Operation Barbarossa. In Mein Kampf and in numerous speeches Adolf Hitler claimed that the German population needed more living space. Davis W. on 10212014, said At the GMT gathering 101914 was able to play this. I enjoy WWII but generally play hex based. This game was very fast and is a card. Frederick I German Friedrich I, Italian Federico I 1122 10 June 1190, also known as Frederick Barbarossa Italian Federico Barbarossa, was the Holy Roman. Barbarossa Game' title='Barbarossa Game' />Hitlers Lebensraum policy was mainly directed at the Soviet Union. He was especially interested in the Ukraine where he planned to develop a German colony. The system would be based on the British occupation of India What India was for England the territories of Russia will be for us. The German colonists ought to live on handsome, spacious farms. The German services will be lodged in marvellous buildings, the governors in palaces. The Germans this is essential will have to constitute amongst themselves a closed society, like a fortress. The least of our stable lads will be superior to any native. Hitler intended to force Norwegians, Swedes and Danes to move to these territories in the East. Hitler believed that the Blitzkrieg tactics employed against the other European countries could not be used as successfully against the Soviet Union. He conceded that due to its enormous size, the Soviet Union would take longer than other countries to occupy. However he was confident it could still be achieved during the summer months of 1. Joseph Stalin believed that Germany would not invade the Soviet Union until Britain and France had been conquered. From Stalins own calculations, this would not be until the summer of 1. Some of his closest advisers began to argue that 1. The surrender of France in June, 1. Stalins calculations. Stalins response to Frances defeat was to send Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin for more discussions. Molotov was instructed to draw out these talks for as long as possible. Stalin knew that if Adolf Hitler did not attack the Soviet Union in the summer of 1. No one, not even someone as rash as Hitler, would invade the Soviet Union in the winter, he argued. Germany was now in a strong negotiating position and found it impossible to agree to Hitlers demands. As soon as talks broke up, Hitler ordered his military leaders to prepare for Operation Barbarossa. The plan was for the invasion of the Soviet Union to start on the 1. HhVn2LgUo7g/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Barbarossa Game' title='Barbarossa Game' />May, 1. Hitler believed that this would give the German Army enough time to take control of the country before the harsh Soviet winter set in. General Friedrich Paulus was asked to carry out a strategic survey on the Soviet Union for the proposed invasion. The main advice given by Paulus to Adolf Hitler was to make sure that after the invasion the Red Army did not retreat into the interior. For the campaign to be successful he argued for battles of encirclement. He also suggested that the main thrust should be made north of the Pripyat Marshes in order to capture Moscow. Information on the proposed invasion came to Stalin from various sources. Richard Sorge, an agent working for the Red Orchestra in Japan, obtain information about the proposed invasion as early as December, 1. Winston Churchill sent a personal message to Stalin in April, 1. German troop movements suggested that they were about to attack the Soviet Union. However, Stalin was still suspicious of the British and thought that Churchill was trying to trick him into declaring war on Germany. When the Red Orchestra prediction that Germany would invade in May, 1. Stalin became even more convinced that Germany had invaded Yugoslavia in April. Adolf Hitler had expected the Yugoslavs to surrender immediately but because of stubborn resistance, Hitler had to postpone Operation Barbarossa for a few weeks. On 2. 1st June, 1. German sergeant deserted to the Soviet forces. He informed them that the German Army would attack at dawn the following morning. Stalin was reluctant to believe the soldiers story and it was not until the German attack took place that he finally accepted that his attempts to avoid war with Germany until 1. The German forces, made up of three million men and 3,4. The north group headed for Leningrad, the centre group for Moscow and the southern forces into the Ukraine. Andrey Yeryomenko, who was in Minsk, later wrote Having covered every inch of ground with corpses the Nazis broke through to Smolensk. Stubborn fighting for the town proper raged for almost a whole month. The city repeatedly passed from hand to hand. More than one German division found its last resting place in the approaches to Smolensk and in the town itself. Every street and every house was contested by severe fighting and the Nazis paid very heavily for every yard of their advance. Hundreds of German soldiers and officers perished in the