AA line

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The AA line (or AA line ) was the military target of Operation Barbarossa according to directive No. 21 from Adolf Hitler to the High Command of the Wehrmacht of December 18, 1940 . What was meant was an imaginary line east of Moscow between the port cities of Arkhangelsk on the White Sea in the north and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea in the south.

Strategic importance

The bulk of the Red Army was to be defeated militarily on this line in a quick campaign until early autumn 1941. Literally, Hitler's instructions on preparing for an attack on the Soviet Union read : “The ultimate goal of the operation is to shield against Asiatic Russia from the general line Volga-Arkhangelsk. If necessary, the last remaining industrial area in the Urals in Russia can be eliminated by the air force. In the course of these operations, the Russian Baltic Sea fleet will quickly lose its bases and thus no longer be able to fight. ”The abbreviation“ AA line ”for the“ Astrakhan-Arkhangelsk line ”was only later coined by Nazi propaganda. If the Wehrmacht had reached their destination, Soviet long-range bombers would no longer have been able to reach the territory of what was then the German Reich .

The German Wehrmacht assumed the bulk of the Soviet armaments sources and the main part of the food and population potential of the Soviet Union in the area west of this line . Reaching this line would have deprived the Soviet Union of 86% of its oil production (oil areas in the Caucasus). In the event of success, a front would have arisen over a length of around 2,600 kilometers, twice the length of the line of deployment. German military strategists such as General Erich Marcks did not consider a military overthrow of the Soviet Union in a single campaign to be feasible due to the geographic conditions. Therefore, the AA line was intended as the starting point for another, smaller campaign, mainly carried out by the Luftwaffe, in the spring of 1942 to conquer the rest of the Soviet Union in the Barbarossa plans.

In fact, the successful lightning war tactics in the western campaign failed on the eastern front, so that the advance in the German-Soviet war to the west of Moscow came to a standstill in the winter of 1941.

See also

literature

  • Oscar Pinkus: The War Aims and Strategies of Adolf Hitler. Jefferson, London 2005, p. 169 ff.

Web links

Wikisource: Fall Barbarossa  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Directive No. 21 "Barbarossa case", December 18, 1940 1000dokumente.de, accessed on February 22, 2020.
  2. ^ Lecture by the Soviet auxiliary prosecutor Major General ND Zorya in the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals , morning session on February 13, 1946. Zeno.org , accessed on February 22, 2020.
  3. ^ Map from Oscar Pinkus: The War Aims and Strategies of Adolf Hitler. Jefferson, London 2005, p. 170.
  4. ^ Wilhelm Deist : The military plans of the "Operation Barbarossa" . In: Roland G. Foerster (Ed.): "Operation Barbarossa". On the historical site of German-Soviet relations from 1933 to autumn 1941. Munich 1993, pp. 109–122.
  5. ↑ Directive No. 21 "Barbarossa case", December 18, 1940 1000dokumente.de, accessed on February 22, 2020.
  6. ^ Alan F. Wilt: War from the Top: German and British Military Decision Making during World War II. Bloomington, Indianapolis 1990, p. 156.
  7. ^ List of Abbreviations National Socialism - Third Reich documentArchiv.de, accessed on February 22, 2020.
  8. ^ David R. Jones: The Military-naval Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union. Vol. 1, Virginia 1978, p. 23.
  9. ^ Wolf-Dieter Dorn: The operational failure of the "Operation Barbarossa" in the summer of 1941 as a result of the previous German warfare and foreign policy January 20, 2013.
  10. ↑ Battle of Moscow 75 years ago: “Nothing came of the Blitzkrieg” Wolfram Wette in conversation with Benedikt Schulz. Deutschlandfunk , January 15, 2017