Horse drawn German artillery crossing Soviet border marker, June 22, 1941.
On this day in 1941, Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, commenced. It was a Sunday, expressing the recent German preference for commencing offensive operations on the traditional Christian sabbath and day of rest.
Crowded road with German armor.
German preparations for the invasion had been going on nearly all year and upwards of 3,000,000 German troops and 690,000 other Axis troops, Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovakian and Finnish, had been mobilized for the assault that commenced on this day. The original D-Day had been set for May 15, but delay was created by the German invasion of Yugoslavia brought about by its determination to aid the Italian campaign in Greece. Indeed, between May 15 and this date, Yugoslavia had been invaded, the Germans had conducted their own offensive in Greece, and Crete had been invaded by air. The Germans had also engaged in major offensive operations in Libya.
During the month long interim the invasion plan was changed a bit, as Finland was brought into it and four German divisions pre-staged there. Romania was also brought into it. Italy had ultimately been brought into it as well, in spite of an abysmal combat performance in Greece and North Africa. Whether it reflected a dawning realization of how difficult the operation was going to be or not, the net result was that what had originally been planned as a German offensive had actually taken on the character of a truly Axis one, albeit one which was by far dominated by the Germans.
It would significantly omit, however, the one Axis power which had the potential to really greatly compound Soviet difficulties, that being Japan, which was at that time focused on plans to bring the sole remaining major neutral on the globe into the war, that being the United States. Japan was aware of the German intent, but did not reformulate its own plans.
Slovak soldiers taking Soviet prisoners.
The German army made massive initial gains, although there were problems with the vast territorial campaign right from the onset. Nonetheless, even its allies, whose forces were far inferior to the Germans, did well in the offensive.
The invasion committed Germany and its allies to a war against a massive well armed enemy in a campaign of conquest that depended upon speed, surprise and Soviet incompetence. At first, all three of those were realized, but the speed alone required to defeat the Red Army by the winter of 1941, which was the goal, was something that even conceptually is difficult in retrospect to imagine as being possible. Much about the German campaign seemed to rely on hubris combined with the assumption that reaching certain landmarks equated with victory. Perhaps they may be somewhat excused for their assumptions by their defeat of the Imperial Russian Army in 1917 and the subsequent collapse of Red opposition to the Imperial German Army in 1917-1918, but the Soviets of 1941 were not the same opponent, in any sense, that had been faced during the First World War.
The invasion itself was accompanied by German, Italian and Romanian declarations of war. Hitler issued a speech with justifications for the war, but the initial German public reaction was shock and fear. Stalin also went into shock and near seclusion, being effectively paralyzed by the invasion. Upon being visited by his minions he reacted with surprise that they had not come to execute him. Indeed, given the typical Soviet penalty for failure, that Stalin wasn't summarily shot is amazing. Winston Church also addressed the Allies, noting that the Soviets were now Allies. Privately Churchill was overjoyed by the German invasion realizing, far in advance of others, that it would lead to German defeat.
Whether the German invasion could have been successful if only this or that had occurred has often been debated by armchair generals, but frankly no Nazi conquest of the Soviet Union was possible. Nazi ideology guaranteed that a Russian population that initially welcomed the Wehrmacht would soon despise it, and no German invasion of the Soviet Union would have occurred but for Hitler.
On the same day, and not coincidentally, a rebellion broke out in Lithuania that sought to restore that country to its independence.
Lithuanian insurrectionist with Soviet prisoner.
The Lithuanian insurrection would result in the proclamation of a provisional government, but in order for it to survive, it would have needed German support, which it lacked. The Germans quickly operated to make it moot and it dissolved, under protest, on August 5. Lithuania then joined the ranks of occupied countries, having switched Soviet occupation for German occupation.
The German reaction to the Lithuanian rebellion was telling in numerous ways. The Germans had come not as liberators but rather as conquerors and territorial extirpators. The Nazi plan for the East was to expand into it, resettle the territory with Germans, and to make slaves of its surviving Slavic occupants. Initially, it planned to incorporate large portions of the Baltic states as well as a large portion of Ukraine into the the German Reich, basing those settlements on areas that German minorities had lived in prior to 1918, or still did. Indeed, Germans living in those areas would soon find themselves liable for conscription, something that many would come to regret. Ultimately the grain growing belt of the East would have been entirely German, if the Nazis had managed to pull the invasion successfully off.
