It was just more than one year after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that the directive for Operation Barbarossa was issued. Signed by Hitler on December 18, 1940, the secret document demanded the Wehrmacht to crush Russia in a rapid campaign, undoing the agreement for spheres of influence throughout Eastern Europe. It remains a point of contention whether Berlin wooed Moscow into benign rapprochement in a series of deceptions stemming from the directive or Stalin, throughout it all, remained sceptical of Hitler’s true designs, merely miscalculating the timing of the invasion. The historiography remains divided on the issue of culpability, a debate complicated by war journals, first-person accounts, and only partially published military collections that tell an arguably ambiguous story. This paper defines Operation Barbarossa as a marker of Hitler’s grand
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Stalin’s unilateral power and penchant for replacing older bureaucrats with younger ones paralysed communication, curbing opinions that challenged his own. Stalin can be held responsible for being surprised, due to his supreme command over policymaking, dismissal of intelligence, and weakening of the military; however the forces behind Operation Barbarossa extend beyond him. Less than a year after the war began, Nazi Germany occupied Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg, and had successfully invaded France. Its domain over Europe in the east stopped short of the boundary of interests defined in the 1939 pact with the Soviet Union. In the early morning of June 22, 1941, three-quarters of the existing German army field strength began the march into Russia, just hours after the last trainloads of raw materials had been delivered into Germany. The combination of military purges and a weakened defence line along the extended Soviet border, with incomplete fortifications and areas of vulnerability, created the conditions for Operation Barbarossa’s tactics of driving deep armoured wedges
Stalin’s unilateral power and penchant for replacing older bureaucrats with younger ones paralysed communication, curbing opinions that challenged his own. Stalin can be held responsible for being surprised, due to his supreme command over policymaking, dismissal of intelligence, and weakening of the military; however the forces behind Operation Barbarossa extend beyond him. Less than a year after the war began, Nazi Germany occupied Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg, and had successfully invaded France. Its domain over Europe in the east stopped short of the boundary of interests defined in the 1939 pact with the Soviet Union. In the early morning of June 22, 1941, three-quarters of the existing German army field strength began the march into Russia, just hours after the last trainloads of raw materials had been delivered into Germany. The combination of military purges and a weakened defence line along the extended Soviet border, with incomplete fortifications and areas of vulnerability, created the conditions for Operation Barbarossa’s tactics of driving deep armoured wedges