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Total military casualties: Breakdown
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Total military casualties: Breakdown
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Operation Barbarossa (German: Unternehmen Barbarossa; Russian: Операция Барбаросса, romanized: Operatsiya Barbarossa) was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. It was the largest and costliest land offensive in human history, with around 10 million combatants taking part,[26] and over 8 million casualties by the end of the operation.[27][28]
The operation, code-named after Frederick I "Barbarossa" ("red beard"), a 12th-century Holy Roman Emperor and Crusader, put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goals of eradicating communism, and conquering the western Soviet Union to repopulate it with Germans. The German Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered people as forced labour for the Axis war effort while acquiring the oil reserves of the Caucasus as well as the agricultural resources of various Soviet territories, including Ukraine and Byelorussia. Their ultimate goal was to create more Lebensraum (living space) for Germany, and the eventual extermination of the native Slavic peoples by mass deportation to Siberia, Germanisation, enslavement, and genocide.[29][30]
In the two years leading up to the invasion, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the code-name Operation Otto). Over the course of the operation, over 3.8 million personnel of the Axis powers—the largest invasion force in the history of warfare—invaded the western Soviet Union, along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front, with 600,000 motor vehicles and over 600,000 horses for non-combat operations. The offensive marked a massive escalation of World War II, both geographically and with the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, which brought the USSR into the Allied coalition.
The operation opened up the Eastern Front, in which more forces were committed than in any other theatre of war in human history. The area saw some of history's largest battles, most horrific atrocities, and highest casualties (for Soviet and Axis forces alike), all of which influenced the course of World War II and the subsequent history of the 20th century. The German armies eventually captured some five million Soviet Red Army troops[31] and deliberately starved to death or otherwise killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, and millions of civilians, as the "Hunger Plan" worked to solve German food shortages and exterminate the Slavic population through starvation.[32] Mass shootings and gassing operations, carried out by German death squads or willing collaborators,[f] murdered over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust.[34]
The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of Nazi Germany.[35] Operationally, German forces achieved significant victories and occupied some of the most important economic areas of the Soviet Union (mainly in Ukraine) and inflicted, as well as sustained, heavy casualties. Despite these early successes, the German offensive came to an end during the Battle of Moscow near the end of 1941,[36][37] and the subsequent Soviet winter counteroffensive pushed the Germans about 250 km (160 mi) back. German high command anticipated a quick collapse of Soviet resistance as in Poland, analogous to the reaction Russia had during World War I.[38] However, no such collapse occurred; instead the Red Army absorbed the German Wehrmacht's strongest blows and bogged it down in a war of attrition for which the Germans were unprepared. Following the heavy losses and logistical strain of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht's diminished forces could no longer attack along the entire Eastern Front, and subsequent operations to retake the initiative and drive deep into Soviet territory—such as Case Blue in 1942 and Operation Citadel in 1943—were weaker and eventually failed, which resulted in the Wehrmacht's defeat. These Soviet victories ended Germany's territorial expansion and presaged the eventual defeat and collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.
