On 22 June 1941 Germany has turn against its ally and invaded the Soviet Union.

Codenamed Operation Barbarossa, it was the largest military operation in history, involving more than 3 million Axis troops and 3,500 tanks. It was the logical culmination of Hitler’s belief that the German ‘master race’ should seek ‘lebensraum’ (living space) in the east, at the expense of the ‘subhuman’ native Slav people, who were to be exterminated or reduced to serf status. The attack on Russia was the climax of Hitler’s bid to establish Germany as the dominant world power.

Hitler’s grand ideological project of colonizing Eastern Europe, granting the German and German-speaking peoples living space, destroying in the process the “degenerate” and “inferior” Slav peoples, the untermenschen to his vision of a racially pure Aryan Europe, was now under way. From the outset it was to be a war of annihilation in which millions would be slaughtered.

That bid had begun with the invasion of Poland in September 1939, using Nazi false flag operation, which was the Gleiwitz incident, carried out the day before Germany invaded Poland to provide the justification for said invasion. The truth about the Gleiwitz incident was revealed by SS major Alfred Naujocks, who personally lead the attack: followed by the German conquest of France in June 1940.

I, Alfred Helmut Naujocks, being first duly sworn, depose and state as follows…

I was a member of the SS from 1931 to 19 October 1944 and a member of the SD from its creation in 1934 to January 1941.

On or about 10 August 1939 the Chief of the Sipo and SD, Heydrich, personally ordered me to simulate an attack on the radio station near Gleiwitz, near the Polish border, and to make it appear that the attacking force consisted of Poles. Heydrich said: ‘Actual proof of these attacks of the Poles is needed for the foreign press, as well as for German propaganda purposes.’ I was directed to go to Gleiwitz with five or six SD men and wait there until I received a code word from Heydrich indicating that the attack should take place. My instructions were to seize the radio station and to hold it long enough to permit a Polish-speaking German, who would be put at my disposal, to broadcast a speech in Polish. Heydrich told me that this speech should state that the time had come for the conflict between the Germans and the Poles and that the Poles should get together and strike down any Germans from whom they met resistance. Heydrich also told me at this time that he expected an attack on Poland by Germany in a few days.

Between the 25th and 31st of August I went to see Heinrich Muller, head of the Gestapo, who was then nearby at Oppeln. In my presence Muller discussed with a man named Mehlhorn plans for another border incident, in which it should be made to appear that Polish soldiers were attacking German troops …. Germans in the approximate strength of a company were to be used. Muller stated that he had 12 or 13 condemned criminals who were to be dressed in Polish uniforms and left dead on the ground at the scene of the incident to show that they had been killed while attacking. For this purpose they were to be given fatal injections by a doctor employed by Heydrich. Then they were also to be given gunshot wounds. After the assault members of the press and other persons were to be taken to the spot of the incident.

The incident at Gleiwitz in which I participated was carried out on the evening preceding the German attack on Poland. As I recalls war broke out on the 1st of September 1939. At noon on the 31st of August I received by telephone from Heydrich the code word for the attack which was to take place at 8 o’clock that evening. Heydrich said, ‘In order to carry out this attack, report to Muller for “Canned Goods. We seized the radio station as ordered, broadcast a speech of 3 to 4 minutes over an emergency transmitter, fired some pistol shots, and left.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident

http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/web/history/WWII/1939/Gleiwitz.shtml

Amazingly, Germany in an instant decided to attack Poland withing hours without diplomatic warning….?  It doesn’t make sense. It was planned!

By 1941 the German war machine had conquered most of Europe as country after country was invaded or forced to join Hitler’s Axis alliance.

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had concluded a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939, together with a secret spheres of influence agreement dividing Poland and the Baltic States between Germany and the Soviet Union. This deal began to unravel in summer 1940 following the defeat of France and Soviet occupation of the Baltic States. In November 1940 Stalin sent his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to Berlin to re-negotiate the Nazi-Soviet pact. But Hitler’s offer of a junior partnership in a global coalition against Britain and the United States was rejected by Stalin. Shortly after the Berlin conference Hitler issued the directive for Operation Barbarossa.

Planning for Barbarossa had begun over a year previously, in the wake of Germany’s stunning success against the western allies in France. The triumphalism that followed this victory, combined with widely believed reports that the Soviet armed forces were weak and deficient (evidence came from defeats by Finland in 1939) led to great optimism in the German high command, with Hitler declaring, ‘we have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.

Nazi propagandists depicted Operation Barbarossa as a pre-emptive strike against an imminent Soviet attack on Germany. By invading Russia Germany was said to be protecting Christian Europe from the Asiatic barbaric hordes in the east. The myth that Germany fought a defensive war against the Soviet Union persists in ultra-right political circles but there is no evidence that Stalin contemplated starting a war with Germany in summer 1941. In fact, Stalin delayed on attacking Poland until 17 September 1939 in order to secure as much time as possible to complete Soviet defence preparations. He also somewhat suspected that the British were plotting to realign with Germany and take part in an anti-Bolshevik campaign against the USSR. These suspicions were reinforced by the mysterious flight to Britain of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess in May 1941, which Stalin interpreted as part of negotiations for an Anglo-German alliance.

The Soviet Union was unprepared for the onslaught that came in June. Stalin refused to believe mounting evidence that an invasion was being prepared, and so his armies and air force on the frontier were caught by surprise. By doctrine and tradition the Red Army was offensive-oriented and it was planning to fight an offensive war against Germany but only after Hitler attacked the USSR.

