The general plan for Barbarossa's endgame was what became known as the A-A Line, also called the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan or Arkhangelsk-Volga-Astrakhan Line. The idea was that German forces would seize the industrial and population core of the USSR, including such centers as Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and the Crimea, so that German power would stretch from the Arctic Ocean to the Caspian Sea. After advancing to the A-A Line, most of the German and satellite forces would demobilize, leaving a sizable German contingent to hold the area. As Hitler explained it in a January 1941 conference, after victory:

Only 40 to 50 divisions would then have to remain in the east, the army could be reduced, and the entire armaments industry could be employed for the air force and the navy. A fully sufficient anti-aircraft defense would then have to be built up and the most important industries relocated to unthreatened regions. Germany would then be unassailable. Russia’s space contains immeasurable wealth. Germany must dominate it economically and politically, but not annex it. With that she would possess all the possibilities of waging war even against continents in the future, and she could not then be defeated by anyone.

The Germans planed for carving up the Soviet territory behind the A-A Line into various inspectorates and new administrative units to be geared completely towards the enrichment of the Reich. Most of the fighting envisioned beyond the A-A Line was delegated to the Luftwaffe. Luftwaffe planners envisioned two stages for airpower in the USSR. The first stage, the land invasion, saw the Luftwaffe devoted to achieving tactical objectives on the battlefield and ensuring air superiority. Once the war of movement was over, then the Luftwaffe would be engaged in strategic bombing of the surviving Soviet industry in the Urals and prevent any recovery of Soviet war making potential. Areas like Siberia were a massive question mark for German planers, with some envisioning the area as a postwar dumping ground for displaced Slavs and it being a colonial reservation under German control and some still toying with further German colonization of Siberia after the Eastern territories had been settled.

Obviously, it did not work out that way and the German planners greatly underestimated both Soviet capacity for resistance and recovery. The result was that stocks of winter clothing for the reduced 40-50 divisions holding the A-A Line piled up in Poland as the troops at the front needed more ammunition and replacements immediately.

Sources

Mazower, Mark. Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. Germany and the Second World War. Volume IV, The attack on the Soviet Union. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.