Eastern Front (World War II)

Great Patriotic War redirects here. For a discussion ofthe term itself, see Great Patriotic War (term).Not to be confused with Patriotic War of 1812.

The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatreof conict between the European Axis powers and co-belligerent Finland against the Soviet Union, Poland andother allies, which encompassed Northern, Southern andCentral and Eastern Europe from 22 June 1941 to 9May 1945. It has been known as the Great Patri-otic War (Russian: ,Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna) in the former SovietUnion and in modern Russia, while in Germany it wascalled the Eastern Front (German: die Ostfront),[3]the Eastern Campaign (der Ostfeldzug) or the RussianCampaign (der Rulandfeldzug).[4][5]

The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largestmilitary confrontation in history.[6] They were charac-terized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruc-tion, mass deportations, and immense loss of life vari-ously due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, andmassacres. The Eastern Front, as the site of nearly allextermination camps, death marches, ghettos, and themajority of pogroms, was central to the Holocaust. Ofthe estimated 70 million deaths attributed to World WarII, over 30 million,[7] many of them civilian, occurred onthe Eastern Front. The Eastern Front was decisive in de-termining the outcome of World War II, eventually serv-ing as the main reason for Germanys defeat.[8][9][10] It re-sulted in the destruction of the Third Reich, the partitionof Germany for nearly half a century and the rise of theSoviet Union as a military and industrial superpower.The two principal belligerent powers were Nazi Germanyand the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies.Though never engaged in military action in the EasternFront, the United Kingdom and the United States bothprovided substantial material aid in the form of the Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. The joint GermanFinnishoperations across the northernmost FinnishSoviet bor-der and in the Murmansk region are considered partof the Eastern Front. In addition, the SovietFinnishContinuation War may also be considered the northernank of the Eastern Front.

1 Background

See also: MolotovRibbentrop Pact

Despite their ideological antipathy, both Germany andthe Soviet Union shared a common dislike for the out-come ofWorldWar I. The Soviet Union had lost substan-tial territory in eastern Europe as a result of the Treaty ofBrest-Litovsk, where it gave in to German demands andceded control of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia andFinland, among others, to the "Central Powers". Subse-quently, when Germany in its turn surrendered to the Al-lies and these territories were liberated under the termsof the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Russia was in acivil war condition and the Allies did not recognize theBolshevik government. The Soviet Union would not beformed for another four years, so no Russian representa-tion was present.[11]

The MolotovRibbentrop Pact signed in August 1939was a non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germanyand the Soviet Union that contained a secret protocol aim-ing to return Central Europe to the preWorld War I sta-tus quo by dividing it between Germany and the SovietUnion. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would re-turn to Soviet control, while Poland and Romania wouldbe divided.Adolf Hitler had declared his intention to invade the So-viet Union on 11 August 1939 to Carl Jacob Burckhardt,League of Nations Commissioner by saying, EverythingI undertake is directed against the Russians. If the Westis too stupid and blind to grasp this, then I shall be com-pelled to come to an agreement with the Russians, beatthe West and then after their defeat turn against the So-viet Union with all my forces. I need the Ukraine so thatthey can't starve us out, as happened in the last war..[12]

The two powers invaded and partitioned Poland in 1939.After Finland refused the terms of a Soviet pact of mu-tual assistance, the Soviet Union attacked Finland on 30November 1939 in what became known as the WinterWar a bitter conict that resulted in a peace treaty on13 March 1940, with Finland maintaining its indepen-dence but losing parts of eastern Karelia. In June 1940,the Soviet Union occupied and illegally annexed the threeBaltic statesan action in violation of the Hague Con-ventions (1899 and 1907) and numerous bi-lateral con-ventions and treaties signed between the Soviet Union andBaltics. The annexations were never recognized by mostWestern states.[13] The MolotovRibbentrop Pact osten-

1

2 2 IDEOLOGIES

sibly provided security to Soviets in the occupation ofboth the Baltics and the north and northeastern regions ofRomania (Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia) althoughHitler, in announcing the invasion of the Soviet Union,cited the Soviet annexations of Baltic and Romanian ter-ritory as having violated Germanys understanding of thePact. The annexed Romanian territory was divided be-tween the Ukrainian and Moldavian Soviet republics.

