Just click the year above to get a summary of what happened at that time.

The Eastern Front in 1941

Germany launches operation  Barbarossa, the most incredibly huge military invasion ever undertaken, a simultaneous assault along a 3,000 mile front, with the intention of marching thousands of miles Eastward.   The plan is to take and hold a line Eastward of Moscow, having destroyed or captured all of the Soviet Unions industrial muscle, then sue for peace.  The Ukraine is intended to become a German colony, where oil and wheat resources can be exploited for the benefit of the Aryan master race.

The Russians, partly thanks to Stalins insistence it would never happen, are almost totally unprepared.  Furthermore, thanks to Stalins purges in the 1930s, most of the best army leaders are gone, leaving many of the generals as Stalins political cohorts, with no knowledge of tactics to fight back.

German successes during this period are incredible.  At Smolensk, they even manage to take an entire Russian Army, some 300,000 strong, prisoner.  Many of these prisoners will die on the march Westward and the subsequent forced labour camps.

The one crucial mistake in the German assault can be blamed on Benito Mussolini.  Without telling Hitler, he invaded Greece and Jugoslavia in early 1941 and was hopelessly defeated.  Germany was forced to despatch forces to the Balkans to help their ally, and while they were successful there, the attack on Russia begins six weeks later than planned.  They almost reach their objectives in Russia, the attack finally grinding to a halt on the outskirts of Moscow, but are stopped, not only by suicidal Russian counterattacks, but by the onset of the Russian winter, where their superior tactics and military muscle sink in the mud and snow.  German troops are forced to dig in.     Not only that, but they are unprepared for the coldness of the Russian winter, having only being issued summer combat wear, and many thousands die in the cold conditions.

December ends with serious Russian counterattacks inflicting further casualties on the Germans.  German generals demand of Hitler that they retreat but Hitler refuses.  Despite horrific losses, Germany holds out.  This seems to build into Hitler the militaristic master leader he comes to believe he is.  During the war in the East he will make many bad decisions, overriding his generals, to serious detriment of the Eastern front campaign.

Germany's other big mistake at this time is not to win over the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people, who suffered terribly through forced starvation policies of Stalin during the 1930s.  Many commentators feel that had they taken the Ukraine and treated it as giving freedom to a Russian  occupied ally the final outcome of the war in the East might have been very different.  This was in fact the very successful policy taken with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, although as far as Germany was concerned those were three nations with strong Aryan roots.  Instead, they treat the Ukrainian citizenry with the same level of contempt as Stalin did.

In the North, Germany advances as far as the edge of Leningrad, and thus a seige lasting 3 years begins.  Many Russians living in the city will be reduced to eating Rats, sawdust and whatever else they can get their hands on.