The 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, codenamed Operation Barbarossa, remains one of Nazi Germany’s most significant military campaigns. Executed by Hitler’s Wehrmacht army, this event saw troops from all over Europe defeat the Red Army and temporarily colonize large swathes of Eastern Europe, ultimately laying the groundwork for the Holocaust. In this illuminating re-examination of this multifaceted event, Operation Barbarossa and its Aftermath refocuses our attention on the multiethnic nature of the campaign, shedding light on the role of soldiers from Slovakia, Italy, Romania, and Spain as well as other important issues. This volume highlights how viewing Operation Barbarossa as a multiethnic campaign, rather than a strictly German-Russian conflict, offers new ways of understanding the Holocaust, World War II and the history of European collaboration.

The first half of a two-part study on Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s plan to invade Soviet Russia during World War II, and what went wrong. At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German Army Group Center’s Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Hitler and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the Soviet capital. Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht’s massive invasion of the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat its Communist ruler, Josef Stalin. Between 22 June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500 kilometers into Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, by doing so satisfying the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safely behind those two rivers. With the Red Army now shattered, Hitler and most Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks. The ensuing battles in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. Once across the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, a surprised Wehrmacht encountered five fresh Soviet armies. Quick victory eluded the Germans. Instead, Soviet forces encircled in Mogilev and Smolensk stubbornly refused to surrender, and while they fought on, during July, August, and into early September, first five and then a total of seven newly mobilized Soviet armies struck back viciously at the advancing Germans, conducting multiple counterattacks and counterstrokes, capped by two major counteroffensives that sapped German strength and will. Despite immense losses in men and materiel, these desperate Soviet actions derailed Operation Barbarossa. Smarting from countless wounds inflicted on his vaunted Wehrmacht, even before the fighting ended in the Smolensk region, Hitler postponed his march on Moscow and instead turned his forces southward to engage “softer targets” in the Kiev region. The “derailment” of the Wehrmacht at Smolensk ultimately became the crucial turning point in Operation Barbarossa. This groundbreaking study, now significantly expanded, exploits a wealth of Soviet and German archival materials, including the combat orders and operational of the German OKW, OKH, army groups, and armies and of the Soviet Stavka, the Red Army General Staff, the Western Main Direction Command, the Western, Central, Reserve, and Briansk Fronts, and their subordinate armies to present a detailed mosaic and definitive account of what took place, why, and how during the prolonged and complex battles in the Smolensk region from 10 July through 10 September 1941. The structure of the study is designed specifically to appeal to both general readers and specialists by a detailed two-volume chronological narrative of the course of operations, accompanied by a third volume and a fourth, containing archival maps and an extensive collection of specific orders and reports translated verbatim from Russian. The maps, archival and archival-based, detail every stage of the battle.

Stalingrad has become a by-word for grim endurance and tenacity; for the refusal to give up, no matter the cost. In this book, Peter Antill takes a dispassionate look at one of the most talked about battles in history. He asks why the Germans allowed themselves to be diverted from their main objective, which was to capture the oil fields of the Caucasus, and concentrate such large resources on a secondary target. He discusses the merits of the commanders on both sides and also the relationship on the German side with Hitler as well as reviewing the ways in which the command structures influenced the battle. Apart from the overall question of German objectives, this book also unpicks the detail of unit directions, priorities and deployments, leading to a vivid account of the day-by-day war of attrition that took place in Stalingrad during World War II (1939-1945), between September 14, 1942 and February 2, 1943. Stalingrad was more than a turning point, it was the anvil on which the back of German military ambitions in the east were broken and the echoes of its death knell were heard in Berlin and indeed the world over.

Drawing on innovative scholarship on Finland in World War II, this volume offers a comprehensive narrative of politics and combat, well-argued analyses of the ideological, social and cultural aspects of a society at war, and novel interpretations of the memory of war.

Drawing on evidence never before seen in the West, including combat records of early engagements, David Glantz claims that in 1941 the Red Army was poorly trained, inadequately equipped, ineptly organized, and consequently incapable of engaging in large-scale military campaigns - and both Hitler and Stalin knew it. He provides a complete and convincing study of why the Soviets almost lost the war that summer, dispelling many of the myths about the Red Army that have persisted since the war and soundly refuting Viktor Suvorov's controversial thesis that Stalin was planning a preemptive strike against Germany.

