Why Barbarossa Failed: Germany and Russia in the Second World War

by Timothy Manion

Operation Barbarossa was the largest military campaign in history. More than three million German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. After an astonishing initial success, the German offensive collapsed outside Moscow in December. The reasons for the campaign’s failure have remained poorly understood for the past 80 years. The excuses offered by Adolf Hitler and his generals for the German army’s defeat continue to be repeated by historians in contemporary accounts of the campaign.

Harvard Law School graduate and Wall Street lawyer Timothy Manion shatters the historical consensus on Operation Barbarossa in his groundbreaking new book, Why Barbarossa Failed. Discarding traditional explanations for the German army’s failure, Manion has uncovered the archival accounts of officers at the front lines. These previously unpublished accounts overturn the past eight decades of dogma on Operation Barbarossa and shed an entirely new light on the most important event of the twentieth century.

352 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2025