![]() ![]() By the time it happened, the Japanese secret police had finally caught up with Richard Sorge and taken him into custody. Fortified by this information, Stalin and Zhukov transferred four hundred thousand crack troops, a thousand tanks, and a thousand planes to the western front.Īlthough it would be another year before the German defeat at Stalingrad decisively turned the tide, Hitler’s failure to take Moscow was the first major setback for his armies on the battlefield - the point at which their remorseless drive across Europe sputtered to a halt. Sorge supplied definitive proof that the Japanese leaders were not planning an attack on the USSR. The reinforcements, trained for winter combat, stunned the Wehrmacht and pushed its soldiers back from the outskirts of Moscow. Fortified by this information, Stalin and Zhukov transferred four hundred thousand crack troops, a thousand tanks, and a thousand planes to the western front. Then word came from a German Communist called Richard Sorge who had spent nearly a decade in Tokyo posing as a Nazi so he could infiltrate Japan’s ruling circles. Committing them to the battle for Moscow risked leaving the Soviet Union defenseless on its eastern flank. The Red Army’s strongest units not already committed to the struggle were based in the Russian Far East, where they were supposed to guard the frontier against a possible attack by Hitler’s ally Japan. Zhukov had a plan for the counteroffensive, but he was desperately short of experienced soldiers. He appointed a new commander, Georgi Zhukov, to coordinate Moscow’s defense. Stalin seriously considered evacuating the city, before deciding to hold the line. With German troops now within striking distance, there was a panicky mood in the Soviet government. The idea of a victory parade through Red Square was intoxicating for the Nazi leadership. In the autumn, their commanders launched an offensive that was supposed to capture Moscow, the greatest prize of all.įor Hitler, Moscow was the world capital of his “Judeo-Bolshevik” enemy. German armies marched through Kiev and Minsk and placed Leningrad under siege. In its early stages, the campaign was devastatingly successful, engulfing the western districts of the Soviet Union and reducing the people who lived there to slavery. The Nazi conquest of the Balkans cleared the way for Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. Soon afterward, his troops hoisted the swastika over the Acropolis. The English Channel and the fighters of the Royal Air Force kept German soldiers out of London, but Hitler could pose triumphantly for a photo in front of the Eiffel Tower and ponder razing Paris to the ground. Review of An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent by Owen Matthews (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019)įor two years between 19, the Wehrmacht swept triumphantly across the capitals of Europe, from Warsaw to Brussels, Copenhagen to Belgrade. To mark the anniversary, Jacobin is publishing several articles today about the Soviet experience of war. Heroic resistance to the invasion turned the tide of the entire war, but the Soviet people had to pay a terrible price, with countless millions of soldiers and civilians losing their lives. From the very start, Operation Barbarossa was a war of unprecedented savagery, bent on reducing tens of millions of people to slavery and rooting out Hitler’s “Judeo-Bolshevik” enemy. Eighty years ago today, the Nazis launched their invasion of the Soviet Union.
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