Germany invades the Soviet Union

On Sunday 22 June 1941, shortly after three in the morning German time (after four Moscow time), German artillery opened fire along the whole length of the frontier from the Baltic to the Carpathians, and Luftwaffe aircraft began bombing Soviet airfields, railway junctions and cities, from Kronstadt near Leningrad to Sevastopol in the Crimea. Behind the barrage the infantry and tanks moved forward. So began Operation Barbarossa, the attack by the Third Reich and its allies on the Soviet Union, prepared since the summer of 1940 and approved by Adolf Hitler in Directive No. 21. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, concluded less than two years earlier, ceased to exist, and a front opened in Europe on which the outcome of the Second World War would be decided.

Popular war chronologies describe Barbarossa as a thrust in three directions: towards Leningrad, Moscow and “the southern oilfields of the Caucasus”. The last of these objectives needs correcting. The Caucasus and its oil were not an initial objective of the operation. Directive No. 21 sent the southern army group towards Kiev and Ukraine west of the Dnieper, and subsequently towards the Donets Basin. Hitler came to regard cutting the USSR off from Caucasian oil as one of the most important objectives only in August 1941, in his dispute with the generals over whether to go for Moscow first, and the Caucasus itself became the objective of an offensive only in the summer of 1942.

Three army groups

For the attack Germany concentrated in the East the largest army it had ever put into the field. According to the most commonly accepted figures it numbered about 3 million German soldiers in more than 150 divisions, with about 3,300–3,600 tanks, more than 7,000 guns and about 2,500–2,800 Luftwaffe combat aircraft. Together with the Romanian and Finnish troops, which joined the fighting over the following days, the attackers’ forces reached 3.6–3.8 million men.

These forces were divided into three army groups. Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North, with the 16th and 18th Armies and Colonel General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Group 4, advanced from East Prussia through the Baltic states towards Leningrad. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre, the strongest of the three, had two panzer groups – Colonel General Heinz Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 on the southern flank and Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 on the northern – with the 4th and 9th Armies between them. Its task was to encircle the Soviet forces in Belorussia with pincers closing at Minsk, and then to march via Smolensk towards Moscow. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South struck from the Lublin area towards Kiev, with Colonel General Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 and the 6th and 17th Armies. Its third army, the 11th, stood in Romania together with the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies.

On the other side of the frontier stood the troops of the western military districts, three of which were renamed fronts on the day of the attack: the North-Western Front of Colonel General Fyodor Kuznetsov in Lithuania and Latvia, the Western Front of General of the Army Dmitry Pavlov in Belorussia and the South-Western Front of Colonel General Mikhail Kirponos in Ukraine. The first echelon and the depth of the western districts held about 2.7–2.9 million men. On paper the Red Army had a clear superiority in equipment there, well over ten thousand tanks and 7,000–9,000 aircraft, but older types predominated, and the modern T-34 and KV tanks were only just reaching the units. The mechanised corps were still being formed, there was a shortage of communications equipment, lorries and ammunition, and the officer corps, decimated in the Great Purge of 1937–1938, was largely young and inexperienced.

Warnings Stalin did not believe

Preparations on such a scale could not be concealed. From the spring dozens of warnings poured into Moscow. Soviet intelligence agents reported from Berlin, among them the Luftwaffe staff officer Harro Schulze-Boysen of the network the Germans later called the Red Orchestra. From Tokyo Richard Sorge, who knew from German diplomats about the concentration of troops, sent a succession of approximate dates for the attack. Some historians, however, doubt the authenticity of the most frequently quoted report, in which he is supposed to have named 22 June itself. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who thanks to decrypted Enigma signals knew of the transfer of German panzer divisions to Poland, instructed the ambassador, Stafford Cripps, to pass a personal warning to Joseph Stalin. The letter of 3 April reached the Kremlin late, in the second half of the month, and made no impression.

