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Talk:Operation Barbarossa

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by SimonP (talk | contribs) at 06:23, 18 December 2002. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Should all of the last half of this article be here. It's always been my impression that Barbarossa was merely the opening campaign against the USSR, and not the entire war up until Stalingrad. I think the last four or five paragraphs should be moved to the article on the eastern front in WWII. 

                                              -SimonP
Before Barbarossa, the Germans and the Russians were allies, having signed an unexpected treaty shortly before the German invasion of Poland.

This wasn't anyting like "unexpected" and it wasn't German but German and Soviet invasion. --Taw

I do think the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact can be described as unexpected. The Soviets only began thinking of allying themselves with the Germans after Munich, and the treaty took the English and French completely by suprise as they had long counted on a Soviet alliance against Hitler. 

                                          -SimonP

Right at the beginning of the article it needs to be stated, that Germany was aware of Soviet Union's plan to attack Germany. When Hitler found that out, he right away took the offensive and cought the Soviet Army in offensive position, therefore surprised them. Soviet Union had appr 30,000 tanks , Germany 6 or 9,000?, something like that.

Viktor Suworow , (book Ice-Breaker) and book "Der Tag M" (M=Mobilizing Day) proved that the Soviet Army under Stalin was ready to attack. Suworow recently inspected many documents. He was trained in Soviet Army at Suworow Officer School in Kaliningrad and at Officer College Kiev.


Further down in the article it needs to be stated , that the main reason, for bogging down the German army, was weather, the rains and early winter . H. Jonat

The vast majority of historians still believe the USSR was taken by suprise by Barbarossa. There is no evidence Hitler's attack was a preemptive strike to prevent an impending war. With the opeing of archives after the fall of the Soviet Union it has only become more clear that Stalin was shocked by the attack and the Russian armies unprepared, even if many in the NKVD were fairly certain an attack was imminent. 

                                                -SimonP

I think it needs to be pointed out that the Germans were bogged down by the weather at Moscow mainly because they first took a detour southward earlier in the campaign. Hitler ordered Army Group Center southward to conquer the Ukraine in a pincer operation instead of taking Moscow earlier in the campaign. I believe that several of Hitler's generals, including Guderian, argued against this. By the time they returned towards the push to Moscow, the muds and then the snows had stopped the advance. -- Egern

BBC article you gave (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/countdown/countdown_1.shtml) contains at least one important mistake - in April 1939 Inagresion Pact between Germany and Poland was cancelled by Germans, so no way could Hitler be "bound by an agreement he signed with Poland in January 1934". --Taw

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