On June 22, 1941 the German Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union — “Operation Barbarossa” began. It was the largest battlefront in the history of the world.

Three million soldiers from Germany and its allies assailed four and a half million members of the Red Army, marking the start of a murderous campaign that was ultimately to claim thirty million lives.

Stalin was not ready to wage war. This war was the result of Hitler’s maniacal obsession with the idea of conquering new “living space” for the Germans to the east.

Decades earlier, in his book “Mein Kampf”, Hitler had already insisted on conquering Russia as a crusade “against world Jewry and Bolshevism”. And the criminally devastating campaign had been meticulously planned and prepared for since the summer of 1940.

The speed with which the Germans advanced in the first weeks after launching the attack was nearly unbelievable. At Hitler’s headquarters, Wolfsschanze in Rastenburg in East Prussia, a euphoric mood developed after the victories at the first major battles of Minsk and Smolensk, in which the Germans encircled their opponents.

Along the roughly 1,000-mile-long front, the Wehrmacht had rubbed out a total of 28 Soviet armies. And behind the advancing front, systematic murder of Jews began.

By early August the Germans were just 160 miles from Moscow. But those in command, Halder and Brauchitsch, waited in vain for orders to attack the city. Ignoring the advice of top-ranking military officers, Hitler instead ordered his troops to turn aside to seize the manufacturing and coal mining areas on the Donez and cut off Russia’s supply of petroleum from the Caucasus.

Weeks passed before Hitler finally gave instructions to storm the Soviet capital. The propaganda newspaper “Völkischer Beobachter” trumpeted that “the final decisive battle” was about to begin: “Operation Typhoon”.

At 5:30 a.m. on October 2, 1941 a lethal advance began. Three armies of the central group rushed forward at great speed until their front units were within sight of Moscow’s suburbs. Recently released documents reveal that Stalin was shocked and had actually already given up Moscow for lost. Government offices were evacuated, and the Kremlin boss had a bunker built near Stalingrad.

He then ordered General Georgi K. Shukov to take command of the Western front. But the Germans’ advance was slowed by the muddy terrain. In December 1941, when the vanguard already had the Kremlin in its sights, the “Blitzkrieg” turned into a debacle.

Never before had German soldiers come so close to the center of Soviet power. But the further the Germans pressed forward, the more vigorous was the resistance they encountered. And at temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius the German soldiers were defenseless against the Russian winter.

When more soldiers at the front began dying of cold than in combat, the field marshals wanted to call a limited retreat. “I want Moscow!” replied Hitler, overruling them.

Hitler continued to wage a war that he could no longer win. At the gates of the Soviet capital, the myth of the Wehrmacht’s invincibility disintegrated. Hitler had a premonition that he had carried his “game” too far and it would be lost. The Red Army reversed the tide, eventually causing the definitive defeat of the Germans. But it took another three and a half years for the end to finally come.