As in their earlier victories, the Luftwaffe quickly gained air superiority, and helped armoured columns and motorised infantry punch holes through the Soviet front line. Barbarossa had three primary objectives – the Baltic states and Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the centre, and the economic resources of the Ukraine and southern Russia in the south. This led to a division of focus for which Hitler and his generals were later to be widely criticised. When Germany invaded Russia, Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, immediately declared his solidarity with Soviet Union while US President Roosevelt authorised American aid to the USSR. The Americans, however, did not enter the conflict officially until the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States in December 1941.

Initially all went well for the Germans, some units advancing 50 miles on the first day, although resistance was fiercer than expected in the south. European Russia was devastated by the German invasion as 70,000 towns and villages were destroyed along with 98,000 collective farms, tens of thousands of factories and thousands of miles of roads and railways. During the war the USSR lost 15% of its population and 30% of its national wealth.

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With Stalin personally intervening to forbid generals to retreat, large Soviet forces were encircled and destroyed or taken prisoner. 250,000 were lost in a massive encirclement around Minsk at the end of June, 180,000 were taken prisoner at Smolensk, while the Red Army suffered 500,000 casualties at the Battle of Kiev in September.

In parts of Ukraine, Latvia, and Estonia, the Nazis were supported by local collaborators, with many joining the ranks of specially organized Waffen SS units such as the Latvian, Estonian and Tatar Legions. These units were mostly assigned to anti-Partisan operations and were involved in some of the most brutal atrocities committed in Nazi occupied territory.

But despite the enormous casualties they had inflicted, the Germans had failed to land a decisive blow. They had underestimated both the resources of the Soviet Union and its willingness to accept massive losses. Now the German offensives were running out of steam, as front-line units halted for resupply and replacements. At a crucial phase of the operation, Hitler insisted that the panzer divisions of Army Group Centre, which were advancing on Moscow, were diverted to overcome resistance in the north and south. With this achieved, the drive on Moscow resumed on 2 October, codenamed Operation Typhoon. Ten days later German units were within 90 miles of the Russian capital, but stubborn Soviet resistance and heavy German casualties, combined with heavy rain which turned bad roads into rivers of mud, slowed the advance to a crawl. By the beginning of December, German troops were within sight of the spires of Moscow. However, a massive Soviet counterattack, using fresh units brought in from the East, supported by T-34 tanks, drove the Germans back. As the Russian winter set in, German offensive operations were abandoned.

Operation Barbarossa was one of the decisive moments of the war in Europe. Despite enormous losses in territory, men and weaponry, the Soviets had fought on, and survived. They would face fresh German offensives in 1942, but as the immense manpower and resources of the Soviet Union were brought into play, time was on their side.

When the Wehrmacht resumed the offensive in summer 1942 it was along a single strategic axis – a southern campaign to capture the oil fields at Baku – which supplied 90% of Soviet oil..

It was Hitler’s war for oil that led to the most important battle of the Second World War – the fight for Stalingrad in the autumn of 1942.

Defeat at Stalingrad was the point of no return for the Wehrmacht. The Eastern Front would become a graveyard of the German armed forces, as men, tanks and aircraft were thrown into an increasingly unwinnable conflict. With the encirclement and destruction of the 6^th army in Stalingrad the Red Army seized the strategic initiative and thereafter inflicted defeat after defeat on the Germans all the way to the capture of Berlin by Zhukov in May 1945.

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After the war surviving German generals claimed they had lost to the Red Army because it had more troops and resources and was better adapted to the weather and terrain of Russia. Hitler was also a convenient scapegoat for Nazi Germany’s defeat by a supposedly barbarian and backward nation. His generals declared Hitler to be a poor supreme commander whose strategic errors had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Conveniently, these same generals forgot the bad advice they gave to Hitler. In relation to the Wehrmacht’s role in the Holocaust they were even more forgetful.

In truth, the German-led forces lost to an army that was better as well a bigger: an army with superior arms, strategy and leadership.

Never has a leader so catastrophically misjudged the character of an enemy as Hitler misjudged the Soviet Union and its people prior to launching his invasion of the country on June 22, 1941.

On this 75th anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union the Russians will once again remind the world that the Red Army saved European civilisation as well as Russia from the Nazis. True, the Soviets did not win the war on their own, but in alliance with Britain, the US and other allies. As the old saying goes, the British gave time, the Americans gave money and the Soviets gave their blood to defeat Hitler. But, as Churchill said, it was the Red Army which tore the guts out of Hitler’s war machine. Stalin made as many mistakes as Hitler but he learned from them as did the Red Army as a whole. The Soviets kept command structures, force organisation and military doctrine under constant review. Meanwhile, military technology improved steadily and the Soviets made good use of the thousands of tanks, planes and trucks supplied by their western allies. Stalin did not always take his generals advice, but he learned from their military professionalism and strove to create a coherent and effective high command.

It was a  victory won at too great a cost, but who knows, if not much worse would have been the alternative of a triumphant Nazi empire in Europe that would have destroyed western democracy as well as Soviet socialism.

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Source:

http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-ww2/barbarossa

http://russia-insider.com/en/barbarossa/ri15045?utm_source=Russia+Insider+Daily+Headlines&utm_campaign=cc480b1063-Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c626db089c-cc480b1063-199978933&ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=cc480b1063&mc_eid=7e9449d7fb

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Many choose to speculate on Stalin preparing to attack nazi Germany in order to avoid blaming Hitler for the decision and to escape the guilt on so much unnecessary deaths.
But who cares when one sits in a warm office shouting orders?

Only the innocent civilians and the soldiers die….right?