Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost The War

Jonathan Dimbleby Viking £25 ★★★★★

According to Field Marshal Montgomery, rule one on page one of the book of war is ‘Don’t march on Moscow.’ This June sees the 80th anniversary of the day Hitler broke that rule. Codenamed Operation Barbarossa, his attack on the Soviet Union started a tragic chain of events that would kill tens of millions of people, and eventually bring about Hitler’s own downfall.

Jonathan Dimbleby’s new history of Barbarossa charts these terrible events from start to finish, but the core of his book describes the military campaign that took place between June and December 1941.

For the Germans, the invasion seemed to start well. Within three months, they had advanced more than 500 miles, and were beginning to gloat about the complete ‘collapse of the Russian Front’. By Christmas they were knocking on the gates of Moscow. Having already overrun the whole of Western Europe with relative ease, this looked like yet another success for their Blitzkrieg tactics.

But as Dimbleby points out, this apparent success was a mirage. The USSR was not like Western Europe: even the loss of vast territories represented little more than a dent in a country that stretched over 11 time zones.

Hitler also underestimated the resilience of both the Soviet economy and the Soviet people. No matter how many soldiers the Germans killed or captured, the Red Army just kept coming. By the time Operation Barbarossa ground to a halt, the Soviets had almost doubled the size of their army and had begun a surge in arms production that would eventually turn them into Europe’s superpower. If there is one thing that Dimbleby brings to life, it is the sheer, staggering scale of these events. When the Germans attacked, they did so with the greatest invasion force in history, along a front that stretched from the Baltic to the Balkans. We live today in an age when war often consists of precision strikes against specific targets. Hitler’s approach, and indeed Stalin’s, was to bludgeon entire populations into submission with indiscriminate violence. As a consequence, the scale of the killing described in this book is quite sickening. Those six months saw not only the death and wounding of more than a million soldiers, but also the deliberate starvation of entire populations of civilians, particularly in cities such as Leningrad. Then there was the cold-blooded killing of Jews, both at massacre sites like Babi Yar and in a chain of concentration camps across the region. Operation Barbarossa turned a series of local atrocities into a continental genocide. Dimbleby describes these events with great skill, care and attention to detail. The only flaw in this book is his repeated assertion that the failure of Hitler’s attack was ‘inevitable’ and ‘preordained’. Nothing in history was ever inevitable. Nevertheless, as generals like Montgomery knew, the odds of success were slim at best: Operation Barbarossa was Hitler’s greatest, bloodiest and most foolhardy gamble of the war.

Keith Lowe is the author of The Fear And The Freedom: Why The Second World War Still Matters (Penguin)