'Barbarossa' was the German grand strategic invasion of the USSR (22 June/2 October 1941).

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More than four million Axis troops, with 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses, invaded the USSR along a 1,800-mile (2900-km) front in the largest invasion in the history of warfare. Triggering what the USSR called the 'Great Patriotic War', this vastly ambitious, or as events were to prove over-ambitious, operation resulted directly from Adolf Hitler’s all-consuming desire to conquer the Soviet territories as embodied in the 'Generalplan Ost' concept. The launch of this undertaking marked the start of the decisive phase in deciding the ultimate victors of World War II. The war that resulted from the German invasion of the USSR led to huge casualty figures: 95% of all German army losses between 1941 and 1944, and 65% of all Allied military casualties in the whole of the war.

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Named after Frederick I Barbarossa, a mediaeval Holy Roman Emperor and a leader of the 3^rd Crusade, the invasion was ordained by Hitler on 18 December 1940 in his Führerweisung Nr 21, which laid down a start date of 15 May 1941. For a number of reasons this start date could not be met, and the invasion therefore began on 22 June 1941: this delay of more than five weeks was to have momentous consequences. At both the operational and tactical levels the Germans secured resounding successes and thereby occupied some of the USSR’s most important industrial, agricultural and raw materials areas, most especially in Ukraine. Yet the German offensive lost its momentum and was then halted on the outskirts of Moscow, and was then driven back to the west by a Soviet counter-offensive without taking the Soviet capital. Never again were the Germans in a position to undertake simultaneous strategic offensives along the entire Eastern Front. The Soviet forces had thus repelled the Germans forces' greatest effort, and therefore Hitler did not achieve the huge victory he had expected, but the USSR’s military, economic and political position nonetheless remained dire.

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The failure of 'Barbarossa' led Hitler to demand more operations along the Eastern Front, but all of these eventually failed.

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'Barbarossa' was the largest military operation in history, measured in terms of the manpower committed and the casualties suffered, and its failure was the decisive turning point in the history of the German Third Reich. Most importantly, 'Barbarossa' created the Eastern Front, to which more forces were committed than in any other theatre of war in history, and along and behind this front took place some of the largest battles, greatest casualties, worst atrocities and direst conditions for both the Germans and the Soviets: all of these had a huge impact on the course of both World War II and as a direct result the subsequent history of the 20^th century.

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In 1941 the German forces took prisoner more than three million Soviets. These were not accorded the protections laid down in the Geneva Conventions governing the conduct of war, and the majority of these men therefore did not survive to the end of the war: many died of disease, but most succumbed to starvation as they were deliberately worked to death without adequate rations.

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Hitler’s determination that Germany must conquer the USSR had its origins in his past, when he became convinced that communism was an evil that must be extirpated completely, together with the nation which had brought it to practical fruition in the first quarter of the 20^th century. Quite separate from this overtly political determination, there was also the fact that Hitler also saw the USSR as being peopled by Slavic 'subhumans' whose destruction would free this vast land, with all its potential in terms of agriculture and raw materials, as Lebensraum (living space) for the expanding 'Aryan master race'.

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It was as early as 1925 that Hitler suggested in Mein Kampf, his political testament, the need for Germany to invade the USSR, asserting that the German people required Lebensraum and raw materials, and that these were to be found most readily in the territories to the east of Germany. In Mein Kampf Hitler averred that it was the destiny of Germany to turn to the east as it had some 600 years earlier, and also that the end of Jewish domination in Russia would also be the end of Russia as a nation. Hitler also 'prophesied' the inevitability of war against pan-Slav ideals, a war in which victory would lead to a German permanent mastery of the world. In pursuance of the aims laid down in Mein Kampf, it became a key element of Nazi policy to kill, deport or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations, and to repopulate with Germanic peoples the land the Slavs had previously occupied. This was the background against which the 'Generalplan Ost' was conceived and later implemented.

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Before World War II it was generally believed that in a war with the USSR, the German army would attack through the Baltic states toward the north-east, and the German navy would seize Leningrad from the sea. The general assumption was that possession of the whole of the Baltic basin would satisfy Hitler, who would therefore not repeat the mistake of many earlier military adventurers in attacking Moscow.

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Hitler was well aware of the dangers with which such a campaign bristled, and of the total disasters to which King Charles XII of Sweden and Emperor Napoleon I of France had come in their campaigns against this monolithic state. He was also aware of the dangers inherent in the waging of war on two fronts, and indeed had averred that he would never fall into this trap.

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On 23 August 1939 Germany and the USSR signed a Treaty of Non-Aggression. This agreement, otherwise known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and agreed only days before Germany’s 'Weiss' (i) invasion of Poland that triggered World War II, was a cynical arrangement that gave Germany a free hand to invade Poland from the west and seize the western two-fifths of that country, and the USSR a similarly free hand to send its forces into eastern Poland and seize it even as the German invasion had persuaded Poland to commit most of its forces against Germany and thereby denude its eastern marches of the forces otherwise deployed there. A secret protocol to the pact outlined the agreement between Germany and the USSR to divide the border states between their respective spheres of influence: Germany and the USSR would therefore divide Poland between themselves, and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland were defined as falling within the Soviet sphere of influence.

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Even though the secret protocol was not known to any but the senior leaderships of Germany and the USSR, the overt details of the pact came as a great surprised the rest of the world because of the two parties' mutual hostility and conflicting ideologies.

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The pact also resulted in the establishment of reasonably strong diplomatic relations and an important economic relationship between Germany and the USSR. During 1940 the two countries signed a trade pact whereby the Soviets received German military and industrial equipment in exchange for raw materials, such as oil and grain, to help Germany circumvent the British naval blockade that prevented maritime deliveries from other nations.

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Even so, Germany and the USSR were each singularly suspicious of the other’s intentions. After the signature of the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940, which created the Axis arrangement between Germany, Italy and Japan, Germany began efforts to draw the USSR into the pact. After negotiations in Berlin on 12/14 November, Germany presented a proposed written agreement for a Soviet entry into the Axis. The USSR proffered a written counterproposal agreement on 25 November 1940, but Germany made no response to this. As the interests of the two countries began to cause friction in eastern Europe, there emerged the greater likelihood of armed conflict, although Germany and the USSR did reach agreement in January 1941 on border and commercial matters to resolve several ongoing issues. These dealings and arrangements were useful to Germany as they bought time for the preparations for 'Barbarossa' were driven forward.

