The German Invasion of Russia, June 22, 1941
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany and its European allies, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Italy, and Slovakia, initiated Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. This is the event that began the Great Patriotic War (Великая Отечественная война) for the Soviet Union, and the Second World War (Вторая мировая война) for the rest of humanity.
Operation Barbarossa (Операция Барбаросса), named after the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa (Redbeard), opened the Eastern Front, the largest and deadliest land theater of war in human history, and brought the Soviet Union into the Second World War as one of the Allied powers.
More than 3.8 million Axis troops invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mile) front. The attack became the largest and costliest military offensive in human history. Around 10 million combatants took part in the opening phase, and there were over 8 million casualties by the end of the operation on December 5, 1941.
Operation Barbarossa launched an explosive German and Axis air and ground assault into western Russia that surprised and stunned Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and the Russian high command.
Although Stalin had accurate intelligence earlier in 1941 about the imminent German attack, he refused to believe it, and did not order a mobilization of the Red Army, fearing that it might provoke Germany. As a result, the understrength and out of position Soviet forces were caught completely unprepared when the massive German air and ground assault began.
The overwhelming German firepower and the lightning encirclement and destruction of entire Russian armies resulted in the catastrophic devastation and collapse of Soviet resistance during the first five months of the German and Axis invasion of Russia.
Operation Barbarossa initiated Generalplan Ost, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s ideological goals for German territorial expansion into Eastern Europe. After Hitler’s rise to power, the concept of Lebensraum became a high priority ideological principle of Nazism that provided justification for German territorial expansion into Eastern Europe, especially Russia.
Generalplan Ost planned for the conquest of the Soviet Union, the eradication of Communism, the extermination of the native Slavic peoples by enslavement, genocide, and mass deportation to Siberia.
Adolf Hitler intended to simply confiscate the western Soviet Union and repopulate the land with Germans to fulfill his Nazi ideological principle of Lebensraum (living space) for future generations of Germans in his expected Thousand Year Reich.
The material targets of the invasion were the agricultural and mineral resources of Ukraine and Byelorussia and oil fields in the Caucasus.
Ultimately, the rampaging German armed forces captured five million Soviet Red Army troops in Russia and deliberately starved to death or otherwise killed 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war, as well as millions of Russian civilians. Mass shootings and gassing operations, carried out by German paramilitary death squads and collaborators, murdered over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust.