“WE HAVE UNDERESTIMATED THE RUSSIAN COLOSSUS”
Accompanies season two of The Rise of the Nazis on BBC Two
On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies launched the biggest land invasion in history. After an artillery barrage had opened up along a thousand-mile front, 3 million German troops, along with half a million more from Romania and other allied countries, poured across the border with the Soviet Union in an attack spearheaded by 3,600 tanks and assisted by more than half a million motor vehicles. Over a thousand combat aircraft bombarded Soviet military positions and airfields from above.
Within a few weeks, the Red Army had been driven back hundreds of miles. Its armies were encircled, its tanks and equipment destroyed, and more than half a million of its men captured. Panic and chaos reigned in the Soviet armed forces as communications broke down, generals did not know what to do, and head-on confrontations with the invaders only led to huge loss of life. On 3 July 1941, Franz Halder, chief of the German Army general staff, wrote ecstatically in his diary: “It’s really not saying too much if I claim that the campaign against Russia has been won in 14 days.”
Operation Barbarossa, named after a celebrated medieval German emperor, had been planned and prepared for almost a year – ever since it had begun to become clear to Hitler that his intention to invade and crush the United Kingdom was going to be difficult to put into effect. As Hitler told his generals on 31 July 1940, the defeat of the Soviet Union
