June 22, 1941

Operation Barbarossa: Or Das Lange Krieg.

In the predawn hours of June 22, 1941, a sound that had become familiar in Western Europe finally rumbled its way into the East. From the early summer stillness that Sunday morning erupted the largest land invasion in history, the culmination of more than a thousand years of socio-ethnic tension and the catalyst of the most destructive war in human history.


No guarantee these pics are of Barbarossa (I think the machine
gun this guy is humping is an MG-42, putting this pic post 1942)

The now familiar sounds echoing across the Eastern European plain included the whine of Stuka dive-bombers, the roar of Panzers and the endless hammer of hob-nailed boot after hob-nailed boot. With an open-ended war still raging with Britain and Free French forces in the West, Adolf Hitler had finally launched his invasion of the Soviet Union. In doing so, he hoped to rid Europe of what he perceived to be a Judeo-Bolshevik menace, and secure for the Third Reich the lebensraum, literally "living space", it needed to assume its rightful place as the world's leading power.

But if you follow this blog, you know nothing is cooler than Germans live in technicolor.

Barbarossa, launched with 4.5 million men over a nearly 2,000 mile front, opened up the Eastern front of the European Theater of World War II. Over the next four years, more men fought over more square miles of territory, resulting in more casualties than in any other land conflict in human history, all of it done with a savage inhumanity that is nearly incomprehensible. To be sure, the war in the Pacific that began following the attack on Pearl Harbor six months later was fought over a larger area and could lay claim to being the Eastern Front's equal in sheer brutality. However, the number of men engaged in the Pacific and the casualty numbers, even with the two atomic bombings, are not even comparable.

From June 22, 1941 to Germany's surrender in 1945, most of Eastern Europe was laid to waste, resulting in the deaths of upwards of 30 million people, both in uniform and out. The siege of Leningrad; the extermination of Eastern European Jews; the battle for Moscow, which remains to date the largest battle ever fought; the infamous and pivotal battle of Stalingrad; the Soviet rape of East Prussia; and the battle of Berlin all were direct effects of Operation Barbarossa, along with countless other battles where the notoriety was more fleeting, but the death just as permanent. Not only were the depths of human depravity made evident during Barbarossa, but the borders and authorities created by its resolution would set the stage for the Cold War that would plague the world for the next 50 years.