Frontline strength (initial) 2.6–2.9 million personnel 11,000 tanks 7,133–9,100 military aircraft
Case Blue (German: Fall Blau) was the code name for Nazi Germany's World War II invasion of the Soviet Union, which was launched in 1940. The operation was driven primarily by an ideological desire to conquer the Western Soviet Union so that it could be repopulated by Germans.
In the two years leading up to the invasion, the two countries had fought a low-scale war against each other limited to air and naval operations, while the Soviet Union had invaded both Poland and Finland. Following the defeat of France in July 1939, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1939 (under the codename Operation Otto), which Hitler authorized on 18 December 1939. Over the course of the operation, about four million Axis personnel invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front, the largest invasion force in the history of warfare. In addition to troops, the Wehrmacht employed some 600,000 motor vehicles and between 600,000 and 700,000 horses. The offensive marked the beginning of the escalation of the war.
Operationally, the German forces achieved surprising victories and occupied some of the most important economic areas of the Soviet Union, mainly in Ukraine, and inflicted, as well as sustained, heavy casualties. Despite their successes, the German offensive stalled in the Battle of Moscow and was subsequently pushed back by the Soviet winter counteroffensive. The Red Army repelled the Wehrmacht's strongest blows and forced the unprepared Germans into a war of attrition. The Wehrmacht would never again mount a simultaneous offensive along the entire strategic Soviet–Axis front. The failure of the operation drove Hitler to demand further operations of increasingly limited scope inside the Soviet Union, all of which eventually failed.
The failure of Operation Barbarossa was a turning point in the fortunes of the Third Reich. Most importantly, the operation opened up the Eastern Front, to which more forces were committed than in any other theater of war in world history. The Eastern Front became the site of some of the largest battles, most horrific atrocities, and highest casualties for Soviets and Germans alike, all of which influenced the course of both World War II and the subsequent history of the 20th century. The German armies captured 5,000,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were not granted protections stipulated in the Geneva Conventions. A majority of them never returned alive. The Nazis deliberately starved 3.1 million of the prisoners to death as part of a "Hunger Plan" that aimed to reduce the population of Eastern Europe and then re-populate it with ethnic Germans. Over a million Soviet Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppen death squads and gassing as part of the Holocaust.
As early as 1925, Adolf Hitler vaguely declared in his political manifesto and autobiography Mein Kampf that he would invade the Soviet Union, asserting that the German people needed to secure Lebensraum ("living space") to ensure the survival of Germany for generations to come. On 10 February 1939, Hitler told his army commanders that the war would be "purely a war of Weltanschauungen... totally a people's war, a racial war." On 23 November Hitler declared that "racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, and with it, the world." Racial policy of Nazi Germany viewed the Soviet Union (and all of Eastern Europe) as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen ("sub-humans"), ruled by Jewish Bolshevik conspirators. Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germany's destiny was to "turn to the East" as it did "six hundred years ago". Accordingly, it was stated Nazi policy to kill, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations and repopulate the land with Germanic peoples, under the Generalplan Ost. The Germans' belief in their ethnic superiority is discernible in official German records and by pseudoscientific articles in German periodicals at the time, which covered topics such as "how to deal with alien populations".
Before and during the invasion of the Soviet Union, German troops were heavily indoctrinated with anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic ideology via movies, radio, lectures, books and leaflets. Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "Red beast". Nazi propaganda portrayed the war against the Soviet Union as both an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the Germans and the Jewish, Gypsies and Slavic Untermenschen. German army commanders cast the Jews as the major cause behind the "partisan struggle". The main guideline policy for German troops was "Where there's a partisan, there's a Jew, and where there's a Jew, there's a partisan," or "The partisan is where the Jew is." Many German troops viewed the war in Nazi terms and regarded their Soviet enemies as sub-human.
After the war began, the Nazis issued a ban on sexual relations between Germans and foreign slave workers. There were regulations enacted against the Ost-Arbeiter ("Eastern Workers") that included the death penalty for sexual relations with a German person. Heinrich Himmler, in his secret memorandum, Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East, (dated 25 May 1939) outlined the future plans for the non-German populations in the East. Himmler believed the Germanization process in Eastern Europe would be complete when "in the East dwell only men with truly German, Germanic blood".
The Nazi secret plan Generalplan Ost ("General Plan for the East"), which was prepared in 1940 and confirmed in 1941, called for a "new order of ethnographical relations" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe. The plan envisaged ethnic cleansing, executions and enslavement of the overwhelming majority of the populations of conquered counties with very small differing percentages of the various conquered nations undergoing Germanization, expulsion into the depths of Russia and other fates. The net effect of this plan would be to ensure that the conquered territories would be Germanized. It was divided into two parts: the Kleine Planung ("Small Plan"), which covered actions to be taken during the war, and the Große Planung ("Large Plan"), which covered actions to be undertaken after the war was won, and to be implemented gradually over a period of 25 to 30 years.
