On June 22, 1941, the army of Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and launched the so-called military operation “Barbarossa“.
In November 1940, plans for the operation were drawn up, which were approved by Hitler in Directive No. 21, dated December 18, 1940 and entitled “Operation Barbarossa“. It was proposed that preparations for the attack be completed by 15 May 1941, and that by autumn the Germans should advance to a line running from Arkhangelsk to the Volga River.
Mussolini's Balkan Adventure Fatally Delays the Wehrmacht
The need for Germany to intervene in the Balkans against Greece and Yugoslavia delayed the attack by 7 weeks. On 22 June 1941, 159 German divisions, 42 Allied, 3.9 million men with 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses, supported by Romanian, Italian and Finnish troops, crossed the border on a 2,900-kilometre front. This was the largest invasion in military history.
Early on the morning of June 22, 1941, the armed forces of Nazi Germany (the Wehrmacht) attacked the USSR after declaring war. Three army groups - North, Center, and South - attacked the Red Army, directing their attacks on Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, respectively. The sudden onslaught of tanks, artillery, infantry, and aviation along the entire front from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea caught the Soviet troops off guard and allowed the Axis forces to penetrate deep into Soviet territory.
On December 5, the troops of the Kalinin Front north of Moscow launched a counteroffensive, followed on December 6 by the Western and Southwestern Fronts south of the capital. Despite the harsh winter conditions, in the first days the Red Army broke through the enemy's defenses south of Kalinin and northwest of Moscow and liberated a number of settlements, and on December 8 Hitler issued an order to switch to the defensive on the entire Eastern Front.
Operation “Barbarossa“ is the largest military operation in human history in terms of number of troops and casualties.
It opened the Eastern Front, on which more troops were deployed than in any other military theater in world history.
The regions covered by the operation became the site of some of the largest battles, with the highest number of casualties and the most terrible conditions, for both the Russians and the Germans.