Operation Barbarossa: Strategic Warfare on the Eastern Front, 1941

By Fouad Sabry

What is Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. It was the largest and costliest land offensive in human history, with around 10 million combatants taking part, and over 8 million casualties by the end of the operation.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Operation Barbarossa

Chapter 2: Battle of Kursk

Chapter 3: Heinz Guderian

Chapter 4: Hermann Hoth

Chapter 5: Eastern Front (World War II)

Chapter 6: Battle of Moscow

Chapter 7: Günther von Kluge

Chapter 8: Konstantin Rokossovsky

Chapter 9: Kirill Meretskov

Chapter 10: Battle of Kiev (1941)

(II) Answering the public top questions about operation barbarossa.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Operation Barbarossa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: May 31, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Operation Barbarossa

German for Operation Barbarossa is Unternehmen Barbarossa; Russian: Операция Барбаросса, Operation Barbarossa (romanized: Operatsiya Barbarossa) was the Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies' invasion of the Soviet Union, beginning this Sunday, 22 June 1941, when the Second World War was raging.

The scale of the campaign was unprecedented in human history, with more than 10 million soldiers participating.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union entered into political and economic pacts in the two years prior to the invasion for tactical reasons. In July 1940, the German High Command started preparing for an attack of the Soviet Union following the Soviet conquest of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (under the codename Operation Otto). Over the course of the operation, the Axis powers sent over 3.8 million personnel—the greatest invasion force in warfare history—across a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 km) front while using over 600,000 motor vehicles and over 600,000 horses for non-combat duties. In terms of both the Allied coalition's size and the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, which included the USSR, the attack marked a significant uptick in World War II.

The action made the Eastern Front accessible, It saw the highest level of troop commitment of any battlefield in human history.

The area saw some of history’s largest battles, the most heinous crimes, higher casualties (for Soviet and Axis forces alike), all of which had an impact on the outcome of World War II and subsequent 20th-century history.

Around five million Soviet Red Army soldiers were finally captured by the German army.

But no such collapse took place, Instead, the Red Army took the worst hits from the German Wehrmacht and dragged it into an attrition war for which the Germans were unprepared.

With less resources, the Wehrmacht was no longer able to attack throughout the entire Eastern Front, and following attempts, such as Case Blue in 1942 and Operation Citadel in 1943, to recover the initiative and drive well into Soviet territory ultimately failed, It ended with the defeat of the Wehrmacht.

Following that, the Nazi Party's demise and German expansionism were made possible, up until their fall in 1945.

A Germanic medieval legend claims, resurrected in the 19th century by German Romanticism's nationalistic motifs, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa—who drowned in Asia Minor while leading the Third Crusade—is not dead but asleep along with his knights in a cave in the Kyffhäuser mountains in Thuringia and is going to awaken in the hour of Germany's greatest need and restore the nation to its former glory.

In his political manifesto and autobiography Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler hinted that he would invade the Soviet Union as early as 1925. He said that the German people needed to obtain Lebensraum ('living space') to assure the existence of Germany for future generations.

The idea of the clean Wehrmacht was more prominent in earlier history, preserving its honor despite Hitler's fanaticism, the historian Jürgen Förster notes that In fact, The ideological nature of the battle ensnared the military leaders, and actively involved in its execution as participants.

The Nazis' covert scheme Generalplan Ost, often known as General Plan for the East,, 1941 preparation and 1942 confirmation, called for a new system of ethnographical connections to be established in the areas of Eastern Europe that Nazi Germany had controlled.

The plan called for ethnic cleansing, executions and forced labor against the people of conquered nations, with only a small percentage becoming German, removal to the depths of Russia or other punishments, while Germanization would take place in the seized areas.

The strategy was divided into two components, the little plan, or Kleine Planung, which covered actions to be taken during the war and the Große Planung ('large plan'), which dealt with insurance after the war was won, gradually over the course of 25 to 30 years.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, also known as the Moscow Non-Aggression Treaty, was signed in Moscow in August 1939 by Germany and the Soviet Union. In a covert protocol to the pact, Germany and the Soviet Union agreed to divide the border states in eastern Europe into their respective spheres of influence, partition Poland in the event of a German invasion, and grant the Soviets permission to annex Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and the Bessarabia region.

