“He wanted to use Lebensraum so he could successfully wage a long war against the UK and the US, because the Third Reich did not have enough resources without seizing those of the USSR,” Lopez put it. Hitler had already expounded upon this concept of German “living space” carved out in Eastern Europe in Mein Kampf – but his failure to defeat Britain gave it a new impetus. Wehrmacht Panzer III tanks in Poland ahead of Operation Barbarossa. “Britain remaining in the war after the Fall of France effectively tore up Hitler’s strategy, so he had to devise a new plan – conquering the USSR to achieve his dream of German Lebensraum,” explained Jean Lopez, co-author of Barbarossa : 1941, La Guerre Absolue. After the Royal Air Force defeated the Luftwaffe in the 1940 Battle of Britain and Churchill had made it clear that the UK would remain a thorn in Hitler’s side, the Nazi dictator turned his attention to the USSR. Hitler felt the need to act one year to the day after the French Armistice because his previous strategy – to knock the UK out of the war – had failed.

“It’s got to be a provocation from the German generals,” he told senior Soviet officials in the early hours of June 22. The communist dictator had refused to believe them. Stalin was shocked he had received a plethora of warnings of an imminent invasion – notably from Winston Churchill, informed by British intelligence briefings. The most horrific images was a three-year-old child lying in the middle of the road with half its head missing.” *īarbarossa shattered the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR signed in August 1939. Civilians were completely taken by surprise they didn’t have time to flee. One of the most striking eyewitness testimonies from this extraordinary outburst of militarised violence – in which some five million people were killed in 200 days – comes from German soldier Alexander Cohrs: “Two villages were burning in front of us.

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