Free Republic

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz formally announced Wednesday that after weeks of stalling and frustrating negotiations Berlin has agreed to send two battalions of Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine. In a statement the government said it would initially send one company of 14 tanks to Kyiv, though its aim is to send up to 88 tanks from its own stockpiles. Scholz said, "This decision follows our well-known line of supporting Ukraine to the best of our ability. We are acting in a closely coordinated manner internationally." Some 15 other EU nations that possess the German-made tanks in their own stocks...

On this day in 1941, seventeen-year-old Shaya “Shaike” Iwensky came within seconds of being shot by the Einsatzgruppen outside the city of Daugavpils, Latvian SSR. Sheer dumb luck — and a slight miscalculation by the Germans — saved his life. Shaike was born and raised in Jonava, Lithuania and fled to Daugavpils with his brother when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. On June 29, he was arrested along with the other Jewish male adults in town. His brother, who was fifteen years old, was arrested alongside him, but released the same day because of his age....

On June 22,1941, German troops invaded the USSR, thus beginning one of the most violent and devastating wars ever. The German army (Wehrmacht) had begun planning this invasion in July 1940, under the code name Otto, then Fritz, and finally Barbarossa. In planning the invasion, the Wehrmacht basically had the choice of two strategies: the first was to wage a war of attrition, while the second was to win by military annihilation in the tradition of Napoleon. In choosing, the Germans would have been wise to consider the consequences the latter strategy had in the invasion of Russia for Napoleon....