Napoleon tried in 1812 and failed. Hitler tried in 1941 and failed. The invasion of Russia is quite possibly the most recurrent and most lethal strategic temptation in European history. The geography, the climate, and the sheer depth of Russian territory have destroyed every army that tried to conquer it. But in no case was the failure so costly or so definitive as in Operation Barbarossa, the largest military offensive ever launched, which opened the bloodiest front in history and sealed the defeat of the Third Reich.
On June 22, 1941, more than three and a half million German and Axis soldiers crossed the Soviet border along a front stretching nearly three thousand kilometres. With them came some three thousand tanks, seven thousand pieces of artillery, and twenty-five hundred aircraft. It was the largest invasion force in human history. Hitler named it after Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor and leader of the Third Crusade, a name that was not coincidental: the war against the Soviet Union was, in Hitler’s mind, a crusade, a war of civilisation and extermination. It was not simply a military campaign. It was the central project of National Socialism: to conquer Lebensraum, living space in the East, and to liquidate those who inhabited it.
Blitzkrieg at Its Fullest
The first weeks of Barbarossa were the most spectacular demonstration of the power of lightning war. The Blitzkrieg, the operational concept that had worked flawlessly in Poland and France, reached an unprecedented scale in Russia. The Soviets were caught off guard. Stalin, despite multiple intelligence warnings, had not ordered full mobilisation for fear of provoking Germany. The result was catastrophic.
In the first week, German forces advanced more than three hundred kilometres in some sectors. The Luftwaffe destroyed around eighteen hundred Soviet aircraft on the first day, most of them on the ground. Entire Red Army divisions were encircled and annihilated in vast pockets of destruction. At Bialystok and Minsk, the Germans captured more than three hundred thousand soldiers in the opening weeks. At Smolensk, by the end of July, another three hundred thousand. The figures had no precedent in modern warfare.
The invasion force was divided into three Army Groups. Army Group North advanced towards Leningrad. Army Group South towards Ukraine and the Caucasus. And Army Group Centre, the most powerful, with two Panzer Groups under Generals Guderian and Hoth, drove straight at Moscow. By mid-July, they were roughly three hundred kilometres from the Soviet capital. Everything suggested the plan was working.
The plan, in its original conception, assumed the Soviet Union would collapse within weeks, as France had collapsed. The idea was to destroy the Red Army west of the Dvina and Dnieper rivers, before it could withdraw and reorganise in the depth of the territory. Once Soviet military capability was eliminated, Stalin’s regime would crumble on its own. Hitler estimated the campaign would last between three and five months. “You only have to kick in the door,” he told his chief of staff, Alfred Jodl, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
It did not come crashing down.
Why the Plan Failed: Logistics, Distance, Winter
The fundamental problem of Barbarossa was not military but logistical. Blitzkrieg depended on speed, and speed depended on supply. In France, the distances were manageable, the roads were good, and the rail infrastructure was intact. In Russia, none of that held true.
The distances were, literally, of a different order. From the Polish border to Moscow is more than a thousand kilometres in a straight line. Russian roads were dirt tracks that turned into swamps at the first rain. The Soviet rail network ran on a gauge different from the European standard, preventing direct use of German rolling stock. The Soviets, as they withdrew, destroyed bridges, burned crops, dismantled factories, and evacuated railway equipment. Entire steel and munitions plants were taken apart, loaded onto trains, and moved east of the Urals, where they resumed production.
By August 1941, the German armoured spearheads were hundreds of kilometres ahead of their infantry, which advanced on foot. Tanks ran out of fuel, troops ran out of ammunition, the wounded went without evacuation. The German army had entered Russia with more than six hundred thousand horses for logistical transport, a detail that reveals with considerable eloquence the limits of German mechanisation. The Panzer divisions, which at the campaign’s start had their full complement of tanks, by October were down to thirty-five per cent of capacity.
And then autumn arrived. In Russian it is called the rasputitsa, the season of mud. The October rains turned the roads into rivers of muck in which vehicles sank to their axles. The advance slowed to a crawl, and logistics, already precarious, became impossible. When the mud froze and winter arrived with temperatures of thirty or forty below zero, the German soldiers had no winter clothing. It was not a minor oversight: it was the reflection of a planning process that assumed the war would be won before December.
