Question: When was the directive to prepare to invade the Soviet Union issued?
About the article "World War II", section "Axis attack on the USSR (1941)".

Candidate passages:
Hitler had been considering war with the Soviet Union since July 1940.
However, after Germany entered the Axis Pact with Japan and Italy, in October 1940, the Soviet Union explored a possible entry into the Axis themselves.
After long discussions and proposals, Germany presented the Soviets with a draft written Axis pact agreement defining the world spheres of influence of the four proposed Axis powers (Japan, Germany, Soviet Union, Italy).
Eleven days later, the Soviets presented a Stalin-drafted written counterproposal where they would accept the four power pact, but it included Soviet rights to Bulgaria and a world sphere of influence focus on the area around modern Iraq and Iran.
The Soviet offer came concurrently with massive economic efforts to Germany.
The Soviets promised by May 11, 1941 the delivery of 2.5 million tons of grain—1 million tons above its current obligations.
They also promised full compensation for the Volksdeutsche property claims.
Shortly thereafter, Hitler issued a secret directive on the eventual attempts to invade the Soviet Union.
Stalin's written draft counter-proposal was ignored, which worsened tensions between the countries. 
Relations between the Soviet Union and the major Axis powers were generally hostile before 1938.
In the Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union gave military aid to the Second Spanish Republic, against Spanish Nationalist forces, which were assisted by Germany and Italy.
However, the Nationalist forces were victorious.
The Soviets suffered another political defeat when their ally Czechoslovakia was partitioned and taken over by Germany in 1938-39.
In 1938 and 1939, the USSR fought and defeated Japan in two separate border conflicts, at Lake Khasan and Khalkhin Gol.
The latter was a major Soviet victory that led the Japanese Army to avoid war with the Soviets and insteas call for expansion south.
In 1939 the Soviet Union considered forming an alliance with either Britain and France or with Germany.
When negotiations with Britain and France failed, they turned to Germany and signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939.
Germany was now freed from the risk of war with the Soviets, and was assured a supply of oil.
This included a secret protocol whereby the independent countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania were divided into spheres of interest of the parties.
The Soviet Union had been forced to cede Western Belarus and Western Ukraine to Poland after losing the Soviet-Polish War of 1919–1921, and the Soviet Union sought to regain those territories.
On 1 September, barely a week after the pact had been signed, Germany invaded Poland.
The Soviet Union on 17 September and on 28 September signed a secret treaty with Nazi Germany to arrange coordination of fighting against Polish resistance.
The Soviets targeted intelligence, entrepreneurs, and officers, committing a string of atrocities that culminated in the Katyn massacre and mass relocation to the Gulag in Siberia.
Soon thereafter, the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and annexed Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina from Romania.
The Soviet Union attacked Finland on 30 November 1939, which started the Winter War.
Finnish defences prevented an all-out invasion, resulting in an interim peace, but Finland was forced to cede strategically important border areas near Leningrad.
The Soviet Union provided material support to Germany in the war effort against Western Europe through a pair of commercial agreements, the first in 1939 and the second in 1940, which involved exports of raw materials (phosphates, chromium and iron ore, mineral oil, grain, cotton, and rubber).
These and other export goods transported through Soviet and occupied Polish territories allowed Germany to circumvent the British naval blockade.
In October and November 1940, German-Soviet talks about the potential of joining the Axis took place in Berlin.
Joseph Stalin later personally countered with a separate proposal in a letter later in November that contained several secret protocols, including that "the area south of Batum and Baku in the general direction of the Persian Gulf is recognized as the center of aspirations of the Soviet Union", referring to an area approximating present day Iraq and Iran, and a Soviet claim to Bulgaria.
Hitler never responded to Stalin's letter.
Shortly thereafter, Hitler issued a secret directive on the eventual attempt to invade the Soviet Union.
Germany ended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by invading the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941.
That resulted in the Soviet Union becoming one of the main members of the Allies.
Germany then revived its Anti-Comintern Pact, enlisting many European and Asian countries in opposition to the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union and Japan remained neutral towards each other for most of the war by the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact.
