A-A line

The AA line ( or AA line) was the military goal of Operation Barbarossa. This refers to an imaginary line from the port city of Arkhangelsk ( in Northern Russia in the White Sea ) - along the River Volga - to the port of Astrakhan ( at the mouth of the Volga into the Caspian Sea ).

The mass of the Red Army should be beaten in a quick campaign before winter west of this line military. The German Wehrmacht suspected in the area west of this line, the bulk of the Soviet armor sources and the main part of the nutritional and demographic potential of the Soviet Union. Reaching this line would have the Soviet Union 86 % of its oil production withdrawn (oil fields in the Caucasus ). This final line was defined by the German military planners as a military downing the Soviet Union considered in a single campaign as a result of geographical conditions is not feasible was. This line was intended as a starting point for a further smaller planned campaign in the spring of 1942 to the conquest of the rest of the Soviet Union in the Barbarossa planning.