2 IdeologiesMain article: GermanySoviet Union relations before1941

2.1 German ideology

Adolf Hitler had argued in his autobiography MeinKampf (1925) for the necessity of Lebensraum (liv-ing space): acquiring new territory for Germans inEastern Europe, in particular in Russia.[14] He envis-aged settling Germans there, as according to Nazi ideol-ogy the Germanic people constituted the master race,while exterminating or deporting most of the exist-ing inhabitants to Siberia and using the remainder asslave labour.[15] Hitler as early as 1917 had referred tothe Russians as inferior, believing that the BolshevikRevolution had put the Jews in power over the massof Slavs, who were, in Hitlers opinion, incapable ofruling themselves but instead being ruled by Jewishmasters.[16] Hard-line Nazis in Berlin (like Himmler[17])saw the war against the Soviet Union as a struggle be-tween the ideologies Nazism and Jewish Bolshevism,and ensuring territory supremacy for the Germanicbermensch (superhumans), who according to Nazi ide-ology were the AryanHerrenvolk (master race), againstthe Slavic Untermenschen (subhumans).[18] Wehrmachtocers told their troops to target people who were de-scribed as Jewish Bolshevik subhumans, the Mongolhordes, the Asiatic ood and the red beast.[19] Thevast majority of German soldiers viewed the war in Naziterms, seeing the Soviet enemy as sub-human.[20]

Hitler referred to the war in unique terms, calling it a warof annihilation which was both an ideological and racialwar. According to a plan calledGeneralplan Ost, the pop-ulations of occupied Central Europe and the Soviet Unionwere to be partially deported toWest Siberia, partially en-slaved and eventually exterminated; the conquered terri-tories were to be colonized by German or Germanizedsettlers.[21] In addition, the Nazis also sought to wipeout the large Jewish population of (Central and) EasternEurope[22] as part of their program aiming to exterminateall European Jews.[23]

After Germanys initial success at the Battle of Kiev in1941, Hitler saw the Soviet Union as militarily weak and

ripe for immediate conquest. On 3 October 1941, he an-nounced, We have only to kick in the door and the wholerotten structure will come crashing down.[24] Thus, Ger-many expected another short Blitzkrieg and made no se-rious preparations for prolonged warfare. However, fol-lowing the decisive Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalin-grad in 1943 and the resulting dire Germanmilitary situa-tion, Hitler and his Nazi propaganda proclaimed the warto be a German defence of Western civilization againstdestruction by the vast "Bolshevik hordes that were pour-ing into Europe.

2.2 Soviet situation

Throughout the 1930s the Soviet Union underwent mas-sive industrialization and economic growth under theleadership of Joseph Stalin. Stalins central tenet,"Socialism in one country", manifested itself as a se-ries of nationwide centralized Five-Year Plans (1929 on-wards). This represented an ideological shift in Sovietpolicy, away from its commitment to the internationalcommunist revolution, and eventually leading to the dis-solution of the Comintern (Third International) organiza-tion in 1943.In February 1936 the Spanish general election broughtmany communist leaders into the Popular Front govern-ment in the Second Spanish Republic, but in a matter ofmonths a right-wing military coup initiated the SpanishCivil War of 19361939. This conict soon took onthe characteristics of a proxy war involving the SovietUnion and left wing volunteers from dierent countrieson the side of the predominantly socialist and communist-led[25] Second Spanish Republic;[26] while Nazi Ger-many, Fascist Italy, and the Portuguese Republic took theside of Spanish Nationalists, the military rebel group ledby General Francisco Franco.[27] It served as a useful test-ing ground for both the Germans and the Soviets to ex-periment with equipment and tactics that they would lateremploy on a wider scale in the Second World War.Nazi Germany, which positioned itself as an anti-Communist rgime, formalized its ideological positionon November 25, 1936 by signing the Anti-CominternPact with the Empire of Japan.[28] Fascist Italy joined thePact a year later.[26][29] The German Anschluss of Aus-tria in 1938 and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia(19381939) demonstrated the impossibility of establish-ing a collective security system in Europe,[30] a policyadvocated by the Soviet ministry of foreign aairs un-der Maxim Litvinov.[31][32] This, as well as the reluc-tance of the British and French governments to sign a full-scale anti-German political and military alliance with theUSSR,[33] led to the MolotovRibbentrop pact betweenthe Soviet Union and Germany in late August 1939.[34]

