(Part 3)World War II Full History

Barbarossa

On 22 June 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Codenamed Operation Barbarossa, it was the largest military operation in history, involving more than 3 million Axis troops and 3,500 tanks. It was the logical culmination of Hitler’s belief that the German ‘master race’ should seek ‘lebensraum’ (living space) in the east, at the expense of the ‘subhuman’ native Slav people, who were to be exterminated or reduced to serf status.

Planning for Barbarossa had begun over a year previously, in the wake of Germany’s stunning success against the western allies in France. The triumphalism that followed this victory, combined with widely believed reports that the Soviet armed forces were weak and deficient (evidence came from defeats by Finland in 1939) led to great optimism in the German high command, with Hitler declaring, ‘we have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.’

The Soviet Union was unprepared for the onslaught that came in June. Stalin refused to believe mounting evidence that an invasion was being prepared, and so his armies and air force on the frontier were caught by surprise. As in their earlier victories, the Luftwaffe quickly gained air superiority, and helped armoured columns and motorised infantry punch holes through the Soviet front line. Barbarossa had three primary objectives – the Baltic states and Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the centre, and the economic resources of the Ukraine and southern Russia in the south. This led to a division of focus for which Hitler and his generals were later to be widely criticised.

Initially all went well for the Germans, some units advancing 50 miles on the first day, although resistance was fiercer than expected in the south. With Stalin personally intervening to forbid generals to retreat, large Soviet forces were encircled and destroyed or taken prisoner. 250,000 were lost in a massive encirclement around Minsk at the end of June, 180,000 were taken prisoner at Smolensk, while the Red Army suffered 500,000 casualties at the Battle of Kiev in September.

But despite the enormous casualties they had inflicted, the Germans had failed to land a decisive blow. They had underestimated both the resources of the Soviet Union and its willingness to accept massive losses. Now the German offensives were running out of steam, as front-line units halted for resupply and replacements. At a crucial phase of the operation, Hitler insisted that the panzer divisions of Army Group Centre, which were advancing on Moscow, were diverted to overcome resistance in the north and south. With this achieved, the drive on Moscow resumed on 2 October, codenamed Operation Typhoon. Ten days later German units were within 90 miles of the Russian capital, but stubborn Soviet resistance and heavy German casualties, combined with heavy rain which turned bad roads into rivers of mud, slowed the advance to a crawl. By the beginning of December, German troops were within sight of the spires of Moscow. However, a massive Soviet counterattack, using fresh units brought in from the East, supported by T-34 tanks, drove the Germans back. As the Russian winter set in, German offensive operations were abandoned.

Operation Barbarossa was one of the decisive moments of the war in Europe. Despite enormous losses in territory, men and weaponry, the Soviets had fought on, and survived. They would face fresh German offensives in 1942, but as the immense manpower and resources of the Soviet Union were brought into play, time was on their side. The Eastern Front would become a graveyard of the German armed forces, as men, tanks and aircraft were thrown into an increasingly unwinnable conflict.

Collaboration and Resistance

In Occupied Europe, resistance and collaboration could take many forms. The Vichy regime established in France in July 1940, led by Marshall Petain, is the most famous example of official collaboration, but the governments of Denmark, the Low Countries, Norway, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Greece all signed alliances with the Third Reich. In most cases, these pacts were signed after German military occupation. In some (such as Austria, where there was large public and political support for the Nazis), they had more to do with ideological affinity than coercion. Collaboration in its most extreme form resulted in the handing over of thousands of Jews to the Nazis by collaborationist administrations. In France alone, the Vichy authorities deported 76,000 Jews to camps including Auschwitz. The issue of collaboration was not always clear cut however. In Denmark, the government accepted certain Nazi demands, such as arresting Communists, but refused others, including passing laws against their Jewish community .

Collaboration by civilians in Occupied Europe ranged from a mere survival tool (for instance doing the laundry of German soldiers to earn extra food for your family), to the denunciation of ‘enemies’ within the community (something which occurred across occupied Europe), to the formation of paramilitary militias and participation in collective massacres. In occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the SS controlled Einsatzgruppen recruited local civilians and police to assist in mass killings. The most infamous example was at Babi Yar near Kiev, where over 33,000 Jews were slaughtered in September 1941 by German security forces, assisted by the Ukrainian police.

Thousands of Europeans opted to resist German and Italian occupiers. Peaceful resistance included ‘go slows’ at work, bureaucratic obstruction, the hiding of Jews or other fugitives, or acts of casual, small-scale sabotage, as happened on the French railway network. All of these actions formed a subtle network of solidarity, especially in countries such as Holland where there was little armed resistance.