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The reputation of Iosif Stalin, the Soviet leader, was a contributory factor in the German justification of the 'Barbarossa' invasion and the German faith in its success. During the late 1930s many competent and experienced Soviet officers had been killed in Stalin’s 'great purge', leaving the Soviet forces weakened in leadership capabilities at all levels. The Germans often placed considerable emphasis on the brutality of the Soviet regime as they targeted Slav populations with anti-Soviet propaganda. The Germans also claimed that the USSR was preparing to attack Germany, and that 'Barbarossa' was therefore a pre-emptive measure.

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In the summer of 1940, at a time of a German crisis in the availability of raw materials and a potential collision with the USSR about territory in the Balkans, it seemed that an invasion of the USSR, later if not sooner, seemed to be Hitler’s only solution. While no concrete plans had yet been developed, Hitler revealed in June that the victories in western Europe finally freed Germany’s hands for the real task of settling with Bolshevism despite the fact that many of Germany’s military leaders told Hitler that the seizure and occupation of the western USSR would be more of a drain on than relief for Germany’s economic situation.

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Even so, Hitler remained confident that the the defeat of the USSR would bring in its train a number of other benefits including the relief of the labour shortage within German industry by the demobilisation of many soldiers; the development of Ukraine as a reliable source of agricultural products and raw materials; the improvement of Germany’s geo-political situation by using the conquered USSR as a source of forced labour; the further isolation of the UK; and the sourcing of more of Germany’s oil requirements from the great fields on the western side of the Caspian Sea.

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It was on 5 December 1940 that Hitler received and approved the military plans for the invasion of the USSR, and fixed their implementation for May 1941. On 18 December, Hitler signed Führerweisung Nr 21 and ordered the German high command to complete the planning for an operation now codenamed 'Barbarossa' in which, Hitler stated, that the German armed forces must be prepared to crush the USSR in a rapid campaign starting on 15 May.

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The final plan was based on the assumption that Germany would be victorious if it could destroy the bulk of the Soviet forces in the area to the west of the Zapadnyi Dvina and Dniepr rivers. This was an assumption that would prove to be fatally wrong less than a month after the start of the invasion, and was based on a number of egregious errors in the German high command’s assessment of the current situation in the period from June 1940 to June 1941. These errors included the fact that the high command was poorly informed about the USSR, and especially its economy and military; as a result of a poverty of accurate information, German thinking about the USSR was based upon traditional German stereotypes of Russia as a backward 'Asiatic state' without the strength to stand up to a superior opponent; an assessment of war with the USSR that was blinkered by a very narrow military viewpoint that gave inadequate consideration to important political, economic and cultural factors, and almost no consideration of the fact that Soviet industrial capacity might exert a major influence on the outcome of a German/Soviet war; the belief that while the average Soviet soldier was courageous and sturdy, the average member of the Soviet officer corps was little more than contemptible; the belief inculcated by the success of 'Sichelschnitt' that the German armed forces were to all purposes invincible; and the belief that the defeat of the USSR was in effect predestined, and would be accomplished in a period of between six and eight weeks.

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During December 1940, in an address to the Soviet military leadership, Stalin made mention of Hitler’s references to an attack on the USSR in Mein Kampf, and told his generals that they must be constantly ready to meet and defeat a German invasion, and also that Hitler thought the Soviet forces needed four years to ready themselves for war. In such circumstance, therefore, Stalin said that the Soviet forces had to be ready at a time considerably before this, and that he would to seek to delay the outbreak of war for another two years.

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In the autumn of 1940, a number of senior German officials sent Hitler a memorandum detailing the dangers they believed to be inherent in an invasion of the USSR, and concluded that Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states would become not major assets for but additional economic burdens on Germany.

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Hitler totally ignored the warnings and fears of senior officers and economists, and told Generalfeldmarschall (soon Reichsmarschall) Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and a major figure in Germany’s plan for the exploitation of conquests in the east, that while many men on all sides constantly raised economic misgivings against war with the USSR, from this time on he would not listen to such talk. This was passed to General Georg Thomas, who had been preparing reports on the negative economic consequences of an invasion of the USSR unless it was captured intact.

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From March 1941, Göring’s 'Oldenburg' plan detailed the manner in which the Soviet economy would be broken up for Germany’s benefit after the completion of the USSR’s defeat. The urban populations were to be starved to death, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and allowing the urban population’s replacement by a German upper class. In the summer of 1941, the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg suggested that conquered Soviet territory should be administered as Ostland comprising the Baltic states and Belorussia extended eastward by about 310 miles (500 km), Ukraine enlarged eastward to the Volga river, Kaukasus comprising southern Russia and the Caucasus region) Moskowien comprising the Moscow metropolitan area and the rest of European Russia, and Turkestan comprising the central Asian republics and territories.

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At the heart of Nazi policy was the destruction of the USSR as a political entity to create the Lebensraum that would greatly benefit future generations of the 'Nordic Aryan master race'.

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As it was developed toward its definitive form, 'Barbarossa' came to combine a north-eastward drive toward Leningrad as the birthplace of Bolshevism, an eastward drive to take Moscow as the symbol of the Soviet political system, and a south-eastward drive to take Ukraine and the oilfield areas in the south beyond Ukraine. However, there was disagreement between Hitler and his generals as to which of these three axes and objectives should have priority and therefore where the German armed forces should focus their offensive energies.

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While planning 'Barbarossa' in 1940/41, Hitler had on many occasions repeated his stricture 'Leningrad first, the Donets Basin second, Moscow third'. Hitler believed that Moscow was not of great importance in the defeat of the USSR, and instead believed that victory would follow from the destruction of the Soviet forces to the west of the Soviet capital. This later led to dispute between Hitler and several senior officers who believed that decisive victory could only be delivered at Moscow.

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Hitler was impatient to start his long-desired destruction of the USSR, and was convinced that the UK would sue for peace once the British had appreciated the consequences of the German victory over the USSR, which was the real area of Germany interest.

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Hitler had grown overconfident as a result of the rapid German successes in western Europe and the evident ineptitude of the Soviet forces as revealed in the 'Talvisota' winter war of 1939/40 with Finland. Hitler therefore expected victory within a few months, and saw no sense in preparing for a war lasting into the winter. This meant his troops lacked adequate warm clothing and preparations for a longer campaign when they began their attack.

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It was, among other things, the current stalemate in Germany’s war with the recalcitrant UK at the end of 1940 that paved the way for the Führerweisung Nr 21 of 18 December that was based on the assumption Germany was now in a position to deal with the USSR in a rapid campaign of Panzer movement to encircle the Soviet forces, which would then be annihilated by the German infantry formations as the Panzer forces swept on to the next victory: the outline plan for 'Otto' was thus transformed into the detailed plan for 'Barbarossa'.