33 Forces

The war was fought between Nazi Germany, its allies andFinland, against the Soviet Union. The conict beganon 22 June 1941 with the Operation Barbarossa oen-sive, when Axis forces crossed the borders described inthe GermanSoviet Nonaggression Pact, thereby invad-ing the Soviet Union. The war ended on 9 May 1945,when Germanys armed forces surrendered uncondition-ally following the Battle of Berlin (also known as theBerlin Oensive), a strategic operation executed by theRed Army. The states that provided forces and otherresources for the German war eort included the AxisPowers primarily Romania, Hungary, Italy, pro-NaziSlovakia, and Croatia. The anti-Soviet Finland, whichhad fought the Winter War against the Soviet Union, alsojoined the oensive. TheWehrmacht forces were also as-sisted by anti-Communist partisans in places likeWesternUkraine, the Baltic states, and later by Crimean Tatars.Among the most prominent volunteer army formationswas the Spanish Blue Division, sent by Spanish dictatorFrancisco Franco to keep his ties to the Axis intact.[35]

The Soviet Union oered support to the partisans in manyWehrmacht-occupied countries in Central Europe, no-tably those in Slovakia, Poland and the Kingdom of Yu-goslavia. In addition, the Polish Armed Forces in theEast, particularly the First and Second Polish armies,were armed and trained, and would eventually ght along-side the Red Army. The Free French forces also con-tributed to the Red Army by the formation of the GC3(Groupe de Chasse 3 or 3rd Fighter Group) unit to ful-ll the commitment of Charles de Gaulle, leader of theFree French, who thought that it was important for Frenchservicemen to serve on all fronts. British and Common-wealth forces contributed directly to the ghting on theEastern Front through their service in the Arctic convoysand training Red Air Force pilots, as well as in the provi-sion of early material and intelligence support. The latermassive material support of the Lend-Lease agreementby the United States and Canada played a signicant partparticularly in the logistics of the war.Main articles: Aufbau Ost (1940) and Lossberg study

For nearly two years the border was quiet while Germanyconquered Denmark, Norway, France, The Low Coun-tries, and the Balkans. Hitler had always intended to re-nege on his pact with the Soviet Union, eventually makingthe decision to invade in the spring of 1941. Hitler be-lieved that the Soviets would quickly capitulate after anoverwhelming German oensive and that the war couldlargely end before the onset of the erce Russian winter.Some historians say Stalin was fearful of war with Ger-many, or just did not expect Germany to start a two-frontwar, and was reluctant to do anything to provoke Hitler.Others say that Stalin was eager for Germany to be at warwith capitalist countries. Another viewpoint is that Stalin

expected war in 1942 (the time when all his preparationswould be complete) and stubbornly refused to believe itsearly arrival.[38]

German infantry in June 1943

British historians Alan S. Milward and M. Medlicottshow that Nazi Germanyunlike Imperial Germanywas prepared for only a short-term war (Blitzkrieg).[39]According to Edward Ericson, although Germanys ownresources were sucient for the victories in the West in1940, massive Soviet shipments obtained during a shortperiod of NaziSoviet economic collaboration were crit-ical for Germany to launch Operation Barbarossa.[40]

Germany had been assembling very large numbersof troops in eastern Poland and making repeatedreconnaissance ights over the border; the Soviet Unionresponded by assembling its divisions on its western bor-der, although the Soviet mobilization was slower thanthe Germans due to the countrys less dense road net-work. As in the Sino-Soviet conict on the ChineseEastern Railway or SovietJapanese border conicts, So-viet troops on the western border received a directive,signed by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and General ofthe Army Georgy Zhukov, that ordered (as demanded byStalin): do not answer to any provocations and do notundertake any (oensive) actions without specic orders which meant that Soviet troops could open re only ontheir soil and forbade counter-attack on German soil. TheGerman invasion therefore caught the Soviet military andcivilian leadership largely by surprise.The extent of warnings received by Stalin about a Ger-man invasion is controversial, and the claim that therewas a warning that Germany will attack on 22 June with-out declaration of war has been dismissed as a popularmyth. However, some sources quoted in the articles onSoviet spies Richard Sorge and Willi Lehmann, say theyhad sent warnings of an attack on 20 or 22 June, whichwere treated as disinformation. The Lucy spy ring inSwitzerland also sent warnings, possibly deriving fromUltra codebreaking in Britain.Soviet intelligence was fooled by German disinformation,so sent false alarms to Moscow about a German invasionin April, May and the beginning of June. Soviet intel-

