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Operation Barbarossa: The Nazi Invasion Of The U.S.S.R. 80 Years Ago

Nazi Germany led the largest-ever ground invasion force in an attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 that unleashed a brutal conflict that cost the lives of millions of people.


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A mother attempts to shield her child from Nazi bullets moments before being killed in a field near Ivangorod, Ukraine. At left is the body of another woman, and at right a group of people apparently digging a grave.
 
Nazi death squads -- in some cases supported by local populations -- executed millions of people, especially targeting Jews and "Asiatics" in the years following the Barbarossa invasion.
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A Jewish man about to be executed in Vinnytsia, Ukraine
 
British historian and author Jonathan Dimbleby says the atrocities carried out by the Nazis -- and to a lesser-extent the vengeful Red Army that he researched -- are "hardly bearable to talk about."
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A Russian girl partisan after being tortured and hanged by the Nazis. 

Dimbleby notes that members of the Nazi death squads "were not drunks hauled off the street or drug addicts who had no mental capacity that would allow us to judge them. These were educated people, they were people who had been doctors who had been through university, were civil servants, who volunteered for this task."
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Amos Chapple

Amos Chapple is a New Zealand-born photographer and picture researcher with a particular interest in the former U.S.S.R.

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