The Third Reich in photos: Death struggle of 1941

THE NAZI CAMPAIGN IN THE EAST WITNESSED SOME OF THE BLOODIEST FIGHTING AND MOST RUTHLESS OCCUPATIONS Change of Tyrants July 1941 ➧ A Russian civilian unveils A new poster, the name of hitler spelled out in cyrillic letters

Rare images from the Nazis’ move east

History’s short-term memory, facilitated by Soviet efforts to fog over the perfidious treachery, often fails to recall that arch-enemies Nazi Germany and the USSR teamed up to destroy Poland in September 1939 under the banner of their infamous non-aggression pact. That partnership would end violently on 22 June 1941 when German forces swept into the Soviet Union. Hitler was intent on utterly destroying what he saw as the foundation of communism and ‘World Jewry’, and in the process gaining huge territories and resources for the Third Reich, to further the goal of dominating Europe and enslaving or exterminating its peoples.

The Germans called the invasion ‘Operation Barbarossa’ after Frederick Barbarossa, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and a leader of the 12th-century Third Crusade. Axis forces attacked with some 3 million soldiers, including Hungarian and Romanian allies, 3,580 tanks, 7,184 artillery guns, 1,830 planes and 750,000 horses. The storm of fire and steel launched on both land and from the air struck eastward, intent on destroying Stalin’s Russia in four months.

As Western Europe’s self-proclaimed ‘cultural warriors’, German soldiers brought both orchestras and poison gas, and also their personal cameras to document what they foresaw as certain success. Envisioning themselves as the defenders of Western civilisation and as crusaders against the Asiatic hordes of the ‘Bolshevik-jewish world threat’, they viewed their victims as Slavic ‘untermenschen’ or ‘subhumans’, or, as Göring described them, “useless eaters”. Thus the Nazi leadership planned, once the war had been won, for 30 million Russian civilians to be mass-executed via starvation to make room for German colonists.

When first invading the Ukraine, German forces were greeted as liberators, Stalin’s draconian economic pogroms having caused the starvation and death of millions and the deportation of millions more. Choosing between the lesser of two evils, many Soviet citizens hoped for relief from the communist dictatorship and even independence for their homelands – ultimately false hopes, quickly dispelled by the German policies of racial persecution, mass murder and enslavement.

Hitler had predicted the USSR would “fall like a rotten house of cards” within a few months. So assured were the German generals that they failed to equip their troops with adequate clothing and equipment, and tens of thousands, dressed in thin summer uniforms, would pay the price exacted by Russia’s ‘General Winter’, when temperatures fell to -34 degrees Celsius, freezing both men and machines.

However, 1941 would at first appear as a pivotal year and a harbinger of Nazi Germany’s military success, as its seemingly unstoppable forces initially swept away Red Army defenders. But time, distance, growing resistance and the weather, along with a fatal arrogance, brought grinding setbacks, including the failure to occupy Moscow. Far greater defeats would follow, but not before Nazi bullets, bombs and flames had killed 30 million Russians.