Barbarossa Unleashed: The Invasion That Was Lost Before It Began

 

A Review of Craig W. H. Luther's Barbarossa Unleashed: The German Blitzkrieg through Central Russia to the Gates of Moscow, June–December 1941

Craig W. H. Luther's Barbarossa Unleashed is 712 pages of extraordinary detail about the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The book follows Army Group Center from the opening days of Operation Barbarossa through its advance toward Moscow and eventual failure to capture the Soviet capitol. By the time I finished it, Luther had convinced me of something that runs contrary to the popular understanding of the campaign: The German invasion was lost before it began. Not because of the Russian winter, but because of inadequate planning, impossible logistical assumptions, and the extraordinary arrogance of an army convinced of its racial and military superiority.

The book concludes with one of its most memorable sections: excerpts from interviews Luther conducted with more than twenty German veterans of the invasion, men who were in their eighties and nineties when he spoke with them. He asked which Soviet weapon they had feared most.

Two answers dominated: the Soviet multiple rocket launcher, known to the Germans as Stalin's Organ, and the T-34 tank.

The rocket launcher terrified German soldiers because it could suddenly saturate their positions with an overwhelming barrage of rockets. The psychological effect was as devastating as the physical destruction. Soldiers who had entered Russia convinced of German technological superiority found themselves facing a weapon capable of inspiring sheer terror.

The T-34 was an even greater shock. With its sloped armor, powerful gun, wide tracks, and excellent mobility, it was superior in important respects to the German tanks that encountered it in 1941. German intelligence had failed to appreciate that such a formidable tank was already operational in the Soviet Army.

The Germans had invaded a country whose military capabilities they fundamentally misunderstood.

That failure of understanding extended far beyond weapons.

Luther painstakingly reconstructs the movement of German formations, the distances traveled, the casualties inflicted, and, most importantly, the supplies consumed. The accumulation of detail can become exhausting, but it serves an essential purpose. The reader gradually understands that the invasion was built upon assumptions that could not survive contact with reality.

German planners expected the Soviet Union to collapse in a short campaign, before winter. They anticipated destroying the Red Army near the western frontier and advancing rapidly enough to secure victory before their logistical weaknesses became decisive.

Instead, the Soviet Union kept fighting.

By the end of August, Army Group Center had advanced hundreds of miles into Soviet territory, inflicted catastrophic casualties, and captured enormous numbers of prisoners. Yet its offensive strength was deteriorating rapidly.

Near Smolensk, German formations had to pause. Tanks and trucks were wearing out. Fuel, ammunition, food, and spare parts could not reach the front in sufficient quantities. The distances were enormous, roads were inadequate, and the railway system could not be converted and restored quickly enough to sustain the advance.

The German Army had achieved spectacular battlefield victories while undermining its ability to continue the war.

Meanwhile, Stalin raised new formations. Despite losing nearly a million soldiers in the opening months, the Soviet Union continued mobilizing men and resources. German commanders had assumed that destroying the armies they initially encountered would destroy Soviet resistance. They had not adequately considered the Soviet Union's capacity to replace its losses.

One of Luther's most revealing contributions is his extensive use of soldiers' letters and diaries, from ordinary enlisted men to senior officers.

These accounts expose the ideological foundations of the invasion. Many German soldiers genuinely believed they belonged to a superior civilization and were fighting racially inferior people. Nazi propaganda had portrayed the Soviet population as Untermenschen, or subhumans, and that contempt permeated the army.

The belief in German superiority was not simply a slogan imposed from Berlin. It shaped how soldiers and commanders understood their mission, their enemy, and their prospects for victory.

They believed their weapons were superior, their training unmatched, and their military organization invincible.

Then came the Russian winter.

The familiar explanation for Germany's defeat invokes "General Winter," as though an extraordinary natural disaster had unexpectedly destroyed an otherwise successful invasion.

Luther's evidence supports a different conclusion.

The Germans had planned a campaign that was supposed to end before winter. Consequently, they were inadequately equipped for the conditions they eventually encountered. German weapons, manufactured to exacting tolerances, could freeze or jam when exposed to extreme cold and contamination. Soviet rifles, machine guns, and submachine guns, often simpler and more tolerant of harsh conditions, continued functioning.

