00:00En el 22 de junio de 1941, Adolf Hitler lanzó Operation Barbarossa,
00:05Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union.
00:08It was the beginning of a campaign that would ultimately decide the Second World War.
00:14At first, the Germans enjoyed stunning success.
00:17The panzers forged ahead while the Luftwaffe ruled the skies.
00:21Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed or captured in huge encirclement battles.
00:27Germany seemed to be on the brink of another major victory.
00:31But the Soviet Union did not crumble as expected,
00:35and despite terrible losses, their will to fight remained strong.
00:39German casualties mounted as they came agonizingly close to taking Moscow.
00:44Just 20 miles short of their objective, the Soviets launched a sudden counterattack,
00:49forcing the Germans onto the defensive.
00:51It was Hitler's first defeat on land in the Second World War.
00:55But how did it happen?
00:57Why did Operation Barbarossa come so close to success before falling at the final hurdle?
01:04Well, before we answer that question,
01:06a reminder to subscribe to the Imperial War Museum's YouTube channel
01:09for more videos just like this every two weeks.
01:13Adolf Hitler begins planning to invade the Soviet Union as early as July 1940,
01:20before the Battle of Britain actually takes place.
01:22Even back in Mein Kampf in the mid-1920s,
01:25he's planning to attack the Soviet Union.
01:29This is going to be the battleground on which National Socialism's ideology
01:33either wins out or found us.
01:35One of the tenets of that ideology was the idea of Lebensraum, or living space.
01:40The creation of a Germanic Aryan Empire in Eastern Europe
01:44that would grant the resources needed for self-sufficiency.
01:48Having defeated France and the Low Countries in just six weeks,
01:51Germany was confident of capturing that land from the Soviet Union.
01:55Hitler believed that the communist society was fundamentally weak,
01:59and that it wouldn't take much to defeat it.
02:02His famous quote is that all we've got to do is kick the door in,
02:05and the whole edifice will come crumbling down.
02:08The Germans are not only planning on a fast blitzkrieg campaign
02:13that's going to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in six to eight weeks,
02:16but they need a fast victory.
02:19They can't have a slow attritional war,
02:22because there's not enough reserves of men and material
02:25to turn this into a long war.
02:27We need to win quickly.
02:28To achieve that victory, Germany mustered over three million men,
02:32the largest invasion force in the history of warfare to that point.
02:36Three army groups set out for three different targets.
02:40Army Group North heading for Leningrad,
02:42Army Group Centre aiming for Moscow,
02:45and Army Group South heading for Kiev.
02:47The whole strategy is a resumption of the blitzkrieg idea
02:50that's been so successful in France.
02:52That is, you win by not fighting.
02:55If you want to find out more about blitzkrieg and how it works,
02:58I've put a link to our video on the subject in the description.
03:01When the operation commenced on the 22nd of June 1941,
03:05those tactics worked perfectly,
03:07the advance exceeding all expectations.
03:10Hundreds of thousands of troops were captured
03:12as German tanks steamed through the Soviet defences.
03:16The Germans begin the campaign
03:17by basically destroying the Soviet air force on the ground.
03:21They catch them by surprise.
03:22The Soviet air force is basically destroyed,
03:24which enables the German army to move freely across the battlefield,
03:28thrust deep into the Russian interior
03:30and encircle the frontier armies.
03:33The Soviet army was taken completely by surprise
03:36and had not had time to fortify their new border in Poland,
03:40while Stalin's purges of the Soviet officer corps
03:43left his army poorly led.
03:45Whereas in the Battle of France,
03:46the French and British armies would see themselves
03:48just about to get cut off
03:50and would decide, oh, time to retreat.
03:52The Soviet armies are so slow, so badly led,
03:56that they don't have time to pull back.
03:57They get encircled, completely cut off,
04:00hundreds of thousands of men.
04:01However, there is a problem.
04:03By the time they reach this point,
04:06Germany expected to have destroyed the Russian field armies
04:09and that the remaining surge towards Moscow
04:11would be more of a parade than a battle.
04:14But the Germans had completely underestimated
04:17the size of the Soviet army.
04:19They're going to invade with about three million men
04:22and they expect the total Soviet army
04:25to be roughly the same.
04:27Whereas in actual fact, by Christmas 1941,
04:30German armies have captured three million Soviet soldiers
04:34and they're still fighting.
04:36Those vast distances covered by the German panzers
04:39made them more and more difficult to supply,
04:41while Soviet soldiers unexpectedly continued to fight.
04:45So actually, these big encirclements behind the German lines
04:50became a real problem in that they could now attack
04:53into the German lines of communication
04:55and cut them off from the front line.
04:57So at this point, Hitler said, well, hang on, stop.
