On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa, one of the largest land military operations of the German army during World War II. By the end of the year, the Germans had advanced hundreds of miles in the direction of the outskirts of Moscow. Soon after the invasion, mobile squads began mass murder of Soviet Jews. Germany's policy of military and civilian occupation led to the deaths of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet civilians.
Since the 1920s, the central policies of Nazi activity included: 1) the destruction of the Soviet Union by military force;2) the permanent elimination of what it considered to be a communist threat to Germany;3) the occupation of high-quality territories within the territory of the USSR as a "living space" in which the Germans were able to settle for a long time. Therefore, Hitler always regarded the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact of August 23, 1939, as a temporary tactical strategy.
In July 1940, a few weeks after the German occupation of France and the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands), Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union the following year. On December 18, 1940, Hitler signed Order No. 21 (Plan Barbarossa), the first operational order for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
From the very beginning of the war plan, the Nazi German army and the police authorities intended to wage a war of annihilation against the "Judeo-Bolshevik" communism** of the Soviet Union and its citizens, especially the Jews. In the winter and spring months of 1941, the Army General Headquarters of Nazi Germany and the General Directorate of Reich Security** discussed the deployment of the Einsatzgruppen behind the front.
In deployment, the Einsatzgruppen was to carry out mass shootings of Jews, communists, and others as they were seen as a threat to Germany's long-term rule on Soviet territory. The Einsatzgruppen is often referred to as the Mobile Operational Unit and is part of the Special Forces of the Security Police and the Imperial Security Service. In addition, according to the German plan, tens of millions of Soviet citizens would be deliberately starved to death as a result of Germany's occupation policy.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union came less than two years after the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact. Three army groups launched a blitzkrieg attack on the USSR from three directions: the north and the south. The front line of the war stretched as far north as the Baltic Sea and south as far as the Black Sea.
Because the Soviet Union was negligent in its defense of Germany before the war. Thus, in the early stages of the war, Germany and its Axis partners almost completely achieved tactical sneak attacks, destroying most of the existing Soviet air force on the ground. At the beginning of the war, the Soviet army was in a rout, and German troops surrounded millions of Soviet soldiers. With a lack of supplies and reinforcements, the Soviet soldiers looked almost left with little choice but to surrender.
As the Germans moved deeper into Soviet territory, the SS and police forces followed. The first to arrive were the Einsatzgruppen, to which the General Directorate of Security was tasked with: 1) identifying and eliminating persons who might organize and carry out resistance activities;2) identify and concentrate groups of people who are seen as a potential threat to German domination in Eastern Europe;3) the establishment of an intelligence network;4) Ensure the safety of important documents and facilities.
This was followed by a massive campaign of shootings by the Einsatzgruppen against Jewish men, the Communists and the Soviet Union***, as well as the Roma. The Einsatzgruppen set up ghettos and other detention facilities to concentrate large numbers of Soviet Jews.
In late July, representatives sent by Heinrich Himmler arrived in the Soviet Union. With the support of locally recruited henchmen, the SS and police forces began to carry out shooting operations against all the local Jewish communities. Hitler's decision to deport German Jews to occupied Soviet areas began on October 15, 1941, and was prompted by the rapid progress made by the German army on both the military front and the Soviet Jews. The decision gave rise to what came to be known as the "Final Solution" policy. The "Final Solution" was intended not only to physically exterminate the Jews of the eastern regions occupied by the Germans, but also to exterminate the Jews of all of Europe.
In the first six weeks after the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union suffered catastrophic military losses. But the Soviet Union did not suffer the total defeat that the Nazis had expected. By mid-August 1941, Soviet resistance had become more stubborn, disrupting the German army's plans to win the war before the autumn of 1941. Despite this, the Germans arrived in the northern Soviet city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) at the end of September 1941. The Germans also captured the Soviet city of Smolensk, more than 200 miles southwest of Moscow, and the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro), more than 200 miles southeast of Kiev. At the same time, German troops advanced into the southern Crimean peninsula and arrived on the outskirts of Moscow in early December.
However, the military operations that lasted for months left the Germans exhausted. In anticipation of a rapid and complete defeat of the Soviet Union, the Germans were not prepared for a winter battle. They also did not have enough food and medicine, as they had expected the Germans to wipe out the local population and obtain supplies from the occupied Soviet areas. As a result, the Germans, overloaded on the 1,000-mile Eastern Front, were vulnerable to Soviet counterattacks.
On December 6, 1941, the Soviet Union launched a major ** campaign against the heart of the front, which led to the evacuation of German troops from Moscow in confusion. It took several weeks for the Germans to successfully gain a foothold on the front line east of Smolensk. In the summer of 1942, the Germans resumed their offensive with massive attacks from the south and southeast on the oil fields of Stalingrad (Volgograd) and the Caucasus along the Volga River. In September 1942, German troops arrived on the outskirts of Stalingrad and advanced toward Grozny in the Caucasus Mountains (about 120 miles from the coast of the Caspian Sea). It also marked the farthest geographical distance from which Germany occupied Europe during World War II.