Could Operation Barbarossa have succeeded?

The short answer

• Hitler’s eastern program. The attack fulfilled an ambition Hitler had long expressed. In Mein Kampf and at the Hossbach conference (Ch. 5), he sought eastern Lebensraum; economic planning also envisaged a continental empire able to withstand blockade. The 1939 Pact gave Germany a temporary arrangement with the Soviet Union while that ambition remained. The intentionalist–functionalist debate (Ch. 3) concerns how Hitler reached war, but even Taylor’s improvising Hitler arrived, within twenty months of maximum power, at the eastern war his book had promised.
• Britain and the imagined exit. Britain remained at war after France fell. In July 1940 Hitler told his generals that Britain continued partly because it hoped for help from Russia and America. If the Soviet Union were defeated, he reasoned, Britain would lose that hope. He also saw growing American power as a deadline and believed a self-sufficient continental empire would be needed to meet it. The proposed invasion of the largest country on earth thus became a means of defeating an island. Like the window argument of 1938 (Ch. 7), it depended on a prediction about the cost of waiting.
• Germany underestimated Soviet strength. German intelligence estimated Soviet strength at roughly 200 divisions. By August 1941 it had identified 360. The lower estimate had seemed plausible: Stalin’s purges in 1937–38 had killed or imprisoned much of the senior officer corps, including three of five marshals and a majority of army and corps commanders, and the war with Finland (Ch. 9) had exposed the damage. Yet the Wehrmacht encountered a state with space, reserves, mobilization capacity and the T-34, willing to sustain enormous losses. German planners expected an eight-week campaign and issued no winter clothing. In December civilians were asked to provide clothes from their own closets.
• Stalin discounted the warnings. Warnings came from Sorge in Tokyo, Churchill, Soviet frontier commands and deserters shortly before the attack. Historians reconstruct Stalin’s reasons for discounting them: Hitler, he believed, would avoid a two-front war; Britain had an interest in drawing the USSR into its own conflict; and mobilization might provoke the very attack it was meant to meet. The experience of 1914 seemed to support the last fear. Soviet forces were caught unprepared, with aircraft lined up on airfields. The Red Army lost more aircraft in the first week than most nations possessed.

What it changed

Mass murder behind the front. The advancing armies made occupied territory available to the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police and local auxiliaries, who carried out systematic mass shootings. By the end of 1941 roughly a million Jews had been murdered. The Wannsee conference in January 1942 coordinated aspects of the wider genocide, which continued beyond this atlas’s December 1941 endpoint. The killings formed part of the racial project of conquest.

The Grand Alliance. Churchill had opposed Bolshevism for thirty years, but offered the Soviet Union support on the evening of the invasion: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil”. American Lend-Lease reached Moscow by November. Hitler’s attack brought Britain and the Soviet Union together, helping assemble the coalition that would eventually include the United States and win the world war.

Japan moves south. Japan’s neutrality pact with the Soviet Union held after Barbarossa, reducing Tokyo’s immediate concern about its northern frontier. A German victory also seemed likely. With European empires occupied elsewhere, both considerations favored a southern strike. Soviet forces counterattacked near Moscow five days before Pearl Harbor, but Japan’s fleet was already at sea.