70 years since "Unternehmen Barbarossa"

Waffen-SS troops on bicycles in Russia

On 22 June 1941 Hitler and his European allies with over 4.5 million troops using the codename Operation Barbarossa invaded Stalin's Soviet Union along a 2,900 km (1,800 mile) front and so unleashed the fiercest period of WW2 in Europe.

A question often asked by Russian soldiers when they reversed the tide and got to Germany in 1945 was "why did they attack us"?  Living standards in Germany were far superior to those in Russia, and apart from Caucus oil and the Ukraine agricultural lands, it is hard to see why Hitler wanted Russia, a primitive country with poor infrastructure and severe winters, as part of his empire.  They had already found it hard enough to get ethnic Germans to move into Poland.  Not only this, the Nazi regime and the Soviet Union under Stalin, despite their different beliefs in private property and the market system, were very similar in practice.  A good website about the appalling crimes of Stalin and the Stalinist era (which lasted into the 1960s) is here