Front & Homeland

The Invasion of the Soviet Union

By: Robert Sterling Herron

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Front & Homeland examines the first year of Operation Barbarossa—Nazi Germany’s vast invasion of the Soviet Union—and the deeper struggle that lay beneath it: a landgrab rooted in centuries of conflict over the fertile borderlands of Eastern Europe. Nowhere was this more evident than in Ukraine, whose black soil made it the object of competing imperial visions. For Hitler, Ukraine was the agricultural foundation of a self-sufficient Reich; for Stalin, its population and grain were essential to the consolidation of Soviet power. Both regimes sought to remake the region through coercion, colonization, and the suppression of national identity.

Drawing from diaries, field reports, speeches, conference notes, and the private conversations of Hitler and Stalin, Front & Homeland follows how these ambitions played out on the ground—how armies advanced, how civilians endured, and how state power justified dispossession as necessity. The book traces the war’s impact not only on the front but on the societies behind it, where propaganda, scarcity, and fear reshaped daily life and moral boundaries.

Seen from today, the story carries a stark relevance. The same territories once targeted by Nazi and Soviet planners remain contested in the present, their histories invoked to legitimize new claims. Front & Homeland shows how the long arc of invasion, famine, occupation, and resistance continues to shape Ukrainian identity—and why the struggle over land and memory endures.