Operation Barbarossa, launched 80 years ago this week by the Nazi Germans against the Soviet Union with a force of nearly 4 million men, was in many ways “the worst thing that ever happened.” With massive brutal savagery on a scale never see before or after, millions fell to terror, weapons, fire and starvation. Will we really “never see the like of it again”?
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29 replies on ““The Worst Thing That Ever Happened”: Barbarossa Changed Human History 80 Years Ago”
“destruction like that can’t happen again…” Truly the Oracle at Delphi was right. “Certainty Destroys”. So convinced are we….and now half the citizens of America, millions of Europeans,and millions of people in India have taken an experimental RNA modifying drug to stave off the affects of a highly infectious mostly benign virus that was most likely the development of a communist run Bio-lab in China which has strangely infected the majority of China’s major competitor’s populations (while somehow missing their own) and no one can see how this could possibly lead to a planet wide shift in demographics during the next War? <sigh> Please God, give me strength…and patience.
The elements of murder are in us all. All you need to do is suppress a person’s view of the value of another person’s life and give us a motive. . . and you get, ‘the rape of Nanking’, Manila, Pol-Pot, ‘The great cultural revolution’, The Bataan Death March, the Japanese-American Internment in WWII, the Ku-Klux-Klan, The SS, and the Gestapo…all still residing in everyone’s human Soul.
Jesus gave us God’s message to love one another. But we have historically forgotten that in our ability to ‘just following orders’ as we, common people willingly kill other common people we’ve never met because ‘someone in authority’ told us those people were SUBHUMAN and that they were the source of all ‘evil.’
TWO things make this carnage possible. 1) our hierarchical organizing 2) our surrender of our God given sense of right and wrong to others
NEVER GIVE IN TO THE WAR WITHIN!! (22)
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I believe that Scott meant to say that you must “love” what is behind you more than you fear what is in front of you.
I think he meant a solder on the line looked back at his officers who would shoot him if he tried to retreat and looked forward to the Russians who might shoot him, or might starve (if he knew that), or might do some other bad thing.
Often with conscripts they do fear the officer behind them more than the enemy ahead of them, and also more than they love their family and friends FAR behind them. They are being pushed forward by by the fear of others, not driven by love from within as our volunteer soldiers are. Which of course makes all the difference.
there’s a third sub-set of soldier. the one who enlists (RA drill sergeant) to stay out of vietnam but ends up there anyway through a series of events largely out of his control. it does happen. i was that guy. i let the dogs out.
Lol, sometimes you game the system, sometimes the system games you.
An often overlooked aspecty of Barbarossa is, like Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, it was a pan European afair. The French only made up around half of the Grande Armée on 1812, and while National Socialist Germany provided by far the overwhelming majority of the massive force that invaded the Soviet Union, they were far from alone. There were two whole Romanian armies (the 3rd and 4th) four Italian divisions, three Slovakian divisions, the Spanish Division Azul, and three Hungarian brigades. Within the SS there numerous foreign recruits, some 18,000 Belgians, 6,000 each from Denmark and Norway, 20,000 Dutch and around 11,000 French, as well as many more from eastern Europe. The National Socialists certainly wanted to present the invasion as civilised Europe opposing Bolshevik barbarism. I’m no fan of Putin, but I can undertsand him being less than pleased at the prospect of an EU army.
It’s BECAUSE Christians know what man is capable of that compels us to keep, nourish, and deepen our faith. “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened…The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.” Excerpt, “Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1983. https://orthochristian.com/47643.html
I’ve been directing people to the battle of Wau and Milne bay. Australian forces fighting in New Guinea with very limited supply’s and in the case of Wau they could only be supplied by air. It was the first time in history that that worked.
Wau. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=013-tYjSWpY&t=3s
Milne bay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pToxEa30KdU&t=9s
One little known reason for the German defeat particularly at Stalingrad and south into the caucuses was the maps. All the maps and guide books had road marked on them north of Georgia running over the caucus mountain and there were Roads and rail links marked west of Stalingrad that simply did not exist. This was an old tsarist trick to fool invaders. The Tsar thought the Ottomans were the major threat when the maps were made. The Germans thought they could supply the push into the oil fields over the mountains but the roads were a lie. There are still no roads there today. Several thousand Germans died trying to take the passes in the mountains, fighting against poorly supplied partisans that were no friends of Stalin but they knew the terrain.
Fascinating.
Does it show that I’m a geography major? lol. The geography of war is a major subject.
Amazing that even with the technological limitations of the time that they were unable to determine the accuracy of their maps. But then, even with some over flights, they likely didn’t have the camera capabilities to look very far.
It was a very thorough deception. The Russians even paid a famous traveler to photograph and write about his crossing of the mountains on a road that did not exist.
That seems like it would make a very interesting read. Thanks for the info.
Great video! Nothing amasses a higher body count than two leftist regimes going to war with each other… Communism and National Socialism.