Background
Naming
The theme of Barbarossa had long been used by the Nazi Party as part of their political imagery, though this was really a continuation of the glorification of the famous Crusader king by German nationalists since the 19th century. According to a Germanic medieval legend, revived in the 19th century by the nationalistic tropes of German Romanticism, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa—who drowned in Asia Minor while leading the Third Crusade—was not dead but asleep, along with his knights, in a cave in the Kyffhäuser mountains in Thuringia and would awaken in the hour of Germany's greatest need and restore the nation to its former glory.[39] Originally, the invasion of the Soviet Union was codenamed Operation Otto (alluding to Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great's expansive campaigns in Eastern Europe),[40] but Hitler had the name changed to Operation Barbarossa in December 1940.[41] Hitler had in July 1937 praised Barbarossa as the emperor who first expressed Germanic cultural ideas and carried them to the outside world through his imperial mission.[42] For Hitler, the name Barbarossa signified his belief that the conquest of the Soviet Union would usher in the Nazi "Thousand-Year Reich".[42]
Racial policies of Nazi Germany
As early as 1925, Adolf Hitler vaguely declared in his political manifesto and autobiography Mein Kampf that he would invade the Soviet Union, asserting that the German people needed to secure Lebensraum ('living space') to ensure the survival of Germany for generations to come.[43] On 10 February 1939, Hitler told his army commanders that the next war would be "purely a war of Weltanschauungen ... totally a people's war, a racial war". On 23 November, once World War II had already started, Hitler declared that "racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, and with it, the world".[44] The racial policy of Nazi Germany portrayed the Soviet Union (and all of Eastern Europe) as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen ('sub-humans'), ruled by Jewish Bolshevik conspirators.[45] Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germany's destiny was to Drang nach Osten ('turn to the East') as it did "600 years ago" (see Ostsiedlung).[46] Accordingly, it was a partially secret but well-documented Nazi policy to kill, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations and repopulate the land west of the Urals with Germanic peoples, under Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East).[47] The Nazis' belief in their ethnic superiority pervades official records and pseudoscientific articles in German periodicals, on topics such as "how to deal with alien populations."[48]
While older histories tended to emphasize the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht," upholding its honor in the face of Hitler's fanaticism, the historian Jürgen Förster notes that "In fact, the military commanders were caught up in the ideological character of the conflict, and involved in its implementation as willing participants".[44] Before and during the invasion of the Soviet Union, German troops were indoctrinated with anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic ideology via movies, radio, lectures, books, and leaflets.[49] Likening the Soviets to the forces of Genghis Khan, Hitler told the Croatian military leader Slavko Kvaternik that the "Mongolian race" threatened Europe.[50] Following the invasion, many Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans," the "Mongol hordes," the "Asiatic flood" and the "Red beast."[51] Nazi propaganda portrayed the war against the Soviet Union as an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the disciplined Germans and the Jewish, Romani and Slavic Untermenschen.[52] An 'order from the Führer' stated that the paramilitary SS Einsatzgruppen, which closely followed the Wehrmacht's advance, were to execute all Soviet functionaries who were "less valuable Asiatics, Gypsies and Jews."[53] Six months into the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered more than 500,000 Soviet Jews, a figure greater than the number of Red Army soldiers killed in battle by then.[54] German army commanders cast Jews as the major cause behind the "partisan struggle."[55] The main guideline for German troops was "Where there's a partisan, there's a Jew, and where there's a Jew, there's a partisan" or "The partisan is where the Jew is."[56][57] Many German troops viewed the war in Nazi terms and regarded their Soviet enemies as sub-human.[58]
After the war began, the Nazis issued a ban on sexual relations between Germans and foreign slaves.[59] There were regulations enacted against the Ost-Arbeiter ('Eastern workers') that included the death penalty for sexual relations with a German.[60] Heinrich Himmler, in his secret memorandum, Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East (dated 25 May 1940), outlined the Nazi plans for the non-German populations in the East.[61] Himmler believed the Germanisation process in Eastern Europe would be complete when "in the East dwell only men with truly German, Germanic blood."[62]
The Nazi secret plan Generalplan Ost, prepared in 1941 and confirmed in 1942, called for a "new order of ethnographical relations" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe. It envisaged ethnic cleansing, executions and enslavement of the populations of conquered countries, with very small percentages undergoing Germanisation, expulsion into the depths of Russia or other fates, while the conquered territories would be Germanised. The plan had two parts, the Kleine Planung ('small plan'), which covered actions to be taken during the war and the Große Planung ('large plan'), which covered policies after the war was won, to be implemented gradually over 25 to 30 years.[63]
