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Jonathan Dimbleby s Barbarossa captures the pitiless human cost of war
4/5
German troops on the Russian front line, circa winter 1942
Credit: Getty Images/adoc-photos/Corbis
A whiff of megalomania must lure historians who want to understand Operation Barbarossa. In its gargantuan sweep, in its unimaginable casualties, in its gambles and its ruination, in its numbing atrocities (mostly Nazi), in its decisive part in a global war, Adolf Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 offers itself as a subject for equally sweeping assertions and atrocious tableaux. In his encyclopedic new account, Jonathan Dimbleby is duly tempted. To call his grasp of detail thorough is the faintest of compliments – obsessively attentive would not be out of place – and over 516 pages his claim is likewise large: that even though three and a half more years of bloodshed would follow, it was Barbarossa’s failed gamble, above all, that sealed Germany’s fate in the Second World War.