The contrast was a powerful demonstration that engineering excellence depends upon the conditions in which equipment must operate.

But winter did not create the German Army's logistical crisis. It exposed and intensified weaknesses that had been present from the beginning.

The most important lesson of Barbarossa Unleashed is that tactical brilliance cannot compensate for strategic delusion.

The Germans were extraordinarily effective at encircling and destroying Soviet formations. Their commanders understood mobile warfare and exploited opportunities with remarkable speed. But they had no realistic means of sustaining their offensive across the immense distances of the Soviet Union against an enemy capable of absorbing terrible losses and continuing to fight.

Their racial ideology compounded their strategic errors. By dismissing Soviet soldiers as inferior, they underestimated their determination, adaptability, weapons, and capacity for regeneration.

Luther's exhaustive documentation makes this conclusion difficult to escape.

After 712 pages, I came away believing that the German Army was not defeated primarily by the weather, or even by one decisive Soviet battlefield victory. It was defeated by the consequences of its own assumptions.

The veterans' recollections of Stalin's Organ and the T-34 provide a fitting conclusion. Decades after the invasion, these men still remembered the terror of confronting weapons they had been taught to believe an inferior enemy could not produce.

Operation Barbarossa was not merely a failure of military planning. It was a catastrophic demonstration of what happens when ideology replaces intelligence, arrogance substitutes for preparation, and battlefield victories are mistaken for the ability to win a war.

In the Vietnam War, in the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, and the recent War in Iran, American forces never lost a battle. But so far America is 0 for 3 and not looking good for victory in Iran.  The lessons of war are seldom learned. 

George Packer at the Hannah Arendt Forum: Rediscovering Solidarity in an Age of Division

George Packer

At the 2026 Hannah Arendt Forum at Bard College, journalist and author George Packer presented a personal and provocative examination of solidarity, the conference's central theme. Drawing on four decades of political involvement, reporting, and observation, Packer traced the disappearance of solidarity from American public life and said that its recovery could begin not with political movements or grand ideological commitments, but with neighbors defending their communities against powerful institutions.

Packer began with a recollection of his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America during the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, the organization was approaching extinction, reduced almost to a political book club. Nevertheless, members concluded their meetings by singing the labor anthem Solidarity Forever, set to the melody of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Packer remembered the emotional power of those gatherings. Members felt united with one another and imagined themselves part of an international working-class movement. Yet even then, he harbored a troubling question: Did the working class actually feel solidarity with them?

That question became increasingly important as Packer spent years reporting on American communities devastated by globalization and the Great Recession. Rather than solidarity, he encountered alienation—from government, economic institutions, political leaders, and even neighbors. People felt abandoned by those exercising power over their lives.

The arrival of social media promised new forms of connection, but Packer argued that its results were frequently destructive. Instead of cultivating mutual responsibility, online communities encouraged tribal loyalties and hostility toward outsiders.

True solidarity, he said, requires something deeper than agreement or shared resentment. It requires recognizing an obligation to others.

Even the COVID-19 pandemic failed to produce that recognition. A common biological threat might have reminded Americans of their shared vulnerability. Instead, disagreements over masks and public health became additional sources of political division.

Nevertheless, Packer found reasons for hope in two experiences during 2026.

The first occurred in Minneapolis, where residents organized to protect neighbors from federal immigration enforcement. People acted on behalf of friends, classmates, and strangers, motivated by their responsibility to the community.

Packer called this genuine solidarity because it involved people working together in a particular place, rather than expressing abstract commitments through political slogans.

His second example came from Clinton, Iowa, a Mississippi River community confronting plans for an enormous artificial intelligence data center. The proposed development would cover an area equivalent to 832 football fields.

Residents across the political spectrum—including MAGA supporters, conventional Republicans, Democrats, and progressives—organized against the project. Their opposition extended beyond concerns about noise, lighting, and environmental disruption. They resented the prospect of a distant technology corporation transforming their community without meaningful consultation.