Due to the fact that many capable and experienced military officers had been killed in Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s, leaving the Red Army with an inexperienced leadership compared to that of their German adversary, Stalin's reputation as a brutal dictator helped both the Nazis' justification of their attack and their faith in success. When using propaganda to attack the Slavs, the Nazis frequently stressed the cruelty of the Soviet state.

The entire decaying structure will collapse with just a kick of the door.

—Adolf Hitler

On December 5th, 1940, Hitler was given the invasion's complete military blueprints, which had been code-named Operation Otto by the German High Command since July 1940.

After looking over the plans, Hitler formally committed Germany to the invasion when he issued Führer Directive 21 on 18 December 1940, where he described in detail how the operation was to be performed.

In 1941, The following Reichskommissariate (or Reich Commissionerships) were proposed by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, who eventually served as Reich Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories:

Military strategists in Germany also studied Napoleon's abortive invasion of Russia. They calculated that there was little risk of the Red Army making a large-scale withdrawal into the interior of Russia because it could not afford to give up the Baltic states, Ukraine, or the Moscow and Leningrad regions, all of which were crucial to the Red Army's supply lines and would therefore need to be protected.

Even before the Balkan campaign was over, the Germans had started to amass soldiers close to the Soviet border. 680,000 German soldiers had collected in staging areas on the Romanian-Soviet border by the third week of February 1941.

The significance of the delay is currently under discussion. William Shirer contended that Hitler's Balkan Campaign had put Barbarossa in jeopardy by delaying its launch by several weeks.

A memo advocating for massive investment in the resources needed for the mass production of weapons was sent to the Kremlin in 1930 by Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a well-known military theorist in tank warfare during the interwar period and later Marshal of the Soviet Union. He argued for 40,000 aircraft and 50,000 tanks..

the Wehrmacht as the most severe threat to the Soviet Union, and that, in the event of a conflict with Germany, the Wehrmacht's major onslaught would come via the area north of the Pripyat Marshes into Belorussia. These battle plans were created by the Red Army General Staff beginning in July 1940, Stalin approved the State Defense Plan 1941 (DP-41) and the Mobilization Plan 1941 (MP-41) in the early months of 1941, which provided for the deployment of 186 divisions as the first strategic echelon in the four military regions.

Whether Stalin had plans to invade German territory in the summer of 1941 has been a point of contention among historians. The controversy started in the late 1980s when Viktor Suvorov claimed in a journal article and later in the book Icebreaker that Stalin had used the start of the war in Western Europe as a chance to spread communist revolutions across the continent and that the Soviet military was prepared for an impending attack at the time of the German invasion.

On June 22, 1941, at about 1:00 a.m., the Soviet military outposts in the border region

Within the first few hours, the German land and air attack's initial momentum utterly decimated the Soviet organizational command and control, paralyzing all levels of leadership from the infantry unit to the Soviet High Command in Moscow.

Soviet troop concentrations, supply depots, and airfields were identified for attack by Luftwaffe reconnaissance units.

Army Group North smashed through the Soviet Northwestern Front's 8th and 11th Armies on June 22.

Army Group South was divided into two sections: the southern half confronted the Southern Front, which housed the majority of Soviet forces, and the northern section opposed the Southwestern Front. Additionally, the northern and southern parts of the army group faced significant difficulties due to the Pripyat Marshes and the Carpathian Mountains, respectively.

The Western Front's ground air force was destroyed early in the invasion by the Luftwaffe, which also crippled the Front's communication lines with the help of the Abwehr and their supporting anti-communist fifth columns operating in the Soviet rear. This particularly isolated the Soviet 4th Army headquarters from the headquarters above and below it.

On June 29, a Soviet directive was issued to address the widespread hysteria that was affecting both military personnel and citizens. The edict mandated prompt, harsh actions against anyone causing panic or acting cowardly. In order to track down soldiers who might be relocating without permission from the military, the NKVD collaborated with commissars and military commanders. In order to deal with civilians spreading rumors and military deserters, field expedient general courts were established.

Finland had demanded to remain neutral during German-Finnish negotiations unless the Soviet Union attacked them first.

Germany thus tried to incite the Soviet Union to attack Finland.

Following Germany's 22 June launch of Barbarossa, Finnish air stations were used by German planes to assault Soviet positions.

The Petsamo Province near the Finnish-Soviet border was taken over by the Germans the same day that Operation Rentier was began.

Simultaneously Finland proceeded to remilitarize the neutral Åland Islands.

The Finnish government argued via diplomatic channels that they were still a neutral party despite these activities, however, Finland was