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Hitler 's Second World War Essay

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On the morning of June 22, 1941, three German army groups, consisting of over three million soldiers, 150 divisions, and three thousand tanks, attacked across the frontier into Soviet territory. The front covered nearly two thousand miles and took the Red Army almost entirely by surprise. Adolf Hitler titled the invasion “Operation Barbarossa”, and it was the critical turning point of the Second World War. The goal of Hitler’s Directive Number 21 was to destroy the Red Army’s fighting capabilities in the West, create a buffer that denied the Russian Airforce the ability to attack territory of the German Reich, establish a general line along the Volga River to Archangel, and ultimately destroy the Soviet Union. For many people it’s not surprising that Operation Barbarossa failed and forced Germany to fight a two front war against a coalition possessing superior resources, leading to the eventual defeat and destruction of Hitler’s “Third Reich”.
The “Third Reich” wasn’t the first Empire to be defeated in the vastness of Russia, barely 120 years earlier, Napoleon suffered a staggering defeat that led to the dissolution of the First French Empire. With what history has taught us it seems like common knowledge that a land invasion of Russia is doomed to failure, but in 1941 it wasn’t too farfetched of an idea to think that the German Army would be able to defeat Russia. Hitler felt that Operation Barbarossa would be successful and ultimately launched the invasion because

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