“From the very first day, the German campaign was driven by hatred: by antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism, by racial mania against the Slavic and Asian peoples of the Soviet Union. ![]() German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier announces he will seeks for a second term. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier addresses the media at his residence Bellevue Palace in Berlin, Germany, Friday, May 28, 2021. He said the anniversary offered an opportunity to rethink events in 1941 when German soldiers unleashed “hatred and violence” and the war moved “towards the madness of total annihilation.” Buoyed by the ease of their Blitzkrieg victories over France and Poland, Hitler and his senior generals underestimated the caliber of the Red Army, the superiority of Russian tanks and the resolve of ordinary Russians, says British broadcaster and author Jonathan Dimbleby in a new book on the invasion, Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War.īut Hitler’s strategic miscalculation was far from the mind of German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier Friday when opening a Barbarossa exhibition in Berlin. As far as Hitler was concerned, it was to be a “war of annihilation” - against Jews and Slavs, both considered subhuman by the German Führer.Įight decades on, Germany has been marking the 80th anniversary of an invasion some military historians say lost Hitler World War II. Operation Barbarossa was the biggest military operation in history and Hitler and his generals started the meticulous planning for it nine months earlier. Stalin reckoned Adolf Hitler wouldn’t invade for another year and he had only started a few weeks earlier to redeploy Red Army divisions to the western front. Within hours, Brest would be rocked by infantry gunfire and artillery bombardments.Įighty years ago Tuesday more than three million German soldiers advanced on an 1,800-mile front from Estonia to Ukraine and invaded communist Russia, taking autocrat Joseph Stalin by surprise, despite warnings from Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill and from some Soviet military commanders and spies. It was 21 June 1941 and Starinov was in the town of Brest - a strategic town earmarked to be captured on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. ![]() It was lovely and pleasant,” he wrote in his memoir Over the Abyss. “Orchestras and brass bands played, people danced, and we were happy. Il’ya Grigoryevich Starinov noted years later. “On Saturday, the day before the war, we met with friends in the park,” Red Army engineer Col.
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