4 4 CONDUCT OF OPERATIONS

ligence reported that Germany would rather invade theUSSR after the fall of the British Empire[41] or after anunacceptable ultimatum demanding German occupationof Ukraine during the German invasion of Britain.[42]

4 Conduct of operationsMain article: Strategic operations of the Red Army inWorld War II

While German historians do not apply any specic pe-riodisation to the conduct of operations on the EasternFront, all Soviet and Russian historians divide the waragainst Germany and its allies into three periods, whichare further subdivided into eight major Campaigns of theTheatre of war:[43]

1. First period of Great Patriotic war (Russian: )(22 June 1941 18 November 1942)

SummerAutumn Campaign (Russian:- 1941 .) (22 June 4 December 1941)

Winter Campaign of 194142 (Russian: - 1941/42 .) (5 December 1941 30 April 1942)

SummerAutumn Campaign (Russian:- 1942 .) (1 May 18 November 1942)

2. Second period of Great Patriotic war (Russian: )(19 November 1942 31 December 1943)

Winter Campaign of 194243 (Russian: - 19421943 .) (19 November1942 3 March 1943)

SummerAutumn Campaign of 1943(Russian: - 1943 .)(1 July 31 December 1943)

3. Third period of Great Patriotic war (Russian: )(1 January 1944 9 May 1945)

WinterSpring Campaign (Russian: - 1944 .) (1 January 31May 1944)

SummerAutumn Campaign of 1944(Russian: - 1944 .)(1 June 31 December 1944)

Campaign in Europe during 1945 (Russian: 1945 .) (1 January 9May 1945)

Operation Barbarossa: the German invasion of the SovietUnion, 21 June 1941 to 5 December 1941:to 9 July 1941to 1 September 1941to 9 September 1941to 5 December 1941

4.1 Operation Barbarossa: Summer 1941Operation Barbarossa began just before dawn on 22June 1941. The Germans wrecked the wire network inall Soviet western military districts to undermine Sovietcommunications.[44]

Panicky transmissions from Soviet front-line units to theircommand headquarters were picked up like this one:

We are being red upon. What shall wedo?"The answer was just as confusing:You must be insane. And why is your signalnot in code?"[1]

1. ^ Reagan, Georey. Military Anec-dotes (1992) p. 210, Guinness Publish-ing ISBN 0-85112-519-0

Map of South Western Front (Ukrainian) at 22 June 1941

At 03:15 on 22 June 1941, 99 of 190 German divi-sions, including fourteen panzer divisions and ten mo-torized, were deployed against the Soviet Union from

4.1 Operation Barbarossa: Summer 1941 5

the Baltic to the Black Sea. They were accompa-nied by ten Romanian divisions, and nine Romanianand four Hungarian brigades.[45] On the same day, theBaltic, Western and Kiev Special military districts wererenamed the Northwestern, Western and SouthwesternFronts respectively.[44] To establish air supremacy, theLuftwae began immediate attacks on Soviet airelds, de-stroying much of the forward-deployed Soviet Air Forceaireld eets consisting of largely obsolescent types be-fore their pilots had a chance to leave the ground.[46]For a month the oensive conducted on three axes wascompletely unstoppable as the panzer forces encircledhundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in huge pocketsthat were then reduced by slower-moving infantry armieswhile the panzers continued the oensive, following theBlitzkrieg doctrine.Army Group North's objective was Leningrad via theBaltic states. Comprising the 16th and 18th Armies andthe 4th Panzer Group, this formation advanced throughthe Baltic states, and the Russian Pskov and Novgorodregions. Local insurgents seized the moment and con-trolled most of Lithuania, northern Latvia and southernEstonia prior to the arrival of the German forces.[47][48]

The corpses of victims of Stalins NKVD murdered in last daysof June 1941, just after outbreak of war

