Operation Barbarossa: the 1941 Axis invasion of the Soviet Union

The High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW) and the High Commands of the Wehrmacht Parts Army, High Command of the Army (OKH), and Navy, High Command of the Navy (OKM), had each had their own plan studies for a limited war against the Soviet Union prepared since June/July 1940 and had given them code names such as "Problem S", "Fritz" and titles such as "Operationsstudie Ost" (Landesverteidigung Abteilung im Wehrmachtführungsamt, OKW), "Operationsplan Ost" (OKH), or "Betrachtungen über Russland" (OKM). These studies were combined until 5 December 1940 and then presented to Hitler. From then on, the overall planning bore the code name "Otto".

Already the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 was to be prepared militarily under the code name "Sonderfall Otto". General Ludwig Beck had not worked out the plan for the "Special Case Otto" as instructed, so that it could not be carried out. Therefore, on March 11, 1938, Hitler issued an instruction, formulated at short notice, to carry out the Anschluss of Austria the following day under the code name "Unternehmen Otto". In doing so, military interventions in accordance with the instructions could be largely omitted, so that the order was not known to all Wehrmacht agencies.

The name probably alludes to the Roman-German Emperor Otto I, whose "services to Germanness," "Slavic" and "colonial" policies, and "Germanization" of conquered Eastern European territories were highlighted as exemplary by widespread history books of the Weimar Republic. Following on from this historical image, the National Socialists understood their policy of conquest as a resumption of the Ottonians' alleged plans to subjugate the Slavs and expand into Eastern Europe. For this purpose, they used "Ostforschung," which was dominated by the historian Albert Brackmann. Brackmann's colleague Hermann Aubin had criticized the pseudo-scientific use of historical references to medieval rulers for "unrestrained imperialism" in a letter on January 25, 1939: "Take heed how soon Otto I and Frederick I will be on top, because they have set the example of how to set up a 'German order.'" Yet Brackmann produced a pamphlet on "Crisis and Reconstruction in Eastern Europe" after the invasion of Poland, commissioned by Heinrich Himmler in October 1939, with just such references. The Wehrmacht bought 7000 copies of it on 7 May 1940.

On July 25, 1940, the code name "Otto" appeared again in an order of the OKW, this time for a "preferred Wehrmacht program" for the expansion of railways and roads in the occupied part of Poland, which was to enable rapid troop and tank transports to the eastern border. Historians see in this the first preparations for a war against the Soviet Union. Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff since September 1938, had instructed his staff on 19 June or 3 July 1940 to draw up a plan to this effect. This plan was expanded after 31 July, merged with other plans and used as a basis for the war preparations of the OKW and OKH in December.

The then Lieutenant Colonel (G.) Bernhard von Lossberg explained in 1956 that Alfred Jodl (OKW) had "later" replaced the previous code name "Fritz" with "Barbarossa" for the plan he had written. Hitler decreed on 18 December 1940 with "Directive No. 21" to prepare the war against the Soviet Union under the new code name "Fall Barbarossa". As Aubin had expected in 1939, he was alluding to Frederick I, who bore this epithet and was, along with the first two Ottonians, the most recognized medieval emperor. Hitler had praised him at his inauguration of the "House of German Art" in July 1937 as the one "who was the first to express the Germanic idea of culture and to carry it outwards as an integral part of his imperial mission". For the first time on January 18, 1941, some Wehrmacht offices also referred internally to the planned attack as "Unternehmen Barbarossa".

As early as 1925, Hitler had declared a war of conquest and annihilation against the Soviet Union as the main goal of his foreign policy in his programmatic pamphlet Mein Kampf. He justified this with the inevitable world-historical struggle of the "Aryan race" against "world Jewry", whose most extreme form of rule was "Bolshevism". There "the Jew" showed himself to be a "tyrant of the people", so that one could only fight both at the same time.

Consequently, an alliance with the Soviet Union was out of the question; one could not "cast out the devil with the Beelzebub". Furthermore, the mere reconquest of German territories lost in the First World War was "political nonsense". Rather, it must be a matter of securing for the German people for all time "the land on this earth which is due to them" and which guarantees them economic independence in the continental area of Europe. This ground was to be sought above all in Russia and its subjugated peripheral states. National Socialism therefore proclaimed as a new goal, even in the face of the "annexationists" of the Kaiserreich: "We stop the eternal Germanic march to the south and west of Europe and point the gaze to the land in the east." Hitler legitimized this perspective with two assumptions: a racial, and therefore political and military, inferiority of the Slavs supposedly dominated by the Jews, so that Soviet rule was "ripe for collapse," and a willingness of Britain to accept Germany's prior conquest of France and then support it in the struggle against the Soviet Union. He criticized the elites of the Kaiserreich for not seeking a clear alliance with either Britain or Russia, but instead engaging Germany in an unwinnable two-front war. From this he concluded that the Soviet Union could only be conquered after an alliance with Great Britain, which would cover the previous conquest of France and thus German "freedom of the rear".

