A–A line

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The A-A line was a line drawn across a map of the Soviet Union that Germany's military planners believed would end the war in the east. Named for the two cities anchoring its ends, Arkhangelsk in the north and Astrakhan in the south, it traced a diagonal slash from the White Sea to the Caspian Sea. It first appeared in official form on the 18th of December 1940, written into Führer Directive 21, the document that launched Operation Barbarossa. That directive named the "general line Volga-Arkhangelsk" as the overall military objective of the entire invasion. What makes this line so striking is not just its ambition, but the cold arithmetic behind it: German planners believed that everything of military and economic value in the Soviet Union lay to its west. The questions worth asking are how that belief came to be, what it would have meant to reach the line, and why it remained, to the end of the war, nothing more than ink on paper.

• 2. A General's Draft

  ›

  General Erich Marcks drew the first version of this line in the summer of 1940, in a military study called the Operation Draft East. Marcks was tasked with thinking through what a German campaign against the Soviet Union would actually require. His answer was frank: Germany needed to occupy Soviet territory up to a line running through Arkhangelsk, Gorky, and Rostov. The purpose, as Marcks stated it, was to prevent the Soviet Union from posing a future threat to Germany and to protect German-held Europe from enemy bombers based in Soviet territory. His study went further than just drawing a boundary. Marcks estimated that the entire campaign, from the first crossing of the border through the capture of Moscow and the push beyond it, would take between nine and seventeen weeks to complete.

• 3. The Line's Geography

  ›

  Arkhangelsk sits on the White Sea in northern Russia, a port city that had long served as a gateway for maritime trade. Astrakhan stands at the opposite extreme, at the mouth of the Volga River where it empties into the Caspian Sea. Between them, the A-A line cut across an enormous expanse of European Russia, running roughly north to south. The plan was for German forces to hold everything to the west of this line after defeating the Red Army there. Everything to the east, the Soviet industrial centers that lay deeper in the continent, was not to be occupied at all. German planners acknowledged that occupying the entire Soviet Union in a single military campaign was simply impossible given the country's geographic scale. Instead, those eastern centers were slated for destruction by aerial bombardment, for which an entire Luftflotte was to be assigned.

• 4. The Economic Calculation

  ›

  German planners believed the lands west of the A-A line held the majority of Soviet military supplies. They also estimated that the same territory contained the main part of the food supply and most of the Soviet population's productive capacity. The petroleum calculation was the most precise figure attached to the plan: reaching the A-A line would strip the Soviet Union of around 86% of its petroleum assets, because the oil territories of the Caucasus lay in that western zone. The Wehrmacht also anticipated that the Red Army west of the line could be destroyed quickly in 1941, before the onset of winter. That seasonal deadline was treated as a hard constraint. A rapid campaign that ended at the A-A line would leave behind a rump Soviet state east of the Volga, stripped of its oil and most of its industrial output, while Germany held the agricultural and demographic heartland.

• 5. What Never Came to Pass

  ›

  Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union failed to secure any of the objectives set out in Directive 21. The A-A line, under all its names, including the Volga-Arkhangelsk line and the rarer full form, the Volga-Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line, remained an aspiration rather than a military reality. The swift campaign Marcks had projected in the summer of 1940 did not materialize. Winter arrived before German forces reached the line's anchor points. The 86% petroleum figure, the population ratios, the food supply assumptions, all of them depended on German forces advancing to a boundary they never crossed.