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Hitler had in July 1937 praised Barbarossa as the emperor who first expressed Germanic cultural ideas and carried them to the outside world through his imperial mission. [42] For Hitler, the name Barbarossa signified his belief that the conquest of the Soviet Union would usher in the Nazi "Thousand-Year Reich". [42]
According to Suvorov, Hitler's intelligence identified the USSR's preparations to attack Germany. Therefore, the Wehrmacht had drafted a preemptive war plan based on Hitler's orders as early as mid-1940, soon after the Soviet annexations of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. On 22 June 1941, the Axis began an assault on the USSR.
On 6 November 1941, Stalin rallied his generals in a speech given underground in Moscow, telling them that the German blitzkrieg would fail because of weaknesses in the German rear in Nazi-occupied Europe and the underestimation of the strength of the Red Army, and that the German war effort would crumble against the Anglo-American-Soviet "war ...
The Battle of Moscow was a military campaign that consisted of two periods of strategically significant fighting on a 600 km (370 mi) sector of the Eastern Front during World War II, between October 1941 and January 1942.
The operation failed, and Hitler told the troops to fight to the death. On 10 January 1943, the Soviets began Operation Koltso, which surrounded the 6th Army. On 31 January, Paulus disobeyed Hitler by surrendering, and soon, 22 generals surrendered with him. By 2 February, the remaining 91,000 German men had surrendered.
On 20 April 1945, Hitler's 56th birthday, Soviet artillery of the 1st Belorussian Front began shelling Berlin and did not stop until the city surrendered. The weight of ordnance delivered by Soviet artillery during the battle was greater than the total tonnage dropped by Western Allied bombers on the city. [ 53 ]
The leaders of the German navy suggest to Hitler they need to occupy Norway. British Prime Minister Chamberlain formally declines Hitler's peace offer in a speech held in the House of Commons. Lithuania signs a 15-year Mutual Assistance Pact with the Soviet Union, which allows the Soviets to have 20,000 men in military bases in Lithuania. In a ...
Seeing as the Soviet South-West Front was close to collapsing, capturing Kiev was considered to be a secondary goal. At this time Hitler did not want to assault Kiev, and prioritised the capture of a bridgehead on the Dnieper, subject to the destruction of large formations of Soviet forces west of the river. However, German Army senior ...