Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Because the Soviet Union and Germany had been allied since 1939, the invasion surprised Joseph Stalin and the Soviet military. In the first months of the offensive, the Germans conquered most of the Soviet Union’s European territory, home to 2,700,000 Jews who were targeted for extermination by the Germans. Immediately following Operation Barbarossa, the Einsatzgruppen murdered 1,500,000 of these Russian and Ukrainian Jews, and hundreds of thousands of communists, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war.
