Aftermath
In what year did the Germans fight against the Soviet Union in Case Blue?
Operation Barbarossa
With the failure of the Battle of Moscow, all German plans of a quick defeat of the Soviet Union had to be revised. The Soviet counteroffensives in the winter of 1941 caused heavy casualties on both sides, but ultimately eliminated the German threat to Moscow. Nevertheless, despite this setback, the Soviet Union had suffered heavily from the loss of large parts of its army, allowing the Germans to mount another large-scale offensive in the summer of 1942, called Case Blue, now directed towards the oil fields of Baku. This offensive failed just as "Barbarossa" had: the Germans again conquered vast amounts of no-mans-land, but they had again failed to achieve their ultimate goals when they were defeated at Stalingrad. By then, the Soviet war economy was fully operational, so the Soviet Union was able to simply outproduce the Germans, who were not prepared for a long war of attrition. As a result, the Germans' last all-out offensive in 1943 at the battle of Kursk failed. After three years of constant warfare, the Germans were exhausted; thus the Soviets were finally able to defeat the Germans decisively in Operation "Bagration" during the summer of 1944. This led to a chain of Soviet victories which pushed the Germans back to Berlin in just one year, leading to the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945.