Summary:
Following the Battle of France (1940), France and Germany signed an armistice (June 1940) which ultimately resulted in the division of France where Germany would occupy both the North and the West. The southeast was occupied by Italy, and a smaller “free zone” was to be occupied by the Vichy Government. As a result of the occupation over 150,000 French civilians had been killed, military deaths exceeded 80,000, and the death toll of prisoners of war was over 1,900,000 by the time of liberation. Under the name of “Operation of Barbarossa” (June 22, 1941), Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The result was the destruction of the Soviet Union through military force and the “elimination” of the Communist threat, Nazi Germany was so afraid of. Adolf Hitler had thought of the “German-Soviet nonaggression pact” as a tactic he would later disregard in order to pursue long-term German settlement across Soviet borders. Despite the heavy first 6 six weeks the Soviet Union experienced, they did not fall as quickly as the Germans had hoped. For this reason, German forces were ill equipped for the winter warfare and were vulnerable to Soviet counterattacks. The Soviet Union did launch the counterattack the Germans had tried to avoid and drove the Germans back to Moscow.