Operation Barbarossa (1941)

Abstract Operation Barbarossa (Red Beard), the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II, began on June 22, 1941 and ended in defeat in early December 1941. Planned by Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of the German Third Reich, and other senior Wehrmacht (armed forces) officers between July 1940 and January 1941, the operation's objectives were to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union's Red Army, seize the cities of Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, overthrow the Soviet Union's communist government, and exploit Soviet territory for the benefit of Germany. Plan ( Fall ) Barbarossa's most important assumption was that the Soviet Union would collapse if the Wehrmacht could destroy the bulk of the Red Army in the border region of the western Soviet Union, specifically, west of the Western Dvina and Dnepr rivers. The plan's most significant flaw was the sharp disagreement between Hitler and many of his generals regarding Barbarossa's objectives, specifically, the German Fü hrer's fixation on economic objectives and attacking on a broad front to destroy the bulk of the Red Army in the field and his generals' concern for seizing Moscow in a rapid advance characterized by a series of spectacular encirclement battles ( Kesselschlacht ). The chief weaknesses of the opposing Red Army in June 1941 were its lack of experienced senior commanders capable of displaying necessary command initiative due to the military purges the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, orchestrated during the late 1930s; the army's faulty and vulnerable defensive dispositions in the western Soviet Union resulting from its occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939; and its failure to complete the military reform program it began in the wake of the Soviet–Finnish War (1939–1940).