Excellent job, gentlemen. It is a shame that most people have never heard of either Operation Barbarossa or General Plan East. That these are not well taught mean that it is almost inevitable that it will happen again. There are over 1Billion Chinese and that government could certainly try to gain some “legroom” to expand.
Never say never! Ref. Mao and Pol Pot, Sadam, Hamas today, et al.
And yet we also now have Steven Pinker suggesting that as atrocious and murderous as the events cited by our hosts were, in the “big picture” our relative level of deadly human extinction is actually declining. When you balance the large increase in populations resulting from Western and/or modern advances, vs. the level of death and destruction using modern weapons, we still end up killing a smaller fraction of ourselves now than in ancient and earlier timespans. See: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_the_surprising_decline_in_violence
I guess the hidden message here is “don’t quite screwing around” so we can repopulate after our likely future wars? I certainly want to believe that humanity survives at least the next 1000 years, although it is a largely open question as to whether our republican constitutional form of society and governance will still exist then.
And given the talk among some medical folks about the prospects of extending life and thwarting disease, etc., will our moral outlooks concerning oldsters vs. children change if/when our lifespan is 200 years rather than 80 or so? Will we reinvent previous tribal and clan social practices when our “families” grow to several dozen to a few hundred people, or we will lose our connections to them when we have so many descendants?
If you are interested in the the battle of Stalingrad and just as importantly the battles that lead up to it, check out the TIKHistory YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfZz8F37oSJ2rtcEJHM2kCg. He does weekly videos with a new “Battlestorm” video every 3 to 4 weeks documenting the battle in detail (the series is ongoing).
I’d also recommend the the books by David Stahel on operation Barbarossa. He does yeoman’s work on dispelling many of the postwar myths the surviving German generals built up about the invasion and the performance of the German army. In many ways the invasion was a spent force by the time Army Group Center had closed the Smolensk pocket. The massive victories of the Kiev and Briansk pockets owe as much to Soviet operational incompetence (and Stalin’s own hold fast orders) as to the waning strength of the Wehrmacht. The German’s would never fully recover.
That it would take 3 more years and the overwhelming power of all of the allies combined to destroy Nazi Germany is a true testament to the unimaginable awfulness of that war.
That was an excellent Right Angle guys
i agree. guys don’t get much information/entertainment presented squarely for guys anymore. it stands out when that happens.
It’s not easy to rank evil. Who is worse than who? I just finished reading Rampage a few weeks ago, about the battle of Manila; an extremely emotionally difficult book to slog through, because of the horror of the shear brutality of the Japanese. I could, at the same time, not put it down, nor continue reading. My visceral feeling the whole time was, “I hate the Japanese!” by which I meant not that I really hate all Japanese at all times, but that I hated the Japanese spirit of WWII age.
So who was worse? Hitler, Stalin, Yamashita, Robespierre, Atilla the Hun, or some of the psychopathic rulers in our world (and our own country) today? A lot has to do with opportunity. If at any time Hitler’s military advances had been checked early enough, the opportunity would not have been there, and the Third Reich probably would have been regarded as, though bad, something less than the worst regime in history.
To give credit where credit is due, the most evil regime in all of history is the principality of Satan and his minions. He is behind it all, and even when evil raises its head in our own hearts, which are “desperately wicked and deceitful,” Satan is there to egg us on.
But there is very good news! Satan is a defeated foe – it’s just taking a while to mop up. I urge all to join the side of victory.
Yes, yes yes! But I see as his last stand the desire to reduce the size of that crowd at the Throne at the end of time. Besides outright stealing, killing, and destroying, tactics include discouraging people from having children and making it impossible for people to have children.
These are the new satanic tactics.
not much difference between a killer who kills seven and a killer who kills eight. have you read the rape of nanking by iris chang? compare that to auschwitz by laurence rees and stalin by edvard radzinsky. wrap that all up with the gulag archipelago by our old friend aleksandr solzhenitsyn.
they’re all tough sledding and not for the faint of heart but one comes away with an appreciation for good vs bad. evil is evil. to what degree is problematic in world events. that guy with three islamic names as president is just as notorious as pol pot who struck quickly with his killing fields. tally ho.
bad actors playing with the lives of tens of millions. sort of like how we just got played by china, fauci, the d’rats, the globalist GOPe and their cabal of nefarious miscreants. the human genome is a pestilence.
what’s next i wonder? who will be next to commit suicide? tucker? trump? desantis? murkowski? sasse? mit the mutt? maxine? beher? collins? mitch? macarthy? maddow? newsome? abrams? nitwhitmer? oh wait.
i got carried away.
Teutons and Slavs don’t like each other. Never have.
“History”? Did we not just see the Red Fist flying over many of our own government’s buildings? No, I’m not saying we’re becoming either of the horrible governments referenced here, but those horrible governments didn’t become what they were overnight.