Early in his political career, Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, spelling out his ideas on how to make Germany great again after the disaster of World War I. One of the necessities was to regain land that the Germans had captured from Russia in that war, but which had been taken away from them by the Treaty of Versailles. This land was rightfully theirs by conquest, Hitler argued, and Germany needed that land as leben-sraum, or living space. Since the Germans had conquered almost all of of European Russia, and been ceded that territory by the Communists through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918, their invading Russia would simply be a reoccupation of land legally belonging to Germany. Of course, this was the best land the Soviet Union owned: the great farm country of the Ukraine, the industrial and economic centers of Kiev and Minsk, and the Baltic ports.

Hitler successfully hid his intentions from the Soviets. Though he openly attacked communism in his speeches and backed Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War while the Soviets supported the government cause, he made no open threats against the Soviet Union. He was quick to exploit the hesitancy of the British and French in the summer of 1939 when they would not treat the Soviet Union as an equal partner. Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin had not expected this rebuff, and it resulted in the signing of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, or Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, in August 1939, just days before Hitler invaded Poland. That agreement amazed the world because the Soviets seemed to be just as violently anti-Nazi as Hitler was anti-Communist. Even more shocking, the world soon learned that a secret clause of the nonaggression pact was an agreement to cooperate in Poland’s dismemberment. The Soviet invasion of Poland in mid-September 1939, just as the entire Polish military was focused on the defense of Warsaw, was one of the most blatant stabs in the back in all of history. Stalin and Hitler, the strangest of bedfellows, each had half of Poland to act as a buffer zone against the other. Further, Hitler promised Stalin that Germany would not interfere with the Soviet Union’s attacks on the Baltic States or Finland, which the Soviets undertook in November 1939. This diplomatic marriage of convenience was off to an auspicious start.

With his rear covered, Hitler made war against the West in the spring and summer of 1940, invading Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and France; he then spent the next few months in a fruitless attempt to bring Britain into the Nazi fold. Only after September 1940, when he postponed indefinitely the invasion of Britain, did Hitler turn back toward the East and his dream of lebensraum. From the fall of 1940 through the spring of 1941, he made preparations for the invasion, all the while dealing with unexpected sideshows such as aiding Italy in North Africa and Greece. These diversions, which included an airborne attack on Crete, served to delay the invasion of the Soviet Union. A one-month suspension of the start, until 22 June 1941, was quite possibly the reason Hitler’s attempt on Mother Russia failed.

Stalin remained blissfully unaware of Hitler’s intentions, even though there were attempts to warn him. Britain’s code-breaking machine, ULTRA, gave the Western allies a look at Germany’s plans. Britain was officially at war with the Soviet Union, but British Prime Minister Winston Churchill nevertheless tried to alert Stalin to Hitler’s intentions—to no avail. Stalin was busy purging his own military and had no time to worry about anyone else’s. Certainly, Stalin thought, Churchill was just trying to sow some discontent between allies.

Thus, Hitler’s generals were able to amass three army groups for the invasion eastward. Army Group North was directed to drive through the Baltic States to secure the port city of Leningrad. Army Group Center’s target was the Soviet capital city of Moscow. Army Group South was to drive for the Caucasus and its oil fields. All three got off to outstanding beginnings. The unprepared Soviet government watched in horror as entire Soviet armies were surrounded and captured in a matter of days. The German blitzkrieg, perfected in Poland and France, proved itself once again on the plains of Byelorussia and the Ukraine. The initial attacks were so successful that Hitler spurned an opportunity that arose early in the invasion. He found that many Byelorussians and Ukrainians so despised the Communist regime that they would assist the Germans in deposing it. Some people viewed the Germans more as liberators than invaders. “The Baltic countries, Ukraine, and Byelorussa all welcomed Nazi invasion in June, 1941, as a potential means of liberation from Soviet rule. Although the Slavs were considered to be of subhuman status according to Nazi ideology, nationalists hoped that by participating in brutality against the Jews, they would ingratiate themselves with the Germans.” (secretlives.org)

The German forces thus had the opportunity not only to gain ground, but to gain size; as they drove deeper into enemy territory, they could actually build a larger army—an army augmented by motivated soldiers familiar with the Soviet military.

Instead, Hitler was married to the racial policies spelled out in Mein Kampf. The lebensraum was to be for Germans only, so the untermensch, or subhumans, who lived there were to be removed. Therefore, the would-be volunteers were either killed, rounded up for slave labor, or—if they were Jewish—shipped to extermination camps. “Those same communities were sorely disappointed as the German military, the Gestapo, and other fascist security forces deemed the Ukrainian nation-like all Slavs-as nothing more than slave labor to be exploited” Lavelle, Commentary). Those who managed to escape those fates headed for the hills and forests to organize guerrilla partisan movements, which made a great difference to Hitler’s ultimate fate in the East. At the height of the German advance, when they were engaged heavily at Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad, they were obliged to maintain almost half their army in the rear to guard their supply lines. Instead of building his army as he went, Hitler was forced to cut in half the army he had in order to deal with the Ukrainians and Byelorussians he had rejected.

