Invasion of the Soviet Union

The largest German military operation of World War II was on June 22, 1941 when they invaded the Soviet Union. The purpose of the operation was to destroy the Soviet Union by force and the seizure of land for German settlement.  Germany wanted to annihilate the Communist state as well as the Jews of the Soviet Union.  Three army groups, including more than three million German soldiers attacked the Soviet Union from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.

The Soviet leadership refused to listen to warnings from the Allies that German troops were building along its western border.  For that reason, Germany and its Axis partners achieved almost complete tactical surprise.  The Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground and its armies were overwhelmed. German units surrounded millions of Soviet soldiers.  Since the soldiers were cut off from supplies and reinforcements, all they could do was to surrender. As the German army advanced deep into Soviet territory, mobile killing units (called  Einsatzgruppen) started to kill large numbers of Jewish males, officials of the Communist Party, and they also established ghettos and facilities to concentrate large numbers of Soviet Jews. Due to the success in the Soviet Union, Hitler decided to deport German Jews to the occupied Soviet Union on October 15, 1941 – the beginning of the Final Solution that had a goal of the killing of all European Jews.

Although the Soviet Union suffered great losses, they did not surrender.  In August 1941, Soviet resistance started to make a comeback, and the Germans knew they had to keep fighting longer.  By early December, Germany had reached the outskirts of Moscow.  However, Germany had expected the Soviets to collapse much sooner, and after many months of fighting, the German army was exhausted and they were not prepared to fight in the cold, bitter winter of the Soviet Union.  German planners had failed to plan for sufficient food and medicine.

On December 6, 1941, the Soviet Union launched a major counterattack which pushed the Germans back from Moscow. In the summer of 1942, Germany went back on the offensive with a massive attack to the south and southeast toward the city of Stalingrad and toward the oil fields of the Caucasus.  The Germans were approximately 120 miles from the shores of the Caspian Sea, and this was the furthest German domination of Europe would reach.