Operation Barbarossa

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 June 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

On 22 June 1941 Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa the biggest military operation in human history. More than 3 million men of the Axis poured into the Soviet Union beginning a conflict, that even within the context of the Second World War, was unprecedented in both its scale and savagery. Operation Barbarossa began with unparalleled success for the Wehrmacht and its allies with millions of Soviet soldiers killed and captured in the opening months of this titanic struggle. But by the winter of 1941 and against all the odds the German war machine had been halted outside the gates of Moscow marking the beginning of the end for the Nazi regime. To better understand this enormous operation Dan is joined by the author and broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby who has written a new book Barbarossa: How Hitler Lost the War. They discuss why Barbarossa was launched, the inhuman nature of the fighting and the horrific treatment of civilians and particularly the Jews, whether Barbarossa could have ever been successful and looking at the more human side behind the almost unbelievable scale of the fighting.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This episode is first broadcast on the
0:07.7	22nd of June 2021, which makes it 80 years to the day since Arolf Hitler unleashed the
0:17.4	largest single military offensive in the history of the world to that point. Operation Barbarossa,
0:26.1	German and Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. The fighting on the so-called Eastern Front
0:33.8	was of course a component part of the Second World War, but even its own terms, it was the
0:39.8	biggest, bloodiest and probably the most savage conflict in the whole of military history. We run
0:47.6	out of superlatives to describe the horrors of what happened, there were the next six months in
0:52.9	which millions and millions of people were killed, wounded, brutalized, displaced. But of course
0:58.7	over the next four years, which is the time it would take for the Soviet Union to regroup,
1:03.0	advance and eventually capture Berlin bringing the Second World War in Europe to an end.
1:08.7	It's a story of a military invasion, but it's also a much bigger story than that because in the
1:13.6	wake of the German invaders came teams of genocidal murderers. His targets, Includiment, were not
1:19.4	restricted to anyone involved in the Soviet Communist Party and the huge Jewish populations of
1:26.2	the new occupied territories. If you have tears, as Richard the Second said in Shakespeare,
1:33.3	if you have tears prepared to shed them now, it's a pretty tough story, this one's tough listen.
1:38.4	On this podcast about Jonathan Dimbleby, he's one of the UK's best known broadcasters. He's
1:43.6	written several books about the Second World War, they're fantastic and he brings both
1:47.9	their kind of journalistic nose for the story and great writing ability to his new book about
1:53.2	Operation Barbarossa. You'll also be hearing on this podcast a clip from History Hit TV's new
2:01.2	documentary about Operation Barbarossa, which is not quite ready to be broadcast yet, we're just
2:07.1	polishing it slightly. One of our great collaborations on History Hit, it have heard in many
2:10.8	times when his podcast is one of our great friends Robin Schaeffer. He managed to get hold of the
	...

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