Hitler And His Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945 from Stalingrad to Berlin

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Glantz, David; House, Jonathan (2015). When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Vol.Revised and Expanded Edition. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 978-0-70062-121-7.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought the war and Nazi policy to their most radical phase. Well before the invasion, the OKW and the OKH, working from Hitler’s general guidance, planned a campaign of persecution, exploitation, and murder that is unparalleled in modern history. No German soldier’s crime against a Soviet civilian would be cause for prosecution. Soviet political officers were to be shot immediately upon capture. Any civilian who was suspected of resisting in any way was also subject to shooting. Jews and Communists were special targets, simply because of who they were (to the generals, a Jew equaled a Communist, equaled a partisan). The army and the SS drew up agreements by which Einsatzgruppen and other mobile killing squads would follow along behind the army, shooting Jews and Communists, with the army providing logistical support. The OKH and the Reich Food Ministry also agreed to take foodstuffs from the USSR in quantities that would condemn millions of civilians to starvation. And the OKW, which was in charge of prisoner of war (POW) policy, deliberately neglected to prepare for the millions of men the army would capture. Langerbein, Helmut (2003). Hitler's Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder. College Station: Texas A & M University Press. ISBN 978-1-58544-285-0.

Army units also participated in separating Jewish POWs and commissars in the camps so that they could be murdered. Military Participation in the Economy and Forced Labor In early 1941 Stalin authorised the State Defence Plan 1941 (DP-41), which along with the Mobilisation Plan 1941 (MP-41), called for the deployment of 186 divisions, as the first strategic echelon, in the four military districts [k] of the western Soviet Union that faced the Axis territories; and the deployment of another 51 divisions along the Dvina and Dnieper Rivers as the second strategic echelon under Stavka control, which in the case of a German invasion was tasked to spearhead a Soviet counteroffensive along with the remaining forces of the first echelon. [139] But on 22 June 1941 the first echelon contained 171 divisions, [148] numbering 2.6–2.9million; [2] [149] and the second strategic echelon contained 57 divisions that were still mobilising, most of which were still understrength. [150] The second echelon was undetected by German intelligence until days after the invasion commenced, in most cases only when German ground forces encountered them. [150] Roberts, Geoffrey (2006). Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11204-7.

Lopez, Jean; Aubin, Nicolas; Bernard, Vincent; Guillerat, Nicolas; Fenby, Jonathan (2019). World War II Infographics. Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0500022924. The whole strategy is a resumption of the Blitzkrieg idea that's been so successful in France, that is you win by not fighting. If you want to find out more about Blitzkrieg and how it works I've put a link to our video on the subject in the description.Less than a thousand T-34s were available at the start of 'Barbarossa' and most were squandered in piecemeal actions by half-trained crews. But the Red Army could absorb significant losses of equipment as well as men. The mass mobilisation of Soviet industry had been set in train, which included relocating vital tank, aircraft and munitions factories eastwards to the Urals. This huge logistical undertaking was already bearing fruit. It meant that despite the early defeats, the Soviet Union was far better prepared for a long war than the Germans, whose own production of tanks and other weapons would be feeble by comparison. GERMAN LOGISTICAL PROBLEMS