The Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic entered World War II with the Soviet Union after the German declaration of war on June 22, 1941. Azerbaijan's oilfields were enticing to the Germans due to the USSR's heavy dependency on Caucasus oil – setting the scene for German campaigns attempting to capture and seize the oilfields in Baku during the Battle of the Caucasus. Azerbaijan’s oil was very decisive for Soviet victory. More than 600,000 people from Azerbaijan were conscripted to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army during World War II from 1941 to 1945.
Pre-war
Operation Pike
The mechanized German army aimed to secure a large supply of oil. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, provided an overwhelming share of Soviet oil production. In an agreement of February 1940 following the August 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Germany and the Soviet Union committed to exchange German machinery, manufactures, and technology for Soviet resources. The Soviet Union thus supplied over 900,000 tons of oil to Germany. This trade arrangement, known to the Allies, fueled Allied propaganda portraying the Soviet Union as a German ally.
Operation Pike was a plan developed by the United Kingdom and France to bomb Baku in a surprise long-range raid from airbases in Iraq and Syria in order to hinder this oil delivery to Germany. Despite being at peace with the Soviet Union, the Allies performed reconnaissance flights to prepare. As later shown by the limited effects of strategic bombing during the war, the plan's potential impact was greatly overestimated, while it risked negative diplomatic and other results for the Allies. The fall of France in June 1940 cancelled the plan; Germany captured plan documents from France and revealed them to the Soviet Union, increasing its distrust of the Allies.
Military campaigns
Battle of the Caucasus
By the time of the German invasion, Baku and the North Caucasus were the main sources of oil for the whole of the USSR. The Soviet Union also relied heavily on the Caucasus region for its grain, following the fall of Ukraine. The region also possessed large reserves of strategic raw materials such as tungsten and molybdenum ore. Loss of the Caucasus would have proved devastating for the USSR: not only would they lose a substantial amount of oil production, which fueled the Red Army, they would also lose a valuable source of precious metals and the increasingly vital crop of grain. These reasons all contributed to why Hitler had intentions of taking the Caucasus in series of campaigns. German armies given orders to take Azerbaijani oil were identified with the letter "A".
German armies in the Caucasus area were ordered to surround and destroy the Southern Front, the area around the Don River, and to seize the city of Rostov-on-Don. Following the capture of Rostov-on-Don, the North Caucasus would theoretically be open to German invasion. The Germans intended to pass around the Greater Caucasus with an army from the South, capturing key cities such as Novorossiysk and Tuapse, and, with another group from the East, to capture the oil rich regions of Grozny and Baku simultaneously. The Germans also wanted to overcome the Dividing Ridge in the central part of the Caucasus Mountains in order to allow an entrance into Soviet Georgia using a bypass maneuver.
Operation Edelweiss
In 1942 on the Eastern Front, the German army approached the South Caucasus. Hitler was eager to capture Azerbaijan, seeking oil to strengthen the German army and weaken the Soviet Union – whose economy relied heavily on oil and fossil fuels. Operation Edelweiss was planned to commence on September 26, 1942. To protect the Azerbaijani oil fields, Joseph Stalin organized the North Caucasian Front along the German route of advance in the southern Caucasus. In late 1942, the reorganized Front consistently proved a tough obstacle for the Axis forces. The Axis divisions, consisting of German and Romanian troops, suffered heavy losses before they could reach the foothills on the Terek River and the Caucasus Mountains. Throughout the 1942 campaign, German and Soviet troops launched small, indecisive offensives against each other. Eventually, the Axis was forced to divert divisions from the Caucasus front to aid the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad. This allowed for a Soviet offensive that drove the remaining Axis forces out of the Caucasus region, effectively defeating the Axis Caucasus campaign. The "A" group of armies lost about 100,000 troops in the operation. Soviet losses to the Caucasus Front in 1942 totaled about 140,000 irrecoverable losses and 170,000 sick and wounded.