A much smaller group chose to take up arms against the occupier. The French maquisard, the Italian and Yugoslavian partisans and Spanish, Polish Danish, Czechoslovakian, Greek and Albanianguerrilleros formed part of the fight against international fascism. The largest resistance armies were the Soviet and Polish guerrilla forces based in the Pripet Marshes, between Belarus and the Ukraine. Their hit and run raids against German supply lines incensed the Nazis to such a degree that at one stage they hatched a plan to drain the thousands of square miles of marshes.

There was also resistance within Germany itself. The White Rose, a student youth movement which called for active opposition to Hitler’s regime, have gone down in history as a result of their leaflet campaign between June 1942 and February 1943. Similarly, Dietrich Boenhoffer’s Confessing Church represented a significant form of Christian opposition to the Nazi government.

The Nazis pursued resistance leaders relentlessly. If captured they would face certain death, with executions widely publicised to cow the local population into submission. In April 1944, the Nazis plastered the walls of Paris with 15,000 copies of the famous ‘Red Poster’, which bore the faces of ten of the 23 partisans they had assassinated in February that year. The Nazis also used savage reprisals to discourage resistance. The Czech village of Lidice and the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane were both obliterated, and their populations murdered or sent to camps.

Although the resistance spanned a wide ideological spectrum, including Catholics, liberals, and nationalists, the most active partisans were young Communists and other left-wingers. Their mission – supported in many cases by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) – was to harass the enemy, disrupt their communications, assist fugitives including downed Allied airmen, and punish collaborators. Sabotage and ambush was their most common action, and names such as Jean Moulin (who united the French Resistance under the Conseil National de la Résistance) and Cristino García Granda (the Spainish communist Guerillero who set out to defeat fascism in France after seeing his own country fall to Franco) passed into legend.

Genocide

The systematic policy of racial extermination carried out against Jews by the Nazis in Europe during World War II stands out as one of history’s most horrifying events. This assault upon Europe’s Jewry began when Hitler came to power in 1933 and culminated in the terrible orchestration of the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question in Europe’, in which six million Jews were killed.

The Nazis targeted many groups for extermination, including Gypsies, Slavs, the disabled and homosexuals, all of whom were labelled as ‘undesirables’ with no future in the Nazi state. However the scale of persecution and murder of Jews – presented in Nazi ideology as an insidious, lethal enemy of the Aryan ‘master race’ – was on a scale without comparison. The Nazis drew on a deeply ingrained tradition of anti-Semitism which permeated much of Europe in the 1930s. And although the Nazis adapted their rhetoric to meet the times, those who collaborated in the extermination of Jews across Europe were often responding to much older prejudices.

From 1933 onwards, the Nazis implemented discriminatory policies against German Jews, most infamously under the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, which stripped them of German citizenship. In November 1938, Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) – an attack on Jewish property engineered by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels – resulted in the murder of 91 Jews, and the deportation to camps of more than 20,000.

After Germany conquered Poland in 1939, the persecution reached terrifying new levels. Polish Jews were rounded up and forced to live in ghettoes, where disease and starvation were constant threats. In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen (‘special operations groups’) followed in the wake of advancing German forces. These paramilitary death squads under SS command were made up of Nazi security forces and local volunteers. They orchestrated mass killings of defenceless civilians: Communists, intellectuals, gypsies, and above all Jews. At the ravine of Babi Yar near Kiev,Einsatzgruppe C organised the war’s most notorious massacre, killing 33,771 Jews on 29 and 30 September 1941.

The implementation of ‘Death Camp Operations’ began in December 1941, at Semlin in Serbia and Chelmno in Poland, where a total of over 400,000 Jews were killed by the exhaust fumes of specially adapted vans. On 20 January 1942, at a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, the ‘Final Solution’ – the annihilation of European Jews - was set up as a systematic operation headed by Reinhard Heydrich. The Nazis began transporting Jews to a network of concentration and extermination camps including Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the largest and most notorious, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where Jews would be either instantly killed or worked to death. A total of 1.1 million people (a million of them Jews) were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The horrific scenes of decaying corpses and emaciated prisoners which Allied troops found as they liberated Nazi camps led to difficult questions about Allied wartime policy towards Nazi genocide. Many felt that British and US politicians, aware of what was occurring in Nazi German concentration camps in German-occupied Poland, failed to act decisively for motives of political expediency.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, many of the leading officials who manned the camps were tried and executed, including Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, hanged in 1947. In addition, the term ‘genocide’ became part of international law, due to the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide. Yet as events in Yugoslavia and Rwanda have demonstrated, these steps failed to extinguish the tragic shadow of genocide from the world.

Credit to: http://www.history.co.uk for my source of this story