Given the utter chaos of the Nazi government throughout its existence, and the pressures of the war, the Germans never fully implemented their postwar plans and, beyond that, they never fully formulated them. They did commence to do so, however, murdering Slavic residents of the region. Long-term plans that were developed called for the extermination of the Poles, and the expulsion of the Lithuanians, Latvians and many other Slavs. Starving the Ukrainians to death was planned and commenced.
It should be noted that it is sometimes the case to make Operation Barbarossa a demarcation point for German conduct in the war and to almost excuse their conduct prior to that. This is really not possible, however. It is true that German conduct grew worse after Barbarossa, but all of the elements of German barbarity were already present. Germany was already engaging in mass murder in Poland and it was already rounding up the Jewish population of regions it occupied and pressuring the same from those states which it influenced. Germany was not about to commence murder, it was already doing it had had been doing so since September, 1939.
All of this makes German conduct all the more inexcusable following this date. In spite of what some may later wish to claim, every German was aware by this date that its government was homicidal and racists. German troops had been ordered into murder in Poland already and had shot civilians, under the pretext of their being franc tireurs, in Crete. At home the Nazi government was exterminating the mentally impaired and had recently banned the Catholic press, with which it was having difficulty. Germany massed 3,000,000 men for the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and very few of those men could have had any realistic doubt about the nature of the regime they were marking for.
Because of all of these horrors, and more, historians have often wondered how it was that a nation that had seemed so cultured could have fallen so low. No really acceptable answer has ever been provided. Comparisons to the Soviets and the Japanese have largely failed. Both Japan and Russia had populations that were much less technologically advanced and much less in communication with each other, let alone the outside world, which seems, perhaps to put them in a different category.
Hilaire Belloc, the great English writer, once expressed the opinion that the English in the Reformation had fallen into a unique category as, in his view, the northern tier of Europe that had gone into the Lutheran sphere had never really been Christianized and the Christianity there merely a thin veneer. It's tempting to look at the events of the Second World War as proving that true, but there's more than a little reason to doubt that, including that the Scandinavians were never attracted to Nazi barbarity and had been many examples of devotion to the principals of Christianity both before and after the 1500s. Something, however, went deeply wrong with Germany of the 20th Century in ways that are almost indescribable.
Operation Barbarossa has been rightly noted as a major turning point in the war for a lot of reasons. By this point in the war the Japanese had already commenced planning to strike the United States, so an entry of the US into the war, which likely would have tipped the balance permanently in favor of the Allies, was already in the works, but invading the Soviet Union guaranteed a German defeat. The Russians were impossible for the Germans to defeat without the Russians agreeing they were beaten, and unlike 1914-1918, the Moscow government did not have an internal enemy that was organized and conspiring for its overthrow. Indeed, the barbarity of the German invasion guaranteed that would not occur.
Of course, major German defeats on land were all in the future. And the German army had won victory after victory. But even here, it's hard to wonder why things didn't give them pause. If the Germans hadn't been defeated yet on land in any major engagement, the British army had proven again and again to be highly resilient even in defeat. If the British hadn't defeated the German in North Africa, they had defeated the Italians and the Vichy French, and they had proven that on the defense they were capable of resisting the Germans in Libya. The British had, moreover, won in the Battle of Britain and while the Luftwaffe continued to bomb the United Kingdom at night, the Blitz was over. The Royal Air Force, moreover was hitting Germany itself from the nocturnal air. The Royal Navy had ended the Kreigsmarine U-boot "happy time", even if it hadn't won the Battle of the Atlantic, and the U.S. Navy was already somewhat of a problem for the Germans. The United States, under Franklin Roosevelt, was getting as close to combat with the Germans as it could, without declaring war, and the Germans could not afford to declare war on the US.
All in all, the Germans not only had to hope for a short victorious war against the Soviet Union, having invaded it, they had utterly no choice but to win one. Failing to defeat the Soviets by the winter would force Germany into a long protracted bloodletting it couldn't win and should know that it couldn't win. So the gamble was not only that it could defeat the USSR, but that it would do so well before the end of the year.
That was a foolish thing to plan on. But the Germans having followed Hitler into Poland in 1939 had guaranteed a war against the Soviets soon thereafter. Germany couldn't win a long war against multiple opponents and the Nazis couldn't avoid attacking the USSR.
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