Coming as a surprise to almost no one, Germany launched one of the largest and most deadly invasions of the war – one which was committed to toppling the Communist regime of Josef Stalin and turn all of Eastern Europe into a Nazi satellite.
Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941. It was the largest and costliest land offensive in human history, with around 10 million combatants taking part, and over 8 million casualties by the end of the operation.
The operation, code-named after Frederick Barbarossa (“red beard”), a 12th-century Holy Roman Emperor and Crusader, put into action Nazi Germany’s ideological goals of eradicating communism, and conquering the western Soviet Union to re-populate it with Germans. The German Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered people as forced labour for the Axis war effort while acquiring the oil reserves of the Caucasus as well as the agricultural resources of various Soviet territories, including Ukraine and Byelorussia. Their ultimate goal was to create more Lebensraum (living space) for Germany, and the eventual extermination of the native Slavic peoples by mass deportation to Siberia, Germanisation, enslavement, and genocide.
In the two years leading up to the invasion, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the code-name Operation Otto). Over the course of the operation, over 3.8 million personnel of the Axis powers—the largest invasion force in the history of warfare—invaded the western Soviet Union, along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front, with 600,000 motor vehicles and over 600,000 horses for non-combat operations. The offensive marked a massive escalation of World War II, both geographically and with the Anglo-Soviet Agreement, which brought the USSR into the Allied coalition.
The operation opened up the Eastern Front, in which more forces were committed than in any other theatre of war in human history. The area saw some of history’s largest battles, most horrific atrocities, and highest casualties (for Soviet and Axis forces alike), all of which influenced the course of World War II and the subsequent history of the 20th century. The German armies eventually captured some five million Soviet Red Army troops and deliberately starved to death or otherwise killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, and millions of civilians, as the “Hunger Plan” worked to solve German food shortages and exterminate the Slavic population through starvation. Mass shootings and gassing operations, carried out by German death squads or willing collaborators, murdered over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust.
News for this day was about the beginnings of the operation; only two days old at the time. And was the subject of considerable speculation on the parts of the Allied countries, and where the U.S. would be fitting into this, since it was not yet declared as part of the war.
Here are those reports, as they happened on June 24, 1941 from NBC Radio’s News Of The World.
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