Operation Barbarossa marks the beginning of the most sinister military theater in human history
Exactly 80 years ago, on June 22, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union with 3 million soldiers, 3,600 tanks and 2,700 aircraft.
Operation Barbarossa is the largest military offensive in human history, not only in terms of troop numbers, but also in casualties. She discovers the Eastern Front – a military theater never seen before or since, where the worst battles are fought in the most horrific conditions, with the most dead in the entire written chronology of the planet.
Hitler’s plan to invade the USSR was previously uncovered by Richard Sorge, a German journalist who worked in Tokyo as a Soviet spy under the pseudonym “Ramsey.”
Alas, in Moscow
the information he is not
taken into account.
Agent Ramsey intercepts the first rumors that Hitler may invade the USSR as early as the end of December 1940. In fact, this is almost immediately because Adolf Hitler approved the Barbarossa Plan on December 18, 1940. According to the directive, preparations for the attack must be made. completed by mid-May next year.
German officers brought the rumors to the German mission in Tokyo, where Richard Sorge was working on the Deutscher Dinst bulletin and was friends with Ambassador Eugene Ott. The two have been extremely close friends for several years, when Ott was still a military attache in the Japanese capital.
In 1936, without suggesting that the journalist was spying on the Russians, Eugen Ott confided in him about the secret negotiations between Japan and Germany and the November 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact, which he learned about from the Japanese General Staff. Then she even asked him to help him encrypt the telegrams to Berlin. This is how the man of Moscow became acquainted with the secret code of the German military.
When Eugen Ott became German ambassador in 1938, he invited Sorge to edit the embassy’s bulletin, giving Agent Ramsey a formal job at the German embassy and access to various classified documents.
In December 1940, Sorge received information that plans were being made in Berlin to attack the USSR, and this seemed shocking news because Hitler and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact the year before. But Sorge wasted no time in searching for more information to make sure the news was true. He was confirmed by Colonel Alfred Kretschmer, the embassy’s new military attaché, who had ties to Hitler’s deputy chief of staff.
On December 28, 1940,
only 10 days after the order
of Hitler, Sorge sends
the first warning
via Vladivostok to Moscow.
More confirmations are accumulating in the coming months. In early May 1941, Ambassador Eugen Ott told Sorge that Hitler was determined to conquer the European part of the USSR. Sorge sends a new alarm message. At the end of May, Ambassador Ot already has data on the date. The attack is planned for the second half of June. Sorge reports again in Moscow.
On May 31, Sorge saw another old friend, Lieutenant Erwin Scholl, who had arrived from Bangkok, where he was a military attache. The two get drunk all night in Ginza’s bars, and Scholl trusts Sorge that the war will begin on June 15, or maybe a day or two later.
Early in the morning of June 1, 1941, Sorge sent a message to Vladivostok. Moscow does not react.
Agent Ramsey was the first to warn that Hitler was preparing to invade the Soviet Union. But he is not the only one. More than 100 messages from secret agents piled up on Stalin’s desk. Reports are pouring in from foreign informants and diplomats. And the signs are more than clear – the Germans have been moving divisions to the east for months, and their planes are flying around the border areas hour by hour. All this is reported in detail to Josip Visarionovic.
Hardly in modern history can another head of state boast that he has been so thoroughly informed of an impending enemy attack.
But why Stalin not
wants to accept the truth?
It is difficult to find a reasonable explanation. He may have been too pleased with the pact with Hitler to assume that it was of no value. Or he believed the version that all these warnings were just a disinformation campaign by the British, who were trying to save their own skin. Even the open confirmation of the plan by the German ambassador to Moscow, made 50 days before the start of the war, was rejected by Stalin as a British fabrication.
The stubborn Georgian has long developed paranoia. For almost a decade now, he has had a grim distrust of his own secret services. According to him, they were infected by the enemy seed of Leo Trotsky, and therefore after December 1934 he began a vigorous purge. Even Sorge’s boss, Jan Karlovic Berzin, was killed. Stalin also hates Richard Sorge. He even openly calls it shit. But his personal attitude in this case does not matter.
The war becomes a fact. On June 22, 1941.
the information of
Ramsey’s agent
is confirmed.
The journalist is ruined.
“There was a monstrous mistake,” he said, declining to believe it had all happened. He goes to the bar of the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and gets drunk with whiskey.
Moscow did not appreciate the professionalism of its intelligence officer until a few months later, when Sorge announced that Japan would not invade the Soviet Union. This allowed the Soviet command to divert 26 fresh, well-trained Siberian divisions from its Far Eastern border without risk and toss them in the battle for Moscow. Thus, the Red Army managed to repel the German attack before the Wehrmacht entered Moscow. The capital is saved!
After the words
Agent Ramsey was arrested in Tokyo on October 18, 1941. Three times the Japanese tried to replace him with one of their spies, and each time they received a response from the Russians: “We do not know the name Richard Sorge.” Apart from wanting to avoid official recognition that the USSR was engaged in espionage from Moscow, they did not hesitate to get rid of the man who was aware of Stalin’s fatal misjudgment.
Richard Sorge was hanged on November 7, 1944 in the Japanese capital.
He was not rehabilitated by the Kremlin until 1964, when he was posthumously awarded the title of “Hero of the Soviet Union.”
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