Army Group Centre's two panzer groups (2nd and 3rd),advanced to the north and south of Brest-Litovsk and con-verged east of Minsk, followed by the 2nd, 4th, and 9thArmies. The combined panzer force reached the BeresinaRiver in just six days, 650 km (400 mi) from their startlines. The next objective was to cross the Dnieper river,which was accomplished by 11 July. Their next targetwas Smolensk, which fell on 16 July, but the erce So-viet resistance in the Smolensk area and retardation oftheWehrmacht advance in North and South forced Hitlerto halt a central thrust at Moscow and to divert PanzerGroup 3 north. Critically, Guderian's Panzer Group 2wasordered to move south in a giant pincer maneuver withArmy Group South which was advancing into Ukraine.Army Group Centres infantry divisions were left rela-tively unsupported by armor to continue their slow ad-vance to Moscow.[49]

This decision caused a severe leadership crisis. The Ger-man eld commanders argued for an immediate oensive

towards Moscow, but Hitler overruled them, citing theimportance of Ukrainian agricultural, mining and indus-trial resources, as well as the massing of Soviet reserves inthe Gomel area between Army Group Centres southernank and the bogged-down Army Group Souths north-ern ank. This decision, Hitlers summer pause,[49] isbelieved to have had a severe impact on the Battle ofMoscow's outcome, by giving up speed in the advance onMoscow in favor of encircling large numbers of Soviettroops around Kiev.[50]

Army Group South, with the 1st Panzer Group, the6th, 11th and 17th Armies, was tasked with advancingthrough Galicia and into Ukraine. Their progress, how-ever, was rather slow, and took heavy casualties in amajor tank battle. With the corridor towards Kiev se-cured by mid-July, the 11th Army, aided by two Roma-nian armies, fought its way through Bessarabia towardsOdessa. The 1st Panzer Group turned away from Kievfor the moment, advancing into the Dnieper bend (west-ern Dnipropetrovsk Oblast). When it joined up with thesouthern elements of Army Group South at Uman, theGroup captured about 100,000 Soviet prisoners in a hugeencirclement. Advancing armored divisions of the ArmyGroup South met with the Guderian Panzer Group 2near Lokhvytsa in mid September, cutting o large num-bers of Red Army troops in the pocket east of Kiev.[49]400,000 Soviet prisoners were captured as Kiev was sur-rendered on 19 September.[49]

Soviet children during a German air raid in the rst days of thewar, June 1941, by RIA Novosti archive

As the Red Army withdrew behind the Dnieper andDvina rivers, the Soviet Stavka (the high command),turned its attention to evacuating as much of the west-ern regions industry as it could. Factories were disman-tled and sent away from the front line in atcars for re-establishment in more remote areas of the Ural Moun-tains, Caucasus, Central Asia and south-eastern Siberia.Most civilians were left to make their own way East, withonly industry-related workers evacuated with the equip-ment; much of the population was left behind to themercy of the invading forces.

6 4 CONDUCT OF OPERATIONS

Stalin ordered the retreating Red Army to initiate ascorched-earth policy to deny Germans and their alliesbasic supplies as they moved eastward. To carry out thatorder, destruction battalions were formed in front-line ar-eas, having the authority to summarily execute any sus-picious person. The destruction battalions burned downvillages, schools, and public buildings.[51] As a part ofthis policy theNKVDmassacred thousands of anti-Sovietprisoners.[52]

4.2 Moscow and Rostov: Autumn 1941Main articles: Battle of Moscow and Battle of Rostov(1941)

Hitler then decided to resume the advance on Moscow,re-designating the panzer groups as panzer armies for theoccasion. Operation Typhoon, which was set in motionon 30 September, saw the 2nd Panzer Army rush alongthe paved road from Oryol (captured 5 October) to theOka River at Plavsk, while the 4th Panzer Army (trans-ferred fromArmyGroupNorth to Centre) and 3rd Panzerarmies surrounded the Soviet forces in two huge pocketsat Vyazma and Bryansk. Army Group North positioneditself in front of Leningrad and attempted to cut the raillink at Mga to the east. This began the 900-day Siegeof Leningrad. North of the Arctic Circle, a GermanFinnish force set out for Murmansk but could get no fur-ther than the Zapadnaya Litsa River, where they settleddown.