Stalin treated this information as provocation. He was convinced that Hitler would not start a war on two fronts until he had defeated Britain, and that the British wanted to drag the USSR into the war. His suspicion was heightened by Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland in May, in which the Kremlin saw a sounding-out of an Anglo-German settlement at the USSR’s expense. After Molotov’s talks in Berlin in November 1940 Moscow was still counting on fresh negotiations, and in April 1941 it secured its rear in the Far East with a neutrality pact with Japan. On 14 June the Soviet press published a TASS communiqué according to which rumours of an imminent war with Germany were “clumsily concocted propaganda” by forces hostile to both states. On a report from Berlin submitted to him on 17 June by the People’s Commissar for State Security, Vsevolod Merkulov, Stalin scrawled an obscene remark that the informant in the Luftwaffe staff was “not a source but a disinformer”. Trains carrying Soviet grain and raw materials kept rolling into the Reich until the last hours of peace.

From May the People’s Commissar for Defence, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, and the Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Georgy Zhukov, had been moving one army after another from the interior towards the frontier, but Stalin would not agree to placing the frontier troops on full alert. On the evening of 21 June a German soldier, Alfred Liskow, crossed over to the Soviet side near Sokal and testified that the attack would begin at dawn. Only late in the evening, after a meeting in the Kremlin, did Timoshenko and Zhukov send the districts the so-called Directive No. 1. It ordered the troops to be put on alert and the aircraft dispersed, but at the same time “not to yield to any provocations” that might cause serious complications. Deciphering it and passing it down the chain took hours, and many regiments did not receive it before the first shots were fired.

The first day

The first blow fell on the air force. Soviet aircraft stood on the frontier airfields in neat rows, often uncamouflaged, and many new airfields were still under construction. On the first day the Luftwaffe reported 1,489 aircraft destroyed on the ground and 322 in the air. Hermann Göring thought these figures implausible and ordered them checked, and an inspection of the captured airfields showed that, if anything, they were too low. According to Soviet data the losses of the first day amounted to about 1,200 machines, more than 800 of them destroyed on the airfields, and the air force of the Western Front alone lost more than 700. German losses were counted in dozens of aircraft. The air commander of the Western Front, General Ivan Kopets, who saw the ruin of his regiments, shot himself that same day.

Bombing and the work of saboteurs severed communications throughout the frontier zone. The front headquarters did not know what was happening in their armies, and Moscow did not know what was happening at the fronts. In many sectors the first defenders were the soldiers of the NKVD Border Troops, who fought in their outposts to the last round. At Brest the German 45th Infantry Division stormed the nineteenth-century fortress, in which thousands of Soviet soldiers and their families had been sleeping. The surprised garrison broke up into several pockets of resistance, which held out in the barracks and forts. The defence of the fortress lasted until the end of June, and isolated groups were still fighting in its underground passages in July. According to the divisional commander’s report, the Germans took more than 7,000 prisoners there and themselves lost about 1,200 killed and wounded.

Guderian’s armour bypassed the fortress on both sides, crossed the Bug and drove along the road towards Kobryn and Slutsk. On the northern flank of Army Group Centre, Hoth’s Panzer Group 3 broke through the Soviet screen in the Suwałki area and captured intact the bridges over the Neman at Olita (Alytus), opening the road to Wilno (Vilnius). Between them, in the Białystok salient jutting out to the west, the main forces of the Western Front were stuck, threatened with encirclement from the very first day. In Lithuania the panzer corps of General Erich von Manstein advanced, according to his memoirs, about 80 kilometres by evening and seized the bridge over the Dubysa at Ariogala. Army Group South made the slowest progress: in Volhynia it ran into Kirponos’s better-prepared troops and in the following days had to beat off counter-attacks by Soviet mechanised corps.

