What was operation barbarossa named after

By late December , the Germans had lost the Battle for Moscow, and the invasion had cost the German army over , casualties in killed, wounded, captured, or missing in action. Operation Barbarossa was the largest military operation in human history—more men, tanks, guns, and aircraft were committed than had ever been deployed before in a single offensive.

Seventy-five percent of the entire German military participated. The invasion opened up the Eastern Front of World War II, the largest theater of war during that conflict, which witnessed titanic clashes of unprecedented violence and destruction for four years that resulted in the deaths of more than 26 million people. Damage to both the economy and landscape was enormous for the Soviets as approximately 1, towns and 70, villages were completely annihilated.

More than just ushering in untold death and devastation, Operation Barbarossa and the subsequent German failure to achieve their objectives changed the political landscape of Europe, dividing it into eastern and western blocs. The gaping political vacuum left in the eastern half of the continent was filled by the USSR when Stalin secured his territorial prizes of —40 and firmly placed his Red Army in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the eastern half of Germany.

As a consequence, eastern Europe became Communist in political disposition and western Europe fell under the democratic sway of the United States, a nation uncertain about its future policies in Europe. Operation Barbarossa: Clockwise from top left: German soldiers advance through Northern Russia, German flamethrower team in the Soviet Union, Soviet planes flying over German positions near Moscow, Soviet prisoners of war on the way to German prison camps, Soviet soldiers fire at German positions.

Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Search for:. Operation Barbarossa Despite their successes, the German offensive stalled on the outskirts of Moscow and was subsequently pushed back by a Soviet counteroffensive, bolstered by the fact that the German army was unprepared for the harsh Soviet winter. The failure of Operation Barbarossa was a turning point in the fortunes of the Third Reich, including opening up the Eastern Front, to which more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in world history, and transforming the perception of the Soviet Union from aggressor to victim.

Weltanschauungen A particular philosophy or view of life; the worldview of an individual or group. Licenses and Attributions. And in the peculiar mathematics of this bloodbath of a campaign, the Soviets could replace their losses more efficiently than the Germans could. How about strategic significance? For most of the war, percent of the Wehrmacht had to be deployed in the East, a preponderance dictated by the sheer size of the front, and 80 percent of German war dead perished there: about four million of the five million German soldiers killed in World War II.

Roosevelt and Churchill both knew who was killing the most Germans, and their wartime policies like Lend-Lease were designed to help the Soviets do just that. In fact, the one strategic nightmare the Allies could never dispel was the possibility that at some point, Stalin might decide to come to terms with Hitler and drop out of the war. A separate peace would have transformed the war in Europe into a very different contest indeed, and a much more expensive proposition for the Western Powers.

So, line up those superlatives when discussing Operation Barbarossa. It really was the biggest war of all time. This essay offers some ways of thinking about how to make sense of the complicated post-war moment through the case of Yugoslavia. During the German invasion of the USSR, the Soviet Secret Police NKVD brutally murdered between 10, and 40, political prisoners in Western Ukraine over the course of eight days, which sparked waves of ethnic violence following the German occupation of the region.

Hitler and his staff kept driving German troops onward to Moscow to impel Imperial Japan to enter the war. Eastern Front. Article Type.

But it is interesting how Stalin rejected every single warning he got. Not just from the British but even from his own diplomats and spies. The answer may lie in the fact that, ever since the Spanish Civil War , he was convinced that anyone living abroad had been corrupted and was somehow instinctively anti-Soviet.

He was convinced it was all an English provocation to force a fight with Germany. It is extraordinary though. You would have thought he would have done a little bit of research on the range of British bombers, which at the time were so weak that they were incapable of making any serious dent into German forces.

This would have taken them past Moscow and more or less beyond the line of the Volga. This is why, when it came to the battle of Stalingrad, many German troops felt that if they could only capture the city and get to the Volga they would have won the war. The plan was that any Soviet troops who had survived after the great battles in the early part of Barbarossa would simply be a rump and could be kept under control by bombing. Meanwhile, the conquered areas of Russia and Ukraine would be opened up for German settlement and colonisation.

According to the Nazi Hunger Plan, the population of the major cities would have been starved to death. They reckoned on 35 million being killed. Some battles of this kind did indeed take place. Kiev, for example, was one of the largest battles in world history in terms of the number of prisoners taken.

In late October , in a moment of panic, Stalin approached the Bulgarian ambassador Stamenov and told him that he thought Moscow was going to be captured and that everything would fall to pieces.

Even if you withdraw to the Urals, you will win in the end. The sheer size of the country meant that the Wehrmacht and their Romanian and Hungarian allies never had enough troops for the occupation and conquest of such a huge area. Secondly, Hitler had failed to learn a lesson from the Japanese assault on China, where another highly mechanised and technically superior force attacked a country with a vast landmass.

It showed that you can certainly win in the beginning but the shock and awe of cruelty, which Hitler also used against the Soviet Union, ends up provoking as much resistance as it does panic and chaos. Hitler never took this into account. Hitler was actually very conscious of Napoleon. That helped account for the delay in reaching Moscow. Some have argued that if Hitler had ignored Leningrad he could have captured Moscow. His refusal to allow withdrawals, particularly from the Kiev encirclement, meant the loss of hundreds of thousands of men.

It was only really in the last stage of the retreat to Moscow that Stalin was allowing more flexibility, and it was a good thing that he did because it preserved enough troops to save the city. There was no chance of any overthrow by popular revolt or anything like that. In fact, there was very little criticism because nobody really knew what was happening and the anger of the people at that particular stage was entirely focused on the Germans and their treasonous breaking of the Nazi-Soviet pact.