The Russian winter is a commonplace that obscures a deeper analysis. It was not just the cold that stopped the Germans. It was the combination of impossible distances, insufficient logistics, an enemy that refused to surrender, and planning based on assumptions that proved false. The central assumption was that the Soviet Union was a fragile regime that would crumble after the first blows. It was an ideological underestimation dressed up as strategic analysis, and it was lethal.
Fatal Decisions: Kyiv vs. Moscow, Stalingrad
If Barbarossa has a turning point, it comes in August 1941 and in the most debated decision of the entire war on the Eastern Front: the diversion to Kyiv.
By late July, Army Group Centre had captured Smolensk and was in position to launch a direct assault on Moscow. The German generals, from Guderian to Halder, from Bock to Brauchitsch, believed the capture of the Soviet capital was the decisive objective. Moscow was not merely a political symbol: it was the communications hub of European Russia, the railway junction connecting every front, and the point where the Red Army was concentrating its reserves. Losing Moscow would have been, for Stalin, a blow that might have been beyond repair.
Hitler thought otherwise. For him, Moscow was of “no great importance.” What mattered were resources: Ukrainian wheat, Donbas coal, Caucasus oil. On August 21 he ordered Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 diverted south, to close a vast pincer around Kyiv together with Kleist’s Panzer Group 1 advancing from Army Group South. When Brauchitsch tried to argue the case for Moscow, Hitler dismissed him, saying only “fossilised brains” could think that way.
Guderian was sent personally to argue before Hitler. He failed. He returned to his headquarters, according to his own memoirs, as an involuntary convert to the Führer’s position. Halder, furious, went so far as to suggest to Brauchitsch that both of them resign in protest. Brauchitsch refused.
The tactical result of the diversion was spectacular. In September 1941, the Germans closed the pocket around Kyiv, trapping five Soviet armies. Roughly six hundred and sixty-five thousand soldiers were captured in what remains the largest encirclement in military history. Hitler called it “the greatest battle in history.” He was right on the tactical level. But the strategic cost was enormous: the diversion consumed crucial weeks. When Operation Typhoon, the assault on Moscow, was finally launched on October 2, the army was exhausted, destroyed tanks had not been replaced, and autumn was already closing the operational window.
Would the capture of Moscow have won the war? Not necessarily. Stalin had survived the loss of Kyiv, Minsk, and Smolensk. The Soviet Union had territorial depth and industrial capacity east of the Urals that no German offensive could reach. But taking Moscow would have destroyed the Soviet communications network and forced a reorganisation that, combined with simultaneous pressure on Leningrad and Ukraine, could have altered the war’s course. It is one of those counterfactual questions military historians will debate for ever.
What is not debated is that after December 1941, when the Soviet counterattack before Moscow halted the German army and pushed it back for the first time, the possibility of a quick victory vanished. From that point on, Germany was fighting the war it was least able to win: a war of attrition against an enemy with more men, more resources, and more territory.
Stalingrad, the following year, was the definitive confirmation. Hitler, obsessed with a city that bore his enemy’s name, diverted forces from the main advance towards the Caucasus to capture it. Paulus’s Sixth Army was trapped in the city, surrounded by Soviet forces, and surrendered in February 1943. It was the point of no return. After Stalingrad, the strategic initiative passed definitively to the Soviet side, and the question ceased to be whether Germany could win the war and became how long it would take to lose it.
Ideological War and Extermination vs. Conventional War
There is an aspect of Barbarossa that transforms the operation from a military failure into something qualitatively different, and it is the nature of the war Germany waged in the East. Barbarossa was not a conventional war. From its conception, it was a war of annihilation.
On March 30, 1941, nearly three months before the invasion, Hitler issued the Barbarossa Decree, which exempted German soldiers from responsibility for crimes against Soviet civilians. In parallel, the Commissar Order established that Red Army political commissars were to be summarily executed upon capture. These were not ambiguous directives: they were explicit orders that the war in the East would be conducted outside the laws of war.
Behind the front lines, the Einsatzgruppen, the SS’s mobile killing squads, followed the regular army executing Jews, political commissars, real or suspected partisans, and anyone the regime considered an enemy. In the first nine months of the invasion, the Einsatzgruppen shot more than half a million people, the overwhelming majority Jewish civilians. Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kyiv, where more than thirty-three thousand Jews were murdered in two days in September 1941, is the most widely known example, but there were hundreds of similar massacres.
