BIGGEST BLOODIEST & MOST BARBAROUS
The greatest gamble in history began just before first light. At 3.15am on a midsummer morning 80 years ago next month, “Operation Barbarossa”, Adolf Hitler’s planned war of annihilation on the Soviet Union, opened with the shock and awe of a massive artillery barrage, a deadly aerial armada and untold waves of men and armoured vehicles pouring across a frontier stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans.
It was, writes Jonathan Dimbleby, the eminent British broadcaster, historian and author of a new book on the campaign, “the biggest, bloodiest and most barbarous military enterprise in the history of warfare”.
Sitting behind a line drawn by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union across a humiliated, conquered Poland two years before were more than four million men of Joseph Stalin’s Red Army. Ranged against them on June 22, 1941, was the largest invasion force in history, more than three million men of Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
By the time the abortive campaign died in the snows outside Moscow just six months later, and the never-before-defeated Wehrmacht had begun a chaotic retreat, there were more than 4.5 million Russians and one million Germans dead, injured or missing. Behind the lines, the Nazis had embarked on an indiscriminate and bestial slaughter of hundreds of thousand of Russian civilians and Jews as the so-called “final solution” began.
“By the end of 1941 at the very latest, the Nazis had already lost any realistic chance of winning the war.”
Yet for all the cruel destruction of lives, livelihoods and