Perhaps Hitler’s grasp on reality was beginning to fade, or perhaps it was the overwhelming success of his invasion that dictated his attitude toward the people he conquered, because his opening successes were phenomenal. German armies raced over vast tracts of land; the only defense the Soviets could mount because of their huge losses in manpower was a scorched-earth policy. By denying the Germans the ability to live off the land, and by partisans harassing the ever-lengthening supply lines, the Soviets finally forced the German army to move not as it wished, but as its dwindling logistics dictated. Still, by September the port city of Leningrad was being surrounded and besieged, Moscow was virtually within German artillery range, and German armies were in the Crimea and poised to move into the oil-rich Caucasus. Another month of good weather, denied them because of the delay in starting the invasion, might have put the German army in warm cities when the winter came. By using rather than abusing the local volunteers, the Germans would have had easier transport and supply lines to put them in those same cities. Instead, German soldiers had to face Mother Russia’s oldest ally, Mother Nature.

Virtually every invader over the centuries has learned to his dismay that few winters can match those found in Russia. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, he found himself in weather reaching -32 degrees Celsius, and 1941 proved to be 1812’s rival. German forces had to survive in their summer uniforms because Hitler had been positive their goals would be reached before winter uniforms were necessary. Warm clothing was available in Germany, of course, but the increasing difficulty of moving materiel over guerrilla-infested supply lines kept most of that clothing out of German hands. Military activity basically ground to a halt until the following spring. Though the Germans suffered, so did the Russians. The two million people besieged in Leningrad (and another million in outlying areas) had to survive two successive winters with virtually no contact with the outside world. But survive they did, in one of history’s most heroic defenses. Just over half a million people were in the city when it was liberated in January 1944.

The spring of 1942 brought the return of German successes in the south, but Hitler’s maddening habit of withdrawing units from the south to reinforce the other army groups, especially around Moscow, limited Army Group South’s effectiveness. Advance German units reportedly saw the Caucasus oil fields in the distance, but the Nazis never reached them. Instead, the major portion of the force went to capture Stalingrad, on the Volga River. Because the city was named for the leader of his enemy, Hitler demanded that there be no withdrawal until Stalingrad was captured. Stalin, equally prideful, demanded his forces fight just as hard and long.

The German Sixth Army went into Stalingrad in late summer 1942, and never returned. Some 350,000 German soldiers fought to capture the city, and only 5,000 ever saw Germany again. Combat was street by street, house by house, room by room, mostly in the dead of winter. Russian tank factories rolled tanks off the assembly line, put a crew inside, and sent them around the corner or down the street directly into combat. Desperate to save his city, Stalin decided to withdraw forces from the Far East, where he had been awaiting a possible Japanese offensive. Those troops, transported across the breadth of Russia, finally surrounded and destroyed the Sixth Army and blunted Germany’s thrust toward Russian oil. Hitler ordered his forces in the city not to break out: “Where the German soldier has once set foot, there he remains.” He promoted the army’s commander, Frederick von Paulus, to field marshal, since no German field marshal had ever been taken prisoner. The orders doomed the Germans, because a tactical withdrawal might have linked up with forces fighting to relieve the Sixth Army and made a later capture of the city possible.

By the spring of 1943, German forces had driven almost as far as they ever would. They had made little headway against Leningrad or Moscow and, after Stalingrad, they were forced onto the defensive in the south. Hitler’s dream of leben- sraum died in the light of military realities: insufficient logistics, a hostile civilian population, inconsistent command from Berlin. The one overriding factor, however, was one that Hitler had preached against after the German experience of World War I: fighting a two-front war. Trying to supply men and materiel to both the Eastern Front and to North Africa, then Sicily and Italy, and finally to France after June 1944, proved impossible, just as it had in 1917–1918. Too many enemies at once, both from abroad and among the conquered territories, proved to be more than any country could handle.

The fighting in the Soviet Union created long-term results for the people defending the country and ultimately for the world. In the Soviet Union, this conflict was referred to not as World War II, but as the Great Patriotic War. People who hated Stalin and communism ultimately fought for them—not out of ideology, but out of love for their country. There is an almost mystical tie between the Russian people and their land, and Stalin played on that throughout the war and afterward. From the time he met with President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill in Teheran in November 1943, Stalin accused the West of delaying a major European invasion so that the Nazis and Communists would kill each other. That accusation became the justification for almost all his actions through the end of the war and into the postwar period. Russia had suffered, so Russians should benefit by capturing Berlin, taking control of Eastern Europe, and exploiting the German people and territory they had captured. Stalin’s appeal to patriotism saved the country in 1942 and 1943, but it set up a confrontational attitude throughout the Cold War.

See also: Russia, Napoleon’s Invasion of; Britain, Nazi Invasion of (Battle of Britain); Egypt, Italian Invasion of; Finland, Soviet Invasion of; France, Nazi Invasion of; Greece, Nazi Invasion of; Hitler, Adolf; Norway and Denmark, Nazi Invasion of; Poland, Nazi Conquest of; Russia, German Invasion of.