The broader plan was the Generalplan Ost, which envisaged the deportation, enslavement, and extermination of tens of millions of Slavs to colonise the East with Germanic population. The Hunger Plan, designed by State Secretary Herbert Backe, intended to divert Soviet agricultural production to Germany, consciously accepting that millions of civilians would starve. Soviet prisoners of war were treated with a brutality without parallel: of the approximately five million captured during the entire war on the Eastern Front, roughly three and a half million died in captivity, deliberately left to die of starvation, cold, and disease.
This ideological dimension of Barbarossa had direct military consequences. In many regions of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine and the Baltic states, the civilian population initially received the Germans as liberators from the Stalinist yoke. Decades of forced collectivisation, engineered famines, and political terror had generated a deep hatred of Moscow. Had Germany treated these populations as potential allies, the war’s outcome might have been different. But the Nazi regime was incapable of that kind of calculation. Racial ideology precluded any genuine cooperation with Slavic Untermenschen. Instead of winning allies, the Germans created a fierce resistance that forced them to divert troops from the front to fight partisans in the rear.
German brutality also hardened Soviet resistance. When Red Army soldiers learned what awaited them if they surrendered, they stopped surrendering. The war in the East acquired a ferocity that had no equivalent in any other theatre. By December 1941, the Red Army had suffered some four million casualties. Germany, roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand, including two hundred thousand dead. By comparison, in the entire French campaign of 1940, the German army had lost thirty thousand men. The Eastern Front was a machine of destruction on a scale without parallel in history.
Lessons on Imperial Overextension
Barbarossa is, above all, a lesson about the limits of power. Germany in 1941 was the most powerful military state in Europe. It had defeated France in six weeks, occupied most of the continent, and its army was, man for man, probably the most professional and best trained in the world. And yet it was destroyed in Russia. Not because its army was bad, but because it was assigned an impossible task: conquering a country of twenty-two million square kilometres with an army that depended on horses for its logistics.
The first lesson is that tactical excellence does not compensate for strategic deficiency. The Germans won virtually every battle in the opening months. The pockets at Bialystok, Minsk, Smolensk, Kyiv, Vyazma, and Bryansk produced millions of prisoners and the destruction of entire armies. And yet the Soviet Union remained standing. Because the strategy was built on a false premise, that the Soviet regime was a house of cards, and no amount of tactical victories could compensate for that error.
The second lesson is that ideology distorts strategic judgement. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union not only out of geopolitical calculation but out of racial conviction. He underestimated the Slavs because he considered them subhuman. He refused to exploit the internal divisions of Soviet society because his ideology would not allow him to treat non-Germans as equals. And he turned what could have been a war of liberation against Stalinism into a war of extermination that unified the entire Soviet Union against him.
The third lesson, the most relevant to the present, concerns overextension. Every empire, every power, has a geographical and logistical limit beyond which its strength dilutes. Napoleon discovered it in Moscow. Hitler discovered it on the Russian steppe. The United States experienced it, on a much smaller scale, in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Russia itself is experiencing it now in Ukraine, where a war Putin estimated would last days has become a war of attrition that has consumed hundreds of thousands of soldiers and revealed the profound limitations of its military apparatus.
The temptation of overextension is particularly acute when a power is riding a streak of successes. France in 1940 was so easy it convinced Hitler that Russia would be too. Inchon was so brilliant it convinced MacArthur he could reach the Yalu without consequence. Every success feeds arrogance, and arrogance is the most dangerous enemy any strategist can face.
Barbarossa also offers a darker lesson, one that concerns the nature of certain regimes. The war in the East was so brutal not because war is inherently brutal but because it was conducted by a regime whose ideology demanded the extermination of entire populations. The Second World War on the Western Front, for all its violence, operated within certain limits. The Eastern Front had no limits, because the Nazis did not recognise their enemies as human beings with rights. When war becomes extermination, conventional military calculation ceases to apply, because the enemy’s resistance becomes existential. They fight not for territory or political advantage: they fight because they have no other choice.
The Eastern Front of the Second World War was the most devastating conflict in human history. It is estimated that between twenty-five and thirty million Soviet citizens died, civilian and military combined. Germany lost some five and a half million soldiers in the East alone. Entire cities were levelled. Entire populations, exterminated. The scale of the suffering defies comprehension.
And it all began with a decision taken in December 1940, when Hitler signed Directive 21 and hurled his army against an enemy he despised, across a territory he could not conquer, for reasons that combined strategic calculation with racial delusion. Barbarossa is the definitive proof that war is not a game of chess. It is a human activity where emotions, prejudices, and ideology weigh as heavily as military power. And where hubris, sooner or later, is paid for.