WATCH VIDEO: When Napoleon Tried to Invade Russia Operation Barbarossa Begins

Codenamed Operation Barbarossa-after the nickname of the powerful Medieval Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I-the invasion called for German troops to advance along a line running north-south from the port of Archangel to the port of Astrakhan on the Volga River, near the Caspian Sea. With France defeated and only Britain left standing against Germany in Western Europe, Hitler turned toward his next goal-Germany’s expansion into the Eastern Front, and the lebensraum (“living space”) that would ensure the dominance of the German people.īy definition, this required the defeat of the Soviet Union and the colonization of its territories, especially the resource-rich Ukraine, by “Aryan” Germans rather than its native Slavic population, which Hitler viewed as racially inferior.īy the end of 1940, Hitler had issued Führer Directive 21, an order for Germany’s planned invasion of the Soviet Union. After eight months of so-called phony war, Germany launched its blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) through Western Europe, conquering Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France in just six weeks beginning in May 1940. On September 3, 1939, two days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, France and Britain declared war on Germany. The pact included secret plans to divide Poland into spheres of influence, with Germany annexing the western half of the country and the Soviet Union the east. Hitler wanted to neutralize an existing mutual defense treaty between France and the Soviet Union and ensure the Soviets would stand by when Germany invaded its next target: Poland. Given the long history of bitter conflict between the two nations, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact surprised the world and dismayed France and Britain, who had signed their own agreement with Hitler’s regime only to see it violated when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia earlier that year. In August 1939, Germany signed a mutual non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, then led by Joseph Stalin, in which the two nations agreed not to take military action against each other for a period of 10 years.

Call of war 1942 easy win strat