‘Operation Barbarossa’ was the code name for the German war against the Soviet Union, in particular the campaign of 1941. Together with senior military officers and Russian emigrants, Adolf Hitler had been propagating a war against the Bolshevik Soviet Union since the 1920s. A key aspect for Hitler was the conquest of ‘living space’, i.e. territories for settlement and economic exploitation.
Planning for a campaign against the Soviet Union began during the German war in western Europe in June 1940. In December 1940, the decision was made to attack the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941. For the first time, ‘Operation Barbarossa’ was to be based on a planned ‘blitzkrieg’, i.e. a temporary mobilization of all resources, with warfare focused on armored forces that were to advance to Moscow within a period of two to three months. The campaign was planned as a war of annihilation from the outset – in particular aiming to starve the Russian urban population so as to feed the Wehrmacht ‘from the land’, also with the objective of murdering of much of the enemy elite and the Jewish population.
The Wehrmacht launched its attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, supported by units from Finland and Romania and with others joining from Italy and Hungary shortly afterwards. The attackers were able to overrun Belarus and large parts of the Baltic states in particular within a few weeks, but the over-optimistic German war plan came to a standstill at the Battle of Smolensk in July 1941. Although Ukraine was likewise occupied by October 1941, two advances on Moscow in October and November 1941 failed to achieve their objective, with the Red Army launching a counter-offensive at the beginning of December instead. In the southern part of the Soviet Union, a second German offensive (‘Operation Blue’) took place in spring 1942: this consisted of an advance up to the Volga near Stalingrad and the North Caucasus in late summer. The retreat of the Wehrmacht from the Soviet Union began with the Battle of Stalingrad; German forces had withdrawn from the country completely by the fall of 1944.
The German war in the Soviet Union resulted in the country being cast under radical military rule. The occupied territories were ruthlessly exploited, with around 2.8 million people being deported to the Reich as ‘Eastern workers’ for the purpose of forced labor. Soviet POWs were not only denied protection under international law: for the most part they also lacked adequate food supplies, resulting in at least 2.5 million of them dying in German camps; more than 150,000 POWs were shot, mainly Jews and communist political functionaries, During the occupation, German forces collaborated with local support groups to murder all the Jews they could get hold of – some 2.5 to 2.7 million people – along with tens of thousands of Rom*nja. In addition, over half a million inhabitants were killed in so-called ‘anti-partisan operations’, mainly in Belarus and Russian territories. An unknown number of people fell victim to starvation in the occupied territories, as well as almost a million of the population of Leningrad while the city was under siege.
People from Munich were involved in the war against the Soviet Union, just like Germans from all other parts of the Reich. A significant number of the officers had passed through Munich military college. Of the commanding authorities, General Command of the VII Army Corps was from Munich. The 7th Infantry Division was deployed throughout the war in the Soviet Union in the central section of the front, while the 167th Infantry Division was there until July 1942; the Munich-based Infantry Regiment 179 fought in the southern section. But soldiers from Munich were deployed in other units in the war against the Soviet Union too, including a student company in the 252nd Infantry Division. One of the leading military figures in the war against the Soviet Union was General Ferdinand Schörner from Munich, who commanded several corps and finally the 17th Army in spring 1944, subsequently Army Group South Ukraine and, in the final phase, Army Group North. General Anton Dostler was also from Munich: he led the 57th and the 163rd Infantry Division, and finally the XXXXII Army Corps in the south of the occupied Soviet Union.
Around half of the soldiers from Munich who were killed in action died in the war against the Soviet Union. The people of Munich not only kept up to date with the war by following the propaganda-biased radio and newspaper reports: the soldiers’ families were also in regular contact with the ‘Eastern Front’ via field post, while the soldiers themselves were occasionally able to return to Munich for short periods of home leave. More than 4,000 Soviet POWs were deployed in Munich; most of them had previously been accommodated at the Moosburg camp (Stalag VIIa). Not far from the state capital, in Hebertshausen near Dachau, there was also an execution site where the Gestapo shot around 4,000 supposedly ‘intolerable’ prisoners.
