Operation Barbarossa Eight Decades On, When Nazism Dug Its Own Grave

“No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt of.” – Friedrich Engels, in his 1887 Preface to In Memory of the German Arch-Patriots of 1806-1807

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” – Winston Churchill.

Fredrick Barbarossa, the most celebrated of the German Holy Roman emperors, drowned on June 10, 1190 in the Calycadnus (Göksu) river near Seleukeia in Asia Minor during his third crusade. In popular memory, the red-bearded Crusader lived on as a revered king and emperor. However, the story did not end there. Seven centuries later, in the 1890s, he emerged as a totem for Germany’s imperialist ambitions under Wilhem II, who promoted the idea that Barbarossa would rise again in the hour of Deutschland’s greatest need and lead the nation to eternal triumph and glory. This was the evocative legend that Hitler attached to Germany’s – and the world’s – bloodiest military campaign when he named the invasion of the Soviet Union which began on this day 80 years ago ‘Operation Barbarossa’.

For the Nazi leader, the war on the Soviet Union was a crusade, a holy war where no quarter was to be given – a war of total annihilation.

Barbarossa was launched on June 22, 1941, south and north of the Pripet Marshes from German advance bases in Poland. Three million soldiers, almost 3,300 tanks and more than 2,500 fighters and bombers divided in three army groups were unleashed on a front that finally covered the terrain from Leningrad in the north to Moscow in the centre to Rostov in the south, thus opening the door for the Wehrmacht to reach the Volga in the south with the Soviet oil reserves of the Caucasus in easy reach.

But Hitler’s war on the eastern front was a fatal miscalculation, for it finally broke the Nazi power. It also ushered in the reorganisation of Europe, in which the Soviet Union emerged as the pre-eminent superpower on the continent, ushered in an arms race and determined the course of history ever since, even after the breakup of the USSR.

For Germany, the Soviet Union and the nations of eastern Europe, Operation Barbarossa was also an act of great tragedy. In the Soviet Union alone, the death toll was put at roughly 27 million. By the summer of 1945, the whole of eastern Europe came under Soviet influence and domination. The course of the war also ensured the militarisation of the United States’ economy and its post-war rise as a pre-eminent global power. The US attempt to roll back and contain the Soviet Union meant a nuclear arms race became inevitable, with all its consequences for nation states around the world who have lived under the spectre of an atomic winter ever since. The seeds of all these events emanated from that one act of war which began exactly eight decades ago.

Was that war with the Soviet Union necessary for the Nazis? This question has always remained only partially answered by historians and researchers. Hitler, of course, had many reasons – tactical, strategic and ideological. The immediate one was Germany’s inability to bring Britain to its knees and force her to the negotiating table. On June 31, 1940, Hitler himself articulated the immediate strategic reasons to his military brass:

“Britain’s hope lies in Russia and the United States. If the hopes pinned on Russia are disappointed, then America too will fall by the wayside, because elimination of Russia would tremendously increase Japan’s power in the Far East….

“Russia is the factor on which Britain is relying the most…. With Russia smashed, Britain’s last hope would be shattered. Germany will then be master of Europe and the Balkans.

“Decision: Russia’s destruction must therefore be made a part of this struggle. Spring ’41. The sooner Russia is crushed the better. Attack achieves its purpose only if Russian state can be shattered to its roots with one blow. Holding any part of the country will not do…. If we start in May ’41, we would have five months to finish the job in. Tackling it this year would still have been the best, but unified action would be impossible at this time”.

All this, almost a year before the actual campaign was unleashed on Germany’s eastern frontier.

However, behind the immediate strategic reason lay the deeper ideological battle between the Nazis and the Communists, where the issue, according to the Nazi gospel, could only be settled by a war of annihilation.

Hitler himself was clear on this score, as stated by the German Chief of Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, who recorded the exact words of his Fuehrer:

“We must forget the concept of comradeship between soldiers. A Communist is no comrade before or after the battle. This is a war of extermination…”.

The Nazis demanded ‘living space, or lebensraum’, that was to be won for the German people in the east. Coupled with that was of course the economic need of sustaining the war on the scale required. Soviet grain and oil reserves were vital to the German interests and Hitler most certainly did not want any negotiated settlement with Moscow, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact notwithstanding.

From Anglo-French appeasement to Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression Pact

In this analysis of causation, we should also not forget the prevarication of the western powers, especially Great Britain under its Tory leadership. It was the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax that convinced Hitler to push for more, with a conviction that the western democracies were weak and could be bullied. The Munich agreement of 1938 was the culmination of that process, when the fate of the Czech Republic was signed away by Britain and France.

The one catastrophic outcome of that diplomatic surrender was the decision Joseph Stalin took to seek a separate, cynical peace with the Nazis. His aim was to keep the flames of the war temporarily away. The Non-Aggression Pact, cynically signed just a week before the fuse was lit by Hitler on September 1, 1939, helped build a glacis for the defence of Leningrad, extended the western frontier of the Soviet Union to the Vistula and bought peace for some time.  This agreement was later justified by Stalin as pragmatic and correct, as in his opinion the inevitable clash with the Nazis was postponed by what he had hoped would be a few years. However, the Nazi-Soviet Pact also eliminated Poland from the map of Europe and freed Hitler’s options in western Europe now that his eastern flank was secure.

The Soviet leadership’s miscalculation was to underestimate the German war machine and its capabilities. The blitzkrieg resulted in the capitulation of France in a mere six weeks, thus making Hitler’s triumph complete in continental West Europe. When the collapse of France made Stalin wary of a German attack on the Soviet Union, the Nazis employed deception operations to suggest an invasion of England on the Crete model was Hitler’s next target. David E. Murphy notes,

“In his diary, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels gleefully described running in the official newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, an article entitled “Crete as an Example” that suggested that the attack on Crete was a prelude to the invasion of England. Deliberately withdrawing the issue of the newspaper as soon as it had been delivered to foreign embassies reinforced rumours of an impending assault on England.”

Later, when it became clear that the Soviets had begun preparing for imminent war, an Abwehr disinformation campaign was launched to suggest Ukraine would be the first target rather than the Brest-Minsk axis north of the Pripet Marshes.

Stalin, of course, also paid the price for the weakening of the Red Army – when the bulk of its leadership from Marshal Tukhachevsky down to lower ranks were eliminated in the terrible purges of 1937. Clearly, the Soviet Union was not ready for a war with the Nazis in June 1941, but a new leadership of the Red Army was forged in the heat of the combat which resulted within six months of the war in the first major morale shaking defeat of the Wehrmacht before Moscow.

Barbarossa ended in failure on what, in hindsight, was the real Longest Day – December 7, 1941 – when the Nazi army under General Heinz Guderian suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Soviet forces under Marshall Zhukov and General Ivan Kunev. On the same day, thousands of miles away, Japan foolishly attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour, thus bringing the greatest industrial power on earth in to the war.

Till then, it did appear as if the ghost of Barbarossa was beginning to light up Germany’s imperial dreams. But by December 7, 1941, with the Nazis in retreat from the Red Army counter-offensive, that glow was to reveal itself as a sunset.

Ajay Dandekar is a Professor in the Department of History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR. He can be contacted at ajayd16@gmail.com.