On Sunday morning 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched the greatest land campaign in world history: Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. This was total war without match, stupefying in its dimension, horrendous in its cruelty, harrowing in its degradation. Hitler committed his armies to a war of subjugation, to an ideological crusade gainst"Jewish-Bolshevism" and to racial war against Slav "subhumans". In the course of "The Great Patriotic War 1941-1945", the Soviet Union mobilized 29,574,900 men. Wartime turnover in manpower amounted to 21,700,000. During 1,418 days of barbarized warfare, bereft of any legal or moral constraints, the Red Army's battlefield losses were more than half those 21 million, 11,440,100 men put permanently out of action. Almost one million men were variously convicted: 376,300 charged with desertion and 422,700 sentenced to service in penal battalions, or strafbats, assigned to the most dangerous sectors. Civilians...

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Feb 5th, 2007
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hammel
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