For Packer, Minneapolis and Clinton revealed a common principle: solidarity emerges when people recognize that they share responsibility for a place and its future. Political differences do not disappear, but they become less important than the recognition that neighbors belong to one another.

Packer concluded by considering artificial intelligence itself. Perhaps AI could accomplish what the pandemic could not: awaken humanity to its shared vulnerability. AI offers extraordinary possibilities, but it also threatens human agency and the ability of ordinary people to control their lives.

In confronting that threat, Packer suggested, humanity might discover a solidarity extending beyond geography, nationality, and political affiliation. His argument echoed Hannah Arendt's insistence that political life depends upon people acting together in a shared world.

Solidarity, Packer reminded his audience, is not simply a feeling of agreement. It is the recognition of mutual obligation, expressed through common action. And perhaps the greatest challenge posed by artificial intelligence is whether humanity can recognize that obligation before surrendering too much of its power to machines and the institutions controlling them.

Solidarity is not created by ideological agreement but emerges when people exercise political freedom together. 

Fifty Years Ago Brigade 76 Reinforced Europe

 

 

Fifty years ago in October the four thousand soldiers of Brigade 76 flew from Colorado Springs to Frankfurt. We climbed into fully combat loaded tanks with 63 live cannon rounds and drove to the East-West border at Fulda.

Tensions with the Soviet Union led the US to send more troops to West Germany and show the Soviet Union our commitment to NATO and Europe. Just 15 years later, against all expectations, the Soviet Union collapsed. Of the four wars I served in or during, the Cold War is the only win.

Which makes Trump's love of Putin that much more horrible. He betrays our allies, Ukraine most of all, and support a truly, deeply genocidal war to erase Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine.  

 

Patrick Deneen, Liberal Democracy, and Viktor Orbán

Patrick Deneen, Liberal Democracy, and Viktor Orbán

Patrick Deneen's critique of liberalism extends considerably beyond the concerns about loneliness he expressed at the Hannah Arendt Forum.

In his influential 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen argued that liberalism has failed not because it betrayed its founding principles, but because it fulfilled them. By emphasizing individual autonomy, personal choice, and liberation from inherited obligations, liberalism has, in his account, weakened families, religious communities, traditions, and the institutions necessary for human flourishing.

Deneen has increasingly associated himself with post-liberal political movements, including those inspired by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In July and August 2025, Deneen participated in discussions at MCC Feszt in Esztergom, Hungary, including a panel on post-liberalism with Chad Pecknold, Gladden Pappin, and István Kiss.

The participants challenged the liberal political order and discussed Hungary's emphasis on national sovereignty, traditional families, religion, and border protection as an alternative. Deneen has previously described Hungary's government as an example for American conservatives.

Orbán explicitly embraces the description "illiberal democracy," arguing that democratic government need not rest upon liberal individualism. His critics, however, contend that his government has weakened judicial independence, media pluralism, and institutional checks on executive power.

Orban was resoundingly defeated earlier this year, but despite Orbán’s political setback, Deneen has not publicly renounced his support for Orbán’s model. In interviews and writings, he continues to frame liberalism as having “failed” in undermining social cohesion and national belonging, and he envisions a “post liberal future” rooted in traditional, communitarian, and conservative principles. 

This background creates an important tension with Deneen's Forum address. Arendt warned that loneliness and mass society could prepare the ground for totalitarian domination. Deneen draws upon that warning to criticize liberal individualism, while expressing sympathy for a political alternative whose concentration of power raises its own questions about freedom and pluralism.

---------

Friendship in Politics on Display

Roger Berkowitz opened the Forum by arguing that political friendship means sharing a world with people whose convictions differ profoundly from our own. He invited Patrick Deneen, whose political philosophy challenges some of the liberal commitments that Arendt's defenders hold dear. 

The invitation itself becomes an example of the solidarity that is the theme of this year's Forum. Deneen's talk was an interesting take on the theme of Solidarity.  

