Opening the Gates of Hell by Richard Hargreaves

Opening the Gates of Hell: Operation Barbarossa, June–July 1941

by Richard Hargreaves

Osprey Publishing 2025

Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, opened perhaps the most epic and catastrophic war in history. The Eastern front in all its exhausting and grotesque details doesn’t exactly defy description (a stupid cliché), but it does make reaching hyperbole about as easy as taking Moscow in the winter; on a higher level, it seems to perfectly capture both the character of the nations involved as well as the total power, blatant madness, stupidly insane megalomania, capriciousness, and weirdness of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. That is all to say, it was a supreme drama within the greatest drama in human conflict, and therefore, predictably, is not facing a shortage of books.

And this month, an anniversary of the opening operation, we have a new entry to this library, journalist Richard Hargreave’s aptly named Opening the Gates of Hell. At first pass, it’s a slightly awkward thing to try and place in the literature:

David Stahel’s Operation Barbarossa and Germany’s Defeat in the East is more scholarly, Robert Kershaw’s War Without Garlands and Craig Luther’s Barbarossa Unleashed are superior operational histories, David Glantz’s Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941 and Jonathan Dimbleby’s Operation Barbarossa: The History of a Cataclysm are better standard accounts, and Alan Clark’s Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 is both broader and probably still the classic narrative. Moreover, Hargreaves pulls in the usual journals – if you’ve read the above, you’ll be able to predict which entries are coming with near-perfect accuracy – and hits all the familiar high points and themes: German hubris, Soviet confusion and paralysis, the setting in of reality at scenes like the Brest Citadel, early armor engagements with Soviet heavy tanks, and the staggering encirclements at Minsk and Smolensk.

This isn’t propitious. We have a glut of books full of rich alternatives; do we need this new volume, and is it worthwhile? To put it succinctly, ‘no’ and then ‘yes’; the book does nothing new but does a couple things uniquely well.

Hargreaves only takes a sliver of time at the start Operation Barbarossa - about a month - which allows him to apply his narrative skills to these extraordinary events in detail, and the result is altogether enthralling. After laying the necessary groundwork, Hargreaves begins slowly walking the reader to the opening barrage. His sections take you from mid-June 1941, to Friday 20 June, to Saturday 21 June, mid-day. . .then nightfall. . .and then midnight, until finally we’re in real time and place: The Black Sea, 3:05AM, Ukraine 3:15AM, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler anxiously pacing in the parlor, and soldiers at the front line wondering if the order to attack will be rescinded minutes before they invade. Admittedly, the whole thing develops a kind of twisted Ghost of Christmas Past-type feeling with the reader hovering over it all, but this performance is completely absorbing and sustained through the whole of the book.

That includes, consequently, atrocities. The reader isn’t only reminded that these fields and cities were what Timothy Snyder has called the Bloodlands, it is described to them, graphically. In his introduction, Hargreaves writes:

The account which follows is therefore a contrast of heroism and horror, of brave, dedicated, determined soldiers on both sides fighting for what they believed were just causes, of unchecked primeval, bestial impulses and actions, of the joy of apparent liberation and the barbarity of hatred unrestrained.

And this book paints a bloody canvas which serves as a visceral reminder that those qualities - heroism, bravery, dedication, and courage - are not virtues unqualified (murder and mutilation do indeed take a certain amount of courage); they are positive virtues when directed at something good, and there is nothing good in the gates of hell. The reader might have to steel themselves for that.

Against the odds, Richard Hargreave’s brilliantly unnerving Opening the Gates of Hell is a contribution through the author’s sheer force of will and talent. His ability to add genuine tantalizing tension to events some readers will know backwards and forwards is a real credit to his approach and style. There are better histories of Operation Barbarossa, and some do give that ‘on the ground’ feeling in their reading, but Hargreave’s book takes it a level deeper. The payoff is an unsparing, disquieting, and thrilling reading experience about this absurd and awful calamity.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.