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The book focuses on the first couple of weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the period that saw the Germans make the biggest advances across the widest front, taking advantage of a disorganised and surprised Red Army. The author focuses on two main aspects of the war – the military campaign itself (the largest land invasion in history along the longest front) and the atrocities committed on both sides of the front.
The contest of this conflict is well known, so we dive straight in to the days immediately before the start of the attack, with a look at what people believed was going to happen in mid-June. This is a very mixed picture – most German troops being massed along the eastern front must have been aware of what was about to happen, although some seem not to have expected an immediate attack, while on the Soviet side the picture was much more varied, with many people believing the official line that war with Germany was unlikely. However plenty of others were convinced an attack was coming, believing the many sources of intelligence rather than official denials.
We then move onto the first day of the attack, seen again from both sides, with many of the Soviet side caught by surprise. This includes many civilians a long way behind the front lines, some witnessing long range German bombing raids, others reacting as the news reached Moscow or Leningrad. Each chapter is then split between detailed accounts of the fighting, as the Soviet line almost collapsed, and the Germans advanced rapidly on almost all fronts, and accounts of the atrocities. There were some exceptions to the rapid German advance – first at Brest, where the fortress held out far longer than expected, and later when newly arrived Soviet forces launched counterattacks, some of which caused panic on the German side. We also see the impact of the first encounters with the most modern Soviet tanks, the T-34 and KV-1, much better armed and armoured than any tanks the Germans were expecting to meet, and which caused much concern in the early days of the war. We also get a good idea of the different experiences of the best equipped German troops – panzer divisions and motorised infantry units – who took part in the rapid advances, and the basic infantry divisions, who were forced to march over seemingly endless distances, often without ever coming into contact with Soviet troops.
This was a conflict that was charactarised by atrocities on both sides. In this early stage of Barbarossa we have four distinct sets of perpetrators. On the Soviet side the NKVD was ordered to execute every political prisoner who might fall into German hands. This resulted in a large scale murder of prisoners in Soviet prisons across eastern Poland, the Baltic States, Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. The number actually killed in these massacres is hotly contested, ranging from a low of around 20,000 to a high of around 100,000. As the Germans arrived they immediately began their own series of atrocities, focused against Communists and Jews. Their Romanian allies committed their own atrocities in the areas they captured in Bukovina. Finally local nationalists in most of the areas captured in the first weeks of Barbarossa carried out their own massacres, mainly targeting local Jews. The Germans used the NKVD massacres to help stir up these nationalist massacres, although the more rapid nationalists didn’t need a lot of encouragement. My only quibble in this section is that some of the more lurid accounts of the NKVD massacres are repeated without a proper discussion of how accurate they may have been – there are many accounts of bodies being found afterwards with signs of elaborate torture, but the massacres generally happened over such short time periods that it seems unlikely the NKVD would have actually had time for all of them. An alternative view is that these marks were caused by decomposition and in the later mass killings phase of most of the massacres, where grenades were thrown into rooms of prisoners etc. However that is a minor quibble, and this is a very valuable part of the book, reminding us that this was a conflict like no other.
The Romanian role in Barbarossa gets more coverage than is often the case. In 1940 the Soviet Union had taken advantage of Germany’s focus being in the west to force Romania to hand over Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. These were areas where about half of the population were Romania, and the other half split between Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish blocks, and that had changed hands repeatedly in the previous hundred years, with Bukovina having been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and northern Bessarabia part of the Russian Empire before the First World War. Both had become Romanian after the war, so had been Romanian for two decades before being taken by the Soviets. Unsurprisingly the introduction of Soviet rule hadn’t been gentle, leading to a great deal of resentment in the newly occupied areas. In addition they had ended legal discrimination against the Jewish population, who thus became associated in nationalist minds with the Soviets (despite many Jews being imprisoned by the Soviets). As a result the Romanian nationalist fevour to reoccupy these areas as part of Barbarossa went hand in hand with the worst anti-semitism and the resulting atrocities.
This is a compelling examination of one of the darkest conflicts in Human history, and doesn’t shy away from the atrocities that made the Eastern Front so dreadful and so costly in human life.
Chapters
1 – One More Blitzkrieg
2 – The Gates of Hell Opened in Front of Us
3 – To Leningrad
4 – To Moscow
5 – To Kiev
6 – Victory Denied
Epilogue: Barbarossa’s Long Shadow
Author: Richard Hargreaves
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 496
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2025