Why Fda's Launched Operation Barbarossa

D-Day was the Allied invasion of German occupied France that was a major factor in the German defect. D-Day was the largest invasion fleet ever and the campaign created a second front which made the Germans split their resources between the west and east front. The Allies and Germanys suffered around 425,000 casualties during D-day. Operation Barbarossa was the German invasion of the Soviet Union which started on 22th of June 1941. The initial invasion took the Soviet leaders by surprise. The invasion had stalled because of the Russian winter which caused the German tanks and other vehicles to get bogged. Germany had invasion had failed to end the USSR and they were pushed back which helped create a two front war. The Germanys suffered 775,000 deaths and the Soviet Union suffered more than 800,000 deaths in

Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union under Directive 21, known as Operation Barbarossa commenced on the 22nd of June 1941. The invasion proved to be motivated by Adolf Hitler’s long-standing ideologies of lebensraum and race. Hitler saw Barbarossa as an ideological, strategic and economic advance within World war II.

Russia had also made progress moving east that same summer and setting up their defence plans. What they did not anticipate however was the bulge in their defences south of Orel and north of Kharkov with Kursk in the centre. The Germans centred their attacks here to prepare for their attacks east. This was Operation Citadel. If Germany did not defeat the bulge then Russia would be able to launch an attack from behind on the German troops stationed at Orel and Kharkov and trapping them between two Russian

Hitler’s generals strongly disagreed with his policies even to the point of attempting an assassination. Multiple times Hitler’s officer tried to stop him from wreaking havoc on the German way of life. Their repeated warnings went unheard, resulting in Germany’s downfall. The German war effort was vastly influenced by the Anti-Nazi tendencies of Hitler’s senior officers.

Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Germany’s leader who started the World War II, had a great plan to conquer every single corner of the world with his powerful army. He actually won a bunch of battles; however several mistakes he made finally led him to the loss. In my opinion, Hitler made his fatal blunder on the Operation Barbarossa, which was the invasion operation on the Soviet Union. The Blitz was a tough loss for Germany in which they focused on killing the civilians but only motivated their enemies; however it didn’t reflect the final failure directly. The war declaration on the U.S. was another mistake, which boosted their lost. The Operation Barbarossa was his fatal mistake, and finally led him to his death.

Hitler had two aims while he was in the USSR, which were capturing Stalingrad and capturing the oil fields in Caucasus. As he had these two aims, he decided to split the German Army into two parts where one could take on Caucasus and the other take Stalingrad. The division that had gone to Stalingrad, the 6th Army, lacked enough resources and knowledge to defeat the Soviet Army. The army consisted of 1,000,000 men, 675 tanks, 1,200 aircrafts, and 10,000 guns and mortars, where a lot of the men were poorly trained. The lack of knowledge of the 6th Army was a tactical error, as they did not know how to fight in Stalingrad, nor were they thought how to. The 6th Army were used to fighting in the open and wide areas of the USSR, but Stalingrad consisted of many buildings and streets, and the German Army made another tactical error by bombing Stalingrad prior to the 6th Army’s entrance, as they thought that it would have weakened Russian resistance, but the opposite had occurred. The bombing had caused buildings to collapse and large pieces of cement to fall, which were used by the Soviet Army as cover. In To the Gates of Stalingrad: Soviet-German Combat Operations Historian David M. Glantz states, “The Luftwaffe’s rubbling of the city only exacerbated things,” reinforcing the fact that it was a

Living space then, was a necessary objective in Hitler 's eyes, but in order to achieve this space he needed to develop Germany 's army first. So he did. Between 1933 and 1939 the Treaty of Versailles was secretly avoided to massively increase the size of the German army, from 100,000 to 300,00017. The Luftwaffe, German air force, also rapidly increased and by 1940 it was the strongest among all the European powers. The German war machine was impressive, in just six years it went from being the weakest army to one of the strongest18. However, this created a vicious circle in terms of foreign policy for Germany: Hitler wanted living space, so he built up the army. However, in order to pay for this rapid rearmament, he had to conquer territories. Thus, Hitler made war profitable and a key part of the foreign policy of Germany19.

The Battle of Stalingrad was a defining moment during the Eastern Front as it was a large scale battle in which the Wehrmacht suffered great casualties and lost initiative. Operation Uranus, Chief of the General Staff, A. M. Vasilevsky’s plan to encircle the Sixth German Army at Stalingrad, forced German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus to surrender and gave Field Marshal Marshal von Manstein command of the surviving Axis forces. Although von

one of the biggest reason would be Hitler's overconfidence near the end of the war. At the beginning of the war Hitler's first couple of idea worked so successfully that he got too over confident and thought of himself as a military genius which led him to stop listening to his generals. For example in the Battle Of the Bulge in December 1944 Hitler's generals advised him not to send out any men but Hitler overturned their decision and sent his men out, which then cost them valuable men and resources that they really needed at the time as the allies were closing in on them and their factories were being liberated. Also Hitler underestimated the USSR and thought that they could invade them before the harsh russian winters, once they failed taking over moscow they lost most soldiers from the cold weather as they were in their summer uniform and their tanks and other vehicles failed to drive or work in the cold conditions.

On February 3, 1933 during a meeting with German military leaders Hitler said his foreign policy was the conquest of Eastern Europe (Weinberg, 1970), also in 1933 Germany withdrew from the League of Nations, which should have been a warning sign that they were planning something big. This along with the increase of the Wehrmacht (German Army) to 600,000 should have thrown up some red flags to Britain and France that Hitler was up to no go. This was another of Hitler’s direct violations of the Versailles Treaty, yet no one stopped him, instead they let him continue untouched. Then in March of 1936

in the north. Consequently Leningrad turned into an essential focus as did Moscow. His drive in the

The initial German invasion of the Soviet Union was known as Operation Barbarossa. It began on June 22, 1941, after months of delay and years of planning. The general goals were to gain more land for Germany, control the oil fields of Azerbaijan, and exterminate Bolshevism—the radical Communism that Vladimir Lenin had installed in Russia during the Russian Revolution. Moreover, Hitler wanted to exterminate the “racially inferior” Russian people from Leningrad, Moscow, and the rest of the western USSR while pushing the rest of the population eastward beyond the Ural Mountains. It was after this invasion that the plan for a ‘Final Solution’ was introduced.

After the failure of Operation Barbarossa to completely crush the U.S.S.R. in one campaign, The Germans were

Adolf Hitler’s military tactics, poor leadership skills, and actions caused him to lose World War II. Hitler’s objective was to gain world power. He was willing to risk everything for Germany to become the most powerful country. According to Richard Overy, a British historian, “If the German people are not prepared to engage in its own survival, so be it: then it must disappear!” (538). Hitler was also willing to sacrifice Germany to attain world control and victory during World War II. The idea of losing WWII never came across Hitler’s mind because he was confident that Germany would become victorious during the war.

<br>The plan to capture the Soviet Union, operation Barbarossa, was initially very successful. The German attack, comprising 134 divisions or just over 3 million soldiers, took the Russians by surprise and they quickly advanced towards Moscow. But the rough country and appalling roads were taking its toll, and the German advance started to slow. Hitler himself took control of the campaign. Hitler was a very determined man. He was very determined to avenge the loss and humiliation of world war