This book examines in unprecedented detail the advance of Germany's Army Group Center through central Russia, toward Moscow, in the summer of 1941, followed by brief accounts of the Battle of Moscow and subsequent winter battles into early 1942. Based on hundreds of veterans' accounts, archival documents, and exhaustive study of the pertinent primary and secondary literature, the book offers new insights into Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler's attack on Soviet Russia in June 1941. While the book meticulously explores the experiences of the German soldier in Russia, in the cauldron battles along the Minsk-Smolensk-Moscow axis, it places their experiences squarely within the strategic and operational context of the Barbarossa campaign. Controversial subjects, such as the culpability of the German eastern armies in war crimes against the Russian people, are also examined in detail. This book is the most detailed account to date of virtually all aspects of the German soldiers' experiences in Russia in 1941.

Sunday, June 22, 1941: three million German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union as part of Hitler’s long-planned Operation Barbarossa, which aimed to destroy the Soviet Union, secure its land as lebensraum for the Third Reich, and enslave its Slavic population. From launching points in newly acquired Poland, in three prongs—North, Central, South—German forces stormed western Russia, virtually from the Baltic to the Black Sea. By late fall, the invasion had foundered against Russian weather, terrain, and resistance, and by December, it had failed at the gates of Moscow, but early on, as the Germans sliced through Russian territory and soldiers with impunity, capturing hundreds of thousands, it seemed as though Russia would fall. In the spirit of Martin Middlebrook’s classic First Day on the Somme, Craig Luther narrates the events of June 22, 1941, a day when German military might was at its peak and seemed as though it would easily conquer the Soviet Union, a day the common soldiers would remember for its tension and the frogs bellowing in the Polish marshlands. It was a day when the German blitzkrieg decimated Soviet command and control within hours and seemed like nothing would stop it from taking Moscow. Luther narrates June 22—one of the pivotal days of World War II—from high command down to the tanks and soldiers at the sharp end, covering strategy as well as tactics and the vivid personal stories of the men who crossed the border into the Soviet Union that fateful day, which is the Eastern Front in microcosm, representing the years of industrial-scale warfare that followed and the unremitting hostility of Germans and Soviets.

The scope and scale of Operation Barbarossa—the German invasion of the Soviet Union—make it one of the pivotal events of the Second World War. Yet our understanding of both the military campaign as well as the “war of annihilation” conducted throughout the occupied territories depends overwhelmingly on “top-down” studies. The three million German soldiers who crossed the Soviet border and experienced this war are seldom the focus and are often entirely ignored. Who were these men and how did they see these events? Luther and Stahel, two of the leading experts on Operation Barbarossa, have reconstructed the 1941 campaign entirely through the letters (as well as a few diaries) of more than 200 German soldiers across all areas of the Eastern Front. It is an original perspective on the campaign, one of constant combat, desperate fear, bitter loss, and endless exertions. One learns the importance of comradeship and military training, but also reads the frightening racial and ideological justifications for the war and its violence, which at times lead to unrelenting cruelty and even mass murder. Soldiers of Barbarossa is a unique and sobering account of 1941, which includes hundreds of endnotes by Luther and Stahel providing critical context, corrections, and commentary.

On 22 June 1941 Hilter unleashed his forces on the Soviet Union. Spearheaded by four powerful Panzer groups and protected by an impenetrable curtain of air support, the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht advanced from the Soviet Union's western borders to the immediate outskirts of Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov in the shockingly brief period of less than six months. The sudden, deep, relentless German advance virtually destroyed the entire peacetime Red Army and captured almost 40 percent of European Russia before expiring inexplicably at the gates of Moscow and Leningrad. An invasion designed to achieve victory in three to six weeks failed and, four years later, resulted in unprecendented and total German defeat. David Glantz challenges the time-honoured explanation that poor weather, bad terrain and Hitler's faulty strategic judgement produced German defeat, and reveals how the Red Army thwarted the German Army's dramatic and apparently inexorable invasion before it achieved its ambitious goals.

