5 Reasons Why Hitler's Operation Barbarossa Failed

When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, he famously declared, “We have only to kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” Hitler and his generals believed so strongly in the superiority of the German fighting force that they predicted it would take just 10 weeks to rout the Soviets and take their vast territory.

At first, Germany’s Blitzkrieg tactics seemed to work, quickly destroying 2,000 Soviet aircraft and pushing deep into the Soviet Union with thousands of Panzer tanks. The Nazis started to believe their own racist propaganda, that a single Aryan soldier was better than 100 “subhuman” Slavs.

In the first week of Operation Barbarossa alone, Germany killed or wounded 150,000 Soviet troops, an astounding number of casualties. Yet for all those losses, the Soviets kept coming. The average Soviet soldier fought as much out of fear of Stalin as out of hatred for Hitler, says Jonathan Trigg, a writer and World War II historian.

“They'd seen Stalin's purges and the forced starvation in the Ukraine, which killed millions,” says Trigg. “But very quickly, that fear was overtaken by the Nazi method of waging war, which was total extermination. The average Soviet soldier was thinking, ‘My only hope to save my family is to fight with everything I've got. If I’m going to die anyway, I'm going to clog up this German advance with blood and bone.”

Two months into Operation Barbarossa, the chief of the German High Command, General Franz Halder, confessed in his diary that the Nazis had misjudged the size and determination of the enemy.

“It is becoming ever more apparent that the Russian colossus… has been underestimated by us,” wrote Halder. “At the start of the war, we reckoned with about 200 enemy divisions. Now we have already counted 360… When a dozen have been smashed, then the Russian puts up another dozen.”

Because the Nazis thought that Operation Barbarossa was going to be over in weeks, they had no long-term strategy for defeating a seemingly inexhaustible number of enemy troops on such a large battlefield.

Hitler’s stated goal when he launched Operation Barbarossa was to capture the so-called “A-A Line,” a 1,600-mile line running north to south through the Soviet Union. "The A-A Line stretches from Archangel in the north all the way down to the city of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, so it’s absolutely vast,” says Trigg. “Did they not have a map? Not only would it be physically impossible for any military to capture [so much territory], but even if they did, how are they going to defend it?”

Hitler’s strategy for conquering the A-A Line was to split the German army into three large groups. Army Group North attacked through the Baltic states with a goal of taking Leningrad. Army Group South invaded Ukraine and the industrial Donbas region. And Army Group Center had the assignment of pushing through Minsk and Smolensk toward the ultimate goal of Moscow.

But after the first few weeks of easy victories, Hitler and his generals lost sight of their goals, Trigg says. By August 1941, Army Group Center’s tanks were within 220 miles of Moscow, but Hitler ordered them to turn south and help take Kyiv in Ukraine, instead. Hitler became obsessed with capturing the coal mines and oil fields of Ukraine, arguing that Moscow could wait.

“The analogy I use to describe the Germans in the Eastern Front is like a kid in a sweet shop just grabbing every little shiny thing they see,” says Trigg. “Ooh, there’s coal! Ooh, there’s oil! They have no real plan, so that creates muddled thinking and the diversion of forces.”

Trigg is convinced that Germany could have easily defeated the Soviet Union in World War II if Hitler had extended a hand to the Soviet people and offered them a viable alternative to Stalinist communism. Even with 3 million German and Axis troops participating in Operation Barbarossa, they still would not have been able to defeat the largest country in the world without a "third force.”

“And that third force was the Soviet people—or at least large sections of them—rising to overthrow their own regime, which they detested to a large degree,” says Trigg. “But the Nazis, because of their own racist delusions, were unable to latch on to what could have been the key to victory. If you come out and say that all Slavs are subhumans who don't deserve to exist, that's not going to get people on your side.”

Only after the failure of Operation Barbarossa and the depletion of German forces in the East did Germany begin to recruit disaffected Soviet soldiers. Trigg says that by late 1942, one in 10 fighters in the German army on the Eastern Front was a “Hiwi” (short for Hilfswilliger or auxiliary volunteer), including Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Chechens.

“All of these people came together for a variety of reasons to help the Germans,” says Trigg, “but the numbers that would have come forward if they had been given a proper alternative to communism would have been the nail in the coffin for Stalinist Russia. That didn’t happen.”

The longest march the German army attempted before Operation Barbarossa was the 1940 invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. In just six weeks, the Nazis advanced 300 miles, overwhelmed the enemy with Blitzkrieg tactics and forced France and the Low Countries to surrender. Hitler believed he could repeat that success on the Eastern Front, but he was sorely mistaken.

One reason the French campaign succeeded was that France and the Low Countries had a strong infrastructure of railways, roads and bridges. German troops, trucks and tanks could move quickly on paved roads, and fuel and supplies could be shipped to the front lines by train.

None of that infrastructure existed on the Eastern Front. Roads were unpaved and rutted. Where train tracks existed, they were a different gauge than in Germany, rendering them useless. The deeper the German army pushed into Soviet territory, the farther it moved from supply lines for essentials like fuel, ammunition and equipment.

“For food, the advancing Nazis were told to live off the land, just take from the local people, because we don't care, we want them dead anyway,” says Trigg. “But you can't do that with fuel because there's no fuel in these places. And no spare parts for your vehicles, so how do you keep them going?”

The real trouble was that as Operation Barbarossa dragged on for months, there was no relief for the soldiers themselves. In a typical invasion, Trigg says, front-line troops would be rotated out and replaced by fresh forces, giving them time to rest and recover. But there was no second wave of reinforcements for the Germans in the Soviet Union. That’s why Trigg believes Operation Barbarossa was effectively over after the Battle of Kyiv in September 1941.

On the surface, the Battle of Kyev was a crushing loss for the Soviets. Germany took more than 660,000 prisoners and the Soviets lost four field armies, 43 divisions and 452,720 soldiers. But the grinding, months-long battle left the victorious German forces totally depleted.

“No other army in the world could have suffered a defeat like that and still survived, apart from the Red Army,” says Trigg, author of Barbarossa Through German Eyes: The Biggest Invasion in History. “But by the end of it, the Germans were utterly exhausted. And after all of their victories, the Red Army was still fighting and still in the field. And [the Germans] had no big second wave of troops coming behind them to continue the advance and gain final victory. From then onwards, it was just a long road of despair for [Germany] until they were finally defeated.”

Because of the diversion of Army Group Center to Ukraine, Hitler didn’t turn his army toward Moscow until October 1941. During the months-long delay, the Soviets had time to reinforce the capital with a million fresh troops and 1,000 new tanks. As German forces closed in on the city, there was an early snowstorm. When the snow melted, it transformed dirt roads into muddy quagmires known as rasputitsa that ground the Germans' progress to a halt.

Still wearing their summer uniforms, the German soldiers were unprepared for the onslaught of the frigid Russian winter. They stuffed their thin overcoats with newspaper and straw in a desperate attempt to insulate themselves, but still suffered a reported 100,000 cases of frostbite, leading to the amputation of 15,000 limbs. Despite taking heavy losses, the Red Army held their ground and the Germans slowly realized the futility of their mission.

"It's too late in the year and you've missed your chance,” says Trigg. “You should have defeated the Soviet Union two months ago and now you're going to be advancing into Moscow at exactly the wrong time with forces that are utterly shattered and badly in need of resupply, reinforcement and reorganization.”

On December 5, Soviet forces in Moscow launched a surprise counteroffensive and sent the frozen German soldiers scrambling in retreat. Six months and more than 750,000 German casualties later, Operation Barbarossa was officially a failure.