MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · JUNE 22 · Operation Barbarossa: Germany invades USSR (1941)ON THIS DAY · 22 JUNE 1941
Operation Barbarossa: Germany invades USSR
Barbarossa: 3.6 million men invade the USSR on a 2,900 km front — the largest invasion ever mounted, on the exact anniversary of France’s 1940 armistice.
22 JUNE 1941 · THE WAR ROOM — WW2, 1936–1945 These maps are reconstructed from published sources · Cliopatria v0.2.1 — dated political boundaries · French Ministry of the Armed Forces — La ligne de démarcation · Regional history institute — Italian annexations of1941, Fiume province and Krk · IGM Fiume, 1:25,000, sheet53B II SE — boundary established in1924 · Natural Earth — physical reference geography · Yugoslavia (1929–1939) location map — international frontier and Adriatic coast · Treaty of Rome (1924), division of Fiume and west-bank boundary · Murli / rowanwindwhistler — Slovakia border changes, 1938–1945 · United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — The Holocaust in Slovakia · US Military Academy — The War in Eastern Europe (1952), maps7 and15 · Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute — The First Vienna Award
Source details Cliopatria contributors / Seshat Global History Databank. CC BY4.0 · Dated polity and constituent territory selections; campaign-dependent occupation overlays reconstructed separately. Ministère des Armées. Historical facts consulted; actual polygon imported from Cliopatria Regional history institute — Italian annexations of1941, Fiume province and Krk. Historical geographic facts consulted; source prose and artwork not republished Istituto Geografico Militare, Fiume (printed1946; 1927 survey with1931–1940 updates), reproduced by Istituto regionale per la storia della Resistenza e dell’Età contemporanea nel Friuli Venezia Giulia. Independent reconstruction from graticule coordinates and boundary observations; archive page reserves artwork rights.. Geographical-fact reconstruction; original archive artwork not distributed Natural Earth. Public domain NordNordWest/Wikipedia. Converted from the published SVG to WGS84; eastern Italian regional territory extracted. Source cites Velhagen & Klasings Großer Volksatlas (1938).. CC BY-SA 3.0 Germany 1924 agreement interpreted alongside the regional history institute and City of Rijeka’s explanation of the Donja/Gornja Drenova division.. Historical geographic facts; citation only Murli; SVG adaptation by rowanwindwhistler (2021). CC BY-SA 2.5; derived geographic paths under the same license · Georeferenced actual published vector regions using eight printed city positions; no map artwork or labels in the atlas. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum — The Holocaust in Slovakia. Historical chronology consulted; no source prose or artwork republished Department of Military Art and Engineering, United States Military Academy,1952. US federal government work; public domain maps Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute — The First Vienna Award. Historical territorial chronology consulted; no source artwork or prose republished Sevastopol remains a Soviet-held fortress enclave in December 1941. Its 10 km regional display radius is an explicit reconstruction.
The moving front follows the source-map position for 1941-12-06. The source date is kept separate from the chapter anchor; manual registration has the precision of a regional map.
Slovak territory is reconstructed from the published 1938–1945 border-change map, which separates the client state from Hungarian and German annexations. This regional source does not resolve small northern frontier changes or survey-level detail. After August 1944, German military occupation supersedes the client-state fill.
The eastern Italian frontier uses the published 1930s regional map and a reconstruction of the 1924 Fiume boundary. Source conquests after April 1941 remain separately dated.
The dates of published political outlines retain the resolution available in their sources. Military fronts and operational perimeters have their own source and method records.
reconstruction: 1936–1941 · reconstruction: 1936–1942 · reconstruction: 1939–1944 · reconstruction: 1940–1941 · reconstruction: 1941-12-06 · reconstruction: 1941.95 · reconstruction: 1941–1941 · reconstruction: 1941–1944 · trace: 1941-12-06 · vector: 1912–1955 · vector: 1936–1941 · vector: 1936–1944 · vector: 1936–1945 · vector: 1938–1972 · vector: 1939–1944 · vector: 1939–2023 · vector: 1940–1941 · vector: 1940–1942 · vector: 1940–1943 · vector: 1941–1941 · vector: 1941–1943 · vector: 1941–1944
Layer records and reconstruction methods
The moment in context Germany attacked the Soviet Union on the assumption that a series of victories near the frontier would destroy the state behind the armies. About 3.6 million Axis troops crossed the border in the largest invasion in history. Three army groups drove toward Leningrad, Moscow and Ukraine. At Minsk, Smolensk and Kiev, German mobile formations surrounded enormous Soviet forces; by winter more than three million prisoners had been taken.
From Operation Barbarossa , chapter 6 of The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945 (DEC 1941).
Teach this in 5 minutes Why it happened — Ideology: Lebensraum and the “Jewish-Bolshevik” enemy. Hitler’s central aim was colonial conquest in the East: the enslavement of Slavs and the annihilation of Jews and communists. Economic and strategic…The turn — The gates of Moscow, 5 December. Soviet reserve armies helped Zhukov launch a counteroffensive before Moscow on 5 December. Intelligence from Richard Sorge in Tokyo had informed…What it changed — A war of attrition Germany cannot win. After December 1941, Germany faced a prolonged contest of factories, oil and manpower. The Soviet Union, aided by growing Lend-Lease, dwarfed the…Then ask the room: Why did predictions of a swift Soviet collapse prove wrong? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
The atlas that shows it
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