Operation Barbarossa by Nazis in Attempt To Add Russia To Conquered Nations, World War 11, 1941-43

Reference: Richard Overy's Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow, 1997.

Why important for study of loss and trauma?

• Probably the bloodiest war of all time with approximately 25 million Russian soldiers and civilians died as a direct or indirect result of the campaign (e.g., indirect siege of Leningrad in which supplies cut off and millions died of starvation). Another 25 million were left homeless. Millions of German soldiers were killed or taken prisoner (with the number dying in Russian captivity estimated to be between 2-3 million). Compared to total U.S. losses in WWII of approximately one -quarter million.

• What would the world and our lives be like today if Russia had not paid this huge sacrifice and if the Nazis had succeeded in winning?  In such a scenario, it is very problematic that the Allies would have won WWII.

• The two battles that symbolically best represent the losses and courage of the Russians were the battle of Stalingrad and the siege of Leningrad. In these battles, the Nazis lost millions of soldiers and essentially the Russian campaign. They never reached Moscow, though they were only a few miles away. The Nazis defeat in the East set the stage for the later liberation of Europe in the West, starting with the Normandy invasion June 6, 1944.

• Russia's War also is symbolically important because it revealed the unfathomable brutality of Hitler and Stalin. Their atrocities are countless and continued until each died, Hitler as the Allies moved into Berlin in 1945 and Stalin in 1953. At the core of each of their personalities were the combined elements of hatred and racism toward others and probable self-hatred, paranoia and delusions of grandeur. It has been said they reflected "evil incarnate." See Psychology Library Reserve short article on Hitler & Stalin in The Economist.

• Group targets for Nazi and Stalin's atrocities:

 
• Jews, with practically the entire European population, overall in the tens of millions, being killed or run off in the Holocaust (6 million killed by the Nazis) and in Stalin's pogroms in the 1930s and 40s);
• Gypsies (with over 1 million killed by the Nazis);
• homosexuals;
• Poles--the Nazis and Soviets took turns in occupying and killing Poles during this period (the Warsaw uprising in 1945 against the Nazis shows the Poles' fierce resistance; it led to the total torching of Warsaw, that then in 10 years was rebuilt brick by brick after WWII);
• intellectuals

• The struggle for existence in Wartime Russia was reflected by children's attempt to survive on rations of 700 calories per day, by women selling sex or anything they had for morsels of bread. Russians gave up their youngest sons (early teens) to die on the battlefronts and then also had to worry about Stalinques purges of anyone thought to be anti-Soviet that led to millions being executed and sent to gulags.

 
• Gulags were "corrective labor camps" in Siberia and other parts of Russia. Millions of Russians died in these camps from malnutrition and disease during WWII. Dissidents in the camps included many who later would become famous such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the novelist.

Alexander Werth in Stalingrad at the end of the battle, Feb. 1943
"At the bottom of the trenches there lay frozen green Germans and frozen gray Russians and frozen fragments of human shapes. . . how anyone could have survived was hard to imagine. But now everything was silent in this fossilized hell, as though a raving lunatic had suddenly died of heart failure."