Wehrmacht soldiers pulling a car from the mud during therasputitsa period, November 1941

Army Group South pushed down from the Dnieper tothe Sea of Azov coast, also advancing through Kharkov,Kursk, and Stalino. The 11th Army moved into theCrimea and took control of all of the peninsula by autumn(except Sevastopol, which held out until 3 July 1942).On 21 November, the Germans took Rostov, the gate-way to the Caucasus. However, the German lines wereover-extended and the Soviet defenders counterattackedthe 1st Panzer Armys spearhead from the north, forcingthem to pull out of the city and behind the Mius River;the rst signicant German withdrawal of the war.

Soviet gun crew in action at Odessa in 1941

The onset of the winter freeze saw one last German lungethat opened on 15 November, when the Germans at-tempted to throw a ring around Moscow. On 27 Novem-ber, the 4th Panzer Army got to within 30 km (19 mi)of the Kremlin when it reached the last tramstop of theMoscow line at Khimki. Meanwhile, the 2nd PanzerArmy failed to take Tula, the last Soviet city that stoodin its way to the capital. After a meeting held in Orshabetween the head of theOKH (ArmyGeneral Sta), Gen-eral Franz Halder and the heads of three Army groupsand armies, decided to push forward to Moscow since itwas better, as argued by the head of Army Group Center,Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, for them to try their luckon the battleeld rather than just sit and wait while theiropponent gathered more strength.However, by 6 December it became clear that theWehrmacht did not have the strength to capture Moscow,and the attack was suspended. Marshal Shaposhnikovthus began his counter-attack, employing freshly mo-bilized reserves,[53] as well as some well-trained Far-Eastern divisions transferred from the east followingintelligence that Japan would remain neutral.

4.3 Soviet counter-oensive: Winter 1941

Main articles: Battle of Moscow, Second Battle ofKharkov and Winter Campaign of 19411942During the autumn, Stalin had been transferring fresh,well-equipped Soviet forces from Siberia and the Far Eastto Moscow. On 5 December 1941, these reinforcementsattacked the German lines around the Soviet capital, sup-ported by new T-34 tanks and Katyusha rocket launch-ers. The new Soviet troops were better-prepared for win-ter warfare than their foes, and they also included severalski battalions. The exhausted and freezing Germans weredriven away from Moscow on 7 January 1942.A further Soviet attack was mounted in late January,focusing on the junction between Army groups Northand Centre between Lake Seliger and Rzhev, and drovea gap between the two German army groups. In con-cert with the advance from Kaluga to the south-west ofMoscow, it was intended that the two oensives convergeon Smolensk, but the Germans rallied and managed tohold them apart, retaining a salient at Rzhev. A Soviet

4.4 Don, Volga, and Caucasus: Summer 1942 7

The Soviet winter counter-oensive, 5 December 1941 to 7 May1942:Soviet gainsGerman gains

parachute drop on German-held Dorogobuzh was spec-tacularly unsuccessful, and those paratroopers who sur-vived had to escape to the partisan-held areas beginningto swell behind the German lines. To the north, the So-viets surrounded a German garrison in Demyansk, whichheld out with air supply for four months, and establishedthemselves in front of Kholm, Velizh, and Velikie Luki.Further north still, the Soviet Second Shock Army wasunleashed on the Volkhov River. Initially this madesome progress; however, it was unsupported, and byJune a German counterattack cut o and destroyedthe army. The Soviet commander, Lieutenant GeneralAndrey Vlasov, later became defected to the Germansand forming the ROA or Russian Liberation Army.In the south the Red Army lunged over the Donets Riverat Izyum and drove a 100 km (62 mi) deep salient. Theintent was to pin Army Group South against the Sea ofAzov, but as the winter eased the Germans were ableto counter-attack and cut o the over-extended Soviettroops in the Second Battle of Kharkov.

