Operation barbarossa how many died

He now believed he could defeat the Soviets by economic damage, depriving them of the industrial capacity to continue the war. That meant seizing the industrial center of Kharkov, the Donbass, and the oil fields of the Caucasus in the south and the speedy capture of Leningrad, a major center of military production, in the north.

After a German victory in Kiev, the Red Army no longer outnumbered the Germans and no more trained reserves were available.

To defend Moscow, Stalin could field , men in 83 divisions, but no more than 25 divisions were fully effective. Operation Typhoon, the drive to Moscow, began on October 2. The Germans initially won several important battles, and the German government now publicly predicted the imminent capture of Moscow and convinced foreign correspondents of a pending Soviet collapse. On December 2, the German army advanced to within 15 miles of Moscow and could see the spires of the Kremlin, but by then the first blizzards had already begun.

A reconnaissance battalion also managed to reach the town of Khimki, about 5 miles away from the Soviet capital. It captured the bridge over the Moscow-Volga Canal as well as the railway station, which marked the farthest eastern advance of German forces. But in spite of the progress made, the Wehrmacht was not equipped for winter warfare, and the bitter cold caused severe problems for their guns and equipment.

Further, weather conditions grounded the Luftwaffe from conducting large-scale operations. Newly created Soviet units near Moscow now numbered over , men, and on December 5, they launched a massive counterattack as part of the Battle of Moscow that pushed the Germans back over miles.

By late December , the Germans had lost the Battle for Moscow, and the invasion had cost the German army over , casualties in killed, wounded, captured, or missing in action. Operation Barbarossa was the largest military operation in human history—more men, tanks, guns, and aircraft were committed than had ever been deployed before in a single offensive.

Seventy-five percent of the entire German military participated. The invasion opened up the Eastern Front of World War II, the largest theater of war during that conflict, which witnessed titanic clashes of unprecedented violence and destruction for four years that resulted in the deaths of more than 26 million people. Damage to both the economy and landscape was enormous for the Soviets as approximately 1, towns and 70, villages were completely annihilated.

Kfz half-track in front of German tank units, as they prepare for an attack, on July 21, , somewhere along the Russian warfront, during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. A German half-track driver inside an armored vehicle in Russia in August of German infantrymen watch enemy movements from their trenches shortly before an advance inside Soviet territory, on July 10, German Stuka dive-bombers, in flight heading towards their target over coastal territory between Dniepr and Crimea, towards the Gate of the Crimea on November 6, German soldiers cross a river, identified as the Don river, in a stormboat, sometime in , during the German invasion of the Caucasus region in the Soviet Union.

German soldiers move a horse-drawn vehicle over a corduroy road while crossing a wetland area, in October , near Salla on Kola Peninsula, a Soviet-occupied region in northeast Finland. With a burning bridge across the Dnieper river in the background, a German sentry keeps watch in the recently-captured city of Kiev, in A German bomber, with its starboard engine on fire, goes down over an unknown location, during World War II, in November, Nazi troops lie concealed in the undergrowth during the fighting prior to the capture of Kiev, Ukraine, in Evidence of Soviet resistance in the streets of Rostov, a scene in late , encountered by the Germans as they entered the heavily besieged city.

Russian soldiers, left, hands clasped to heads, marched back to the rear of the German lines on July 2, , as a column of Nazi troops move up to the front at the start of hostilities between Germany and Russia. Russian men and women rescue their humble belongings from their burning homes, said to have been set on fire by the Russians, part of a scorched-earth policy, in a Leningrad suburb on October 21, Reindeer graze on an airfield in Finland on July 26, In the background a German war plane takes off.

Heinrich Himmler left, in glasses , head of the Gestapo and the Waffen-SS, inspects a prisoner-of-war camp in this from in Russia. Evidence of the fierce fighting on the Moscow sector of the front is provided in this photo showing what the Germans claim to be some of the , Russian prisoners which they captured at Bryansk and Vyasma.

They are here seen waiting to be transported to a prisoner of war camp somewhere in Russia, on November 2, General Franz Halder, on August 7, German soldiers, supported by armored personnel carriers, move into a burning Russian village at an unknown location during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 26, A huge Russian gun on tracks, likely a mm howitzer M, is manned by its crew in a well-concealed position on the Russian front on September 15, Rapidly advancing German forces encountered serious guerrilla resistance behind their front lines.

Here, four guerrillas with fixed bayonets and a small machine gun are seen in action, near a small village. Red Army soldiers examine war trophies captured in battles with invading Germans, somewhere in Russia, on September 19, A view of the destruction in Riga, the capital of Latvia, on October 3, , after the wave of war had passed over it, the Russians had withdrawn and it was in Nazi hands.

Five Soviet civilians on a platform, with nooses around their necks, about to be hanged by German soldiers, near the town of Velizh in the Smolensk region, in September of A Finnish troop train passes through a scene of an earlier explosion which wrecked one train, tearing up the rails and embankment, on October 19, Burning houses, ruins and wrecks speak for the ferocity of the battle preceding this moment when German forces entered the stubbornly defended industrial center of Rostov on the lower Don River, in Russia, on November 22, You want great battles?

The German-Soviet war has got them: great encirclements by the Germans at Bialystok and Minsk in the opening weeks, and a mega-encirclement at Kiev in the opening months. That last one trapped four complete Soviet armies, the 5th, 37th, 26th, and 21st, and netted nearly , Soviet prisoners of war.

Dramatic swings of fortune? Once again, there is nothing like the German-Soviet War. Take the first six months. The Soviets hung on, grimly and barely, in this opening phase, as the Germans drove towards Moscow. Hopes were high, both in the German high command and at the front, that the Third Reich had won the war. German tanks advance through the Soviet Union. Assault guns rolled forward and broke the Soviet resistance.

That all changed at Moscow, however. Coolly amassing 17 fresh armies in front of the Soviet capital, General G. Zhukov launched a vast counterstrike in early December that inflicted punishing losses on the invader and that sent German forces—exhausted, freezing, understrength, and undersupplied—reeling back in some confusion.