Invasion of the USSR: Battle of Kiev 1941

Operation «Barbarossa» on the invasion of Germany into the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941, involved three groups of armies, which combined at least 120 divisions. It was the most powerful concentration of Wehrmacht forces in World War II. The combat mission of Group South was the destruction of the Red Army on the territory of Ukraine west of the Dnieper. The spearhead of this group was Kleist’s 1st Panzer Group, named after its commander, General von Kleist. It consisted of five Panzer, three Motorized, and four Infantry divisions, later joined by Hungarian, Italian, and Slovakian contingents.

This previously unknown archive of an unknown German officer is a unique documentary evidence of the beginning of the German Army’s Blitzkrieg against the USSR. Several rolls of black-and-white film were packed in special cardboard canisters, some of which were signed «Eastern Front» (German: Ostfeldzug) with a pencil by the photographer.

At the beginning of the war the photographer was at the location of the 298th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht. At the end of June 1941 the soldiers of the 298th Infantry Regiment entered the battle for the first time on the Eastern Front. The insignia of the 298th Infantry Division was a deer skull with horns and the letter G between the horns. The division commander was Lieutenant General Walther Graeßner. During the invasion of Ukraine the division was part of the XVII Army Corps, 6th Army (which would later be defeated at Stalingrad).

All the photographs were captured during the first few months, August — September 1941, when German troops had already occupied half of the territory of Ukraine and were approaching Kiev. One of the most interesting and rare shots are those taken presumably during the so-called «Kiev pocket», which was the largest defeat of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War. German generals called it «the greatest encirclement battle of World War II» and their "biggest victory. In the Kiev pocket of 1941 the entire Southwestern Front of the Red Army was defeated and captured: four Soviet armies were defeated and destroyed completely, two more were partially defeated.

According to German reports, the Red Army lost 665,000 prisoners of war. This is the largest number of prisoners captured in a single battle. According to the data published in 1993 by the general headquarter of the Russian Armed Forces, the Soviet losses exceeded 700 thousands of people, of which 627.8 thousands were irretrievable. The defeat of the Southwestern Front opened the way for the enemy to the Eastern Ukraine, the Azov Sea region, and the Donbass.

The photographs taken by this unknown German photographer show various moments of life and death during the war. Judging by the composition of the shots, the framing, the photographer’s own shadow in the frame, and the periodic overlapping of shots as the film was improperly stretched in the camera, the photographer was more of an amateur. In his pictures you can see the rapid advance of German troops on the territory of Ukraine, despite the lack of roads, repair of bridges blown up by the Red Army, resting of German soldiers, eating and vaccination. But of course what is most striking are the images of the horror and scale of the aftermath of the fighting between the German and Soviet armies on the battlefields: the still smoking remains of crushed Soviet equipment, the abandoned horses walking in shock, the dead and captured Red Army soldiers. All these pictures strongly convey the atmosphere of the beginning of the war, a war that would last another 4 years and end in the defeat of Nazi Germany.