WW2 - Invasion of the Soviet Union

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Added: 17-Jul-08

Under the inexorable logic of the five year plans, the Soviet Union had been marching awkwardly to war for more than a decade.

The Nazi - Soviet Non - Aggression Pact of 1939 had enabled these two countries to dismember Poland, aligning their borders, and establishing their armies in close and uneasy proximity along a five hundred mile frontier.

In secret codicils to the pact, Hitler and Stalin had agreed to the division of Europe into two great power blocks, separated by a line drawn between the Baltic and the Black Sea.

While Hitler consolidated his power in the West by force or by diplomacy, Stalin, in the East did likewise, seizing the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and invading Finland and Rumania.

In contrast to Hitler's stunning victories in the West Russian efforts to subdue resistant nations were fraught by material inadequacies in arms and equipment, and hamstrung by a military and tactical incompetence, permeating through every echelon of the Red Army.

Believing in the inevitability of war between Russia and Germany, Hitler determined to strike before the immense reserves of Russia in people and resources could be sufficiently marshalled to overhaul the German advantage in Technology and tactics. The attack was to be launched on June 22nd, 1941.

For Hitler, the invasion of Russia was to be the culmination of his most enduring obsession, the destruction of Bolshevism and the establishment of the Thousand Year Reich, an entity that was to stretch from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains of Asia.

Like earlier invaders of Russia, the Germans knew that success hinged upon destroying the Russia Army before it could withdraw into the vast and inhospitable hinterlands of the East.

Four Panzer Armies spearheaded a force of more than three million men. The German strategy was no different from those employed in Poland or in France, only immensely greater in scale. As the armoured spearheads knifed through the Soviet fronts , the infantry advanced in a relentless onslaught of fighting and marching.

Though numerically superior to the Wehrmacht, the plight of the Red Army could hardly have been worse. Most of its equipment was obsolete. Its office corps had been decimated in the purges of the l930s. And it carried the burden of a rigidly enforced and inflexable ideology, stifling initiative, and deterring any independence of action.

Against such a force as this, Hitler had assured his commanders, the cruel logic of National Socialism would meet little serious resistance. In the first weeks of the campaign in Russia events appeared to confirm the truth of this prediction. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were taken. Vast amounts of war equipment was captured or destroyed. Everywhere the grey tide of the Wehrmacht advanced, it advanced through chaos and capitulation. Soviet fronts collapsed almost as soon as they were formed.