II.

German Ambitions

At dawn on June 22, 1941, German and pro-Axis forces from Finland, Hungary, Italy, and Romania invaded the Soviet Union, crossing the border from the Baltic to the Black Sea, taking the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin by surprise. Altogether a total of more than 3 million troops, comprising 153 divisions, with 3,600 tanks, 7,000 artillery guns, and 2,700 aircraft, were involved in the invasion. This was the culmination of the long-held dream of German dictator Adolf Hitler: a German-occupied Russia stretching from the Volga to Arkhangel’sk near the White Sea, which would provide Germany with vital raw materials and the German people with “living space,” or Lebensraum.

Hitler also persuaded himself that the invasion was justified by the need to secure Soviet oil and natural resources to sustain the expansion of the Third Reich, and by the belief that Stalin was already preparing for war with Germany. Hitler was convinced, especially after Stalin’s far-reaching purges of the Red Army officer class in the late 1930s and its dismal showing against Finland in the Winter War of 1939-1940 (see Russo-Finnish War), that the “Russian Jewish Bolsheviks” were incapable of prolonged resistance—“smash in the door and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.” For Hitler this was a war of competing ideologies and of race hatred.