![]() ![]() To investigate the fate of those trapped between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, we must first have a general understanding of how the military campaign of Operation Barbarossa unfolded. Soviet records answered many open questions about Barbarossa, and especially enhanced our understanding of the depredations both states practiced against non-combatants. Russian accounts were equally colored by the official propaganda of “The Great Patriotic War.” The realities behind this ideological cant began to clarify only when Glasnost permitted access to Soviet archives from the mid-1980s onward. For example, referring to Stalingrad, historian Alan Clark tells us that: “The whole question of…the fate of the 6 th Army is so clouded with guilt in the German mind to find any witness who has told the whole truth.” ![]() ![]() During the first forty years after the close of World War II, histories of this campaign relied almost totally on the recollections and records of unsuccessful Wehrmacht generals, often resulting in highly biased and self-serving accounts of operations in the occupied territories. It ended in the complete destruction of Hitler’s empire. Operation Barbarossa launched Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Historiography of Operation Barbarossa’s Victims, 1941 – 1945
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