Barbarossa

   Operation Barbarossa was Adolf Hitler’s plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union. From the inception of planning in late 1940, Joseph Stalin received and ignored good intelligence of Hitler’s intentions. In early 1941, Stalin received information from the Red Orchestra and Richard Sorge, as well as other NKVD and GRU sources, about German intentions, which he rejected as disinformation. NKVD foreign intelligence chief Pavel Fitin vainly tried to warn Stalin, who believed that many of the reports were generated by the British government. The official Russian intelligence history of the war notes: “Only the outbreak of the war saved Fitin from a firing squad.”

   Besides more than a hundred credible human intelligence reports about German intentions, Stalin also received accurate information about German photo reconnaissance flights over Soviet territory and the capture of German spies on the Soviet–German frontier. On the morning of 22 June 1941, just hours before the attack, a German soldier deserted and warned Moscow of the forthcoming attack. That warning was also ignored; the soldier was shot. Stalin’s intelligence chiefs were in large part responsible for the intelligence failures. GRU chief Filipp Golikov informed Stalin that many of the reports came from British-controlled sources. Intelligence generalissimo Lavrenty Beria also confused the picture, punishing intelligence officers who accepted agent reports of German preparations. On 20 June—two day before the war began—he informed Stalin that war would not come until 1942 at the earliest. As the attack on the morning of 22 June began and more than 3 million German soldiers advanced into the motherland, Soviet units were caught unprepared. Thousands of airplanes and tanks were destroyed on airfields and in training commands. Reserve units, which had been identified by German reconnaissance, were destroyed before they could reach the front.

   Russian historians since Stalin’s death have sought to explain this monumental intelligence failure. Stalin, who acted as his own intelligence analyst, was clearly fooled by German disinformation, which played on his distrust of the British leadership. The Soviet leader also wanted at all costs to delay a general war with Hitler’s Germany until 1942, when the Red Army would have more fully recovered from the purges of the 1930s. Moreover, Stalin believed that he understood Hitler better than any of his intelligence officers or their agents; he thought Hitler would not move against his country in 1941, and he informed his military and intelligence chiefs that if Hitler did strike, the offensive would be a local one to force the Soviet Union to make diplomatic concessions. The cost of Stalin’s dogmatism was the destruction of several Soviet armies clustered on the Soviet–German border and the death of millions of Soviet soldiers. According to Soviet records, in the first 10 weeks of the war, more than 2.5 million Soviet soldiers were killed or taken prisoner.