Operation Barbarossa
...of June 22, 1941, more than 3 million German
soldiers, 600 000 vehicles and 3350 tanks were amassed along a 2000km
front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Their sites were
all trained on Russia. This force was part of ‘Operation Barbarossa’,
the eastern front of the greatest military machine ever assembled.
This machine was Adolf Hitler’s German army. For Hitler, the
inevitable assault on Russia was to be the culmination of a long
standing obsession. He had always wanted Russia’s industries and
agricultural lands as part of his Lebensraum or ‘living space’ for
Germany and their Thousand Year Reich. Russia had been on Hitler’s
agenda since he wrote Mein Kampf some 17 years earlier where he
stated: ‘We terminate the endless German drive to the south and the
west of Europe, and direct our gaze towards the lands in the east…If
we talk about new soil and territory in Europe today, we can think
primarily only of Russia and its vassal border states’i Hitler wanted
to exterminate and enslave the ‘degenerate’ Slavs and he wanted to
obliterate their ‘Jewish Bolshevist’ government before it could turn
on him. His 1939 pact with Stalin was only meant to give Germany time
to prepare for war. As soon as Hitler controlled France, he looked
east. Insisting that Britain was as good as defeated, he wanted to
finish off the Soviet Union as soon as possible, before it could
significantly fortify and arm itself. ‘We only have to kick in the
front door and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling down’ii he
told his officers. His generals warned him of the danger of fighting a
war on two fronts and of the difficulty of invading an area as vast as
Russia but, Hitler simply overruled them. He then placed troops in
Finland and Romania and created his eastern front. In December 1940,
Hitler...
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