BARBAROSSA

The name for Operation Barbarossa, the code-name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the Second World War, came from the medieval Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, a leader of the Third Crusade in the 12th century. The invasion by Adolf Hitler’s armoured and infantry forces opened on 22 June 1941. It was the largest operation in military history, an epic undertaking involving more than four million troops on the German side alone, and their 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses. They came in to make war along an 1,800-mile front. The adventure would finally cost the German Army ninety-five percent of all its casualties in the war. In the action the Germans took more than three million Soviet prisoners of war. They were not protected by the conditions of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war and most of them never returned alive, having been systematically worked and starved to death by their captors, a part of the Nazi plan to reduce the Eastern European population. The ultimate failure of Barbarossa would turn the tide of the war against Germany.

Sunday morning. 22 June 1941. Just as the early morning raid by aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy on the ships and facilities of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Sunday, 7 December 1941 would surprise the men of the U.S. Navy, the arrival of German Panzer divisions surprised the Russians. The German forces overran the Soviet positions and advanced a substantial distance before the Russians were able to react.

While serving a prison sentence in 1924, Hitler was at work on his two-volume Mein Kampf (My Battle), in which he wrote of the German people’s need for lebensraum (increased living space, land and raw materials) and how this should be accessed in the East. His National Socialist ideology identified the people of the Soviet Union as untermenschen or subhuman. He claimed that it was Germany’s destiny to end the Jewish domination of Russia and how, through an inescapable battle against Pan-Slav ideals, German victory would lead to a permanent mastery of the world. Nazi policy, according to Hitler, included the killing, deportation or enslavement of the the Russian and other Slavic peoples and the repopulation of their eastern lands with Germanic peoples.

Hitler believed that the Nazis would achieve their concept of the new world through depopulating the Soviet Union and eastern lands in a four-part policy beginning with a German blitzkrieg victory in the summer of 1941, leading to the collapse of the Soviets, as they had with Poland in 1939. This was to be followed with a campaign of starvation against the thirty million people inhabiting Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Caucasus through the winter of 1941-42 as the Germans diverted food from those regions to Germany and western Europe. This was to be followed by implementation of the Nazi plan to eliminate all Jews from the Soviet Union, Poland, and all of Europe in a ‘Final Solution’ programme. And finally, the completion of the Nazification of Europe and the East would follow with the deportation, enslavement, murder, or assimilation of all remaining peoples and the resettlement of eastern Europe by German colonists.