Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa
Part of the Eastern Front of World War II
Clockwise from top-left: German soldiers advance through northern Russia German flamethrower crew burns down a house in the background German Panzer IV stuck in the snow with white camouflage paint Soviet Ilyushin Il-2s over German positions near Moscow Soviet POWs on the way to prison camps Soviet soldiers fire artillery
Date 22 June 1941 – 5 December 1941 (5 months and 13 days) Location Western Soviet Union Result Axis strategic failure Territorial changes Axis captured approximately 600,000 sq mi (1,600,000 km2) of Soviet territory but failed to reach the A-A line
Belligerents
Germany[a]  Romania  Finland  Italy[b]  Hungary  Slovakia	Soviet Union
Commanders and leaders
Adolf Hitler Wilhelm Keitel Alfred Jodl Walther von Brauchitsch Franz Halder Hermann Göring Hans Jeschonnek Fedor von Bock Gerd von Rundstedt Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb Ion Antonescu C.G.E. Mannerheim	Joseph Stalin Georgy Zhukov Boris Shaposhnikov Aleksandr Vasilevsky Kliment Voroshilov Semyon Timoshenko Semyon Budyonny Pavel Zhigarev Markian Popov Fyodor Kuznetsov Dmitry Pavlov  Andrey Yeremenko Mikhail Kirponos † Ivan Tyulenev
Units involved
Axis armies: Army Group North 16th Army 18th Army 4th Panzer Army Army Group Centre 2nd Army 4th Army 9th Army 2nd Panzer Army 3rd Panzer Army Army Group South 6th Army 11th Army 17th Army 1st Panzer Army 3rd Army 4th Army Independent armies: Army of Norway Army of Karelia	Soviet armies: Northern Front 7th Army 8th Army 48th Army 52nd Army 54th Army 55th Army Northwestern Front 11th Army 27th Army 34th Army Western Front 3rd Army 10th Army 13th Army 16th Army 19th Army 20th Army 22nd Army 24th Army 28th Army 40th Army 50th Army Southwestern Front 5th Army 6th Army 12th Army 21st Army 26th Army 37th Army Southern Front 9th Army 18th Army Coastal Army
Strength
Frontline strength (22 June 1941) 3.8 million personnel[1][2] 3,350–3,795 tanks[3][1][4][5] 3,030–3,072 other AFVs[6][c] 2,770–5,369 aircraft[3][7] 7,200–23,435 artillery pieces[1][3][5] 17,081 mortars[5] 600,000 horses[8] 600,000 vehicles[8]	Frontline strength (22 June 1941) 2.6–2.9 million personnel[9][10] 11,000 tanks[11][12] 7,133–9,100 military aircraft[13][14][15]
Casualties and losses
Total military casualties: 1,000,000+[d] Breakdown Casualties of 1941: According to German Army medical reports (including Army Norway):[16] 186,452 killed 40,157 missing 655,179 wounded in action[e] 8,000 evacuated sick 2,827 aircraft destroyed[17] 2,735 tanks destroyed[4][18] 104 assault guns destroyed[4][18] Other involved country losses 114,000+ casualties (at least 39,000 dead or missing)[19] 75,000 casualties (26,355 dead) in Karelia[20] 5,000+ casualties during Operation Silver Fox.[21] 8,700 casualties[22] 4,420 casualties[f]	Total military casualties: 4,500,000 Breakdown Casualties of 1941: Based on Soviet archives:[24] 566,852 killed in action (101,471 of whom died in hospital of wounds) 235,339 died from non-combat causes 1,336,147 sick or wounded via combat and non-combat causes 2,335,482 missing in action or captured 21,200 aircraft, of which 10,600 were lost to combat[17] 20,500 tanks destroyed[25]

Operation Barbarossa^[g] was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and several of its European Axis allies starting on 22 June 1941, during World War II. More than 3.8 million Axis troops invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front, with the main goal of capturing territory up to a line between Arkhangelsk and Astrakhan (A-A line). The attack became the largest and costliest military offensive in history, with around 10 million combatants taking part^[26] and over 8 million casualties by the end of the operation on 5 December 1941.^[27][28] It marked a major escalation of World War II, opening the Eastern Front—the largest and deadliest land theatre of war in history—and bringing the Soviet Union into the Allied powers.

The operation, code-named after the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa ("red beard"), put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goals of eradicating communism and conquering the western Soviet Union to repopulate it with Germans under Generalplan Ost, which planned for the extermination of the native Slavic peoples by mass deportation to Siberia, Germanisation, enslavement, and genocide.^[29][30] The material targets of the invasion were the agricultural and mineral resources of territories such as Ukraine and Byelorussia and oil fields in the Caucasus. The Axis eventually captured five million Soviet Red Army troops on the Eastern Front^[31] and deliberately starved to death or otherwise killed 3.3 million prisoners of war, as well as millions of civilians.^[32] Mass shootings and gassing operations, carried out by German paramilitary death squads and collaborators,^[h] murdered over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust.^[34] In the two years leading up to the invasion, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in July 1940, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the country, which was approved by Adolf Hitler in December. In early 1941, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, despite receiving intelligence about an imminent attack, did not order a mobilization of the Red Army, fearing that it might provoke Germany. As a result, Soviet forces were largely caught unprepared when the invasion began, with many units positioned poorly and understrength.

The invasion began on 22 June 1941 with a massive ground and air assault, resulting in large territorial gains for the Nazis and their allies. The main part of Army Group South invaded from occupied Poland on 22 June and on 2 July was joined by a combination of German and Romanian forces attacking from Romania. Kiev was captured on 19 September, which was followed by the captures of Kharkov on 24 October and Rostov-on-Don on 20 November, by which time most of Crimea had been captured. Army Group North overran the Baltic lands and on 8 September 1941, began a siege of Leningrad accompanied by Finnish forces, which ultimately lasted until 1944. Army Group Centre, the strongest of the three, captured Smolensk in late July 1941 before beginning its drive on Moscow on 2 October. Facing logistical problems with supply, slowed by muddy terrain, not fully outfitted for Russia's brutal winter, and coping with determined Soviet resistance, Army Group Center's offensive stalled at the city's outskirts by 5 December, at which point the Soviets began a major counteroffensive.

The failure of Operation Barbarossa reversed the fortunes of Nazi Germany.^[35] Operationally, it achieved significant victories and occupied some of the most important economic regions of the Soviet Union, captured millions of prisoners, and inflicted heavy casualties. The German high command anticipated a quick collapse of resistance as in the invasion of Poland, but instead the Red Army absorbed the German Wehrmacht's strongest blows and bogged it down in a war of attrition for which Germany was unprepared. Following the heavy losses and logistical strain of Barbarossa, German forces could no longer attack along the entire front, and their subsequent operations—such as Case Blue in 1942 and Operation Citadel in 1943—ultimately failed.

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