Germany's Eastern Front in 1941

Abstract

Given the numbers involved, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 made it unambiguously the decisive theater of the Second World War. Almost four million German and Axis (or Axis allied) forces drove East, initially opposed by some 2.7 million Red Army men with millions more being quickly mobilized. Not only was the conventional war unprecedented in scale, but Nazi Germany also unleased a parallel war against the Soviet Jewish population that murdered some 700,000 men, women, and children before the year was over. Older historiography treated the German military and genocidal campaigns separately. With few exceptions until the 1980s the Wehrmacht was seen to fight a conventional “clean” war against the Red Army, while the SS conducted mass murder in the occupied territories. This led to a distorted understanding not only of how Germany’s war was conceived and conducted, but also of the degree to which major German institutions were intellectually, culturally, and structurally integrated. Importantly, although Operation Barbarossa is at least as much a Soviet event as a German one, the aim in this article is to provide a distinctly German perspective on the invasion. Moreover, the priority has been to provide, wherever possible, English-language books, including for German studies available in translation.