From there the Army of Karelia moved north along the shores of Lake Onega to secure the remaining area west of Lake Onega, while simultaneously establishing a defensive position along the Svir River. The 1st Panzer Group then went south, while the 17th Army struck east and trapped three Soviet armies near Uman. [193], On 21 June, at 13:00 Army Group North received the codeword "Dsseldorf", indicating Barbarossa would commence the next morning, and passed down its own codeword, "Dortmund". [295] On 13 October, the 3rd Panzer Group penetrated to within 140km (87mi) of the capital. [131], During Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in the late-1930s, which had not ended by the time of the German invasion on 22 June 1941, much of the officer corps of the Red Army was executed or imprisoned and their replacements, appointed by Stalin for political reasons, often lacked military competence. la 1601/41 on 22 September 1941, which accorded Hitler's plans. [287] Petrozavodsk, the capital city of the Karelo-Finnish SSR, fell on 1 October. Barbarossa | Meaning, Biography, Pirate, & History | Britannica [277][278], Before an attack on Moscow could begin, operations in Kiev needed to be finished. However, Bock insisted on the order by stating that it would be irresponsible to reverse orders already issued. [89] It is speculated that this was passed on to General Georg Thomas, who had produced reports that predicted a net economic drain for Germany in the event of an invasion of the Soviet Union unless its economy was captured intact and the Caucasus oilfields seized in the first blow; Thomas revised his future report to fit Hitler's wishes. [27] The operation, code-named after Frederick Barbarossa ("red beard"), a 12th-century Holy Roman emperor and German king, put into action Nazi Germany's ideological goal of conquering the western Soviet Union to repopulate it with Germans. [141][142] Soviet intelligence also received word of an invasion around 20 June from Mao Zedong whose spy, Yan Baohang, had overheard talk of the plans at a dinner with a German military attach and sent word to Zhou Enlai. [57] Heinrich Himmler, in his secret memorandum, Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East (dated 25 May 1940), outlined the Nazi plans for the non-German populations in the East. [38] Hitler had in July 1937 praised Barbarossa as the emperor who first expressed Germanic cultural ideas and carried them to the outside world through his imperial mission. [42] Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germany's destiny was to "turn to the East" as it did "600 years ago" (see Ostsiedlung).