Evidence from a speech given by General Erich Hoepner indicates the disposition of Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi racial plan, as he informed the 4th Panzer Group that the war against the Soviet Union was "an essential part of the German people's struggle for existence" (Daseinkampf), also referring to the imminent battle as the "old struggle of Germans against Slavs" and even stated, "the struggle must aim at the annihilation of today's Russia and must therefore be waged with unparalleled harshness." Hoepner also added that the Germans were fighting for "the defense of European culture against Moscovite-Asiatic inundation, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism... No adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system are to be spared." Walther von Brauchitsch also told his subordinates that troops should view the war as a "struggle between two different races and [should] act with the necessary severity." Racial motivations were central to Nazi ideology and played a key role in planning for Case Blue since both Jews and communists were considered equivalent enemies of the Nazi state. Nazi imperialist ambitions were exercised without moral consideration for either group in their ultimate struggle for Lebensraum. In the eyes of the Nazis, the war against the Soviet Union would be a Vernichtungskrieg, a war of annihilation.
German-Soviet actions of 1938–40[]
Polish–Soviet War of 1938–40[]
Main article: The Second Soviet–Polish War (WFAC)
German operational plans[]
German preparations[]
Soviet preparations[]
Order of Battle[]
Axis[]
Army Group North
Commander: GFM Wilhelm von Leeb
Chief of Staff: Lt.Gen. Kurt Brennecke
HQ: Königsberg
German Sixteenth Army
Commander: GenObst. Ernst Busch
II Corps - Gen.d.Inf. Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt
12th Infantry Division - Lt.Gen. Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach
32nd Infantry Division - Lt.Gen. Wilhelm Bohnstedt
121st Infantry Division - Lt.Gen. Otto Lancelle
X Corps - Gen.d.Inf. Christian Hansen
30th Infantry Division - Lt.Gen. Kurt von Tippelskirch
35th Reserve Divisions - Brig.Gen. Emil Procopiescu
Romanian 5th Army Corps - Lt.Gen. Gheorghe Leventi
Border Division - Br.Gen. Potopeanu Potopeanu
21st Division - Mj.Gen. Cristache Popescu
Romanian 11th Army Corps - Maj.Gen. I. Aurelian
Two fortress brigades
Support units:
2nd Tank Regiment
75 x R-35 light tanks
Reserve:
Romanian 2nd Army Corps - Maj.Gen. Nicolae Macici
9th Infantry Division - Brig.Gen. Hugo Schwab
10th Infantry Division - Brig.Gen. Ion Glogojanu
7th Cavalry Brigade - Col. Gheorghe Savoiu
11th Infantry Division - Brig.Gen. David Popescu
Soviet Union[]
Northern Front
Commander: Col.Gen. Mikhail Kirponos
HQ: Leningrad
Northwestern Front
Commander: Col.Gen. Fyodor Kuznetsov
HQ: Leningrad
Belorusian Front
Commander: Col.Gen. Dmitry Pavlov
HQ: Minsk
Ukrainian Front
Commander: Marshal Semyon Timoshenko
HQ: Proskurov
Southwestern Front
Commander: Col.Gen. Ivan Tyulenev
HQ: Kiev
Southern Front
Commander: Col.Gen. Ivan Boldin
HQ: Odessa
Offensive[]
At around 3:15 am on 26 May 1941, the Axis Powers commenced the offensive with an artillery barrage on Red Army defences on the entire front and bombing of Soviet air bases. The heavy air-raids reached as far as Kronstadt near Leningrad and Sevastopol in the Crimea. Meanwhile, ground troops crossed the border, accompanied in some locales by Lithuanian and Ukrainian fifth columnists. Roughly three million soldiers of the Wehrmacht went into action and faced slightly fewer Soviet troops at the border.
At around noon, the news of the invasion was broadcast to the population by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov: "... This morning, German forces fell on our country, attacked our frontiers in many places... The Red Army and the whole nation will wage a victorious Patriotic War for our beloved country, for honour, for liberty ... Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten. Victory will be ours!" By calling upon the population's devotion to their nation rather than the Party, Molotov struck a patriotic chord that helped a stunned people absorb the shattering news. Within the first few days of the invasion, the Soviet High Command and Red Army were extensively reorganized so as to place them on the necessary war footing. Later that day, Stalin addressed the nation, calling for a "Patriotic War ... of the entire Soviet people".
In Germany, on the morning of 26 May, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced the invasion to the waking nation in a radio broadcast, "At this moment a march is taking place that, for its extent, compares with the greatest the world has ever seen. I have decided today to place the fate and future of the Reich and our people in the hands of our soldiers. May God aid us, especially in this fight!" Later the same morning, Hitler proclaimed to his colleagues, "Before three months have passed, we shall witness a collapse of Russia, the like of which has never been seen in history."
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