Operation Barbarossa

Jonathan Dimbleby, who previously wrote a history of the Battle of the Atlantic in World War Two (Oxford University Press, 2016), turns to what was arguably the biggest military undertaking in history: Nazi Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Many historians regard it as the decisive turning point of the European war. It transformed former partners into bitter adversaries and set in motion the atrocities that became part of the Holocaust.

Hitler and his senior officials began preparing the attack while the non-aggression pact with Moscow was still in force. They believed a campaign in the east would destroy communism, wipe out what they considered inferior peoples, and seize the resources that would secure Germany's survival and eventually its dominance across the globe. Instead, between the start of the invasion in June and its halt in December 1941, roughly six million soldiers were killed, wounded or reported missing. Troops on both sides carried out atrocities on a scale rarely matched in the history of warfare. When the German army was pushed back, the myth of its invincibility collapsed, and its faltering in the east made a German defeat in the war all but inevitable.

Many histories cover Barbarossa in passing, while the few that concentrate on it either address only part of the campaign or have grown dated. Dimbleby draws heavily on memoirs, diaries and letters, along with unpublished and untranslated correspondence from recently opened Russian archives, to offer a broad general account of the operation for readers without specialist training.