The

The from the home of the codebreakers and the birthplace of modern computing, this is the Bletchley Park podcast.

Welcome to this additional episode of the Bletchley Park podcast, Barbarossa.

80 years ago in June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in what Hitler hoped

would be a lightning campaign to destroy Bolshevism and provide living space for his empire in the

east. The result was four years of brutal conflict, which shaped the world we live in today.

What did the co-breakers at Bletchley Park know about the German plans of attack? Was Stalin warned?

And how did the war in the East play out at BP?

In this It Happened Here episode, we are, as usual, joined by our research historian, Dr David Kenyon,

to tell us more about the Signals Intelligence picture on the Eastern Front.

Special thanks go to Dr Ben Thompson for voicing our archival documents.

This is Bletchley Park.

It happened here.

Our last podcast episode, Val Gelb, related to the events of 1940, because it was held over from last year's schedule.

Obviously, the pandemic interrupted our programming, but we are back now, and we're back to our anniversaries.

This episode is 80 years from the start of Operation Barbarossa. David, can you give us some background? What was Operation Barbarossa? Operation Barbarossa is the code name the Germans give to the

first part of the war against the Soviet Union

in the Second World War. And their invasion of the Soviet Union began 80 years ago on the 22nd of

June 1941. Barbarossa is remembered as one of the largest military operations that's ever taken

place. There were something like 3.8 million

German military personnel involved and they literally attacked the whole frontage of the Soviet

Union. So there's troops more or less from the Black Sea all the way up to the Arctic.

...