What too few people know about the Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa

The Holocaust and Operation Barbarossa theme centers on the 22 June 1941 invasion that helped shape Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front. At 4am that day, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa with a land force of 3.5 million men supported by thousands of tanks and aircraft. Prime Minister Winston Churchill warned Britain that the war had reached a “climacteric,” a prediction that the article says proved accurate. The invasion was followed by Einsatzgruppen, about 3,000-strong in four “special action groups,” which moved into towns and villages behind the front line. Aided by local collaborators, Wehrmacht personnel, police auxiliaries and SS officers, the units carried out killings that expanded from communists, partisans, and Jewish men to Jewish women and children too. The article states that between 1.5 and 2 million Jews were massacred by war’s end, marking systematic mass murder “by bullets” in forests and fields rather than death camps.