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Well before the German invasion, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko referred to the Germans as the Soviet Union's "most important and strongest enemy," and as early as July 1940, the Red Army Chief of Staff, Boris Shaposhnikov, produced a preliminary three-pronged plan of attack for what a German invasion might look like, remarkably similar to the ...
The German minority population in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union stemmed from several sources and arrived in several waves. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Russification policies and compulsory military service in the Russian Empire, large groups of Germans from Russia emigrated to the Americas (mainly Canada, the United States, Brazil and Argentina ...
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion plan, called for the capture of Moscow within four months.On 22 June 1941, Axis forces invaded the Soviet Union, destroyed most of the Soviet Air Force (VVS) on the ground, and advanced deep into Soviet territory using blitzkrieg tactics to destroy entire Soviet armies.
Its war plan called for immediate action before Russia could mobilize much force, and instead use very rapid mobilization of German active duty and reserve forces to invade France through Belgium. Once France was knocked out, the German troops would be sent to the East to defeat Russia with the assistance of the Austrian army.
Historians have debated whether Stalin was planning an invasion of German territory in the summer of 1941. The debate began in the late 1980s when Viktor Suvorov published a journal article and later the book Icebreaker in which he claimed that Stalin had seen the outbreak of war in Western Europe as an opportunity to spread communist revolutions throughout the continent, and that the Soviet ...
[citation needed] The German invasion therefore caught the Soviet military and civilian leadership largely by surprise. The extent of warnings received by Stalin about a German invasion is controversial, and the claim that there was a warning that "Germany will attack on 22 June without declaration of war" has been dismissed as a "popular myth".
In early 1912, the Russian high command decided on a variant of the plan known as Schedule 19A, in which two Russian armies would invade East Prussia while four armies would invade Galicia. This did not give Russia the decisive advantage in either location, but it tried to balance the need for Russia to support France by attacking Germany while ...
The actions resulted in over 200,000 Soviet Army casualties but did slow the German assault. [75] The Germans formed bridgeheads across the Don on 20 August, with the 295th and 76th Infantry Divisions enabling the XIVth Panzer Corps "to thrust to the Volga north of Stalingrad." The German 6th Army was only a few dozen kilometres from Stalingrad.