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Hitler appreciated that the Soviet forces were vast and could indeed call on relatively limitless reserves of raw manpower, and it was for this reason that he had seen fit to use the so-called Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of August 1939 to placate Stalin with offers of matériel aid and eastern Poland if the USSR would stand idly by while Germany undertook its 'Weiss' (i) campaign in western Poland and later its 'Gelb' (finally 'Sichelschnitt') campaign against the western European nations should this latter prove necessary.

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But by 1941 Hitler had become convinced of the effective invincibility that his substantial (and, perhaps more importantly, well-equipped and battle-experienced) forces, with a useful proportion of mechanised and motorised formations as well as Panzer divisions, provided and that these could comprehensively defeat the Soviet armies, which the German intelligence apparatus had revealed to be demoralised after Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s, lacking in tactical expertise as demonstrated by the USSR’s reverses against Finland in the 'Talvisota' campaign of 1939/40, and equipped almost completely with obsolescent weapons. Hitler foresaw that he could deploy against the USSR some 145 of this 205 divisions, including 19 Panzer and 12 motorised divisions, though the bulk of the German forces would still have to rely on horse and foot transport for this fast and extensive campaign, which the army high command anticipated might be over in 10 weeks. That Hitler was also confident that the campaign would be completed in short order is attested by the fact that he could easily have bolstered the forces on this new Eastern Front by another 10 divisions drawn from the 38 in the West and the 12 in Norway, but chose not to do so.

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To face these German forces the Soviets could call on about 12 million men under arms or available as reserves for a strength of some 160 infantry divisions, 30 cavalry divisions and about 35 armoured or motorised brigades.

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In armour and aircraft strengths the Germans were quantitatively inferior but qualitatively superior, though their planners failed to appreciate that the Soviets had new and considerably more advanced types of tanks and warplanes under final development, and would be able to produce these capable types in vast numbers and in short order.

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Hitler had ordered Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch’s Oberkommando des Heeres (army high command) to begin considering the 'Otto' invasion of the USSR as early as 21 July 1940, and since that time the initial thinking had progressed through a lengthy development phase. Oddly enough, though, given the professionalism of the German army’s high command, the plans were never fully completed, especially with regard to the ultimate stop line envisaged for the offensive, which glibly (and fatally) assumed that Soviet resistance would end once Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, the three largest cities to the west of the Ural mountains, had fallen to the Germans, together with the Soviets' main industrial areas in the western USSR.

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Planning without any real geo-political and strategic object in mind, the Oberkommando des Heeres first came up with a plan for a two-part major offensive directed by Heeresgruppe 'Nord' at Moscow via Smolensk and by Heeresgruppe 'Süd' at Kiev, with Kharkov as a follow-on target. These major thrusts would be covered by two subsidiary flanking offensives, that in the north directed through the Baltic states and Belorussia at Leningrad, and that in the south from south-eastern Poland, north-eastern Hungary and north-eastern Romania directed at Kiev through the Ukrainian agricultural heartlands. It was anticipated that the northern main force would then drive to the south from Moscow to link with the southern thrust at Kharkov for an offensive to the Volga river at Stalingrad.

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War games revealed major operational deficiencies in this scheme, which was thus altered to place greater emphasis on the northern thrusts, in which a weakened Heeresgruppe 'Nord' would take the Baltic states and Leningrad and a new but stronger Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' would take Moscow before exploiting to the east and north toward the Volga river and the Arctic port of Arkhangyel’sk respectively. Heeresgruppe 'Süd' would have a strengthened flank in southern Ukraine and would concentrate on Kiev, only then exploiting eastward to Kharkov and Stalingrad.

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In December 1940 Hitler reviewed the revised Oberkommando des Heeres plan and approved it in principal, though he insisted that Leningrad should the major target in the north, and that after taking Smolensk during the advance of Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' on Moscow, some of the formations allocated to this army group should be detached to strengthen the attack of Heeresgruppe 'Nord' on Leningrad. After the fall of Moscow, Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' would now exploit not to the east, but only to the north with the objective of taking Arkhangyel’sk so that the Germans armies would arrive at an undefined stop line running basically south from Arkhangyel’sk to Moscow, the Don river, and Rostov-na-Donu at the Don river’s mouth on the Sea of Azov.

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The Germans had begun massing troops near the Soviet border even before the start of the campaign in the Balkans ('Unternehmen 25' against Yugoslavia and 'Marita' against Greece), whose implementation in the event delayed 'Barbarossa' by more than five weeks. By the third week in February 1941, the Germans had positioned 680,000 men on the Romanian/Soviet border. In preparation for the invasion, the German high command deployed 3.2 million German and about 500,000 Axis troops to the USSR’s western borders, undertook a major air reconnaissance programme over Soviet territory, and stockpiled vast quantities of matériel in the east.

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The 38-day postponement of 'Barbarossa' from the initially planned date of 15 May to the actual invasion date of 22 June in fact resulted from a combination of factors including the diversion of men and resources for the Balkan campaign, logistic failings which delayed preparations, and the effect of an unusually wet winter which had kept many rivers in full flood. Even so, there remains considerable dispute as to whether or not this delay materially affected the outcome of 'Barbarossa'.

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In the period just before the launch of 'Barbarossa', the Germans also brought up rear forces (mostly Waffen-SS units and Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death squads) in preparation for swift movement into the conquered territories to counter partisan activity and to begin the process of seizing Jews and other 'undesirables'.

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Despite their best efforts, the Germans could not hope to effect a complete concealment of their concentration in the east. Even so, however, the Soviets were still taken by complete operational and tactical surprise, mostly as a result of Stalin’s conviction that Germany would not attack within a period of two years after the signature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet leader also believed that Germany would possess the strategic sense to complete its war with the UK before opening a new front. Stalin therefore steadfastly refused to believe repeated warnings from his intelligence services on the German concentration along the border with the USSR, fearing the reports to be British misinformation designed to spark a war between Germany and the USSR.

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There is also a view, supported by the fact that the war declaration act has never been published, that Germany actually launched a pre-emptive attack on the USSR. According to at least one later source, the Soviet forces were preparing to launch their own attack in the middle of July, which may also explain why the Soviet forces were positioned right up against their western frontier as if preparing to undertake an offensive war, rather than in depth as if preparing to to undertake a defensive war.

