Barbarossa Derailed: the Battle for Smolensk 10 July - 10 September 1941 Volume 1: The German Advance, the Encirclement Battle, and the First and Second Soviet Counteroffensives, 10 July-24 August 1941

At dawn on 10 July 1941, massed tanks and motorised infantry of German Army Group Center's Second and Third Panzer Groups crossed the Dnepr and Western Dvina Rivers, beginning what Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of Germany's Third Reich, and most German officers and soldiers believed would be a triumphal march on Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union.