Patrick Deneen on Loneliness, Liberalism, and the Threat of Totalitarianism

 

Patrick Deneen on Loneliness, Liberalism, and the Threat of Totalitarianism

The 20th Hannah Arendt Forum, Bard College — Thursday, October 15, 2026

Patrick Deneen, political philosopher at the University of Notre Dame and prominent critic of modern liberalism, addressed the Hannah Arendt Forum on Thursday with a warning about the growing loneliness and social isolation of modern society. Drawing on the writings of Kurt Vonnegut and Hannah Arendt, Deneen argued that the erosion of human relationships threatens not only individual happiness but also the survival of political freedom.

Deneen began by acknowledging Arendt's influence on his intellectual development. Since graduate school, he explained, her writings have served as a North Star in his thinking about politics and its contemporary crises.

He then turned to a fellow Indiana resident, Kurt Vonnegut. Deneen, originally from Connecticut, has lived in Indiana for fifteen years. Vonnegut, born in Indianapolis, repeatedly explored the costs of modern civilization, particularly the loneliness produced by the dissolution of traditional communities.

Vonnegut was immersed in the horror of war. Captured by the Germans during World War II in the freezing Hell of the Battle of the Bulge, he was taken to Dresden the day before the firebombing of that city. He survived the inferno in a meat processing plant, slaughterhouse five, under the city. More than 25,000 Germans died in the attack.  The firestorm and its aftermath  profoundly shaped his writing. Vonnegut's most famous book is Slaughterhouse Five about the Dresden bombing. Yet Deneen argued that Vonnegut ultimately identified loneliness as one of humanity's greatest modern afflictions.

In a commencement address at Smith College, Vonnegut provocatively described loneliness rather than cardiovascular disease as America's leading killer.

His 1976 novel Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! explored the same concern. Vonnegut drew inspiration from anthropologist Robert Redfield's concept of the "folk society," a relatively small, stable community held together by kinship, shared history, inherited traditions, and relationships extending across generations.

Vonnegut believed human beings naturally longed for such communities. Their disappearance left people increasingly isolated despite the apparent freedoms and material benefits of modern life.

Deneen argued that contemporary social science has repeatedly confirmed this deterioration of human connections. Americans are less likely than previous generations to marry, have children, participate in religious communities, join civic associations, or maintain extensive personal relationships.

Trust has declined, while social media has expanded contact without necessarily providing meaningful human connection.

He cited the U.S. Surgeon General's report on loneliness and isolation, which associated loneliness with a 26 percent increased risk of premature death and social isolation with a 29 percent increase. The report compared the mortality risks associated with insufficient social connection to those of smoking fifteen cigarettes daily.

Deneen jokingly suggested that perhaps people should smoke cigarettes with their friends. 

But the consequences of loneliness extend beyond physical and psychological health. Here Deneen turned to Hannah Arendt and The Origins of Totalitarianism.

He urged his audience to read the final pages of Arendt's monumental work, where she examined the conditions that make totalitarian domination possible.

Arendt recognized that totalitarian movements do not simply impose themselves upon healthy societies. They emerge within societies whose traditional relationships and institutions have already deteriorated.

Individuals who once belonged to families, associations, religious communities, and political organizations become members of an anonymous mass society. Their isolation makes them vulnerable to movements promising belonging, meaning, and collective identity.

Deneen quoted Arendt's warning that loneliness, once largely confined to marginal circumstances such as old age, had become an everyday experience for enormous numbers of people.

For Arendt, this transformation was politically dangerous. The isolated individual, deprived of meaningful relationships and a place in the common world, becomes susceptible to totalitarian domination.

Deneen suggested that modern liberal societies should take this warning seriously rather than congratulate themselves on having escaped the authoritarian catastrophes of the twentieth century.

The very freedoms that liberal societies celebrate may coexist with forms of social disintegration that undermine the foundations of political liberty.

He then considered Arendt's admiration for the ancient Greek polis, the political community in which citizens appeared before one another, spoke, acted, and created a shared public world. 

The polis was not simply an administrative arrangement. It was a place where human actions acquired meaning through their recognition and remembrance by others.

Deneen compared Arendt's polis with Vonnegut's folk society. Both represented forms of human association that gave individuals a place within a larger community and connected their lives to a shared history.

