A public domain video

The Russians stop Nazis eastward advance with fierce fighting. Russian footage with English narration.

On 22 June 1941, Hitler launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin was confident that the total Allied war machine would eventually stop Germany, and with Lend Lease from the West, the Soviets stopped the Wehrmacht some 30 kilometers from Moscow. Over the next four years, the Soviet Union repulsed Axis offensives, such as at the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk, and pressed forward to victory in large Soviet offensives, such as the Vistula-Oder Offensive.

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, starting Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. The operation stemmed from Nazi Germany's ideological aims to conquer the western Soviet Union so that it could be repopulated by Germans, to use Slavs as a slave-labor force for the Axis war-effort, and to seize the oil reserves of the Caucasus and the agricultural resources of Soviet territories.

In the two years leading up to the invasion, Germany and the Soviet Union signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Nevertheless, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the codename Operation Otto), which Adolf Hitler authorized on 18 December 1940. Over the course of the operation, about four million Axis powers personnel, the largest invasion force in the history of warfare, invaded the western Soviet Union along with a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front. In addition to troops, the Wehrmacht employed some 600,000 motor vehicles, and between 600,000 and 700,000 horses for non-combat operations. The offensive marked an escalation of the war, both geographically and in the formation of the Allied coalition.


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