22.6.1941 – German invasion of the Soviet Union - Operation "Barbarossa"
On Sunday, June 22, 1941, at 4 am (Moscow time), Nazi Germany launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, with a force of about 150 divisions, of which 41 were armored and mechanized, with about 4,300 tanks, and with the support of about 4,000 aircraft.
The German force numbered about 3,200,000 soldiers and hundreds of thousands of soldiers from Finland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and fascist Spain (the "Blue Division"), who were joined by nationalist collaborators in those occupied countries, such as the Baltic nationalists, Bandera's Ukrainian forces and militias From the Caucasus.
Opposite them, the Red Army, which was deployed in the military districts of the Baltic States, Byelorussia and Ukraine, and numbered about 3,000,000 Soviet soldiers, who were not deployed in defensive formations and were in bases, hundreds
of kilometers from the border.
The attack was conducted on 4 main axes.
Army Group "North" - attacked north towards its targets - the Baltic countries and Leningrad.
Army Group "Center" - attacked through Belarus and its capital Minsk, and its main target was Moscow.
Army Group "South" - its targets were Ukraine, southern Russia and the Caucasus.
The 11th Army attacked together with the Romanian Army, along the northern coast of the Black Sea, towards Odessa and the Crimean peninsula. At the same time, in the north, Finnish forces launched an attack towards Leningrad.
The aim of the operation was to achieve the geopolitical goals of German imperialism and the ideological goals of German fascism.
The "Commissar Order", signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff of the Wehrmacht High Command, stipulated that "political commissars" of the Red Army would not be considered prisoners of war, and would be killed at the front. If discovered later, they were sent to concentration camps for extermination. More about the German invasion of the Soviet Union -ברית המועצות | מוזיאון הלוחם היהודי במלחה"ע ה - 2