Hitler's decision to renege on his alliance with Stalin and invade Russia in June 1941 was to have the most far reaching consequences for the world. Indeed, if there was one critical turning point in the Second World War, it would have to be this. The latest book in the Images of War series uses over 300 rare contemporary photographs to capture the scale, intensity and brutality of the fighting that was unleashed on 22 June 1941. No less than 4.5 million men of the Axis Power advanced on a 2,900 kilometer front. We see how the apparently unstoppable German led assaults crushed the Soviet resistance. But not for the first time Russian determination aided by the terrible winter conditions and over extended lines of communication checked the Nazi onslaught. In the annals of warfare there has never arguably been such a bitter and costly campaign.

Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and events on the Eastern Front that same year were pivotal to the history of World War II. It was during this year that the radicalization of Nazi policy -- through both an all-encompassing approach to warfare and the application of genocidal practices -- became most obvious. Germany's military aggression and overtly ideological conduct, culminating in genocide against Soviet Jewry and the decimation of the Soviet population through planned starvation and brutal antipartisan policies, distinguished Operation Barbarossa-the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union-from all previous military campaigns in modern European history. This collection of essays, written by young scholars of seven different nationalities, provides readers with the most current interpretations of Germany's military, economic, racial, and diplomatic policies in 1941. With its breadth and its thematic focus on total war, genocide, and radicalization, this volume fills a considerable gap in English-language literature on Germany's war of annihilation against the Soviet Union and the radicalization of World War II during this critical year. Alex J. Kay is the author of Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941 and is an independent contractor for the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War Consequences. Jeff Rutherford is assistant professor of history at Wheeling Jesuit University, where he teaches modern European history. David Stahel is the author of Operation Barbarossa and Germany's Defeat in the East and Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East.

On June 22, 1941, Germany launched the greatest land assault in history on the Soviet Union, an attack that Adolf Hitler deemed crucial to ensure German economic and political survival. As the key theater of the war for the Germans, the eastern front consumed enormous levels of resources and accounted for 75 percent of all German casualties. Despite the significance of this campaign to Germany and to the war as a whole, few English-language publications of the last thirty-five years have addressed these pivotal events. In Ostkrieg: Hitler's War of Extermination in the East, Stephen G. Fritz bridges the gap in scholarship by incorporating historical research from the last several decades into an accessible, comprehensive, and coherent narrative. His analysis of the Russo-German War from a German perspective covers all aspects of the eastern front, demonstrating the interrelation of military events, economic policy, resource exploitation, and racial policy that first motivated the invasion. This in-depth account challenges accepted notions about World War II and promotes greater understanding of a topic that has been neglected by historians.

In a definitive new account of the Soviet Union at war, Alexander Hill charts the development, successes and failures of the Red Army from the industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the late 1920s through to the end of the Great Patriotic War in May 1945. Setting military strategy and operations within a broader context that includes national mobilisation on a staggering scale, the book presents a comprehensive account of the origins and course of the war from the perspective of this key Allied power. Drawing on the latest archival research and a wealth of eyewitness testimony, Hill portrays the Red Army at war from the perspective of senior leaders and men and women at the front line to reveal how the Red Army triumphed over the forces of Nazi Germany and her allies on the Eastern Front, and why it did so at such great cost.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler began what would be the most important campaign of the European theater. The war against the Soviet Union would leave tens of millions of Soviet citizens dead and large parts of the country in ruins. The death and destruction would result not just from military operations but also from the systematic killing and abuse that the German army, police, and SS directed against Jews, Communists, and ordinary citizens. In War of Annihilation, noted military historian Geoffrey P. Megargee provides a clear, concise history of the Germans' opening campaign of conquest and genocide in 1941. By drawing on the best of military and Holocaust scholarship, Megargee dispels the myths that have distorted the role of Germany's military leadership in both the military operations themselves and the unthinkable crimes that were part of them.