A-A line

Formation and meaning

The German designation is A-A-Linie or AA-Linie, the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line. It was not a defensive border but the military end-goal of Operation Barbarossa and a planning benchmark for building an occupation and exploitation system over the conquered territory. Because occupying the whole Soviet Union in one campaign was considered impossible given its geographic dimensions, the German military treated this line as the terminus of the war. Planners assumed the Red Army west of the line would be destroyed in a quick campaign before winter, and assessed that reaching it would deprive the USSR of around 86 per cent of its petroleum assets (the Caucasus oil territories); in case of success the front would run roughly 2,600 kilometres.

Origins and planning

The concept dates from the planning of the attack on the USSR ordered by Hitler in July 1940 and was enunciated in Directive 21 (Barbarossa) of 18 December 1940. Its preparatory work included the Operationsentwurf Ost (Operations Study East) submitted by Erich Marcks on 5 August 1940 and the OKW Loßberg study of 15 September 1940. Directive 21 set the shielding against Asiatic Russia along the general line Volga-Archangel and provided that the last industrial area left to Russia in the Urals could be eliminated by the Luftwaffe. It ordered preparations completed by 15 May 1941 and stressed that the intention to attack must not become discernible. Hitler expected to reach the line in eight to ten weeks, before the autumn 1941 rasputitsa.

Failure

Barbarossa was launched on 22 June 1941 after a delay of about five weeks for the operations in Greece and Yugoslavia. Over three and a half million German and other Axis troops attacked along a front of about 2,900 kilometres, but the objective of destroying Soviet fighting power and forcing a capitulation was not achieved. The advance halted west of Moscow, and the Soviet counter-offensive launched on 5 December 1941 pushed Army Group Centre back up to 240 kilometres from the capital. The northern terminus Arkhangelsk was never remotely reached, because the Soviet Karelian Front stopped the German-Finnish attacks. Causes cited for the failure include strategic planning that assumed a short campaign, vast distances and logistical difficulties, Soviet troop numbers, intelligence failures that repeatedly underestimated Soviet reserves, and the rasputitsa and winter cold.

Relations

The line is bound up with the planned civilian occupation regimes. Reichskommissariat Moskowien, initially also called Reichskommissariat Rußland, was the intended regime for central and northern European Russia; Siegfried Kasche was the projected Reichskommissar, but it remained on paper only. Reichskommissariat Ukraine was to reach the lower Volga, including Saratov and Stalingrad, and Reichskommissariat Kaukasus was to include Astrakhan as the administrative centre of German Kalmykia. Generalplan Ost, the Nazi scheme for settlement and 'Germanization' of captured Eastern European territory, involved genocide and ethnic cleansing whose victims included Slavs, Eastern European Jews and others classed as 'Untermenschen'; it was only partially implemented and envisaged deportation beyond the Urals. The Hunger Plan, first formulated by senior officials at a Staatssekretäre meeting on 2 May 1941, planned to seize Soviet food for German troops and civilians and entailed the genocide by starvation of millions of Soviet citizens, with deaths estimated at around 31 to 45 million inhabitants. The Urals were noted as a distant objective of Generalplan Ost, and at the conference of 16 July 1941 it was codified that no non-German military power would ever again be allowed west of the Urals.

Assessment and distinctions

The line should not be conflated with the terminus of the Marcks study: Marcks advocated occupation up to 'Arkhangelsk-Gorky-Rostov', and the Operationsentwurf Ost gave the final line as the lower Don, the middle Volga and the northern Dvina, different from the later Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan formulation. Directive 21 named only the 'general line Volga-Archangel' and did not name Astrakhan; the abbreviation AA-Linie for the 'Astrachan-Archangelsk-Linie' was coined only subsequently by Nazi propaganda. The Barbarossa end-goal also differs from the later Urals or 'living wall' conception: Hitler later rejected the Urals as an adequate border, calling it absurd that those middle-sized mountains marked the boundary between the 'European and Asiatic worlds', and argued that only a 'living wall' of Aryan fighters would serve as a frontier.