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A Soviet spy in Japan, Richard Sorge, gave Stalin the exact German launch date, and Swedish intelligence also knew beforehand of the date on which 'Barbarossa' was to be launched, but Sorge and other informers had previously given different invasion dates which passed peacefully before the actual invasion. In addition, British intelligence-gathering information through the 'Ultra' system had been able to warn the USSR of impending invasion several months before 22 June.

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The Germans implemented the 'Haifisch' (i) and 'Harpune' (i) deception operations from April 1941 to add substance to their claims that the UK was in fact their real target. These simulated preparations in Norway and along the south coast of the English Channel were supported by activities such as ship concentrations, reconnaissance flights and training exercises. Some details of these bogus invasion plans were also deliberately leaked.

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German military planners also researched Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia. They also calculated that there was little likelihood of a large-scale Soviet retreat deep into the Russian interior as the USSR could not afford to give up the Baltic states, Ukraine, or the Moscow and Leningrad regions, all of which were vital to the Soviet forces for supply reasons and would thus have to be defended.

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Despite the low estimate of Soviet strength and overall capability held by Hitler and many senior German commanders, the USSR was by no means weak. The rapid pace of industrialisation during the 1930s had led to a level of industrial output second only to that of the USA and generally similar to that of Germany. The manufacture of military equipment had grown steadily, and in the pre-war years the economy became progressively more oriented toward military production. Marshal Sovetskogo Soyuza Mikhail Tukhachevsky, one of the prominent military theorists in tank warfare in the inter-war period until his execution on 11 June 1937 in the 'great purge', lobbied the Kremlin for colossal investment in the resources required for the mass production of weapons. In 1930 he had written a memorandum pressing the case for the manufacture of no fewer than 40,000 aircraft and 50,000 tanks. In the early 1930s, a very modern operational doctrine was developed and promulgated in the 1936 field regulations in the form of the 'deep battle' concept. Defence expenditure also grew rapidly: by 1933 it had grown from a figure of 5.2% in 1913 to 12% of gross national product, and by 1940 stood at 18%.

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On 5 May 1941, in a speech to graduates of military academies in Moscow, Stalin declared that war with Germany was inevitable, and that if Vyacheslav M. Molotov, the foreign minister, managed to stave off the war for two or three years that would be fortunate, but that the new graduates had meanwhile to do all that they could to increase the combat readiness of the Soviet forces.

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There are differing assessments of the position along the Soviet eastern frontier on 22 June 1941. One estimate claims that the Soviet forces in the western districts were outnumbered, with 2.6 million Soviet soldiers opposed by 3.9 million Axis soldiers, but another estimate gives a total Axis strength of 3.8 million, of whom 900,000 were deployed in the west. Early in July 1941 the Soviet forces totalled slightly more than 5 million men, of whom 2.6 million were deployed in the west, 1.8 million in the Far East, and slightly more than 600,000 deployed elsewhere or under training. These figures, however, can be misconstrued: the figure for Soviet strength in the USSR’s western districts includes only the 'first strategic echelon' deployed on and behind the Soviet western frontier to a depth of 250 miles (400 km), and underestimates the size of the 'first strategic echelon', which was actually 2.9 million men. The figure does not include the smaller 'second strategic echelon', which on 22 June was in the process of moving toward the frontier and was scheduled to be in position reinforcing the 'first strategic echelon' by a time early in July. The total Axis strength is also exaggerated: 3.3 million German troops were earmarked for 'Barbarossa', but the figure includes reserves which did not take part in the initial assault. A further 600,000 troops provided by German allies also participated, but mostly after the initial offensive.

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On 22 June, the Germans possessed a local superiority in their initial assault: 98 divisions, including 29 armoured and motorised divisions, which represented some 90% of their mobile forces, attacked along a 750-mile (1200-km) between the Baltic Sea in the north and the Carpathian mountains in the south. These were faced by NKVD border troops and the divisions of the 'first operational echelon' (that part of the 'first strategic echelon' positioned immediately behind the frontier in the three western Special Military Districts), and the Germans had a local superiority because they had completed their deployment and were ready to attack about two weeks before the Soviets were scheduled to have finished their own deployment with the 'second strategic echelon' in place. At the time, 41% of Soviet bases were located near the frontier, many of them in the 125-mile (200-km) cordon just inside the border. In accordance with directives, fuel, equipment, railway rolling stock and other equipment were similarly concentrated there.

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As full mobilisation progressed after the the war had started, the Soviet strength increased steadily. While each side’s strength varied, in general the Axis forces maintained a modest numerical superiority in manpower up to the end of 1941.

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By one reckoning, on 22 June the Soviet forces had 5,774,211 troops: these comprised 4,605,321 in the ground forces, 475,656 in the air forces, 353,752 in the navy, 167,582 in the border guard arm, and 171,900 in the NKVD’s internal troops branch. These took the form of 316.5 divisions with 27,500 tanks, 117,600 guns and mortars, and 18,700 aircraft.

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In several weapon categories, however, the Soviets had a considerable numerical advantage. In tanks, for example, the Soviets were overwhelmingly superior, with 23,106 vehicles, of which about 12,782 were in the five western military districts, three of which directly faced the German invasion front. The numerical strength was radically offset, however, by poor maintenance and readiness standards, the shortage of ammunition and radio equipment, and the lacked in many formations and units of the trucks needed for the movement of supplies.

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Moreover, from a time in 1938 the Soviets had decided on the partial dispersal of their tank strength to infantry divisions in the support role, but after their experiences in the 'Talvisota' and their observation of the German campaign against France, they had started to adopt the German practice and organise most of their armour into large tank divisions and corps. This reorganisation had been accomplished only in part by 22 June, largely as a result of the fact that there were not enough tanks available to bring the mechanised corps up to establishment strength.

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The German armoured strength in June 1941 was based on about 5,200 tanks, and some 3,350 of these were allocated to the formations involved in 'Barbarossa'. This meant that the USSR had a numerical tank superiority of about 4/1 to Germany. Offsetting this numerical advantage, however, was the fact that the vast majority of Soviet tank types were significantly inferior to their German counterparts: the two exceptions were the KV-1 heavy tank and T-34 medium tank, but these totalled just 7.2% of the overall Soviet tank strength and were therefore not available in numbers large enough to be tactically significant in the first campaign of the war on the Eastern Front.

