1,200 Tanks Roll Into Battle. The Stunning Offensive of the German Army Group Center. Part 3.

Today we begin our exploration of the memoirs of German non-commissioned officer. At dawn on June 22, 1941, Germany crossed the border with the Soviet Union and Romania with the full might of its three-million-strong army. One army group launched an attack in a northeasterly direction along the Vilnius–Leningrad line. Another strike was launched to the southeast toward Kyiv. The third was carried out by Army Group Center under the command of von Bock, advancing eastward along the Bialystok–Minsk–Smolensk–Moscow axis. A thirty-year-old communications noncommissioned officer —a former law student and participant in the German occupation of France—was attached to the artillery unit of this army group. Operation Barbarossa – The invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany and many of its Axis powers, which began on Sunday, June 22, 1941, during World War II. It was the largest and bloodiest land offensive in human history, involving approximately 10 million soldiers and claiming more than 8 million lives by the end of the operation. In the two years prior to the invasion, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts that served strategic objectives. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the German High Command began planning the invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the code name “Plan Otto”). During the operation, more than 3.8 million Axis soldiers—the largest invasion force in the history of warfare—invaded the western Soviet Union across a 2,900-kilometer front, with over 600,000 vehicles and more than 600,000 horses available for non-military operations. The failure of Operation Barbarossa turned the tide for Germany. Operationally, German troops achieved significant victories, occupied a number of important economic areas of the Soviet Union (mainly in Ukraine), and inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, but they also suffered heavy losses themselves. Despite these initial successes, the German advance ended during the Battle of Moscow in late 1941, and the subsequent winter offensive by Soviet troops pushed the Germans back about 250 kilometers. The German command expected a rapid collapse of Soviet resistance, as had been the case in Poland, analogous to the situation in Russia during World War I. However, such a collapse did not occur; instead, the Red Army repelled the strongest attacks by the German forces and drew them into a war of attrition for which the Germans were unprepared. After heavy losses and logistical problems during Operation Barbarossa, the weakened German forces were no longer able to advance along the entire Eastern Front, and subsequent operations to regain the initiative and advance into Soviet territory—such as Plan Blue in 1942 and Operation Citadel in 1943—were weaker and ultimately failed, leading to the defeat of the German forces. These victories by Soviet troops ended Germany's territorial expansion and foreshadowed Germany's final defeat and collapse in 1945. #history #easternfront #worldwarii #technic #wehrmacht #ww2 #memoirs #storytime #army #military #facts