85 years after Hitler’s invasion, Germany rearms for war on Russia

On June 22, 1941, more than three million soldiers of Nazi Germany and its allies crossed the Soviet border in Operation Barbarossa. What followed was a colonial war of annihilation that killed some 27 million Soviet citizens over four years, most of them civilians.

Eighty-five years later, the German ruling class is building for war in the East again.

In 2025, Germany raised its military spending 24% — the third straight year of double-digit increases — to $114 billion, making it the fourth-largest military spender on earth. Across the continent, NATO members in Europe spent $559 billion on their armed forces that year, a rate of increase the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute called the fastest since 1953. The Pistorius plan, named for the German defense minister, sets out to build the strongest conventional military force in Europe by 2039.

The U.S. is restructuring the alliance to fit this drive. At a meeting of NATO ministers, U.S. Secretary of War Peter Hegseth presented what he called “NATO 3.0,” demanding the alliance move “quickly and irreversibly” toward a Europe that takes primary responsibility for its own defense. Washington has begun cutting forces and capabilities earmarked for NATO and is reviewing its troop deployments in Europe, while shifting its global posture toward confrontation with China.

A Europe-led alliance means above all a Germany-led one. Only Germany can pay for it — and in March 2025 it rewrote its constitution to exempt military spending from the “debt brake” that had capped its borrowing.

The aims are stated openly. Kaja Kallas, then Estonia’s prime minister and now the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said Russia’s defeat could mean a breakup into “small nations,” replacing a “big power,” adding that this would be “not a bad thing.” Roderich Kiesewetter, a Christian Democratic Union politician and former Bundeswehr general staff officer, wrote that Europe’s strategic goal must be Russia’s “unconditional capitulation.” This is the language of 1941 in the mouths of 2026.

The Nazi war on the Soviet Union was a capitalist war for raw materials, land and labor. As Sevim Dagdelen recently recalled in the Morning Star, the Nazi leadership spoke of the East as a colony: “Russia is our India.” Behind the armies came an Economic Staff East of roughly 20,000 officials, seizing factories, mines, farms and food supplies for German capital.

Goering’s Hunger Plan aimed to starve as many as 30 million Soviet citizens so Germany and its army could be fed. German forces, with Finland holding the northern ring of the blockade, starved roughly one million people to death in Leningrad. The plan was not only military conquest. It was colonial seizure — land without its people, industry without its workers, grain without those who grew it.

In 1942, in Berlin’s Lustgarten, the regime mounted a propaganda exhibition called “The Soviet Paradise” to sell the eastern war. The Jewish-communist Herbert Baum group attacked it with firebombs. They were workers and young people who understood what the rest of Germany was instructed to ignore.

Berlin has never officially recognized the Nazi war against the peoples of the Soviet Union as genocide. It prefers narrower language about war crimes and Nazi crimes. The issue was never memory alone. German capital has long looked east for markets, raw materials, energy and industrial advantage. For decades, cheap Russian gas fed German factories and profits. Today, German imperialism is being reorganized for war.

German and European workers will pay for this, in money now and in blood later. The buildup runs on credit and on austerity. The same governments that find no money for pensions, wages, and housing find unlimited funds for weapons. In April 2026, the Belgian chief of defense, General Frederik Vansina, told the Brussels daily Le Soir that Europe has a few years yet, bought with the blood of Ukrainians, and that “this is why we support them.” It was the proxy war stated plainly: Ukraine fed into the war on Russia to buy the imperialists time to arm. The rulers of Europe count the dead of one country as the price of preparing the slaughter in others.

Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general, once said the alliance existed to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. NATO 3.0 turns the last part on its head. It puts German imperialism back at the head of a war on Russia — in its own interest, and in the interest of the U.S. ruling class that has dominated the imperialist bloc since 1945.