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Operation Barbarossa
1941
Captain
von Rosenbach-Lepinski is said to have told his motorcycle
reconnaissance
battalion : "The war with Russia will last only four
weeks."
Army Group South
(Between the Pripet Marshes and the Carpathian mountains - map
barbarossa
In the south,
where Soviet forces were strongest, the German advance was much
less rapid as planned. Red Army General Kirponos had managed to
establish a defence
in depth rather then line his armies along the frontier. But
although his divisions
inflicted quite heavy casualties on the Germans, their own
losses were infinitely
greater. Kirponos rushed his tank formations into the
battle before they could
deploy effectively.
On the second
day, 23 June, General Ewald von Kleist's First Panzer Group came
up
against Soviet divisions equiped with the T-34 tank, and for the
very first time,
German crews saw the T-34 tank, the best general-purpose tank
developed in the
Second World War.
The reduction of
the southern front between the Pripet Marshes and the Carpathian
mountains took much longer than expected. Fieldmarshall von
Reichenau's 6th Army
found itself continually harassed by Russian forces cut off in
the wooded swampland
to its left. Reichenau wanted prisoners executed as partisans,
wether or not they
still wore uniform. Red Army units also shot their German
captives, especially
Luftwaffe pilots who had baled out. There were few opportunities
for sending them
to the rear, and they did not want them to be saved by the enemy
in advance.
In Lvov, the capital of Galicia, the NKVD slaughtered political
prisoners to prevent
their release by the Germans. Its savagery was no doubt
increased by the atmos-
phere of suspicion and chaos in the city, with drunkenness and
looting.
Lvov was subjected not only to aerial bombing, but also to
sabotage by German
organized groups of Ukrainian nationalists. The mood of violent
fear had been
fuelled just before the invasion by jibes from the non-Russian
population.
"The Germans are coming to get you".
Fieldmarshall von
Rundstedt's army group, now supported by Romanians, Hungarians
and the German 11th Army took 100.000 prisoners from the
divisions trapped in the
Uman pocket early in August. The advance into the Ukraine across
the open, rolling
priarie with sunflowers, soya beans and unharvested corn, seemed
unstoppable.
(The Romanians,
Hungarians together with 11th German Army, supported Army Group
South on July 01, 1941, after the danger of a Russian
counterattack against
the Romanian oilfields near Ploesti was gone. The Ploesti
oilfields were vital for the
German war industry.)
The greatest
concentration of Soviet forces lay round the Ukrainian capital
of Kiev.
Their commander in Chief was Marshal Budenny, with Nikita
Krushchev as chief
commissar, whose main responsibility was the evacuation of
industrial machinery
to the east.
Once Rundstedt's
mobile forces had finished at Uman, they continued, veering to
the south of Kiev. Kleist's First Panzer Group then swung north,
joining up with
Guderian's divisions (Army Group Center), whose sudden strike
down from the
central front took the Soviet command by surprise. The danger of
a terrible trap
became plain, but Stalin refused to abandon Kiev. On 21
September, the encirclement
battle of Kiev ended. The Germans claimed 665.000 prisoners.
Hitler called it " the
greatest battle in world history". The Chief of the General
Staff, Halder, on the
other hand, called it the greatest strategic mistake of the
campaign in the east.
Like Guderian, he felt that all their energies should have been
concentrated
on Moscow.
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