80 years since Hitler’s doomed invasion of the Soviet Union

Posted at 11:30am UK time

On the 22nd June 1941, nearly two years into the Second World War, the German Army launched Operation Barbarossa: the invasion of the Soviet Union. Hitler saw Eastern Europe as a natural area of expansion for the German people – the ‘lebensraum’ for his Aryan Empire. In preparation, the Germans had assembled over three million troops, making it the largest land invasion in military history.

Between June and December of 1941, the German Army Group North had surrounded Leningrad, starving its inhabitants of basic resources, such as food; Army Group Centre had sliced through the heart of the Soviet Union, swallowing the key Soviet cities of Minsk and Smolensk; Army Group South had blitzed through resource-rich Ukraine, taking roughly 700,000 prisoners of war near Kiev.

The Wehrmacht’s mystifying march towards Moscow was halted with the onset of winter, as the divisions approaching the city’s limits had to abandon their vulnerable positions, leaving much of their heavy equipment behind. This would happen again in Operation Bagration, which was not the simple withdrawal of forces from the area, but a catastrophic defeat which the Wehrmacht would never recover from.

Read the rest of Luke Perry’s article here.