Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's failed invasion of Russia

On the 22nd of June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of a campaign that would ultimately decide the Second World War. At first, the Germans enjoyed stunning success. The panzers forged ahead while the Luftwaffe ruled the skies. Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed Germany seemed to be on the brink of another major victory. But the Soviet Union did not crumble as expected, and despite terrible losses, their will to fight remained strong. German casualties mounted as they came agonisingly close to taking Moscow. Just 20 miles short of their objective, the Soviets launched a sudden counter-attack, forcing the Germans onto the defensive. It was Hitler's first defeat on land in the Second World War. But how did it happen? Why did Operation Barbarossa come so close to success before falling at the final hurdle? Well, before we answer that question, a reminder to subscribe to the Imperial War Museum's YouTube channel for more videos just like this every two weeks. Adolf Hitler begins planning to invade the Soviet Union as early as July 1940, before the Battle of Britain actually takes place. Even back in Mein Kampf in the mid-1920s, he's planning to attack the Soviet Union. This is going to be the battleground on which National Socialism's ideology either wins out or found us. One of the tenets of that ideology was the idea of Lebensraum or living space. The creation of a Germanic Aryan empire in Eastern Europe that would grant the resources needed for self-sufficiency. Having defeated France and the Low Countries in just six weeks, Germany was confident of capturing that land from the Soviet Union. Hitler believed that communist society was fundamentally weak and that it wouldn't take much to defeat it. His famous quote is that all we've got to do is kick the door in and the whole edifice will come crumbling down. The Germans are not only planning on a fast blitzkrieg campaign that's going to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in six to eight weeks, but they need a fast victory. They can't have a slow attritional war because there's not enough reserves of men and material to turn this into a long war. We need to win quickly. To achieve that victory, Germany mustered the largest invasion force in the history of warfare to that point. Three army groups set out for three different targets. Army Group North heading for Leningrad, Army Group Centre aiming for Moscow, and Army Group South heading for Kiev. The whole strategy is a resumption of the blitzkrieg idea that's been so successful in France. That is, you win by not fighting. If you want to find out more about blitzkrieg and how it works, I've put a link to our video on the subject in the description. When the operation commenced on the 22nd of June 1941, those tactics worked perfectly, the advance exceeding all expectations. Hundreds of thousands of troops were captured as German tanks steamed through the Soviet defences. The Germans begin the campaign by basically destroying the Soviet air force on the ground. They catch them by surprise. The Soviet air force is basically destroyed, which enables the German army to move freely across the battlefield, thrust deep into the Russian interior and encircle the frontier armies. The Soviet army was taken completely by surprise and had not had time to fortify their new border in Poland, while Stalin's purges of the Soviet officer corps left his army poorly led. Whereas in the Battle of France, the French and British armies would see themselves just about to get cut off and would decide, oh, time to retreat, the Soviet armies are so slow, so badly led, that they don't have time to pull back. They get encircled, completely cut off, hundreds of thousands of men. However, there is a problem. By the time they reached this point, Germany expected to have destroyed the Russian field armies and that the remaining surge towards Moscow would be more of a parade than a battle. But the Germans had completely underestimated the size of the Soviet army. They're going to invade with about three million men and they expect the total Soviet army to be roughly the same. Whereas in actual fact, by Christmas 1941, German armies have captured three million Soviet soldiers and they're still fighting. Those vast distances covered by the German panzers made them more and more difficult to supply, while Soviet soldiers unexpectedly continued to fight. So actually these big encirclements behind the German lines became a real problem in that they could now attack into the German lines of communication and cut them off from the front line. So at this point Hitler said, well, hang on, stop. Despite protests from the German generals, Army Group Centre stopped its attack on Moscow and peeled off to the left and right to help destroy the Soviet pockets that were still fighting. Killing or capturing hundreds of thousands more Soviet soldiers in huge battles of annihilation. By mid-September, the Soviet field armies were finally finished and the drive on Moscow could begin. This pause to look behind and clear up behind, to allow everybody to catch up, it gives a breather for the Soviets to redefine their own front line and bring up more units into the front line, dig in before Moscow. So there's now a completely new defence line that the Germans have to break through when they recommence the offensive. And that wasn't the only problem for Germany. Though these new troops were under-supplied and under-trained, new supplies were beginning to arrive from Britain. Many of the divisions don't have uniforms, they're just civilian clothes. Some of the divisions, they have to share rifles, there's not enough rifles to go around. At the same time, the first Arctic convoys are arriving in Murmansk and Archangel, bringing supplies from Britain, just giving enough equipment for the Soviets to sort of stay in the field. On top of that, the Soviets had managed to relocate their factories from in front of the advancing Germans to the Ural mountains. That meant war production was actually kicking up and they were able to get more tanks like the new T-34 into the front line. Worst of all though, was the rapidly deteriorating Russian weather. Through October, it's the Soviet autumn, so what happens is you have snowfalls, thaw, snowfall, thaw, you get completely muddy morass across all of central Russia. So the German offensive begins to grind to a halt, both because they're coming up against this new defensive line that they didn't really expect, plus the Soviet weather's getting in the way, plus the fact that now most German formations, especially the armoured formations at the tip of the sphere, are now down to about 50 percent strength. They get to 20 kilometers away from Moscow and by that stage the weather has now turned completely. It's now full-blown Soviet winter. By the end of November you've got more German troops in hospital with frostbite than you have with wounds. The offensive was over, but looking at the whole picture as Barbarossa came to a halt, Germany still seemed to be in a good position. Army Group North was sure that the besieged Leningrad was about to fall. Army of Moscow and Army Group South had taken the Ukraine and Kiev. When the new year came they planned to finish the job, however little did they know the Soviets had an ace up their sleeve. They managed to transfer the majority of those Russian divisions which were on the eastern side of the Soviet Union, those that had been facing Mongolia and the Japanese, because they'd learned that the Japanese were not going to attack. These weren't green untrained troops, these were proper Soviet field divisions and many of them had been trained for winter warfare because they're from Siberia. Unlike the exhausted Germans they would be facing, these troops had winter camouflage and weapons that could survive the extreme cold. On December 6th they counter-attacked. And they launched this big Soviet counter-offensive in front of the gates of Moscow and catch the Germans completely by surprise and force them onto the retreat and that's the end of Barbarossa. Hitler's ideological assumption that Soviet society would collapse when they kicked the door in could not have been further from the truth. The Germans needed a quick victory but the Soviets had managed to stay in the fight and turn the blitzkrieg Barbarossa into a war of production. The Germans are now being forced into a war of attrition. A long, grinding, slow war in the Soviet interior, in this case in wintertime, and things are looking bad for the Germans because they haven't got the men and materiel to face up to the Soviet armies on a one-to-one basis. Despite Barbarossa's failure to finish the Soviets quickly, a new German offensive began in 1942. Under Hitler's direct orders the target was the Caucasus in the south and a city called Stalingrad. The German generals wanted to resume the push on Moscow but Hitler insisted that Germany needed the oil fields in Azerbaijan to supply their armies. Though it escaped his generals, Hitler had now realised this was a war of attrition and material, whether he liked it or not.