In Moscow Zhukov telephoned Stalin soon after the bombing began. According to his memoirs Stalin was silent for a long time and did not immediately agree to issue an order to fight, suspecting a provocation by German generals without Hitler’s knowledge. The members of the Politburo gathered in Stalin’s office before six in the morning. Directive No. 2, sent after seven, ordered the destruction of the forces that had violated the frontier but forbade crossing it on land. In the evening, with no idea of the real situation, Moscow issued Directive No. 3, which ordered the fronts to go over to the offensive, destroy the enemy and take the Suwałki and Lublin areas by the end of 24 June. It could not be carried out, and the attempts at counter-attacks over the following days deepened the defeat. That same day Stalin sent Zhukov to Kiev to coordinate the operations of the South-Western Front.

Notes and speeches

The declaration of war came only after the first shots. At about 5.30 a.m. Moscow time the German ambassador, Count Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, read out to Vyacheslav Molotov in the Kremlin a telegram from Joachim von Ribbentrop. The Reich government accused the USSR of subversive activity in Germany and in Europe, of a policy directed against Germany and of concentrating all its combat-ready armed forces on the frontier, and announced that the Wehrmacht had been ordered to counter this threat “with all the means at its disposal”. Schulenburg, an advocate of good relations with Moscow, delivered the note against his own convictions. According to the accounts of German diplomats, Molotov heard it out and asked whether Germany thought the USSR had deserved this. In Berlin Ribbentrop summoned the Soviet ambassador, Vladimir Dekanozov, at four in the morning and handed him a memorandum of the same content. At 5.30 a.m. German time Joseph Goebbels read Hitler’s proclamation to the German people on the radio. In it Hitler presented the attack as a necessary defence against the “Jewish-Bolshevik rulers in Moscow”, who allegedly intended to attack the Reich. The preventive-war thesis, later repeated by some writers, is rejected by the great majority of historians. Soviet war plans provided for a counter-stroke, but the sources do not indicate that the USSR was preparing to attack in the summer of 1941, and Hitler had decided on war a year earlier.

Stalin did not appear in public that day. At noon, at 12.15, Molotov spoke on the radio. He announced that Germany had attacked the USSR “without presenting any claims” and without a declaration of war, in spite of the non-aggression pact, and called it a perfidy unparalleled in the history of civilised nations. He recalled Napoleon, whose invasion had ended in disaster, and called the struggle now beginning a patriotic war. He ended with words that became the watchword of the whole war: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be beaten. Victory will be ours.” That same day martial law was proclaimed in the European part of the country, together with the mobilisation of the men born in 1905–1918. Stalin addressed the nation only on 3 July.

Hitler’s allies

It is often said that on this day Romania, on Germany’s side, invaded the south-western border areas of the USSR. That is only partly true. General Ion Antonescu, whom Hitler had let into his plans at a meeting in Munich on 12 June, issued an order of the day to the army on 22 June: “Soldiers, I order you: cross the Prut!” Romania did not, however, formally declare war. Its main aim was to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which the USSR had taken from it in June 1940. On the first day Romanian and German units seized only a few bridgeheads on the Prut, while the air forces of both sides attacked targets across the river. The real offensive by the German 11th Army and the Romanian armies began only on 2 July. Shortly afterwards, on 28–30 June, a pogrom took place in Iași in which thousands of Jews were killed.

Benito Mussolini learned of the attack from a letter from Hitler which the German embassy delivered during the night to his son-in-law and Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano. That same day Ciano informed the Soviet ambassador in Rome that Italy was at war with the USSR. The Duce, though once again presented with a fait accompli, decided to send an expeditionary corps of his own to the East. Over the following days Slovakia and Hungary entered the war, while Finland, which had been mobilising its army since 9 June, allowed German aircraft that had been laying mines in Soviet waters on the night of 21–22 June to land at its airfields, although it declared a state of war only on 25 June. Bulgaria, though tied to the Axis, did not enter the war against the USSR.

