Heinz Guderian during the opening stage of Barbarossa, 1941. by Robert C. Smith Introduction One of the least explicable incidents of the Second World War was the almost total surprise—strategic, operational, and tactical—that Germany achieved over the Soviet Union at the start of the Barbarossa campaign. Viewed in modern terms, in which the Soviet Union’s intelligence apparatus is sometimes viewed as all-seeing and all-knowing, the need to know why this failure occurred becomes all the more interesting. Much of the difficulty in accurately investigating the matter lies in the almost visceral abhorrence the USSR had toward seriously analyzing many of the events which occurred during the disastrous period between 22 June and 1 October 1941. Much of the information that has come out of the USSR on the subject seems to indicate that the Soviet military leadership and the intelligence services were indeed fully aware of the imminence of the German attack; however, with a serio...