Operation Barbarossa, 85 years on, the enemies of Russia are on the move again
Strategic Culture Foundation (Editorial)
Strategic Culture Foundation
German soldiers accompanied by Panzer III tanks march
eastward through a Russian meadow in the summer of 1941.
German spearheads covered vast swaths of Russian territory
during the opening weeks of Operation Barbarossa.
Western imperialism and its NATO weapons, proxies, and media are at it again.
This week marked 85 years since Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the greatest crime of aggression in human history. This week, too, German panzers with their distinctive Iron Cross insignia were rolling towards Russia’s border, along with other NATO partners in a military exercise cynically misnamed Operation Freedom Shield.
It is truly shocking how history on such a criminal scale is being repeated, brazenly and seemingly with public insouciance.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched the biggest military invasion ever recorded in history. Operation Barbarossa deployed three million German troops along with units from allied countries. The Blitzkrieg opened the largest theater of World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. At least 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union were killed, most of them civilians. Grainy footage from the time shows line after line of people being shot and dumped in mass graves. In one notorious atrocity, in September 1941, over 33,000 civilians were executed in just two days at a ravine in Babi Yar, near Kyiv.
Four years later, the Soviet Red Army fought the Nazi Wehrmacht all the way back to final defeat in Berlin.
Every Russian family was traumatized by the horror and inhumane suffering. The memory of the calamity remains seared in the nation’s consciousness. The Nazi invasion was carried out as a war of annihilation in which there was no mercy for men, women, and children. The Final Solution involved the systematic extermination of Slavs, Jews, Communists, and Roma and others considered Untermenschen (Subhuman) by Nazi racial ideology. The German Wehrmacht and Einsatzgruppen death squads were assisted by fascist auxiliaries in Lithuania, the other Baltic states, and Ukraine.