05:01Despite protests from the German generals,
05:04Army Group Centre stopped its attack on Moscow
05:06and peeled off to the left and right
05:08to help destroy the Soviet pockets that were still fighting,
05:11killing or capturing hundreds of thousands more Soviet soldiers
05:15in huge battles of annihilation.
05:18By mid-September, the Soviet field armies were finally finished
05:21and the drive on Moscow could begin.
05:24This pause to look behind and clear up behind
05:27to allow everybody to catch up,
05:28it gives a breather for the Soviets
05:31to redefine their own front line
05:34and bring up more units into the front line,
05:37dig in before Moscow.
05:38So there's now a completely new defence line
05:41that the Germans have to break through
05:43when they recommence the offensive.
05:45And that wasn't the only problem for Germany.
05:47Though these new troops were undersupplied and undertrained,
05:51new supplies were beginning to arrive from Britain.
05:54Many of the divisions don't have uniforms.
05:56They're just civilian clothes.
05:58Some of the divisions, they have to share rifles.
06:01There's not enough rifles to go around.
06:02At the same time, the first Arctic convoys
06:05are arriving in Mamansk and Archangel,
06:07bringing supplies for armed Britain,
06:09just giving enough equipment for the Soviets
06:11to sort of stay in the field.
06:13On top of that, the Soviets had managed
06:15to relocate their factories
06:17from in front of the advancing Germans
06:19to the Ural Mountains.
06:21That meant war production was actually kicking up
06:23and they were able to get more tanks
06:25like the new T-34 into the front line.
06:28Worst of all, though,
06:29was the rapidly deteriorating Russian weather.
06:32Through October, it's the Soviet autumn.
06:34So what happens is you have snowfalls,
06:37thaw, snowfall, thaw.
06:40You get a completely muddy morass
06:42across all of central Russia.
06:44So the German offensive begins to grind to a halt,
06:47both because they're coming up against
06:49this new defensive line that they didn't really expect,
06:51plus the Soviet weather's getting in the way,
06:53plus the fact that now most German formations,
06:56especially the armoured formations
06:57at the tip of the spear,
06:58are now down to about 50% strength.
07:00They get to 20 kilometres away from Moscow.
07:03And by that stage,
07:04the weather has now turned completely.
07:07It's now full-blown Soviet winter.
07:09By the end of November,
07:11you've got more German troops in hospital with frostbite
07:14than you have with wounds.
07:16The offensive was over.
07:18But looking at the whole picture
07:20as Barbarossa came to a halt,
07:22Germany still seemed to be in a good position.
07:25Army Group North was sure
07:26that the besieged Leningrad was about to fall.
07:29Army Group Centre were at the gates of Moscow,
07:32and Army Group South had taken the Ukraine and Kiev.
07:35When the new year came,
07:37they planned to finish the job.
07:39However, little did they know,
07:41the Soviets had an ace up their sleeve.
07:43They've managed to transfer
07:45the majority of those Russian divisions
07:48which were on the eastern side of the Soviet Union,
07:51those that had been facing Mongolia and the Japanese,
07:53because they'd learned
07:54that the Japanese were not going to attack.
07:58These weren't green, untrained troops.
08:01These were proper Soviet field divisions,
08:04and many of them had been trained for winter warfare,
08:08because they're from Siberia.
08:09Unlike the exhausted Germans they would be facing,
08:12these troops had winter camouflage,
08:14and weapons that could survive the extreme cold.
08:17On December 6th, they counterattacked.
08:20And they launched this big Soviet counter-offensive
08:23in front of the gates of Moscow,
08:24and catch the Germans completely by surprise,
08:27and force them onto the retreat,
08:29and that's the end of Barbarossa.
08:31Hitler's ideological assumption
08:33that Soviet society would collapse
08:35when they kicked the door in
08:36could not have been further from the truth.
08:39The Germans needed a quick victory,
08:41but the Soviets had managed to stay in the fight,
08:44and turn the Blitzkrieg Barbarossa
08:46into a war of production.
08:48The Germans are now being forced
08:49into a war of attrition,
08:51a long, grinding, slow war
08:53in the Soviet interior,
08:55in this case in wintertime,
08:57and things are looking bad for the Germans,
09:00because they haven't got the men and materiel
09:03to face up to the Soviet armies
09:04on a one-to-one basis.
09:06Despite Barbarossa's failure
09:08to finish the Soviets quickly,
09:09a new German offensive began in 1942.
09:13Under Hitler's direct orders,
09:14the target was the Caucasus in the south,
09:17and a city called Stalingrad.
09:19The German generals wanted to resume the push on Moscow,
09:23but Hitler insisted that Germany needed
09:25the oil fields in Azerbaijan
09:27to supply their armies.
09:29Though it escaped his generals,
09:31Hitler had now realized
09:32this was a war of attrition and material,
09:35whether he liked it or not.
