Land Leviathans

Under pressure from Stalin to hold Smolensk, Yeremenko was desperate to halt the German offensive. On I July, he committed his sole armored reserve: the 1st Moscow Motorized Rifle Division under Major General LG. Kreyzer. It was a crack unit, …

1941-07-03

TS3

Under pressure from Stalin to hold Smolensk, Yeremenko was desperate to halt the German offensive. On I July, he committed his sole armored reserve: the 1st Moscow Motorized Rifle Division under Major General LG. Kreyzer. It was a crack unit, the pride of ST A VKA. Equipped with the new T-34and KV II tanks, the division moved off to meet and defeat the 18th Panzer Division, the spearhead of Guderian's 2nd Panzer Gruppe. On 3 July at Lipki, six miles east of Borisov, contact was made.

Lipki, Russia

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, which started on Sunday, 22 June 1941, during World War II. The operation put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union so as to repopulate it with Germans. The German Generalplan Ost aimed to use some of the conquered people as slave labour for the Axis war effort while acquiring the oil reserves of the Caucasus as well as the agricultural resources of various Soviet territories. Their ultimate goal included the eventual extermination, enslavement, Germanization and mass deportation to Siberia of the Slavic peoples, and to create more Lebensraum for Germany.

Wikipedia: Operation Barbarossa

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