In Lithuania the outbreak of war was the signal for the June Uprising against Soviet rule, which the country knew from the annexation of 1940 and from the deportations of a week earlier. Japan, Germany’s ally under the Tripartite Pact, had been told of Hitler’s intentions only in vague terms, in a conversation with its ambassador at the beginning of June, and Hitler did not then seek its participation in the war.

Churchill: “The Russian danger is our danger”

In London the news reached the Prime Minister at his country residence, Chequers. The evening before, Churchill had told his secretary John Colville that if Hitler invaded Hell, he himself would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons. Without convening the War Cabinet, he prepared a speech himself, which the BBC broadcast at nine in the evening. “No one has been a more consistent opponent of communism than I have over the last twenty-five years. I shall not take back a single word I have said about it. But all this pales before the spectacle now unfolding,” he said. He announced that Britain would give Russia and the Russian people all the help it could: “Every man and every state that fights Nazism will receive our help. Every man and every state that goes with Hitler is our enemy.” He warned that the attack on the USSR was no more than a prelude to an attempt to conquer the British Isles: “The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States.”

After a year in which Britain had fought Germany without a great ally, the speech heralded the coalition that was to defeat the Reich. On 12 July the two states signed an agreement on joint action in Moscow and undertook not to conclude a separate peace, and in August the first British aid convoy sailed for Arkhangelsk.

For the Poles the war between their two occupiers opened up a new situation. The front rolled across the eastern lands of the Republic, occupied by the USSR since 1939: through Białystok, Grodno, Brest and Lwów (Lviv), and also through Wilno, handed to Lithuania in 1939 and incorporated with it into the USSR. The fleeing NKVD murdered thousands of prisoners in its jails, and behind the Wehrmacht’s front came the operational groups of the SS and police, the Einsatzgruppen, which in the very first days began shooting Jews en masse. On 23 June the Prime Minister, Władysław Sikorski, announced in a radio broadcast that he was ready for an understanding with the USSR, expecting the annulment of the German–Soviet agreements of 1939 on the partition of Poland and the release of the prisoners of war and the Poles deported into the depths of the Soviet Union. The talks ended on 30 July with the Sikorski–Maisky Agreement, which restored diplomatic relations and opened the way to forming a Polish army in the USSR.

Its place in the war

On 22 June 1941 the war, which since September 1939 had been waged in Europe on the periphery and at sea, became a total war on an unprecedented scale. For the next three years the majority of German divisions fought on the Eastern Front, and it was there that the Wehrmacht suffered most of its losses. The first weeks seemed to confirm Hitler’s calculations. On 28 June Guderian’s and Hoth’s pincers closed at Minsk, and in the Białystok–Minsk encirclement German troops took hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Pavlov, blamed for the defeat, was shot in July. After Smolensk and the gigantic Kiev pocket in September, the Germans reached the approaches to Moscow in the autumn, and from September Leningrad was under siege.

The plan, which assumed the destruction of the Red Army within a few weeks, rested, however, on false premises. The Germans underestimated the USSR’s ability to raise ever new armies from millions of reservists and to evacuate its industry to the east, overestimated their own capacity for supply across a roadless country and did not prepare the army for winter. On 5 December 1941 the Red Army launched its counter-offensive before Moscow, and the hope of a quick victory collapsed.

From the first day it was also a war of annihilation. Orders issued before the attack absolved soldiers of responsibility for crimes against civilians and ordered political commissars to be killed (the Commissar Order). Behind the front the Einsatzgruppen, the police and the local formations collaborating with them began murdering Jews, which within a few months turned into the genocide of entire communities; and of the more than 5 million Soviet prisoners of war taken during the war, about 3 million died according to the most commonly accepted estimates, most of them of hunger and disease in the camps. The German–Soviet war, called the Great Patriotic War in the USSR, lasted almost four years, until the capture of Berlin in May 1945, and according to the most commonly accepted estimates cost the lives of 26–27 million citizens of the Soviet Union.