jun 22, 1941 - German Forces Invade Russia
Description:
German forces invaded Russia. The Germans advanced on a 2,000 mile-long front. Together with their allies, they were able to mass 3 million troops. Initially, the Russians had 2 million troops. German troops advanced along the whole front. By September, they began laying seige to Lenningrad, and then captured Kiev. By the end of October, the Germans had reached Crimea in the south and Moscow's suburbs in the north.
From the beginning of operational planning, German military and police authorities intended to wage a war of annihilation against the Communist state as well as the Jews of the Soviet Union, whom they characterized as forming the "racial basis" for the Soviet state.
Despite catastrophic losses in the first six weeks of the war, the Soviet Union failed to collapse as anticipated by the Nazi leadership and the German military commanders. In mid-August 1941, Soviet resistance stiffened, knocking the Germans off their unrealistic timetable. Nevertheless, by late September 1941, German forces reached the gates of Leningrad in the north. They took Smolensk in the center and Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipropetrovs'k) in Ukraine. They spilled into the Crimean Peninsula in the south. German units reached the outskirts of Moscow in early December.
Yet after months of campaigning, the German army was exhausted. Having expected a rapid Soviet collapse, German planners had failed to equip their troops for winter warfare. They failed to provide sufficient food and medicines. German planners expected their military personnel to live off the land of a conquered Soviet Union at the expense of the local population, which in German calculations would starve to death in the millions. German troops, advancing rapidly, also outran their supply lines. This made their thinly defended flanks vulnerable to Soviet counterattack along the 1,000 mile stretch from Berlin to Moscow.
On December 6, 1941, the Soviet Union launched a major counterattack against the center of the front, driving the Germans back from Moscow in chaos. Only weeks later were the Germans able to stabilize the front east of Smolensk. In the summer of 1942, Germany resumed the offensive with a massive attack to the south and southeast toward the city of Stalingrad (Volgograd) on the Volga River and toward the oil fields of the Caucasus. As the Germans reached the outskirts of Stalingrad and approached Groznyj (Groznyy) in the Caucasus, approximately 120 miles from the shores of the Caspian Sea in September 1942, the German domination of Europe reached its furthest geographical extension.
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