The Soviet Union ended the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact by invading Manchukuo on 8 August 1945, due to agreements reached at the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt and Churchill. 
Axis attack on the USSR (1941).
With the situation in Europe and Asia relatively stable, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union made preparations.
With the Soviets wary of mounting tensions with Germany and the Japanese planning to take advantage of the European War by seizing resource-rich European possessions in Southeast Asia, the two powers signed the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact in April 1941.
By contrast, the Germans were steadily making preparations for an attack on the Soviet Union, amassing forces on the Soviet border.
Hitler believed that Britain's refusal to end the war was based on the hope that the United States and the Soviet Union would enter the war against Germany sooner or later.
He accordingly decided to try to strengthen Germany's relations with the Soviets, or failing that, to attack and eliminate them as a factor.
In November 1940 negotiations took place to determine if the Soviet Union would join the Tripartite Pact.
The Soviets showed some interest, but asked for concessions from Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Japan that Germany considered unacceptable.
On 18 December 1940 Hitler issued the directive to prepare for an invasion of the Soviet Union.
On 22 June 1941, Germany, Italy and Romania invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, with Germany accusing the Soviets of plotting against them.
They were joined shortly by Finland and Hungary.
The primary targets of this surprise offensive were the Baltic region, Moscow and Ukraine, with the ultimate goal of ending the 1941 campaign near the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan line, from the Caspian to the White Seas.
Hitler's objectives were to eliminate the Soviet Union as a military power, exterminate Communism, generate "Lebensraum" ("living space") by dispossessing the native population and guarantee access to the strategic resources needed to defeat Germany's remaining rivals.
Although the Red Army was preparing for strategic counter-offensives before the war, "Barbarossa" forced the Soviet supreme command to adopt a strategic defence.
During the summer, the Axis made significant gains into Soviet territory, inflicting immense losses in both personnel and materiel.
By the middle of August, however, the German Army High Command decided to suspend the offensive of a considerably depleted Army Group Centre, and to divert the 2nd Panzer Group to reinforce troops advancing towards central Ukraine and Leningrad.
The Kiev offensive was overwhelmingly successful, resulting in encirclement and elimination of four Soviet armies, and made further advance into Crimea and industrially developed Eastern Ukraine (the First Battle of Kharkov) possible.
The diversion of three quarters of the Axis troops and the majority of their air forces from France and the central Mediterranean to the Eastern Front prompted Britain to reconsider its grand strategy.
In July, the UK and the Soviet Union formed a military alliance against Germany The British and Soviets invaded Iran to secure the Persian Corridor and Iran's oil fields.
In August, the United Kingdom and the United States jointly issued the Atlantic Charter.
By October, when Axis operational objectives in Ukraine and the Baltic region were achieved, with only the sieges of Leningrad and Sevastopol continuing, a major offensive against Moscow had been renewed.
After two months of fierce battles, the German army almost reached the outer suburbs of Moscow, where the exhausted troops were forced to suspend their offensive.
Large territorial gains were made by Axis forces, but their campaign had failed to achieve its main objectives: two key cities remained in Soviet hands, the Soviet capability to resist was not broken, and the Soviet Union retained a considerable part of its military potential.
The "blitzkrieg" phase of the war in Europe had ended.
By early December, freshly mobilised reserves allowed the Soviets to achieve numerical parity with Axis troops.
This, as well as intelligence data that established a minimal number of Soviet troops in the East sufficient to prevent any attack by the Japanese Kwantung Army, allowed the Soviets to begin a massive counter-offensive that started on 5 December all along the front and pushed German troops west.
The Army was re-created on December 16, 1979 in the Turkestan Military District on the directive of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces.
The commanding officer of the army was appointed Lieutenant General Yu.
Tukharinov who was the first deputy CO of the Turkestan MD.
To cover the boundary with unstable Afghanistan three motor rifle divisions (the 5th Guards, 108th and 68th) were pulled to the region.
