Following the May 1940 fall of France, Nazi Germany was at the height of its power, with Adolf Hitler, about to turn his powerful Wehrmacht against Britain, also contemplating an attack on the Soviet Union in the fall of 1940. That operation, code-named Barbarossa, would not be launched until June 1941, but when it was, it would become, as "The World at War" narrator Laurence Olivier intones at the start of "Barbarossa (June-December 1941)," "the battle that was to decide the Second World War."
So opens the fifth installment of this groundbreaking 26-part documentary that must have been a revelation to viewers watching its initial broadcast and remains an invaluable lesson about World War Two today.
The Cold War effectively effaced the role and stature of the Soviet Union as a crucial ally against the Nazi conquest of Europe, but writer-producer Peter Batty delivers an intricate yet clear and compelling narrative of the background and initial consequences of the largest and bloodiest campaign of World War Two, one that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and claimed millions of lives, yet because the communist Soviet Union had been the mortal enemy of the "free world" during the subsequent Cold War, it is a campaign about which many are still largely unaware. "Barbarossa" vividly redresses this oversight.
German interviewee General Walter Warlimont notes that, for once, Hitler's generals were able to dissuade him from launching the proposed fall 1940 attack because of the harsh winter sure to ensue. Albert Speer, the Nazis' Minister of Armaments and War Production, explains that the Soviets' failure to defeat Finland in the 1939 Winter War (detailed in the second installment "Distant War") bared their military weakness to Hitler, who had always believed that Germany's quest for "lebensraum," "living space," lay in the vast reaches of Russia, rich in resources--and in potential slave laborers as the eastern Slavic peoples were considered "untermenschen," "sub-humans," by Nazi Aryan racial standards.
The sole Russian interviewee, rocket scientist Grigori Tokaty, who had defected to Britain in 1947, affirms that the purges conducted by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s literally decapitated Russia's military leadership, but the Finnish campaign and the growing evidence that, despite the August 1939 non-aggression treaty signed between Germany and Russia, the Nazis would inevitably turn against them spurred the strengthening of Soviet forces.
Paul Schmidt, Hitler's interpreter, relates how Soviet Minister for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov, who had negotiated the treaty with Germany, arrived in Berlin in November 1940 to confront Hitler about the possibility of an invasion, a belief that had been bolstered by the September 1940 Tripartite Pact Germany signed with Italy and Japan, cementing them as the Axis Powers pledged to provide one another mutual military support.
This prompted the Soviet Union to annex the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well as portions of Romania to form a bulwark against Nazi Germany. Ironically, however, as recounted by Averell Harriman, President Franklin Roosevelt's special representative to Britain, warnings by Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that Hitler's attack was imminent were disbelieved by Stalin, convinced that they were trying to trick him, a perception Tokaty confirms.
Thus the stage was set for Germany's Operation Barbarossa in mid-1941, but Soviet intrigues in the Balkans prodded Hitler to invade first Yugoslavia, then Greece, starting in May. Although the invasions were successful, they prompted a five-week delay in the invasion of the Soviet Union that, as "Barbarossa" turns toward its second half, would have dire consequences for Hitler and Nazi Germany.
As edited by Peter Lee-Thompson, the footage of the German invasion of Russia and especially footage of the Soviet home front presents an illuminating, often bracing and poignant tableau of scenes rarely seen by Western viewers because of the de facto censoring during the Cold War.
Also vivid and sometimes haunting are the recollections of several unnamed German military survivors describing the conditions of the invasion. The Wehrmacht, split into three enormous groups, charged eastward toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev, catching Soviet forces unawares. This resulted in the mass slaughter of Russian troops as the Germans, yet to be defeated, boldly drove forward more than a thousand miles, encircling Leningrad and coming within sight of Moscow, its citizens digging defensive fortifications yet certain of their eventual capture; however, Stalin's refusal to evacuate, as many Muscovites had done, heartens the Red Army bracing for battle.
But Hitler's delay in launching the invasion proves bitterly fatal as the brutal Russian winter besets German forces that even in good weather, and good military fortune, were already beginning to despair of "the melancholy" of the utter vastness of Russia's western steppes. Now the German survivors bemoan the "disconsolate" frozen landscape. However, their woes are just beginning. Taking charge of the defense of Moscow is General Georgy Zhukov, who masterminds a counteroffensive comprising 40 divisions of Siberian troops skilled in winter warfare as Nazi Germany feels its first true reversal of fortune, one that marked future misery for Hitler's invading forces attempting to conquer Russia.
With Carl Davis's incidental music accenting discreetly beneath the sobering black-and-white footage highlighting this insightful, unblinking portrait of a crucial yet overlooked campaign, "Barbarossa" is an essential installment of "The World at War."
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