Operation Barbarossa: A Good Plan?

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their 'Jewish Bolshevist' government before it could turn on him. His 1939 pact with Stalin was only meant to give Germany time to prepare for war.

As soon as Hitler controlled France, he looked east. Insisting that Britain was as good as defeated, he wanted to finish off the Soviet Union as soon as possible, before it could significantly fortify and arm itself. 'We only have to kick in the front door and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling down'ii he told his officers. His generals warned him of the danger of fighting a war on two fronts and of the difficulty of invading an area as vast as Russia but, Hitler simply overruled them. He then placed troops in Finland and Romania and created his eastern front. In December 1940, Hitler made his final battle plan.

He gave this huge operation a suitable name. He termed it 'Operation Barbarossa' or 'Redbeard' which was the nickname of the crusading 12th century Holy Roman emperor, Frederick I. The campaign ...

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details the fact that the invasion of Russia was doomed to fail from the beginning due to the fact that the Germans were unprepared and extremely overconfident for a reasonable advancement towards Moscow.

Macksey's first reason for the failure was the simply that Germany should not have broken its agreement with Russia and invaded its lands due to the fact that the British were not defeated on the western front, and this in turn plunged Hitler into a war on two fronts. The Germans, and Hitler in particular were stretching their forces too thin and were overconfident that the Russians would be defeated in a very short time. Adolf Hitler's overconfidence justifiably stemmed from ...

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