Yet Deneen emphasized that neither thinker was simply nostalgic for an imagined golden age. Vonnegut did not propose recreating traditional village life, nor did Arendt advocate restoring ancient Athens.

Both recognized the achievements of modern freedom while questioning whether liberal societies had adequately preserved the relationships that make freedom meaningful.

Their challenge was to recover forms of association capable of counteracting modern loneliness without abandoning the genuine accomplishments of liberal civilization.

Deneen's argument is a provocative contribution to the Forum's theme of solidarity. Solidarity cannot exist among people who have lost the habits, institutions, and relationships that allow them to recognize one another as members of a common world.

His warning was that loneliness is not merely an unfortunate personal condition. It is a political danger.

A society of increasingly isolated individuals may possess extraordinary material wealth, personal liberty, and technological sophistication while losing the human connections necessary to sustain democratic life.

For Deneen, Vonnegut and Arendt present an unsettling possibility: the greatest threat to a free society did not arise from its enemies, but from the unintended consequences of its own successes.

Solidarity: Roger Berkowitz Opens the 20th Hannah Arendt Forum

 

Roger Berkowitz opened the 20th annual Hannah Arendt Forum at Bard College with a deceptively simple question: “What are we fighting for?” The theme of this year's gathering, Solidarity, grew directly from last year's exploration of joy. Berkowitz argued that joy cannot remain a private experience. Loving the world means accepting responsibility for the people with whom we share it.

We live in an age when solidarity is proclaimed everywhere—with Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, immigrants, workers, and victims of injustice. Yet our common world seems increasingly fractured. Berkowitz asked whether our declarations of solidarity actually bring people together or simply reinforce the divisions between them.

His answer, drawn from Hannah Arendt, was that genuine political solidarity requires friendship. Not friendship understood as intimacy or agreement, but the willingness to share a world with people who think differently, challenge us, and sometimes disappoint us.

Berkowitz distinguished three responses to human suffering: pity, compassion, and friendship.

Pity, he argued, looks down upon suffering from above. Drawing on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, he described the Grand Inquisitor, who claims to love humanity while denying people their freedom. The Inquisitor offers bread and security in exchange for obedience. His pity becomes an instrument of domination.

Compassion is different. Dostoevsky's Jesus stands silently before the Inquisitor, offering unconditional love rather than judgment or coercion. Berkowitz quoted Augustine: Volo ut sis—“I want you to be.” Compassion recognizes another person's humanity without demanding that the person change.

But compassion alone cannot create political solidarity. It remains personal and largely silent. Politics requires speech, action, and participation in a common world.

Berkowitz turned to Arendt's experiences helping Jewish refugees in Paris during the 1930s. She discovered that refugees needed more than charitable assistance. They needed work, education, games, singing, reading, and discussion—activities through which people could recover their dignity, freedom, and joy.

He also drew on Arendt's On Revolution, contrasting the French Revolution's emphasis on relieving suffering with the American founders' effort to establish institutions of political freedom. Pity for the poor could justify coercion, while republican institutions offered citizens opportunities to speak and act together.

Friendship provides another possibility. Arendt believed that genuine political friendship emerges through conversation, particularly between people who disagree. Friends do not necessarily share opinions. They share a world and try to understand how that world appears to one another.

This does not mean overlooking evil. Berkowitz emphasized Arendt's insistence upon judgment rather than automatic forgiveness or moral condemnation. Some actions make reconciliation impossible. But judgment considers individuals and circumstances rather than dividing humanity into permanent categories of good and evil.

The forum's program of discussion, music, dancing, and shared experiences was intended to demonstrate this understanding of solidarity.

Berkowitz concluded by returning to Augustine, extending “I want you to be” into a political affirmation: “I want us to share a world.”

Solidarity, he argued, is not simply standing against injustice. It is the patient, difficult, and sometimes joyful work of building a common world with people who are different from ourselves.

Last week Berkowitz published A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World, a fascinating exploration of Arendt's view of friendship and a life devoted to friendship and her friends.  I reviewed the book here.

