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Remembering Operation Barbarossa
Many in the West expected a swift and easy victory over the USSR for Hitler — including the Fuhrer himself. They didn't count on the iron will and enormous capacity for sacrifice of the world's first socialist state, writes JOHN ELLISON
Hitler speaks in the Reichstag in 1941

80 YEARS AGO on June 22, 1941, the armies of Nazi Germany swept across the frontier of what was then the Soviet Union along a front exceeding a thousand miles.

Over three million soldiers, including Finnish troops to the north and Romanian troops to the south, with thousands of tanks and aircraft to the fore and fortified by the war industries of already occupied countries, constituted the Nazi attacking force.

Brutality against civilians was to be unconfined. Hitler’s hopes were high given his low opinion of the Soviet peoples’ ability to resist. The invasion followed a series of devastating blitzkrieg strategies beginning with that against Poland in September 1939.

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