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For the relative luck of the Russian people, they have always had a great allied when somebody had the unhappy idea of invading their great territory.
This allied is the so-called "General Winter" that creates immense difficulties to the invaders, so that the victims of freezing and pulmonary diseases were even more that those of combats.

Already NAPOLEON (1812) had been severely punished for having invaded Russia and despite this negative experience, also HITLER tried the same adventure, pushed by his arrogance and hate against the Russians.

The German attack to Russia started in summer, on June 22nd 1941, and took Stalin and the his Red Army by surprise, because the Soviet Union had tried to keep friendly relations with the Nazi Germany.

Stalin was shocked, that day and, for 2 days, he didn't go out from his office; Hitler had been the only person on which Stalin, known for his paranoid diffidence, had trusted.

The Soviet Army wasn't ready and in the first months of the invasion, it had to withdraw with many losses under the fast German offensive along a very long front, from the borders with Finland to the Black Sea and even up to the Caucasian Mountains.

Germany had send in Russia many thousands of tanks and aircrafts and millions of troops, the best of its army.

But already in November and December 1941, first the heavy rains of the autumn that turned the Russian soil in a muddy swamp and then, above all, the great cold and snow of the Russian winter, delayed and blocked the German advance at 50 Km from Moscow, together with the more and more effective resistance of the Russian Army, that could profit of the difficulties of the enemies to improve their organization and quickly increase the production of weapons and spare parts in Siberia and in other far regions of their immense Country.

The Russian strategy was to create the desert behind them, when they had to withdraw, to deny supplies and food to the enemy in advance and making many guerrilla, sabotage and resistance action behind the German lines.
Losing territory wasn't a problem for the Russians.

Together with the German troops, also a corp of 100,000 Italian Alpine troops has been sent in Russia, immediately after the invasion, by Mussolini, impatient to show to Hitler how precious was the "Italian help to the German victory").

Other corps were sent by Romania, Slovakia, Finland and Hungary, ruled by puppet-regimes imposed by Hitler at the beginning of that year.

The winter made drop down the temperatures

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