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The Soviet quantitative advantage in heavy weapons was further offset by the superior training, greater combat experience and higher readiness of the German forces. The Soviet high command and officer corps had been decimated the 'great purge' of 1936/38. Of 90 generals arrested, only six survived the purges, as did a mere seven out of 57 corps commanders and only 36 of 180 divisional commanders; the deaths included three of the five pre-war marshals. It is believed that something in the order of 30,000 Soviet military personnel were killed during this period, while large numbers of the personnel who were not executed were deported to Siberia and replaced by 'politically reliable' officers. Inevitably this meant that younger and significantly less experienced officers were promoted to fill the command gaps, and by 1941 some 75% of Soviet officers had held their posts for less than one year. Thus the average Soviet corps commander was 12 years younger than the average German divisional commander. Moreover, the political threats they faced combined with their lack of adequate command experience rendered these officers very reluctant to take any form of initiative, and the new commanders also tended to lack the specialised training which was necessary for them to undertake their new responsibilities with any real competence.

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With regard to air power, the numerical balance was also tipped strongly in favour of the USSR but, as with the armour, this quantitative superiority was more than offset by a qualitative inferiority of machines and men. The vast majority of Soviet aircraft were technically obsolete, and the poor quality of pre-war training meant that while Soviet pilots and aircrew were able to handle their aircraft under untaxing conditions, early combat rapidly proved that they wholly lacked the ability to cope with combat flying. In parallel with this, the Soviet anti-aircraft artillery branch, like the rest of the Soviet artillery, lacked modern fire-control equipment and techniques.

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Most Soviet units were on a peacetime footing, which probably explains why air force units had their aircraft parked closed together and in trim rows rather than in widely spaced dispersal areas and bays, and this made Soviet aircraft extraordinarily easy targets for German pilots in the first days of the conflict.

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It is also worth noting that before the German invasion Soviet pilots were expressly forbidden to shoot down German reconnaissance aircraft, which made several hundreds of incursions into Soviet airspace in the months preceding the launch of 'Barbarossa'.

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One of the factors which most severely afflicted the Soviet resistance against the German invasion was a severe shortage, if not a total lack, of modern warplanes. Insofar as fighters were concerned, the Soviets were equipped with very large numbers of obsolete aircraft, such as the Polikarpov I-15 biplane and Polikarpov I-16 monoplane. In 1941 much superior monoplane fighters, such as the Mikoyan-Guryevich MiG-3, Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3 and Yakovlev Yak-1, were starting to come off the production lines, but even these were not, at first, the equal in terms of all-round performance to the Messerschmitt Bf 109F or the Focke-Wulf Fw 190A, of which the latter first reached the front in September 1941. Of the Soviet aircraft, few had radio equipment, and even when present these equipments were not reliable.

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The perceived poor performance of the Soviet air forces during the 'Talvisota' campaign had served to increase the Luftwaffe’s confidence that the capabilities of its pilots and aircraft were altogether superior to those the Germans would encounter over western Russia. The Soviets had started to make considerable improvements in the standard of flight training their pilots received, but this effort had been planned to create a more effective air arm in time to meet a German invasion no earlier than 1942. Thus in June 1941 the standard of Soviet pilot training was extremely poor. While an order of 22 December 1940 had instructed that flight training be accelerated and shortened, but so poor was the order’s implementation that on 22 June the Soviets had 201 MiG-3 and 37 MiG-1 fighters ready for operations, they had a mere four pilots trained to fly them.

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In overall terms the Soviet forces, and most especially the army, were widely dispersed and almost totally unprepared, and very large numbers of formations and units were separated and without the transport they needed to concentrate. And while the Soviet ground forces rightly prided themselves on the numbers and quality of their artillery, these guns and howitzers lacked adequate ammunition with which to fight all but the most fleeting engagements. In common with other branches of the Soviet military, artillery units often lacked the transport move their guns.

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Tank units also lacked training and logistical support, and their maintenance standards were poor. Moreover, units were committed to combat without any arrangements for refuelling, ammunition resupply and personnel replacement. Often, after just a single engagement, even those units which had not been destroyed were rendered ineffective for lack of fuel, ammunition, replacements and any repair capability. The army was also involved in a major reorganisation of its armoured units into large tank corps, which further added to the disorganisation.

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Thus while the Soviet forces seemed, on paper, at least equal to the German forces, the front-line reality was altogether different inasmuch as inexperienced in not incompetent officers, lack of much essential equipment, a total insufficiency of motorised logistical support and poor training combined to render the Soviet forces totally inferior to their German opponents.

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In August 1940 British intelligence had begun to receive hints of a German plan to invade the USSR only a week after Hitler informally approved the plan for 'Barbarossa', and warned the USSR of this fact. Stalin distrusted the UK, however, and believed that the warning was a merely a ploy to draw the USSR into a pre-emptive attack that would trigger a two-front war and thereby ease the German pressure on the UK. During the spring of 1941, the Soviet intelligence services and US intelligence also provided several warnings of an impending German invasion, but Stalin also chose to ignore these.

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Stalin did in fact acknowledge that an invasion was possible and made significant preparations, but was wholly unwilling to do anything which might provoke Hitler. Stalin also appears to have placed an ill-founded confidence in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

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Thus the Soviet forces along the border with Germany were not placed on full alert and were sometimes even forbidden to fire back without permission when attacked. A partial alert was implemented on 10 April, but in overall terms the Soviet forces were completely unready for the massive blow that fell on them on 22 June.

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This should not be construed as meaning that the USSR had only very limited forces along its border with Germany, for in fact the USSR had deployed huge forces along this possible front line. These forces were very vulnerable however, for the reasons mentioned above, and also as a result of changes in their tactical doctrine. During 1938 the Soviet army had adopted, largely at the urging of General Leytenant Dmitri G. Pavlov, head of the Directorate of Tank and Armoured Car Troops. This new doctrine laid it down that the Soviet army would adopt a linear defence tactic in which the infantry divisions, each reinforced by an organic tank component, would dig in to form heavily fortified zones.

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Then in May and June 1940 the German army, with massive tactical air support, totally destroyed the French army in a matter of only six weeks. Based on information which was signally incomplete, the Soviet analysis of events, based on limited information about 'Sichelschnitt', arrived at the conclusion that the French military collapse was attributable to reliance on linear defence and lack of armoured reserves.

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The Soviets therefore decided not to repeat the mistake of relying on a linear defence, and instead to group their infantry divisions in massive concentrations, and bulk of their armoured forces into 29 mechanised corps each with a minimum of 1,031 tanks. In the event of an invasion from the west, therefore, the German armoured spearheads would be cut off and wiped out by the mechanised corps, which would then co-operate with the infantry armies to drive back the German infantry during its vulnerable approach march without massive armoured support. The Soviet left wing, in Ukraine, was to be enormously reinforced and thus be able to execute a vast strategic envelopment: after destroying Heeresgruppe 'Süd', it was to swing first to the north-west and then to the north-east through Poland and thereby reach the strategic position to fall on the rear of Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' and Heeresgruppe 'Nord'. With the complete destruction of the encircled German army thus inevitable, there would follow a Soviet offensive into the rest of Europe.

