The war against the Soviet Union brought National Socialist Germany the biggest single extension of its power and contributed decisively to its collapse. The number of dead that it cost exceeded those of the other fronts several times over. The reason for this is to be found in a radicalization of warfare on the German side unparalleled in history, which was accompanied by a systematic breech of international law and resulted not least in the civilizational rupture of the genocide against the Jews.

A decisive radicalizing thrust already occurred in the preparatory phase for the attack, between January and June 1941. At this point, Germany's political and military leadership resolved to wage the war beyond all boundaries of international law. The conflict was to be fought unscrupulously in every sense; the elites of the USSR were to be decimated, large parts of the Soviet population left to starve to death, and the rest condemned to an existence as helots. Even if in this campaign, in the view of the chief of the Army General Staff, Generaloberst Halder, “the troops [must] also fight the struggle of ideologies,” it was still unclear on June 22 to what extent the conservative elites within the Wehrmacht, but also in the administration and the police, would support these radical policies or whether they would take advantage of the leeway remaining open to them to mitigate or even sabotage these policies.