On the 2nd of December 1941, a small number of German light vehicles and motorcycle combinations rolled into the township of Khimki, close to the Moscow Ring Road. The men of the Panzer Pioneer battalion of the 250th Infantry Division believed they had discovered a gap in the Soviet lines. They pushed through it and reached the edge of the Soviet capital. From their position, some officers claimed they could see through binoculars the gleaming golden domes and spires of Red Square and the Kremlin, just fourteen miles away.

They waited for support that never came. The next day, a Soviet force of local militia, supported by a few T-34 tanks, pushed them back out of the town. This was as far as the German Army ever got towards Moscow. It had taken more than five months of brutal campaigning to reach that point.

On the 22nd of June 1941, Hitler had unleashed Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in history, against what he perceived to be his greatest enemy: Soviet Communism. Some 3. 8 million Axis soldiers crossed the border with orders to destroy the Soviet Union in a five-month campaign. The Red Army, caught off guard by the timing of the assault and with its officer corps fatally weakened by political purges, reeled under the sudden, massive attack.

The German armies advanced along three main axes, each aimed at a vital objective: Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the center, and Kiev in the south. Within the first thirty days, Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb’s Army Group North drove to within 135 miles of Leningrad, while Hitler’s Finnish allies also struck towards the city from the north. In the center of the front, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center drove 480 miles into Soviet territory. One important city after another fell to the Germans.

On the 17th of July, the Germans captured Smolensk, the key to Moscow itself. In the south, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South cut a swathe through the Ukraine. It appeared as though the Soviet Union was finished. Stalin had only 800,000 men with which to defend the capital, and of the 800 divisions available, only some twenty-five were fully operational.

The Germans launched Operation Typhoon, their assault on Moscow, on the 30th of September 1941. Army Group Center faced a series of elaborate defensive lines centered on the cities in the path to the capital. The Second Panzer Group took Orel, 75 miles south of the Soviet’s first main defensive line. Three days later, the panzers captured Bryansk, while the German Second Army attacked from the south, encircling the Soviet 3rd and 13th armies.

In the north, the 3rd and 4th Panzer armies attacked towards Vyazma, trapping four Soviet armies in the process. The Germans had cracked Moscow’s first defensive line. They captured over 663,000 prisoners from a total of three million men taken since the start of Barbarossa. Stalin had only about 90,000 men and 150 tanks left to defend Moscow itself.

On the 13th of October, the 3rd Panzer Group stood just 87 miles from Moscow. Martial law was declared in the city. But then the weather turned against the invaders. Heavy rain and snow turned the roads into deep mud, and the German tanks, with their narrow tracks, struggled to move.

On the 31st of October, the Germans were forced to call a temporary halt to the advance so they could reorganize their precarious supply situation. That pause gave the Soviets a breathing space. Stalin organized eleven new armies, including thirty divisions of tough Siberian troops who were far better able to cope with the harsh conditions. A thousand tanks also arrived.

As the temperature fell, the mud froze solid. On the 15th of November, the German advance resumed. The plan was to move the 3rd and 4th Panzer armies across the Moscow-Volga Canal and envelop the city from the northeast. The 2nd Panzer Group would attack Tula and then close on Moscow from the south.

These movements would force the bulk of the Soviet armies to shift to deal with the threats. As they did so, the German 4th Army would attack the center. For two weeks, short of fuel and ammunition, the German armies fought forward towards the city. In the south, the Soviets stopped the 2nd Panzer Group on the 22nd of November.

Siberian units counter-attacked and defeated it. But the 4th Panzer Group managed to push the Soviets back and cross the Moscow-Volga Canal, the last major obstacle before the city itself. Units of the 7th Panzer Division now stood just 22 miles from Red Square and the Kremlin. That group got no further.

On the 28th of November, a powerful Soviet counter-attack pushed them back northwest of Moscow. The Germans reached Krasnaya Polyana, now just 18 miles from the Kremlin. There, again, stiff Soviet resistance and the Germans’ chronic supply problems stopped them cold. But the 250th Infantry Division got closer.

Part of the division’s Panzer Pioneer battalion appeared to have discovered a gap in the Soviet lines. On the 2nd of December, that small number of light vehicles and motorcycle combinations reached the township of Khimki, close to the Moscow Ring Road. It was all that the Germans managed. Officers claimed to have seen through binoculars from their position at Khimki the gleaming golden domes and spires of Red Square and the Kremlin, fourteen miles away.

The story, however, is either exaggerated or a case of mistaken identity. Moscow in 1941 was fairly low-rise, so the Kremlin’s buildings certainly stood out on the skyline, but many high-rise Soviet apartment blocks had been built along the main highways out of the city center. Khimki itself contained no tall buildings from which to get an elevated view of the far distance. There was another problem with the story.

The Soviets had camouflaged both Red Square and the Kremlin. The golden spires had been painted dark colors, the Kremlin walls painted to look like ordinary buildings with windows. Camouflage and plywood structures had been erected on Red Square to confuse the street layout for German bombers, and Lenin’s Mausoleum had been disguised as a two-story residential building. In the snowy, cold conditions, it is likely the Germans saw snow and frost reflecting off the roofs in strong sunlight, or they saw other towers and church domes in the general direction of central Moscow.

Whatever the truth of what the men at Khimki saw, it marked the farthest point of the German advance towards Moscow. The small number of German troops in the township waited for support that never came. On the 3rd of December, a Soviet force of local militia, supported by a few T-34 tanks, pushed them out of Khimki. Today, at kilometer 23 on the Leningrad Square highway into Moscow, next to a giant IKEA furniture store, a memorial has marked the point of the farthest German advance since 1966.

It consists of giant Czech tank traps. Severe winter weather descended, and the supply problems continued. The German offensive against Moscow stalled completely. On the 5th of December, the Soviets launched a massive counter-attack, taking the exhausted, frozen, and undersupplied Germans by surprise.

By the 7th of January 1942, when the Soviet offensive finally halted, the Germans had been pushed back between sixty and 150 miles from Moscow. The battle for Moscow was over. The Germans had come within sight of the Kremlin, but they would never come closer.