waters of the Dnieper River. General Demitry Pavlov was forced to retreat and the within six days, the German Army had captured the city. When he heard the news Stalin told Lavrenty Beria This is a monstrous crime. Those responsible must lose their heads. Pavlov and his chief of staff, Major General Vladimir Efimovich Klimovskikh, were now recalled to Moscow. After a meeting with Kliment Voroshilov they were charged on 4th July with being involved in an anti Soviet military conspiracy that had betrayed the interests of the Motherland, violated the oath of office and damaged the combat power of the Red Army that are crimes under Articles 5. RSFSR Criminal Code. It was reported that A preliminary judicial investigation and determined that the defendants Pavlov and Klimovskikh being the first the commander of the Western Front, and the second the chief of staff of the same front, during the outbreak of hostilities with the German forces against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, showed cowardice, failure of power, mismanagement, allowed the collapse of command and control, surrender of weapons to the enemy without fighting, willful abandonment of military positions by the Red Army, the most disorganized defense of the country and enabled the enemy to break through the front of the Red Army. When Joseph Stalin was told that Pavlov and Klimovskikh had been charged he told Major General Alexander Poskrebyshev I approve the sentence but tell Ulrikh to get rid of all that rubbish about conspiratorial activity. The case shouldnt drag out. No appeal. And then inform the fronts so that they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy. Anastas Mikoyan later wrote It was a pity to lose him but it was justified. With the execution of Demitry Pavlov and three other generals, Joseph Stalin made it clear that he would punish severely any commander whom he believed had let down the Soviet Union. In future, Soviet commanders thought twice about surrendering or retreating. Another factor in this was the way that the German Army massacred the people of Minsk. Terrified of both Stalin and Hitler, the Soviet people had no option but to fight until they were killed. The first few months of the war was disastrous for the Soviet Union. The German northern forces surrounded Leningrad while the centre group made steady progress towards Moscow. German forces had also made deep inroads into the Ukraine. Kiev was under siege and Stalins Chief of Staff, Georgi Zhukov, suggested that the troops defending the capital of the Ukraine should be withdrawn, thus enabling them to take up strong defensive positions further east. Stalin insisted that the troops stayed and by the time Kiev was taken, the casualties were extremely high. It was the most comprehensive defeat experienced by the red army in its history. However, the determined resistance put up at Kiev, had considerably delayed the attack on Moscow. It was now September and winter was fast approaching. Operation Barbarossa The Biggest Military Adventure in History. June 2. 2nd marks the 7. Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germanys invasion of the Soviet Union the biggest military adventure in history, which led directly to the downfall of Adolf Hitlers murderous regime. Together with the Holocaust that followed it, Operation Barbarossa was the ultimate expression of Hitlers twisted vision, reflecting both the vaulting ambition and depthless cruelty of Nazi ideology. After Germanys humiliating defeat in the First World War, the Austrian born Hitler consumed by weird conspiracy theories and even weirder notions of racial purity made it his life mission to reunite the German people, topple the Soviet Union, destroy Communism and win lebensraum living space for the superior Aryan race. In Mein Kampf, dictated in 1. Germanys eternal enemies, Bolshevism and world Jewry, which were in fact the same thing If we talk about new soil and territory in Europe today, we can think primarily only of Russia and its vassal border states. The colossal empire in the east is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. Hitler never offered many specifics about his grand vision perhaps because even he realized they were too shocking to be committed to paper. After years rattling around his hate filled brain, in 1. Hitler give the task of actually planning the colonization of Eastern Europe to his loyal henchman Heinrich Himmler the commander of the elite Schutzstaffel SS security force, and a man who rivaled his Fhrer in sheer crazed murderous ambition. In the broad outlines of Himmlers Generalplan Ost Eastern Master Plan, German victory in the east would inaugurate ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale. After the destruction of the Soviet Union, approximately 3. Slavic sub humans would be murdered, starved to death, or forcibly deported to Siberia to make room for 8 1. German settlers. The groups to be resettled which soon became a euphemism for murder included all of Eastern Europes Jews and most of the Slavic populations of Poland, Ukraine, and Belorussia. Fourteen million Slavs would be sterilized and retained as slave labor. The Great Gamble. Although many members of his general staff were skeptical about the wisdom of invading Russia, Hitlers fantastic vision seemed a little more plausible following an unbroken string of triumphs from 1. Remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1. Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1. Britain and France finally declared war on Germany following Hitlers invasion of Poland in September 1. German Wehrmacht armed forces appeared unstoppable with the lightning conquests of Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France from March June 1. And all this was merely a preamble. On December 1. 8, 1. Hitler issued a secret order to Germanys top generals instructing them to begin preparing a massive surprise attack on the Soviet Union, codenamed Barbarossa after a 1. Holy Roman Emperor who won land for the Germans from the Slavs. The element of surprise was crucial, Hitler emphasized, because of the need to prevent the Red Army from withdrawing into Russias vast interior German troops would drive deep into Soviet territory and capture millions of enemy troops in huge encirclements before their commanders had time to react. To accomplish this, Hitlers generals planned a blitzkrieg, or lightning war, similar to the ones that destroyed Poland and France in 1. As originally planned, the attack would begin in the spring, no later than May 1. German armies the most time for fighting before the grim seasonal deadline imposed by the Russian winter the Red Army would have to be beaten no later than December 1. German soldiers risked death by freezing. Underlying this breathtakingly ambitious strategy was the German general staffs conviction that the Red Army had been fatally weakened by Stalins purges in the late 1. Soviet dictator executed 4. Hitler had also lulled Stalin into something like a false sense of security with a non aggression pact signed when the two dictators divided up Poland in 1. Hitlers diplomatic agreements was nothing more than a scrap of paper to be treacherously discarded after serving its purpose. Unprecedented, Unmerciful, and Unrelenting HarshnessViewing the coming invasion of Russia as a battle to the death between Germany and Judeo Bolshevism, Hitler ordered his generals to crush resistance with utmost brutality. In a secret speech on March 3. Army Chief of the General Staff Franz Halder in his diary, Hitler warned these proud Prussian officers to abandon obsolete notions of decency and honor The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but. I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. This included killing every Communist official the infamous Commissar Order. Squeaky Voice Program. Hitler justified mass murder by arguing that Bolshevik officials, left alive, would lead a guerrilla war threatening the German militarys lines of communication and supply. Indeed the same method summary executions would be used against anyone even suspected of supporting the partisan resistance. If guilty parties couldnt be found, the Germans would simply execute everyone in the nearest village to make their point. In short, millions of people mostly peasants would be murdered for trivial or imagined offenses. And there was a still darker secret Hitler hid even from his generals, aside for a few vague allusions the planned murder of all of Europes Jews, beginning with roughly three million Polish Jews, 9. Ukrainian Jews, and 6. Belorussian Jews. In his fevered imagination Hitler lumped together poor Jewish peasants, Communist party officials, and anti German partisans in a single, malignant conspiracy that had to be exterminated. Some of the officers objected to the Commissar Order and atrocities against civilians on grounds of honor Field Marshal Erich von Manstein told the commander of the Army Group under which I served at that time that I could not carry out such an order, which was against the honor of a soldier. But Hitler, anticipating the qualms of his professional soldiers, gave them an easy out much of the dirty work of hunting partisans and murdering Jews would be left to about 3,0. SS death squads euphemistically termed Einsatzgruppen Special Action Groups. In the final months before Barbarossa, personnel and materials moved around Europe on an unprecedented scale, as roughly 3. Finland to Romania. German troops would be supported by 6. Third Reichs vassal states and allies, including 3. Finns, 2. 50,0. 00 Romanians and 5. Slovaks. Speaking with his top generals on February 3, 1. Fhrer contemplated his vast gamble with typical nihilism When the attack on Russia commences, the world will hold its breath and make no comment. But the world would have to wait to hold its breath. Crucial Delays. Hitler originally intended to launch Operation Barbarossa around May 1.