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Immediately after the German invasion of the USSR, Hitler promulgated the idea that the USSR had made extensive preparations for an offensive war in Europe, thus justifying the German invasion as a pre-emptive strike. Some credence has been given to this notion by the discovery of a document, authored by General Georgi K. Zhukov (chief of the general staff from 14 January 1941) and signed by General Major Aleksandr M. Vasilevsky (head of the operations directorate of the general staff) and General Major Nikolai F. Vatutin (chief of staff of the Ukrainian Front) suggesting a secret mobilisation and deployment of the main strength of the Soviet army along the western border under the cover of training. This operation was proposed as the means of isolating Germany from its allies, most importantly Romania and its oilfields, which Germany needed to conduct the war.

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It has also been suggested that Stalin planned to use Germany as a proxy against the west. In this concept, Stalin aimed to further Hitler’s aggressive plans against other European nations, and then to exploit the resulting weakness of these nations to facilitate a Soviet drive into western Europe. It was for this reason, therefore, that Stalin provided significant material and political support to Hitler, while at the same time preparing the Soviet army for the 'liberation' of all Europe from Nazi occupation. According to this point of view, 'Barbarossa' was a German pre-emptive offensive which capitalised on the Soviet troop concentrations immediately on the 1941 borders.

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As it finally emerged from the lengthy German development process, 'Barbarossa' was as a triple-axis offensive designed to take the three major cities of Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the centre and Kiev in the south before the onset of winter, and to destroy or capture the bulk of the Soviet field armies (now estimated at 155 divisions, but in fact totalling 230 divisions of which 170 were within operational distance of the Western Direction) by the use of large-scale enveloping movements.

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The Direction was a strategic/operational command and control echelon, comparable with the Western nations' army group, established by the Soviets to direct the operations of groups of fronts and fleets. Directions were employed primarily during the first year of the war in the strategic defence. After 1942, the Soviet high command occasionally formed temporary headquarters under Stavka representatives, most notably Marshals Sovetskogo Soyuza Zhukov, Vasilevsky and Semyon K. Timoshenko, to co-ordinate the operations of several fronts (groups of armies) in especially complex or important situations. The first directions were created on 10 July 1941, facing each of the German strategic axes in 'Barbarossa'.

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The North-Western Direction, commanded by Marshal Sovetskogo Soyuza Kliment Ye. Voroshilov, co-ordinated defensive operations along the Leningrad axis from 10 July to 27 August 1941, after which it was disbanded. The Western Direction defended the approaches from Smolensk to Moscow from 10 July to 10 September 1941 under Timoshenko, and was then re-established under then-General Zhukov from 1 February to 5 May 1942. The South-Western Direction existed from 10 July 1941 to 21 June 1942. Its first commander-in-chief was Marshal Sovetskogo Soyuza Semyon M. Budyonny, who proved unequal to the task and was removed in September 1941 and replaced, only after an interval, by Timoshenko.

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(The Stavka established a fourth direction in 1945 as the Far East Direction that existed between 30 July and 20 December 1945 under Vasilevsky, as the strategic/operational command for 'Avgust Buri' against the Japanese.)

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Thus the 26 divisions (including three Panzer and three motorised within Generaloberst Erich Hoepner’s 4^th Panzergruppe) of Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s Heeresgruppe 'Nord' (Generaloberst Georg von Küchler’s 18^th Army, Generaloberst Ernst Busch’s 16^th Army and the 4^th Panzergruppe) would be supported by Generaloberst Alfred Keller’s Luftflotte I in its drive through the Baltic states to encircle and not capture but rather wholly destroy Leningrad. The opposition was found by the 34 divisions (including four tank) of General Polkovnik Fyedor I. Kuznetsov’s Baltic Special Military District or North-Western Direction (once the war had started the North-West Front) containing General Leytenant Vasili I. Morozov’s 11^th Army (two infantry and one mechanised corps), General Major Piotr P. Sobennikov’s 8^th Army (two infantry and one mechanised corps) and General Major Nikolai E. Berzarin’s 27^th Army (three infantry corps) with General Major Ivan S. Bezuglyi’s V Airborne Corps (three airborne brigades) as front reserve.

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The 49 divisions (including nine Panzer and six motorised within Generaloberst Hermann Hoth’s 3^rd Panzergruppe and Generaloberst Heinz Guderian’s 2^nd Panzergruppe) of Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' (Generaloberst Adolf Strauss’s 9^th Army and Generaloberst Günther von Kluge’s 4^th Army as well as the 3^rd Panzergruppe and 2^nd Panzergruppe) would be supported by Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte II in its thrust toward Minsk, Smolensk and ultimately Moscow. The opposition was found by the 34 divisions (including eight tank) of Pavlov’s Western Special Military District or Western Direction (once the war had started the West Front) containing General Leytenant Vasili I. Kuznetsov’s 3^rd Army (one infantry and one mechanised corps), General Leytenant Konstantin D. Golubev’s 10^th Army (two infantry, one mechanised and one cavalry corps), General Leytenant Aleksandr A. Korobkov’s 4^th Army (one infantry and one mechanised corps) and, as front reserve, General Leytenant Piotr M. Filatov’s 13^th Army which could call on four infantry, two mechanised and one airborne corps.

