant, and the panzers were diverted.
Soviet planes flying over Nazi positions near Moscow in December 1941. RIA Novosti archive, image #2564/Samaryi Guraryi/CC-BY-SA 3.0
While Army Group Center fended off multiple counterattacks, Gen. Heinz Guderian's 2nd Panzer Group, along with Army Group South's 1st Panzer Group, attacked the area around Kyiv, trapping almost the entire Soviet Southwestern Front.
More than 450,000 Soviets were taken prisoner in what became the largest encirclement in history.
With the northern and southern flanks deemed secure, the Germans finally attacked Moscow. They had initial success, encircling Soviet forces in the Vyazma and Bryansk pockets, capturing more than 500,000 prisoners.
But by the time the Germans began their drive to Moscow in October, the seasons had caught up with them. Rains turned roads and battlefields into vast stretches of mud.
Supplies were having difficulty reaching the front. German losses - especially among critical panzer groups - were mounting. With November came the winter.
'We underestimated the Russian colossus'
German infantry in winter camouflage, some carrying MP-40 submachine gun, in a village east of Volkhov in the Soviet Union in November 1941. Polish National Digital Archives
Operation Barbarossa was now five months into what was supposed to be a three-month campaign. By their own calculations, the Germans should have reached the A-A Line and destroyed the Red Army.
But despite unparalleled losses, the Red Army was actually growing. At the start of the war, it was 5 million men. By the end of December, it had grown to 8 million.
This was unexpected. Halder even wrote, "It stands out more and more clearly that we underestimated the Russian colossus." If the Germans destroyed a dozen Russian divisions, Halder wrote, "then the Russians put another dozen in their place."
It was clear that this was a war of attrition and that taking Moscow wasn't possible. On December 2, three days before the end of offensive operations, a German reconnaissance unit reached the suburb of Khimki, just 8 miles from Moscow and less than 20 miles from the Kremlin.
German soldiers digging out a panzer stuck in the snow somewhere in the Soviet Union in December 1941. Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-215-0354-14/Gebauer/CC-BY-SA 3.0
Operation Barbarossa had failed. Hitler's prediction of a Soviet collapse proved grossly incorrect. Almost 200,000 of his best soldiers were killed and more than 500,000 wounded. The Germans lost more than 2,500 tanks and almost 3,000 aircraft.
Soviet casualties were appalling; well over 500,000 soldiers had been killed in action alone. Millions more were wounded or sick, and tens of thousands of planes and tanks had been destroyed.
The Germans captured 3.3 million soldiers, and by February 1942, 60% of them had died in camps - the first Soviet victims in an extermination campaign unleashed by Hitler.
The Red Army's continued counterattacks and offensives meant the Germany military never had less than 75% of its forces stationed on the Eastern Front. Hitler had led Germany into a two-front war that it did not have the resources or manpower to win.
Read the original article on Business Insider
