80 years of “Operation Barbarossa”: the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II

(CNN Spanish) – In the early morning of June 22, 1941 near 3.05 million Germans and their allies they crossed the border to invade the Soviet Union without a declaration of war. The beginning of “Operation Barbarossa”, 80 years ago, triggered a massacre of people on a scale rarely seen.

From that June 22, Eastern Europe would be the scene of the fiercest fighting during the Second World War. When German troops finally surrendered in Berlin on May 9, 1945, the conflict had cost the lives of 25 million Soviets, and 3.5 million between the Germans and their allies on this front alone.

While close to 2.5 million Jews (out of a total of six million in the entire war) were killed in their villages and towns by German special troops – the Einsatzgruppen– accompanying the invading forces.

Furthermore, the German special troops – the Einsatzgruppen– accompanying the invading forces murdered about 2.5 million Jews (out of a total of six million in the whole war) based in territories owned or controlled by the USSR, according to estimates from the World Shoah Commemoration Center Yad Vashem.

“The ‘Operation Barbarossa’ was a turning point in the destiny of the Jews,” he says. Yad Vashem. “The ideological campaign and the identification of communism with Jews and Judaism created a link between war and anti-Jewish policy ”of Nazismhe adds.

A multinational force

World War II had started on September 1, 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. Then the fighting moved west: Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and France would then fall under German occupation. Only the UK was left standing.

In 1941 the Adolf Hitler regime once again turned its attention to the east. Although a non-aggression pact signed in 1939 between the foreign ministers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union governed, the German troops and their allies Romanians, Hungarians, Italians, Slovaks as well as Finns they attacked on June 22. Even a group of volunteers from Spain, which had remained neutral, also joined the assault.

The invading troops attacked with three Army Groups and the objective of capturing Leningrad, Kiev and Moscow.

Emboldened by their rapid successes in Poland and France, the German forces attempted to replicate their tactical novelties with the combined use of tanks, motorized infantry and aircraft in large maneuvers – already known by the name of Blitzkrieg-. The objective was to deliver a decisive blow to the Red Army.

Although they had initial successes, the tenacity of the Soviet defenders, the unavoidable scale of distances and fighting, and the pressures on logistical lines made progress difficult.

The end of “Operation Barbarossa”, but not of the war

Delayed in their objectives and with the harsh Russian winter settling in, German troops and their allies took Kiev and besieged Leningrad, but a Soviet counteroffensive stopped them 80 kilometers from Moscow and nearly collapsed the invading armies.

The operation, named in honor of Frederick I “Barbarossa” -a medieval Germanic king-, had failed. But the conflict on the Eastern Front, which the Soviets christened “Great Patriotic War”, just beginning.

“Filled with sadness and shame we bow in reverence before the more than 30 million people who gave their lives in Central and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 during the war, which was planned and started to its end by Germany,” said the German Foreign Minister Heiko maas June 9.