From December 3–16, 1979 two battalions of the 345th Separate Guard Parachutist Regiment and the special operation GRU unit (Muslim battalion) was deployed to the airport in Bagram (Afghanistan) as the situation in the Middle-Asian country had intensified.
On December 8, 1979 a meeting between Brezhnev, Andropov, Suslov, and Gromyko took place to discuss the situation in Afghanistan.
In a couple of days the minister of defense General Dmitriy Ustinov communicated to the Chief of the General Staff N. Ogarkov that the Politburo adopted a decision on the temporary introduction of troops in the country and ordered to prepare somewhere around 75,000-80,000 concentration of force.
Ustinov issued an oral order "No.
312/12/00133" on creation of a new general purpose army in TurkVO.
Only on December 12, 1979 the Politburo has officially adopted the decision on the introduction of the Soviet Army in Afghanistan.
Next day an operative group of the Ministry of Defense was formed lead by the deputy Chief of the General Staff General S. Akhromeyev, later replaced by the Marshall of the Soviet Union Sergei Sokolov.
On December 14 at 22:00 the operative group arrived to Termez, Tajik SSR, the same day the special KGB group "Grom" arrived to Kabul to reinforce another group "Zenit-2".
The field headquarters of the army was deployed in the Turkestan MD, while its aviation support by the 34th mixed aviation corps in the Central Asia Military District.
On December 24, 1979 Minister of Defense Ustinov officially announced about the adopted decision to invade Afghanistan and signed the directive #312/12/001.
Next day there were deployed around 100 different units.
Out of the reserves were drafted additional 50,000 people from the Middle Asia republics and the Kazakh SSR, some 8,000 units of automobiles were transferred out of the public sector. 
Hitler had been considering war with the Soviet Union since July 1940.
However, after Germany entered the Axis Pact with Japan and Italy, in October 1940, the Soviet Union explored a possible entry into the Axis themselves.
Stalin sent Molotov to Berlin to negotiate, where he negotiated with Ribbentrop and Hitler personally, who spoke at length about a division of the world after the destruction of Britain that would be like a "a gigantic world estate in bankruptcy".
After long discussions and proposals, Germany presented the Soviets with a draft written Axis pact agreement defining the world spheres of influence of the four proposed Axis powers (Japan, Germany, Soviet Union, Italy).
Eleven days later, the Soviets presented a Stalin-drafted written counter-proposal where they would accept the four-power pact, but it included Soviet rights to Bulgaria and a world sphere of influence focus on the area around modern Iraq and Iran.
The Soviets concurrently promised, by May 11, 1941, the delivery of 2.5 million tons of grain—1 million tons above its current obligations.
They also promised full compensation for the Volksdeutsche property claims.
Germany never responded to the counter-proposal.
Shortly thereafter, Hitler issued a secret directive on the eventual attempts to invade the Soviet Union.
Hitler wanted an additional economic deal to get what he could from the Soviet Union before the invasion, while other German officials wanted such a deal in the hopes that it could change the current anti-Soviet direction of German policy.
Knowing they were preparing for an invasion of the Soviet Union, German negotiators pushed to delay the delivery of German goods beyond the summer of 1941.
Suspicious of German delays, in December, the Soviets demanded that all questions pending between the countries be resolved before an agreement could be made.
Tensions had already built after Germany had ignored Stalin's letter regarding Axis membership, with negotiators almost coming to blows at one point.
At the same time, German war planners were aware of the potential fragility of Soviet oil, agreeing with Allied military assessments that they had captured in France saying that "a few incendiary bombs would have sufficed to shut down Baku for years.
"At the same time, Britain was forecasting continued German oil problems.
The British Chiefs of Staff produced a report in September 1940 predicting a possible exhaustion of German oil stocks by June 1941.
They believed that Germany could only improve its position by defeating Britain or by driving the Royal Navy from the Eastern Mediterranean so that Germany could import Soviet and Romanian oil supplies by sea.
An American spy then viewed a December German report detailing the need for an invasion of the Soviet Union because of projected mid-1941 shortages of heavy metals and other supplies.