A speech given by General Erich Hoepner demonstrates the dissemination of the Nazi racial plan, as he informed the 4th Panzer Group that the war against the Soviet Union was "an essential part of the German people's struggle for existence" (Daseinskampf), also referring to the imminent battle as the "old struggle of Germans against Slavs" and even stated, "the struggle must aim at the annihilation of today's Russia and must, therefore, be waged with unparalleled harshness."[64] Hoepner also added that the Germans were fighting for "the defence of European culture against Moscovite–Asiatic inundation, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism ... No adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system are to be spared." Walther von Brauchitsch also told his subordinates that troops should view the war as a "struggle between two different races and act with the necessary severity."[65] Racial motivations were central to Nazi ideology and played a key role in planning for Operation Barbarossa since both Jews and communists were considered equivalent enemies of the Nazi state. Nazi imperialist ambitions rejected the common humanity of both groups, declaring the supreme struggle for Lebensraum to be a Vernichtungskrieg ('war of annihilation').[66][44]
German-Soviet relations of 1939–40
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On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact in Moscow known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.[67] A secret protocol to the pact outlined an agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union on the division of the eastern European border states between their respective "spheres of influence," Soviet Union and Germany would partition Poland in the event of an invasion by Germany, and the Soviets would be allowed to overrun Finland, Estonia, Latvia and the region of Bessarabia.[68] On 23 August 1939 the rest of the world learned of this pact but were unaware of the provisions to partition Poland.[69] The pact stunned the world because of the parties' earlier mutual hostility and their conflicting ideologies.[70] The conclusion of this pact was followed by the German invasion of Poland on 1 September that triggered the outbreak of World War II in Europe, then the Soviet invasion of Poland that led to the annexation of the eastern part of the country.[71] As a result of the pact, Germany and the Soviet Union maintained reasonably strong diplomatic relations for two years and fostered an important economic relationship. The countries entered a trade pact in 1940 by which the Soviets received German military equipment and trade goods in exchange for raw materials, such as oil and wheat, to help the German war effort by circumventing the British blockade of Germany.[72]
Despite the parties' ostensibly cordial relations, each side was highly suspicious of the other's intentions. For instance, the Soviet invasion of Bukovina in June 1940 went beyond their sphere of influence as agreed with Germany.[73] After Germany entered the Axis Pact with Japan and Italy, it began negotiations about a potential Soviet entry into the pact.[74] After two days of negotiations in Berlin from 12 to 14 November 1940, Germany presented a written proposal for a Soviet entry into the Axis. On 25 November 1940, the Soviet Union offered a written counter-proposal to join the Axis if Germany would agree to refrain from interference in the Soviet Union's sphere of influence, but Germany did not respond.[74] As both sides began colliding with each other in Eastern Europe, conflict appeared more likely, although they did sign a border and commercial agreement addressing several open issues in January 1941. According to historian Robert Service, Joseph Stalin was convinced that the overall military strength of the Soviet Union was such that he had nothing to fear and anticipated an easy victory should Germany attack; moreover, Stalin believed that since the Germans were still fighting the British in the west, Hitler would be unlikely to open up a two-front war and subsequently delayed the reconstruction of defensive fortifications in the border regions.[75] When German soldiers swam across the Bug River to warn the Red Army of an impending attack, they were shot as enemy agents.[76] Some historians believe that Stalin, despite providing an amicable front to Hitler, did not wish to remain allies with Germany. Rather, Stalin might have had intentions to break off from Germany and proceed with his own campaign against Germany to be followed by one against the rest of Europe.[77] Other historians contend that Stalin did not plan for such an attack in June 1941, given the parlous state of the Red Army at the time of the invasion.[78]
Axis invasion plans
Stalin's reputation as a brutal dictator contributed both to the Nazis' justification of their assault and to their expectations of success, as Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930s had executed many competent and experienced military officers, leaving Red Army leadership weaker than their German adversary. The Nazis often emphasized the Soviet regime's brutality when targeting the Slavs with propaganda.[79] They also claimed that the Red Army was preparing to attack the Germans, and their own invasion was thus presented as a pre-emptive strike.[79]