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Some 57 divisions (including 14 Romanian and two Hungarian as well as five Panzer and three motorised, the last two types within Generaloberst Ewald von Kleist’s 1^st Panzergruppe) comprised Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt’s Heeresgruppe 'Süd', whose major formations were Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Reichenau’s 6^th Army, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel’s 17^th Army (including General I Triedy Ferdinand Čatlos’s Slovak Expeditionary Force and Altábornagy Béla Miklós de Dálnok’s Hungarian Gyorshadtest, or Mobile Corps), General de corp de armatâ Anton Dumitrescu’s Romanian 3^rd Army, Generaloberst Eugen Ritter von Schobert’s 11^th Army (including Generale d’Armata Giovanni Messe’s Corpo di Spedizione Italiano in Russia) and General de corp de armatâ Nicolae Ciupercă's Romanian 4^th Army as well as the 1^st Panzergruppe. This southern grouping would have the considerable weight of Generaloberst Alexander Löhr’s Luftflotte IV for geographically the largest task, that of taking Lwów and Kiev. The defence was found by the 45 divisions (including 16 tank) of General Polkovnik Mikhail P. Kirponos’s Kiev Special Military District or South-Western Direction (once the war had started the South-West Front) containing General Leytenant Mikhail I. Potapov’s 5^th Army (two infantry and two mechanised corps), General Leytenant Ivan N. Muzychenko’s 6^th Army (two infantry, two mechanised and one cavalry corps), General Leytenant Fyedor Ya. Kostenko’s 26^th Army (one infantry and one mechanised corps) and General Leytenant Pavel G. Ponedelin’s 12^th Army (two infantry and one mechanised corps), and the eventual 26 divisions (including four tank) of the Odessa Military District (once the war had started General Polkovnik Ivan V. Tyulenev’s South Front) containing General Leytenant Aleksandr K. Smirnov’s 18^th Army, General Polkovnik Yakov T. Cherevichenko’s 9^th Independent Army (three infantry, two mechanised and one cavalry corps), and in reserve two infantry and one airborne corps.

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Excluding the far northern 'Platinfuchs', 'Polarfuchs' and 'Silberfuchs' undertakings by General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst’s Norway-based Armee 'Norwegen' (two corps) supported by Generaloberst Hans-Jürgen Stumpff’s Luftflotte V and aimed at securing north Finland and taking Murmansk in northern Russia, the main weight of the German forces was composed of Heeresgruppe 'Nord' and Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' to the north of the Pripyet Marshes that divided the German offensive, and it was expected that the more determined Soviet resistance would be found in this sector, though the main weight of the Soviet defences was in fact located south of the Pripyet Marshes to defend the vital agricultural and industrial regions of Ukraine.

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It is an ironic fact that neither the Germans not the Soviets entered on this campaign, the greatest in history when measured in terms of the numbers of men and the extent of territory involved, with any definite overall strategic concept.

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The Soviet dispositions remain something of a puzzle. Initially, there appeared to be few if any preparations for a defence in depth or for delaying actions to draw the Germans deep into the USSR before major counterattacks and even counter-offensives were undertaken. Thus vast masses of Soviet troops had been concentrated close to the frontier as if for eventual offensive action, which was probably Stalin’s longer-term intention.

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The Führerweisung Nr 21 of 18 December 1940 had emphasised the need for the USSR to be crushed in a 'lightning campaign'. The bulk of the Soviet armies in the western USSR was to be destroyed in place, to prevent any organised retirement into the vastness of the USSR’s interior. With this accomplished, the Germans would then launch a rapid pursuit up to the general line provided by the Volga river, Kazan and Arkhangyel’sk.

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Heeresgruppe 'Süd', advancing to the east in the area to the south of the Pripyet Marshes, would make its main effort toward Kiev in a strategic envelopment designed to cut off all the Soviet forces in western Ukraine before they could escape across the Dniepr river.

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Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' would make the main attack up the traditional invasion route from Warsaw to Moscow via Smolensk, utilising its two Panzergruppen to envelop and destroy the large Soviet forces massed on its front.

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Heeresgruppe 'Nord' would destroy the Soviet forces in the Baltic area and then advance on Leningrad.

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Finally, in the extreme north, German and Finnish forces (4.5 and 20 divisions respectively) would operate toward Murmansk and the railway linking Murmansk with Leningrad and Moscow, while the main Finnish strength advanced on Leningrad from the north.

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Beyond these initial missions, Hitler and his military commanders remained in profound disagreement. Hitler’s chosen objectives were largely political and economic: Leningrad, whose destruction would enable the Germans and Finns to link, and would turn the Baltic into a 'German lake'; Ukraine with its wheat and coal; the industrial Donets basin; and finally the Caucasian oil fields. All of these would have been valuable conquests for an isolated Germany, but there were large Soviet armies which had first to be brought to battle and destroyed.

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The German generals' solution was an offensive aimed straight at Moscow, the city which was the political centre of both the USSR and communism. It was also the centre of much of the Soviet armaments industry and the centre of the Russian railway system. For these reasons, the generals felt, the Soviets would commit the best of their forces to the defence of Moscow, giving the Germans the opportunity to destroy it in a relatively short period of aggressive fighting.

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No definite agreement was ever reached, and as a result the German advance was frequently directed on a day-to-day basis as Hitler vacillated and called upon his intuition. Hitler had increased the number of Panzer divisions, although mainly by reducing the tank strength in each division and thus reducing such formations' capability for sustained combat. At this same time, Germany’s armament industry was still operating at little more than peacetime tempo. Production of non-essential civilian goods continued, and Hitler refused to increase tank production. Moreover, many factories were being diverted from army to navy and air force work in preparation for the new offensive against the UK which was to follow the swift destruction of the USSR.

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Meanwhile, the German navy and much of the German air force were still engaged with the British, and Hitler would therefore have to fight what had had always said he would avoid, namely a two-front war. This was a vast strategic error, and one that was compounded at the operational level by the delay imposed on its start by Hitler’s belated decision to invade and defeat Yugoslavia and Greece in 'Unternehmen 25' and 'Marita' before turning Germany’s attentions to the defeat of the USSR.

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A particular oddity of the campaign which now began was the fact that the USSR, despite its enormous intelligence system and regardless of warnings supplied by the UK and others, was taken completely unawares by the German onslaught. Although many Soviet units rallied quickly and fought stubbornly and well, many of the higher Soviet headquarters appear to have lost control of the situation suddenly confronting them. The Soviet formations opposing Heeresgruppe 'Süd', however, fought dogged and partially successful delaying actions, and the counterattacks of Potapov’s 5^th Army to the south from the Pripyet Marshes were especially effective.

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Germany’s invasion of the USSR had four phases, of which the first three (the frontier battles, the battle for Smolensk, and the battles for Leningrad and Kiev) were 'Barbarossa' proper (22 June/2 October) and the last was 'Taifun' (i) against Moscow (2 October/5 December).

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At 03.15 on 22 June German warplanes bombed major cities in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, two hours after the codeword 'Wotan' had been issued to begin 'Barbarossa'. The surprise which the Germans gained was total, even though the Stavka, which had become alarmed by reports that Germans formations and units were closing up to the border, had at 00.30 ordered that the border troops be warned that war was imminent. In fact only a few units had been alerted by 03.15.