In 1928 Hitler affirmed in his "Second Book": Since Germany could permanently find its living space only in the East, an alliance with the Soviet Union made no sense. Destructively inclined Jewry would destroy the Soviet state and make it easier for the Germans to shed their inhibitions about the only possible "goal of German foreign policy": to conquer "living space in the East" sufficient "for the next 100 years". To do this, he said, Germany must acquire "great military power" and concentrate all its state forces on this conquest. In this formula Hitler inextricably linked racist, expansionist, and imperialist ideas. The goal of conquering the European parts of the Soviet Union was to determine all German armaments and foreign policy and to make possible a later world domination by the German Aryans.

Even after his seizure of power in 1933, Hitler repeatedly professed, both publicly and internally, the goal of a great war of conquest in the East. On February 3, 1933, he explained his Lebensraum concept to the commanders of the Reichswehr, who in turn advocated similar concepts (see Liebmann record). In 1934 he first considered waging blitzkriegs in the West first, so that he could then turn his attention to the East, since the Western powers would not grant Germany Lebensraum. The Wehrmacht would have to be ready for this in eight years. From 1937 he was ready to dare a war against France and Great Britain in order to carry out the expansion to the East. In two major Reichstag speeches in 1937 and 1938, he declared that he was relentlessly waging war against "Jewish-international Moscow Bolshevism."

On January 30, 1939, Hitler threatened in the Reichstag that the result of a new world war would be "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" instead of the "Bolshevization of the earth." On 10 February 1939 he told troop commanders that he preferred the solution of the "German space problem" by conquests in the East to increased export-import trade. The next war necessary for this purpose would be "a pure war of world outlook, i.e., consciously a war of the people and a war of the races." He, Hitler, as Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht, was also a world-view leader to whom all officers were bound, for better or worse, even if the people "let him down" in the process.

On 23 May 1939, one day after the conclusion of the steel pact in preparation for the invasion of Poland, Hitler told Wehrmacht leaders that he was not concerned with Danzig in the conflict with Poland, but rather with "expanding the living space in the East and ensuring food supplies, as well as solving the Baltic problem". In August 1939 he gave the League of Nations Commissioner Carl Jacob Burckhardt to understand that he would solve the "problem of Danzig" militarily, even against resistance from France and England, and that he finally wanted to have "a free hand in the East":

Hitler understood the Hitler-Stalin Pact decided on August 23, 1939, only as a temporary tactical maneuver for the invasion of Poland and the war against Poland's protecting powers France and Great Britain, as he expressly emphasized to Wehrmacht leaders. Poland was the future deployment area for Germany's "further development" to the east. To NSDAP representatives on 27 August 1939, Hitler alluded to his statement in Mein Kampf: it was a pact "with Satan to cast out the devil". Ulrich von Hassell noted that Hitler "did not change his fundamentally anti-Bolshevik policy"; any means against the Soviets, including this pact, was fine with him, since he inwardly "reserved the attack on Soviet Russia for later.

According to Nicolaus von Below, Hitler declared in a small circle on 31 August 1939, the eve of the attack on Poland: his "offer to Poland" - meaning German proposals to Poland by March 1939 to ally with Germany against the Soviet Union as a "junior partner" (dependent satellite state) - had been honest. For his foreign policy task remained "to crush Bolshevism": "All other struggles served only the one purpose of clearing one's back for the confrontation with Bolshevism." On 9 October 1939 Hitler explained the necessity of the Western campaign against France to the OKH by saying that Soviet treaty loyalty could not be relied upon, only military strength. On 21 October 1939, he told Reich and Gauleiters that after the victory over England and France he would "turn again to the East" [...] and "set about creating a Germany as it had existed before". In his address to the Commanders-in-Chief on 23 November 1939, he told the generals that the Soviet Union would remain "dangerous in the future"; "but is weak at present" and the "value of the Russian Wehrmacht" was low, but it could only be countered if it was unbound in the West. Treaties would be held only as long as they were useful to the contracting parties. He urged that the Western campaign be carried out in the spring of 1940, so that the Army would then be available again for "a major operation in the East against Russia."