WW2: Operation Barbarossa

PowerPoint Show by Andrew

On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany and its Axis allies began a massive invasion of the Soviet Union named Operation Barbarossa -- some 4.5 million troops launched a surprise attack deployed from German-controlled Poland, Finland, and Romania.

Hitler had long had his eye on Soviet resources. Although Germany had signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR in 1939, both sides remained suspicious of one another, and the agreement merely gave them more time to prepare for a probable war. Even so, the Soviets were unprepared for the sudden blitzkreig attacks across a border that spanned nearly 2,900 km (1,800 mi), and they suffered horrible losses.

Within a single week, German forces advanced 200 miles into Soviet territory, destroyed nearly 4,000 aircraft, and killed, captured, or wounded some 600,000 Red Army troops.

By December of 1941, German troops were within sight of Moscow, and they laid siege to the city. But, when the notorious Russian winter set in, German advances came to a halt.

By the end of this, one of the largest, deadliest military operations in history, Germany had suffered some 775,000 casualties. More than 800,000 Soviets had been killed, and an additional 6 million Soviet soldiers had been wounded or captured. Despite massive advances, Hitler's plan to conquer the Soviet Union before winter had failed, at great cost, and that failure would prove to be a turning point in the war.

A German infantryman walks toward the body of a dead Soviet soldier and a burning tank in the southern Soviet Union in 1941, during the early days of Operation Barbarossa.

German tank units, as they prepare for an attack, on July 21, 1941, somewhere along the Russian warfront, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

A German driver inside an armored vehicle in Russia in August of 1941.

German infantrymen watch enemy movements from their trenches shortly before an advance inside Soviet territory, on July 10, 1941.

German soldiers cross a river, identified as the Don river in 1941, during the German invasion of the Caucasus region in the Soviet Union.

German soldiers move a horse-drawn vehicle over a corduroy road while crossing a wetland area, in October 1941.

With a burning bridge across the Dnieper river in the background, a German sentry keeps watch in the recently-captured city of Kiev, in 1941.

German soldiers watch as a Russian village burns - 1941.

Machine gunners of the far eastern Red Army in the USSR, during the German invasion of 1941.

German troops lie concealed in the undergrowth during the fighting prior to the capture of Kiev, Ukraine, in 1941.

Evidence of Soviet resistance in the streets of Rostov, a scene in late 1941, encountered by the Germans as they entered the heavily besieged city.

Russian soldiers, left, hands clasped to heads, marched back to the rear of the German lines on July 2, 1941, as a column of German troops move up to the front at the start of hostilities between Germany and Russia.

Russian men and women rescue their humble belongings from their burning homes, said to have been set on fire by the Russians, part of a scorched-earth policy, in a Leningrad suburb on October 21, 1941.

Heinrich Himmler (left, in glasses), head of the Gestapo, inspects a prisoner-of-war camp in 1940-41 in Russia.

Adolf Hitler studies a Russian war map with his generals on August 7, 1941.

German soldiers, supported by armored personnel carriers, move into a burning Russian village on June 26, 1941.

A huge Russian gun, likely a 203 mm howitzer M1931, is manned by its crew on the Russian front on September 15, 1941.

Rapidly advancing German forces encountered serious guerrilla resistance behind their front lines. Here, four guerrillas with fixed bayonets and a small machine gun are seen in action, near a small village.

Red Army soldiers examine war trophies captured in battles with invading Germans, somewhere in Russia, on September 19, 1941.

Five Soviet civilians on a platform about to be hanged by German soldiers, near the town of Velizh in the Smolensk region, in September of 1941.

Burning houses, speak for the ferocity of the battle when German forces entered the stubbornly defended industrial center of Rostov November 22, 1941.

General Heinz Guderian, commander of Germany's Panzergruppe 2, chats with members of a tank crew on the Russian front, on September 3, 1941.

A man, his wife, and child are seen after they had left Minsk on August 9, 1941, when the German army swarmed in.

Russian prisoners of war, taken by the Germans on July 7, 1941.

A column of Russian prisoners taken during recent fighting in Ukraine, on their way to a Nazi prison camp on September 3, 1941.

Soviet women partisans fight the Germans.

German infantrymen force their way into a snipers hide-out, where Russians had been firing upon advancing German troops, on September 1, 1941.

German sources described the gloomy looking officer at the right as a captured Russian colonel who is being interrogated by Nazi officers.

Flames shoot high from burning buildings in the background as German troops enter the city of Smolensk, in the central Soviet Union, during their offensive drive onto the capital Moscow, in August of 1941.

The Germans ruthlessly executed partisans.

Soviet prisoners en route to Germany, on October 3, 1941. Several million Soviet soldiers were eventually sent to German prison camps, the majority of whom never returned alive.

Russian snipers leave their hide-out in a wheat field, somewhere in Russia, on August 27, 1941, watched by German soldiers. In the foreground is a disabled soviet tank.

German infantrymen march next to horse-drawn vehicles as they pass through a district near Moscow, in November 1941. Winter conditions strained an already thin supply line, and forced Germany to halt its advance - leaving soldiers exposed to the elements and Soviet counterattacks, resulting in heavy casualties and a serious loss of momentum in the war.

A defeated demoralized German army withdraws from Russia. 1944.

Waffen SS men burn a Russian village as they withdraw.