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Germany committed some 3.2 million troops to the undertaking, either immediately or as reinforcements and replacements as the campaign continued, and this German strength was bolstered by about 500,000 Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak, Croat and Italian troops largely in the south, and large numbers of Finnish troops in the north. Though much of the Soviets' forward deployments and major concentrations in the western USSR had been pinpointed in the months before 22 June by German aerial reconnaissance, Luftwaffe reconnaissance units now flew intensively for on-the-spot plotting of troop concentration, supply dumps and airfields marked for immediate attack and destruction. The Luftwaffe was also tasked with the annihilation of Soviet air power. This was not achieved in the first days of operations, despite the fact that the Soviets had concentrated their aircraft in huge groups on the permanent airfields, which were ideal targets, rather than dispersing them on field landing strips. The Luftwaffe claimed to have destroyed 1,489 aircraft on 22 June. As commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Göring felt that the figure was probably exaggerated and ordered the figure to be checked. As German officers picked through the wreckage on Soviet airfields overrun on the first day of 'Barbarossa', they found that the Luftwaffe’s figure was in fact an underestimate, for they found more than 2,000 wrecked Soviet aircraft were found. The Luftwaffe lost 35 aircraft on the first day of combat.

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The Germans claimed to have destroyed 3,100 Soviet aircraft in the first three days of 'Barbarossa', but in fact the Soviet losses were far greater (3,922 aircraft according to one source). Thus the Luftwaffe swiftly secured total air supremacy over all three sectors of the front, and maintained this superiority to the end of 1941. With the threat of Soviet air intervention thus removed from the balance of power equation, the Luftwaffe was now able to devote large numbers of its fighter and bomber Geschwadern to supplement the efforts of the dedicated ground attack and close support units in direct support of the the ground forces.

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von Leeb’s Heeresgruppe 'Nord' was opposed by Sobennikov’s (from 30 June General Leytenant Fyedor S. Ivanov’s 8^th Army and Morozov’s 11^th Army in Soviet-occupied Lithuania, and here the Oberkommando des Heeres had ordered the 4^th Panzergruppe, with some 600 tanks, to drive at the junction of the two Soviet armies. The 4^th Panzergruppe's objective was to cross the Niemen and Daugava rivers, which were the two largest obstacles in the planned German advance to Leningrad. On the first day, German armour crossed the Riemann and penetrated 50 miles (80 km). Near Raseiniai, the German armoured spearhead of 245 tanks was counterattacked by almost 800 tanks of General Major Aleksei V. Kurkin’s III Mechanised Corps of the 11^th Army and General Major Nikolai M. Shestopalov’s XII Mechanised Corps of the 8^th Army in the Battle of Raseiniai. It took the Germans four days to encircle and destroy the Soviet armour, which was poorly co-ordinated and also lacked any fuel and ammunition resupply capability. By the end of the first week the two Soviet mechanised corps had lost 90% of their strength. The 4^th Panzergruppe, which comprised General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLI Corps (mot.) with two Panzer and two infantry divisions and General Erich von Manstein’s LVI Corps (mot.) with one Panzer and three infantry divisions, then crossed the Daugava river near Daugavpils. The Germans were now within striking distance of Leningrad. Then the poor situation of the German armour persuaded Hitler to order the Panzer formations to hold in their present positions until the slower-moving infantry formations of the 16^th Army and 18^th Army had reached them.

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The arrival of the infantry formations took a week, and this afforded the Soviets an invaluable breathing space in which to improve their defences along the banks of the Luga river and, to their rear, on the south-western approaches to Leningrad.

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The Soviet position at this time had also been made more complex by the start, on 22 June, of an anti-Soviet uprising in Lithuania and, on the following day, a declaration of Lithuanian independence. Some 30,000 Lithuanians, supplemented by ethnic Lithuanian deserters from the Soviet army, engaged the local Soviet forces. As Heeresgruppe 'Nord' moved farther to the north-east, armed resistance to Soviet rule also broke out in Estonia. The battle for Estonia ended on 7 August, when the 18^th Army reached the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland.

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von Bock’s Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' comprised the 2^nd Army, 9^th Army, Guderian’s 2^nd Panzergruppe with General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg’s XXIV Corps (mot.), General Heinrich-Gottfried von Vietinghoff-Scheel’s XLVI Corps (mot.), General Joachim Lemelsen’s XLVII Corps (mot.) and an infantry corps, and Hoth’s 3^rd Panzergruppe with General Rudolf Schmidt’s XXXIX Corps (mot.) and General Adolf-Friedrich Kuntzen’s LVII Corps (mot.), together with powerful rear, reserve and headquarters elements. Opposite Heeresgruppe 'Mitte' was the West Front with the 3^rd, 4^th, 10^th and 11^th Armies.

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The Soviet armies occupied a salient which jutted into German-occupied Poland with the Soviet salient’s centre at Białystok. To the east of Białystok was Minsk, the capital of the Belorussian republic and a communications (especially railway) nexus of strategic importance. The task of the two Panzergruppen of Heeresgruppe 'Mitte', striking from Suwałki in the north and Brest-Litovsk in the south on the army group’s flanks, was to meet at Minsk and thus cut off the formations of the West Front for piecemeal destruction. The 3^rd Panzergruppe broke through the junction of the North-West and West Fronts in the north of the salient, and crossed the Riemann river, while the 2^nd Panzergruppe crossed the Bug river river in the south. As the Panzergruppen attacked, the 2^nd Army and 9^th Army struck directly at the centre of the Soviet salient, pinning the formations in front of them and eventually encircling large numbers of Soviet troops at Białystok.

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The Stavka at first failed to grasp the vast extent of the catastrophe that was breaking on the USSR. Timoshenko, chairman of the Supreme Military Council of the Red Army and from 23 June chairman of the High Command, ordered all Soviet forces to launch a general counter-offensive: with the necessary supply and ammunition dumps destroyed and the3 Soviet communications network totally collapsed, the attacks were totally unco-ordinated and therefore pre-ordained to the failure that then resulted. Zhukov signed the infamous Directive of the People’s Commissariat of Defence No. 3 (Zhukov later claimed that this was only under pressure from Stalin), which ordered the Soviet forces to start an offensive. He commanded the troops 'to encircle and destroy the enemy grouping near Suwałki and to seize the Suwałki region by the evening of 26 June' and 'to encircle and destroy the enemy grouping invading Vladimir-Volynia and Brody direction' and even 'to seize the Lublin region by the evening of 24 June'.This manoeuvre could not succeed, and the further disorganised Soviet formations and units were soon destroyed by the Germans.

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The Battle of Białystok-Minsk, known to the Soviets in its two primary ph