Soviet tank force june 1941 armored1/4/2023 ![]() ![]() Between them, Army Group Centre’s objective was Minsk, Smolensk, and then Moscow itself. ![]() Army Group North was to head through the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia and take Leningrad.Īrmy Group South would attack into Ukraine towards Kiev and the Donbas (Donets Basin) industrial region. The German forces were split into three army groups, each with a specific objective. It was the largest invasion force to date. They were supported by 2,700 aircraft of the Luftwaffe. Seventeen panzer divisions, formed into four Panzer Groups, formed the vanguard with 3,400 tanks. Over three and a half million German and other Axis troops attacked along a 1,800-mile front.Ī total of 148 divisions – 80 percent of the German Army – were committed to the enterprise. SOVIET TANK FORCE JUNE 1941 ARMORED DRIVERThis would bring the bulk of the Soviet population and its economic potential under German control.Ī German half-track driver inside an armored vehicle in Russia in August of 1941.Īfter a five-week delay while operations in Greece and Yugoslavia were completed, Operation ‘Barbarossa’ – named after the all-conquering Medieval Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I – was launched on 22 June 1941. ![]() The German military plan called for an advance up to a hypothetical line running from the port of Archangel in northern Russia to the port of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea – the so-called ‘A-A line’. On 18 December 1940 Hitler issued Führer Directive 21, an order for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Regardless of recent economic and political co-operation, the Soviet Union was regarded as the natural enemy of Nazi Germany and a key strategic objective. The conquest and enslavement of the Soviet Union’s racially ‘inferior’ Slavic populations would be part of a grand plan of ‘Germanisation’ and economic exploitation lasting well beyond the expected military victory. He intended to destroy what he saw as Stalin’s ‘Jewish Bolshevist’ regime and establish Nazi hegemony. Hitler had always wanted to see Germany expand eastwards to gain Lebensraum or ‘living space’ for its people.Īfter the fall of France Hitler ordered plans to be drawn up for an invasion of the Soviet Union. In May 1940 the Blitzkrieg rolled westwards and France was conquered in six weeks. Soviet cooperation allowed Hitler to expand his plans for European domination. For the next year and a half Germany also benefitted economically from the arrangement, with Russia exporting grain and oil in return for manufactured goods.Īn Sd.Kfz-250 half-track in front of German tank units, as they prepare for an attack, on July 21, 1941, somewhere along the Russian war front, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s forces then attacked from the east and completed the subjugation and partition of the Polish state. It ushered in a period of military co-operation that allowed Hitler to ignore western diplomatic moves and invade Poland. The Nazi-Soviet Pact came as a complete surprise to other nations, given the ideological differences between the two countries. In August 1939, as Europe slid towards another world war, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty. The Eastern Front, which was opened by Operation Barbarossa, would become the biggest theater of war in World War II, with some of the largest and most brutal battles, terrible loss of life, and miserable conditions for Russians and Germans alike. It was to be the turning point for the fortunes of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, in that the failure of Operation Barbarossa arguably resulted in the eventual overall defeat of Nazi Germany. Operation Barbarossa (Unternehmen Barbarossa) was the German codename for Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, which commenced on June 22, 1941. ![]() A German infantryman walks toward the body of a killed Soviet soldier and a burning BT-7 light tank in the southern Soviet Union in 1941, during the early days of Operation Barbarossa. ![]()
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