Operation Barbarossa: The Nazi Invasion Of The U.S.S.R. 80 Years Ago

This photo -- of German soldiers hauling a cannon past a Soviet border marker -- is one of the first images taken of Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union that was launched at dawn on June 22, 1941.
 

German soldiers watch a Soviet village burn in June 1941.
 
Barbarossa was the largest military ground invasion in history, with some 3.8 million troops, thousands of tanks and aircraft, and more than half a million horses advancing across the entirety of Eastern Europe, from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea.

A Nazi soldier with a grenade tucked in his boot moves through a Soviet village in June 1941.

Barbarossa was motivated in part by racial hatred for what Nazi leadership deemed "subhuman" Slavic people. In the Nazi "master plan for the East," most Slavs were to be killed or enslaved and the vast territories of the Soviet Union would be resettled with ethnic Germans.

Heinrich Himmler and other senior Nazis look at a plan for ethnic German rural settlements on Soviet territory in March 1941.  
 
The invasion had been years in the making, and was hinted at in Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s 1925 manifesto Mein Kampf when he wrote, "If we talk about new soil and territory in Europe today, we can think primarily only of Russia and its vassal border states."

Nazis on motorcycles ride past a burning Soviet tank in June 1941.
 
Despite receiving dozens of warnings of an impending attack, the June 22 invasion stunned Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who reportedly disappeared to his country house for two days after the invasion.

Soviet citizens head to the front lines armed with tsarist-era Mosin-Nagant rifles.
 
On announcing the invasion to its citizens, the Soviet leadership astutely appealed to people's patriotism by calling for the defense of "our beloved country" rather than the usual appeals to international socialism or to Stalin.

Red Army units advance against the Nazi-led invasion force in an undated photo.
 
Once Stalin had snapped out of his apparent shock and taken leadership, Red Army fighters were faced with the Nazi war machine in front and political commissars in the rear who were authorized to execute deserters on the spot and arrest their families.

A Soviet Tupolev bomber plunges to earth after being shot down during fighting in Berezina in July 1941 in what today is Belarus.
 
 

Civilians shelter from aerial bombardment in the Mayakovskaya subway station as the Nazis close in on Moscow in August 1941. 

A group of Soviet prisoners captured by Nazi forces. Around half of the Soviet POWs held by Germany died in captivity, compared to a less than 4 percent fatality rate for U.S. and British prisoners. 

Nazi troops engage in a firefight on the Moscow-Smolensk railway in August 1941. A Soviet KV-1 tank is caught in the middle of the shoot-out.
 
Despite Hitler's prediction of a swift capture of Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Nazi troops soon faced ferocious resistance and were unable to capture either city.

German officers try to extract a vehicle from the mud in late 1941.
 
As autumn rains began to fall, Nazi commanders were forced to prepare for a drawn-out conflict as "General Mud" and vengeful Soviet fighters bogged down the German advance.

Red Army soldiers supported by a T-34 tank advance through a village in a major counterattack against Nazi invaders.
 
Although many historians see the autumn and winter of 1941-42 as the beginning of the end for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, the human suffering was only beginning.

Men arrive to collect the bodies of victims of the siege of Leningrad in October 1942.

Having failed to capture Leningrad, Nazi-led forces surrounded the northern city with the aim of starving the populace.
 

These pages are from the diary of Tanya Savicheva, a girl who chronicled the passing -- one by one -- of her six family members as they died during the Leningrad siege. The first entry (top left) marks her sister Zhenya's death on "December 28 at noon, 1941." The last two pages at bottom right say, "everyone is dead.... Only Tanya is left." She died soon afterward from intestinal tuberculosis.

German officers and soldiers prepare to execute Maria Bruskina and Vladimir Shcherbatsevich, members of the anti-Nazi resistance in Minsk in October 1941.
 
Shortly after Bruskina's arrest, the Jewish teenager wrote to her mother: "I swear to you that you will have no further unpleasantness because of me. If you can, please send me my dress, my green blouse, and white socks. I want to be dressed decently when I leave here."

A mother attempts to shield her child from Nazi bullets moments before being killed in a field near Ivangorod, Ukraine. At left is the body of another woman, and at right a group of people apparently digging a grave.
 
Nazi death squads -- in some cases supported by local populations -- executed millions of people, especially targeting Jews and "Asiatics" in the years following the Barbarossa invasion.

A Jewish man about to be executed in Vinnytsia, Ukraine
 
British historian and author Jonathan Dimbleby says the atrocities carried out by the Nazis -- and to a lesser-extent the vengeful Red Army that he researched -- are "hardly bearable to talk about."

A Russian girl partisan after being tortured and hanged by the Nazis. 

Dimbleby notes that members of the Nazi death squads "were not drunks hauled off the street or drug addicts who had no mental capacity that would allow us to judge them. These were educated people, they were people who had been doctors who had been through university, were civil servants, who volunteered for this task."

Red Army soldiers in winter camouflage patrol the center of Stalingrad in 1943.
 
The battle for Stalingrad, won by the Red Army, was the high-water mark of the Nazi advance into the Soviet Union. From the spring of 1943 onward, German led-forces were in retreat and the Soviet military would eventually push them all the way back to Berlin.