Operation Barbarossa and the Turning of the Tide in the East (1941-1943)

At dawn on 22 June 1941, Germany unleashed Operation Barbarossa, hurling more than three million soldiers across the Soviet frontier in three army groups — North, Center, and South — in the largest invasion in military history. The offensive achieved near-total surprise: much of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground within days, and sweeping German encirclements captured hundreds of thousands of prisoners at Minsk, Smolensk, and Kiev through the summer and autumn, even as the Einsatzgruppen began a simultaneous campaign of massacre against the Jewish population in the newly occupied territories.