STOP NATO: �NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Get a low APR NextCard Visa in 30 seconds! 1. Fill in the brief application 2. Receive approval decision within 30 seconds 3. Get rates as low as 2.99% Intro or 9.99% Ongoing APR and no annual fee! Apply NOW! http://www.bcentral.com/listbot/NextCard ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nazi Germany's Night of Infamy: The Launch of Operation Barbarossa MOSCOW, Jun 21, 2001 -- (Agence France Presse) Before Pearl Harbor there was Brest-Litovsk. Late in the night of June 21, 1941, German sentries patrolling the international bridge between the German and Soviet zones of occupied Poland, instead of saluting their Soviet counterparts, shot them dead. The killings were the signal for Operation Barbarossa, which was, and remains, the biggest military attack in history. Germany and its Axis partners pitched more than three million troops, 600,000 vehicles, 750,000 horses, 3,580 tanks and 1,830 planes against the Soviet Union along a 1,800-mile (2,900-kilometer) front stretching from the Arctic to the Black Sea. Like the United States, the Soviet Union had chosen to remain on the sidelines of the war in Europe, adopting an official policy that the conflict was one between capitalist-imperialist powers who should best be left to tear themselves apart. Joseph Stalin had believed that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact signed in August 1939 made him safe from Hitler's attentions. Indeed, as the Wehrmacht and troops from Romania and Finland crossed into Soviet territory, Soviet ships were still ploughing through the Baltic Sea to supply Germany with goods under various trade deals. Stalin was thrown into a state of shock and incapable of taking a coherent decision for two days, the address to the nation the next day being made by his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. The dictator had received numerous warnings of Hitler's intentions, notably from the spy Richard Sorge based in Tokyo who had contacts in the foreign ministry there, but had chosen to ignore them. Hitler's biggest ally, the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, was informed of the attack only after it had started but promptly declared war on the Soviet Union, as did Romania, Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary and Finland. The 4,500,000 defenders deployed along the Soviet Union's western flank were totally unprepared and suffered massive losses as German forces drove across the Bug river. Within a day they had lost more than 500 planes while destroying only a dozen or so German aircraft, and within three days the world's largest air force had been reduced to a remnant. Hitler's strategic objective was to smash Soviet communism forever and create Lebensraum -- German territories -- in the east, forming a thousand-year Reich that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Caucasus. Launching his lightning strike he hoped to secure a quick victory and drive to the Ural mountains before winter. The immediate objectives were Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev, with an army group directed at each of the key cities. Within a week German troops had captured Minsk, the capital of Belarus 200 miles inside Soviet territory, and by September had reached the Dniepr river, Smolensk and the outskirts of Leningrad. But with Stalin assuming overall command of the Red Army and introducing a draconian disciplinary regime in which defeatism and rumor-mongering were deemed criminal offenses punishable by death, the German advance slowed while Soviet forces were able to regroup. Then on December 7, 1941 Japanese warplanes attacked a naval base at Pearl Harbor in the Pacific Ocean, bringing the United States into the war, and Hitler's fate was sealed. ((c) 2001 Agence France Presse) __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
