Operation Barbarossa was the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany and many of its Axis allies, starting on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during the Second World War. It was and still is the largest land offensive in human history, with over 10 million combatants taking part. The operation, code-named after Frederick Barbarossa, a 12th-century Holy Roman emperor and German king, put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union to repopulate it with Germans. The German Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered people as forced labour for the Axis war effort while acquiring the oil reserves of the Caucasus as well as the agricultural resources of various Soviet territories. Their ultimate goal was to create more Lebensraum for Germany, and the eventual extermination of the indigenous Slavic peoples by mass deportation to Siberia, Germanisation, enslavement, and genocide.
The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of conflict between the European Axis powers against the Soviet Union (USSR), Poland and other Allies, which encompassed Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northeast Europe (Baltics), and Southeast Europe (Balkans) from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945. It was known as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union – and still is in some of its successor states, while almost everywhere else it has been called the Eastern Front. In present-day German and Ukrainian historiography the name German-Soviet War is typically used.
Icebreaker: Who Started the Second World War? is a military history book by the Russian non-fiction author Viktor Suvorov, published in 1988. Suvorov argued that Joseph Stalin planned a conquest of Europe for many years, and was preparing to launch a surprise attack on Nazi Germany at the end of summer of 1941 to begin that plan. He says that Operation Barbarossa was a pre-emptive strike by Adolf Hitler, a claim which the Nazi leader himself had made at the time. Since the 1990s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this theory has received some support among historians in some post-Soviet and Central European states, but Western scholars have criticized his conclusions for lack of evidence and documentation.
Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia is a British historian and journalist originating from London, England. He is a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, a Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society. He was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London from 2013 to 2021.
John Adalbert Lukacs was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books. Lukacs was Roman Catholic. Lukacs described himself as a reactionary.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to World War II:
Falsifiers of History was a book published by the Soviet Information Bureau, edited and partially re-written by Joseph Stalin, in response to documents made public in January 1948 regarding German–Soviet relations before and after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
German–Soviet Axis talks occurred in October and November 1940 concerning the Soviet Union's potential entry as a fourth Axis Power during World War II. The negotiations, which occurred during the era of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, included a two-day conference in Berlin between Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Adolf Hitler and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. The talks were followed by both countries trading written proposed agreements.
The United Kingdom, France, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement with Nazi Germany on 30 September 1938, an agreement which provided "cession to Germany of the Sudeten German territory" of Czechoslovakia. Almost a year later the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany on 23 August 1939. In addition to stipulations of non-aggression, the treaty included a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, starting World War II. The Soviets invaded eastern Poland on 17 September. Following the Winter War with Finland, the Soviets were ceded territories by Finland. This was followed by annexations of the Baltic states and parts of Romania.
World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West is a 2008 six-episode BBC/PBS documentary series on the role of Joseph Stalin and German-Soviet relations before, during, and after World War II, created by Laurence Rees and Andrew Williams.
Operation Long Jump was an alleged German plan to simultaneously assassinate Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Roosevelt, the "Big Three" Allied leaders, at the 1943 Tehran Conference during World War II. The operation in Iran was to be led by SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny of the Waffen SS. A group of agents from the Soviet Union, led by Soviet spy Gevork Vartanian, uncovered the plot before its inception and the mission was never launched. The assassination plan and its disruption have been popularized by the Russian media with appearances in films and novels.
A hypothetical military victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of World War II (1939–1945) is a common topic in speculative literature. Works of alternative history (fiction) and of counterfactual history (non-fiction), including stories, novels, and plays, often explore speculative public and private life in lands conquered by the coalition, whose principal powers were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.
The Soviet offensive plans controversy was a debate among historians in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as to whether Joseph Stalin had planned to launch an attack against Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. The controversy started with Viktor Suvorov with his 1980s book Icebreaker:Who started the Second World War? where he argued, based on his analysis of historical documents and data, that Stalin used Nazi Germany as a proxy to attack Europe.
The War That Came Early is a six-novel series by Harry Turtledove depicting an alternate history of World War II. As is typical of Turtledove's alternate histories, the narrative follows a large cast of both fictional and historical characters.
Verlorene Siege is the personal narrative of Erich von Manstein, a German field marshal during World War II. The book was first published in West Germany in 1955, then in Spain in 1956. Its English translation was published in 1958 for distribution in the UK and the US.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin is a 2010 book by Yale historian Timothy D. Snyder. It is about mass murders committed during World War II in territories controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
The foreign relations of Third Reich were characterized by the territorial expansionist ambitions of Germany's dictator Adolf Hitler and the promotion of the ideologies of anti-communism and antisemitism within Germany and its conquered territories. The Nazi regime oversaw Germany's rise as a militarist world power from the state of humiliation and disempowerment it had experienced following its defeat in World War I. From the late 1930s to its defeat in 1945, Germany was the most formidable of the Axis powers - a military alliance between Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and their allies and puppet states.
Pact Ribbentrop - Beck is an alternative history novel by the Polish journalist and writer Piotr Zychowicz. The book, whose full title is Pact Ribbentrop - Beck, or How Poles Could Have Defeated the Soviet Union alongside the Third Reich, was published in 2012 by Dom Wydawniczy Rebis from Poznań.
The diplomatic history of World War II includes the major foreign policies and interactions inside the opposing coalitions, the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers, between 1939 and 1945.
Conspiracy theories about the death of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, contradict the accepted fact that he committed suicide in the Führerbunker on 30 April 1945. Stemming from a campaign of Soviet disinformation, most of these theories hold that Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, survived and escaped from Berlin, with some asserting that he went to South America. In the post-war years, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) investigated some of the reports, without lending them credence. The 2009 revelation that a skull in the Soviet archives long (dubiously) claimed to be Hitler's actually belonged to a woman has helped fuel conspiracy theories.
