Outbreak of Operation Barbarossa

Date: June 22, 1941 • Location: Tiergarten, Germany

This milestone marked the outbreak and beginning of this historic period, which spanned 1941–1945.

World War II: Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.

Nazi Germany, officially the German Reich and later the Greater German Reich, was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a totalitarian dictatorship. The Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", was the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and the German Empire (1871–1918); the Nazis called it the Thousand-Year Reich, but it ended just 12 years later in May 1945, when the Allies defeated Germany and entered Berlin, ending World War II in Europe.