The first half of a two-part study on Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s plan to invade Soviet Russia during World War II, and what went wrong. At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorized infantry of German Army Group Center’s Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Hitler and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the Soviet capital. Less than three weeks before, on 22 June Hitler had unleashed his Wehrmacht’s massive invasion of the Soviet Union, code-named Operation Barbarossa, which sought to defeat the Soviet Red Army, conquer the country, and unseat its Communist ruler, Josef Stalin. Between 22 June and 10 July, the Wehrmacht advanced up to 500 kilometers into Soviet territory, killed or captured up to one million Red Army soldiers, and reached the western banks of the Western Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, by doing so satisfying the premier assumption of Plan Barbarossa that the Third Reich would emerge victorious if it could defeat and destroy the bulk of the Red Army before it withdrew to safely behind those two rivers. With the Red Army now shattered, Hitler and most Germans expected total victory in a matter of weeks. The ensuing battles in the Smolensk region frustrated German hopes for quick victory. Once across the Dvina and Dnepr Rivers, a surprised Wehrmacht encountered five fresh Soviet armies. Quick victory eluded the Germans. Instead, Soviet forces encircled in Mogilev and Smolensk stubbornly refused to surrender, and while they fought on, during July, August, and into early September, first five and then a total of seven newly mobilized Soviet armies struck back viciously at the advancing Germans, conducting multiple counterattacks and counterstrokes, capped by two major counteroffensives that sapped German strength and will. Despite immense losses in men and materiel, these desperate Soviet actions derailed Operation Barbarossa. Smarting from countless wounds inflicted on his vaunted Wehrmacht, even before the fighting ended in the Smolensk region, Hitler postponed his march on Moscow and instead turned his forces southward to engage “softer targets” in the Kiev region. The “derailment” of the Wehrmacht at Smolensk ultimately became the crucial turning point in Operation Barbarossa. This groundbreaking study, now significantly expanded, exploits a wealth of Soviet and German archival materials, including the combat orders and operational of the German OKW, OKH, army groups, and armies and of the Soviet Stavka, the Red Army General Staff, the Western Main Direction Command, the Western, Central, Reserve, and Briansk Fronts, and their subordinate armies to present a detailed mosaic and definitive account of what took place, why, and how during the prolonged and complex battles in the Smolensk region from 10 July through 10 September 1941. The structure of the study is designed specifically to appeal to both general readers and specialists by a detailed two-volume chronological narrative of the course of operations, accompanied by a third volume and a fourth, containing archival maps and an extensive collection of specific orders and reports translated verbatim from Russian. The maps, archival and archival-based, detail every stage of the battle.

Hitler's decision to renege on his alliance with Stalin and invade Russia in June 1941 was to have the most far reaching consequences for the world. Indeed, if there was one critical turning point in the Second World War, it would have to be this. The latest book in the Images of War series uses over 300 rare contemporary photographs to capture the scale, intensity and brutality of the fighting that was unleashed on 22 June 1941. No less than 4.5 million men of the Axis Power advanced on a 2,900 kilometer front. We see how the apparently unstoppable German led assaults crushed the Soviet resistance. But not for the first time Russian determination aided by the terrible winter conditions and over extended lines of communication checked the Nazi onslaught. In the annals of warfare there has never arguably been such a bitter and costly campaign.

Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's plan for invading the Soviet Union, has by now become a familiar tale of overreach, with the Germans blinded to their coming defeat by their initial victory, and the Soviet Union pushing back from the brink of destruction with courageous exploits both reckless and relentless. And while much of this version of the story is true, Frank Ellis tells us in Barbarossa 1941, it also obscures several important historical truths that alter our understanding of the campaign. In this new and intensive investigation of Operation Barbarossa, Ellis draws on a wealth of documents declassified over the past twenty years to challenge the conventional treatment of a critical chapter in the history of World War II. Ellis's close reading of an exceptionally wide range of German and Russian sources leads to a reevaluation of Soviet intelligence assessments of Hitler's intentions; Stalin's complicity in his nation's slippage into existential slaughter; and the influence of the Stalinist regime's reputation for brutality—and a fear of Stalin's expansionist inclinations—on the launching and execution of Operation Barbarossa. Ellis revisits two major controversies relating to Barbarossa—the Soviet pre-emptive strike thesis put forward in Viktor Suvorov's book Icebreaker; and the view of the infamous Commissar Order, dictating the execution of a large group of Soviet POWs, as a unique piece of Nazi malevolence. Ellis also analyzes the treatment of Barbarossa in the work of three Soviet-Russian writers—Vasilii Grossman, Alexander Bek, and Konstantin Simonov—and in the first-ever translation of the diary kept by a German soldier in 20th Panzer Division, brings the campaign back to the daily realities of dangers and frustrations encountered by German troops.