ON THIS DAY ·
Operation Barbarossa: Germany invades USSR
Barbarossa: 3.6 million men invade the USSR on a 2,900 km front — the largest invasion ever mounted, on the exact anniversary of France’s 1940 armistice.
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The moment in context
The German plan rested on a single gamble, which was that the Soviet state would collapse if its frontier armies were destroyed quickly enough. Around 3.6 million Axis troops crossed the border in the largest invasion in history, and three army groups drove toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Ukraine. German mobile formations trapped and destroyed enormous Soviet forces at Minsk, Smolensk, and Kiev, taking more than three million prisoners by winter. Each victory seemed to confirm the plan, yet the state behind those armies did not break, and the deeper the Germans advanced, the more clearly the limits of their own supply became a problem they could not solve.
From Operation Barbarossa, chapter 6 of The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945 (DEC 1941).
Teach this in 5 minutes
- Why it happened — Ideology: Lebensraum and the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy. For Hitler this was always the real war — colonial conquest of the East, enslavement of Slavs, annihilation of Jews and communists. The economic and…
- The turn — The gates of Moscow, 5 December. Zhukov — informed by his Tokyo spy Richard Sorge that Japan would strike south, not at Siberia — has quietly massed reserve armies. Their winter…
- What it changed — A war of attrition Germany cannot win. From December 1941 the contest becomes factories, oil and manpower — categories in which the USSR (plus Lend-Lease) dwarfs the Axis. Every later…
Then ask the room: Every military expert — including most Allied ones — predicted Soviet collapse within weeks. Why were they all wrong? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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