A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz--A Review

For several months I have anticipated the new book A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. I was not disappointed. The book opens with a sad and dramatic episode showing the fragility of friendship. Berkowitz invited a speaker to a conference who, by the time of the conference, had been elected to the German Parliament as a member of Alternativ fur Deutschland (AfD). The conference went well with students engaging with the controversial speaker.  But after the conference, a colleague who Berkowitz considered a friend signed an open letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education condemning him—without calling or in any way getting in touch.

Tensions between friends are precisely a theme of the book. Hannah Arendt lost long-time close friends after publishing an article questioning Zionism after World War II and more so after Ardent published Eichmann in Jerusalem the most condemned and misunderstood of her many books and articles.  Berkowitz knits together the various threads of this sad tale in Chapter 6, echoing his own hurtful experience of a friend who denounced him publicly without any prior private exchange.  At the same time, Arendt’s “Genius for friendship” is also woven through the entire text, maintaining friendship through and beyond negative experiences.  Arendt saw friendship not as romantic love, which fuses two people into one, but as a relationship that preserves each person’s independence based on trust and respect. Friendship allows individuals to “appear before one another as free and distinct beings,” creating the conditions for dialogue, mutual understanding, and the “unity of a plurality” in political community. Which makes friendship a political virtue, modeling the trust and openness necessary for a shared world.

Although I have read all of Arendt’s books and collected essays, I have not read many of her letters.  After reading this book, I moved Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975 to my “To Be Read” shelf.  Berkowitz devotes Chapter 5 of A World We Share to Arendt’s women friends.  In my mind, Arendt seemed very much like Marie Curie in holding a respected place among groups of accomplished men in the gender-segregated world of knowledge.  So, to read about Arendt sharing her complicated life with women navigating the patriarchal world of the mid-century was fascinating. 

For me, the center of the book, the part I most looked forward to reading, is Chapter 7 titled “From Love to Respect”. Why a chapter on Love? For centuries, Love and Friendship have been systematically contrasted (or defined by contrast?) by philosophers. As opposed to love (eros) which means being attracted to the essence of the beloved, the inner self, “…what we respect in a friend is not their inner self but their persona, says Hannah Arendt, the Roman term for the public face through which one’s dignity resounds.” As I read this chapter, I was hearing lines from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis. In it, he explains the four Greek words for love which we call friendship, eros, family love, and charity. Lewis says the posture of friendship is side by side: two sharing a walk or some activity. They look out into the world and discuss what they see. In Eros, the lovers are face to face: they look at and into each other.  

As Berkowitz states at the opening of chapter 7, “Arendt’s writing does not offer a theory of friendship. She did, however, identify three defining characteristics of friendship: sustained conversation, duration, and respect. … As she wrote, friendship ‘is between two: a cutout of the world.’ … in friendship, two people carve out a space in the world—a homeland of conversation and mutual recognition where truth can appear not as doctrine but as something revealed between them. … Unlike love which can erupt suddenly and fade just as quickly, friendship depends on duration. … the intimacy and trust friendship nurtures cannot be rushed; it requires the slow accumulation of shared experiences and tested trust that develops over years, even decades. … Indeed, friendship is often strongest between those who fundamentally disagree.”

Yet despite those contrasting definitions, both Arendt and Lewis envisage the possibility of a confluence between love and friendship. Arendt describes her husband Heinrich Blucher as the love of her life and her friend. Lewis believed friendship could “turn into love” both metaphorically and actually. The friends turn toward each other when they become lovers. It was another delight of reading this book that I could compare two very different authors I admire very much on the same subject.

The final Chapter of the book titled “Common Ground” ties together the limits and value of friendship.  Berkowitz presents a story about the NPR reporter Zack Mack and his conspiracy theory believing father and how they came to share what they could of their very different lives through shared interests.  The ability to find and share common ground, to forgive, to work together for love of a common world glows at the center of all of Arendt’s works. Through this book I now know that glow is from inside Arendt herself. At the close of the book, I found myself wanting the book to be much longer. Agreeing with C.S. Lewis when he said, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” But I will keep reading Arendt and discussing her works in the Virtual Reading Group, so the discussion, unlike the book, does not end.