Hitler also utilised the rising tension between the Soviet Union and Germany over territories in the Balkans as one of the pretexts for the invasion.[80] While no concrete plans had yet been made, Hitler told one of his generals in June 1940 that the victories in Western Europe finally freed his hands for a "final showdown" with Bolshevism.[81] With the successful end to the campaign in France, General Erich Marcks was assigned the task of drawing up the initial invasion plans of the Soviet Union. The first battle plans were entitled Operation Draft East (colloquially known as the Marcks Plan).[82] His report advocated the A-A line as the operational objective of any invasion of the Soviet Union. This assault would extend from the northern city of Arkhangelsk on the Arctic Sea through Gorky and Rostov to the port city of Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga on the Caspian Sea. The report concluded that—once established—this military border would reduce the threat to Germany from attacks by enemy bombers.[82]
Although Hitler was warned by many high-ranking military officers, such as Friedrich Paulus, that occupying Western Russia would create "more of a drain than a relief for Germany's economic situation," he anticipated compensatory benefits such as the demobilisation of entire divisions to relieve the acute labour shortage in German industry, the exploitation of Ukraine as a reliable and immense source of agricultural products, the use of forced labour to stimulate Germany's overall economy and the expansion of territory to improve Germany's efforts to isolate the United Kingdom.[83] Hitler was further convinced that Britain would sue for peace once the Germans triumphed in the Soviet Union,[84] and if they did not, he would use the resources gained in the East to defeat the British Empire.[85]
We only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.[86]
— —Adolf Hitler
Hitler received the final military plans for the invasion on 5 December 1940, which the German High Command had been working on since July 1940, under the codename "Operation Otto." Upon reviewing the plans, Hitler formally committed Germany to the invasion when he issued Führer Directive 21 on 18 December 1940, where he outlined the precise manner in which the operation was to be carried out.[87] Hitler also renamed the operation to Barbarossa in honor of medieval Emperor Friedrich I of the Holy Roman Empire, a leader of the Third Crusade in the 12th century.[88] The Barbarossa Decree, issued by Hitler on 30 March 1941, supplemented the Directive by decreeing that the war against the Soviet Union would be one of annihilation and legally sanctioned the eradication of all Communist political leaders and intellectual elites in Eastern Europe.[89] The invasion was tentatively set for May 1941, but it was delayed for over a month to allow for further preparations and possibly better weather.[90]
the purpose of the Russian campaign the decimation of the Slavic population by thirty million.
According to a 1978 essay by German historian Andreas Hillgruber, the invasion plans drawn up by the German military elite were substantially coloured by hubris, stemming from the rapid defeat of France at the hands of the "invincible" Wehrmacht and by traditional German stereotypes of Russia as a primitive, backward "Asiatic" country.[g] Red Army soldiers were considered brave and tough, but the officer corps was held in contempt. The leadership of the Wehrmacht paid little attention to politics, culture, and the considerable industrial capacity of the Soviet Union, in favour of a very narrow military view.[94] Hillgruber argued that because these assumptions were shared by the entire military elite, Hitler was able to push through with a "war of annihilation" that would be waged in the most inhumane fashion possible with the complicity of "several military leaders," even though it was quite clear that this would be in violation of all accepted norms of warfare.[94]
Even so, in autumn 1940, some high-ranking German military officials drafted a memorandum to Hitler on the dangers of an invasion of the Soviet Union. They argued that the eastern territories (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic) would only end up as a further economic burden for Germany.[95] It was further argued that the Soviets, in their current bureaucratic form, were harmless and that the occupation would not benefit Germany politically either.[95] Hitler, solely focused on his ultimate ideological goal of eliminating the Soviet Union and Communism, disagreed with economists about the risks and told his right-hand man Hermann Göring, the chief of the Luftwaffe, that he would no longer listen to misgivings about the economic dangers of a war with the USSR.[96] It is speculated that this was passed on to General Georg Thomas, who had produced reports that predicted a net economic drain for Germany in the event of an invasion of the Soviet Union unless its economy was captured intact and the Caucasus oilfields seized in the first blow; Thomas revised his future report to fit Hitler's wishes.[96] The Red Army's ineptitude in the Winter War against Finland in 1939–40 also convinced Hitler of a quick victory within a few months. Neither Hitler nor the General Staff anticipated a long campaign lasting into the winter and therefore, adequate preparations such as the distribution of warm clothing and winterisation of important military equipment like tanks and artillery, were not made.[97]
Further to Hitler's Directive, Göring's Green Folder, issued in March 1941, laid out the agenda for the next step after the anticipated quick conquest of the Soviet Union. The Hunger Plan outlined how entire urban populations of conquered territories were to be starved to death, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and urban space for the German upper class.[98] Nazi policy aimed to destroy the Soviet Union as a political entity in accordance with the geopolitical Lebensraum ideals for the benefit of future generations of the "Nordic master race".[79] In 1941, Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg—later appointed Reich Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories—suggested that conquered Soviet territory should be administered in the following Reichskommissariate ('Reich Commissionerships'):