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Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the USSR by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. The military operation, codenamed after Frederick Barbarossa (“red beard”), a 12th-century Holy Roman emperor and German king, put into activity Nazi Germany’s ideological goal of occupying the western USSR to repopulate it with Germans. The German General plan Ost intended to use some of the conquered people as a workforce for the Axis war effort while getting the oil reserves of the Caucasus and the agricultural resources of different Soviet lands. Their foremost goal was to create more Lebensraum (living space) for The Third Reich and eventually eradicate the indigenous Slavic peoples by mass exile to Siberia, Germanisation, enslavement, and genocide.
The Nazi High Command began the attack on the USSR in July 1940. Throughout the operation, over 3.8 million personnel of the Axis powers – the most significant invasion force in the history of warfare – invaded the western part of the USSR along a 2.9 thousand kilometers (1.8 thousand miles) front, with 600 thousand vehicles and over 600 thousand horses for non-combat activities.
The military operation opened up the Eastern Front, in which more forces were carried out than in any other theater of war conflict in human history. Eastern Europe saw some of history’s most significant combats, most horrible atrocities, and highest losses, all of which affected the course of WWII and the consecutive history of the 20th century. The German armies eventually captured some five million Soviet Red Army troops. The Nazis purposely starved to death or murdered 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, and millions of citizens, as the “Hunger Plan” carried out to solve German food deficiencies and eliminate the Slavic population through a famine. Mass shootings and gassing actions, carried out by the Nazis and volitional collaborators, massacred over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust.
Below is the map of operation Barbarossa superimposed onto the territory of the United States.
This map is shown the vastness of the war effort of our Soviet Allies. The map of the western half of the Soviet Union has been placed (in reverse) upon the map of the United States. The shadings show:
Brown color:A map of that part of the Soviet Union occupied by the Nazis at the peak of the invasion. (The map of the Soviet Union is reversed to compare the industrial west of Russia with the similar eastern area of the United States.) Yellow color: Giant industrial and agricultural communities moved from invaded regions . . . equivalent to a transfer of the mills and factories of all eastern America to the Rockies.
Soviet cities are in only approximately correct relation to each other, the object being to show their relation to comparable American cities.
“Russian War Relief. Inc., 1lE. 35th St., New York City, presents this map to help Americans to visualize the almost inconceivable extent of the need for American aid to the people of the Soviet Linton, from the vast invaded area of the USSR, here shown superimposed on a map of the United States, 38,000,000 Russians escaped the Nazis in 1941 by fleeing their homes- Strafed by dive bombers and machine-gunning “hedge-hoppers” they fled across their country before the invaders while their Red Army fought and fell bock-fought and fell back. Regarding the map of America, 38,000,000 persons walked and rode across more than half of the United States. They left behind them – besides their homes – the lands which fed them, the mines which fed their factories, their clothing, their hospitals, their schools, their nurseries – in short, their lives. In the land to which they went, there were almost none of these things. They built new factories first, ploughed the land second. Now they are building new homes. But- even as we would be – they are often cold, hungry, and physically exhausted. They need help. But the fate of those who escaped is not the worst fate in Russia. Forty million of the residents of the invaded area did not escape! They stayed. From forest hideouts, they have seen the Nazis burn their homes and truck away from food stores, clothing, and even household equipment. Some, staying in their homes to meet the invaders, have been robbed of all they owned … and many have been killed. Some survivors are now returning to homes recaptured by the Red Army. They return to almost utter desolation They, too, need help. Ten million of our Soviet allies will never return home. Ten million have died in the fight that is theirs and ours. The Red Army has lost almost as many men, in killed and wounded, as are now in all the American armed forces’ Civilians have died – by millions – of malnutrition, cold, exhaustion disease – and of the Nazi hangman s noose and the bullets of Nazi firing squads Hundreds of thousands of Soviet homes ore sheltering the war’s orphans. Look at the map. Imagine the tragedy to you and your family if an invader had ravaged America throughout all that shocked territory on our Atlantic seaboard, westward all the way to St Louis and Tulsa, because the equivalent of that tragedy has happened to millions of our Soviet allies, Russian War Relief Inc., asks oil Americans to help keep relief ships sailing.”