4.4 Don, Volga, and Caucasus: Summer1942

Main articles: Case Blue, Battle of Voronezh (1942) andBattle of StalingradAlthough plans were made to attack Moscow again, on28 June 1942, the oensive re-opened in a dierent di-rection. Army Group South took the initiative, anchoringthe front with the Battle of Voronezh and then followingthe Don river southeastwards. The grand plan was to se-cure the Don and Volga rst and then drive into the Cau-casus towards the oil elds, but operational considerationsand Hitlers vanity made him order both objectives to beattempted simultaneously. Rostov was recaptured on 24July when the 1st Panzer Army joined in, and then that

Operation Blue: German advances from 7 May 1942 to 18November 1942:to 7 July 1942to 22 July 1942to 1 August 1942to 18 November 1942

group drove south towards Maikop. As part of this, Op-eration Shamil was executed, a plan whereby a group ofBrandenburger commandos dressed up as Soviet NKVDtroops to destabilise Maikops defenses and allow the 1stPanzer Army to enter the oil town with little opposition.Meanwhile, the 6th Armywas driving towards Stalingrad,for a long period unsupported by 4th Panzer Army, whichhad been diverted to help 1st Panzer Army cross the Don.By the time the 4th Panzer Army had rejoined the Stal-ingrad oensive Soviet resistance (comprising the 62ndArmy under Vasily Chuikov) had stiened. A leap acrossthe Don brought German troops to the Volga on 23 Au-gust but for the next three months the Wehrmacht wouldbe ghting the Battle of Stalingrad street-by-street. To-wards the south, the 1st Panzer Army had reached theCaucasian foothills and the Malka River. At the end ofAugust Romanian mountain troops joined the Caucasianspearhead, while the Romanian 3rd and 4th armies wereredeployed from their successful task of clearing theAzovlittoral. They took up position on either side of Stalingradto free German troops for the main oensive. Mindfulof the continuing antagonism between Axis allies Roma-nia and Hungary over Transylvania, the Romanian armyin the Don bend was separated from the Hungarian 2ndarmy by the Italian 8th Army. Thus, all of Hitlers allieswere involved including a Slovakian contingent with the1st Panzer Army and a Croatian regiment attached to 6thArmy.The advance into the Caucasus bogged down, with theGermans unable to ght their way past Malgobek and tothe main prize of Grozny. Instead, they switched the di-rection of their advance to approach it from the south,crossing the Malka at the end of October and enteringNorth Ossetia. In the rst week of November, on theoutskirts of Ordzhonikidze, the 13th Panzer Divisions

8 4 CONDUCT OF OPERATIONS

spearhead was snipped o and the panzer troops had tofall back. The oensive into Russia was over.

4.5 Stalingrad: Winter 1942

Operations Uranus, Saturn and Mars: Soviet advances on theEastern Front, 18 November 1942 to March 1943:to 12 December 1942to 18 February 1943to March 1943 (Soviet gains only)

Main articles: Battle of Stalingrad, Operation LittleSaturn, Operation Mars, Third Battle of Kharkov andBattle for Velikiye Luki (1943)

While the German 6th and 4th Panzer Armies had beenghting their way into Stalingrad, Soviet armies had con-gregated on either side of the city, specically into theDon bridgeheads that the Romanians did not reduce,and it was from these that they struck on 19 November1942. In Operation Uranus, two Soviet fronts punchedthrough the Romanian lines and converged at Kalachon 23 November, trapping 300,000 Axis troops behindthem.[54] A simultaneous oensive on the Rzhev sectorknown as Operation Mars was supposed to advance toSmolensk, but was a failure, with German tactical airwinning the day.The Germans rushed to transfer troops to Russia for adesperate attempt to relieve Stalingrad, but the oensivecould not get going until 12 December, by which timethe 6th Army in Stalingrad was starving and too weakto break out towards it. Operation Winter Storm, withthree transferred panzer divisions, got going briskly fromKotelnikovo towards the Aksai river but became boggeddown 65 km (40 mi) short of its goal. To divert the res-cue attempt, the Soviets decided to smash the Italians andcome down behind the relief attempt if they could; thatoperation starting on 16 December. What it did accom-plish was to destroy many of the aircraft that had beentransporting relief supplies to Stalingrad. The fairly lim-ited scope of the Soviet oensive, although still eventu-

A Soviet junior political ocer (Politruk) urges Soviet troops for-ward against German positions (12 July 1942)

German infantry and a supporting StuG III assault gun duringthe advance towards Stalingrad, September 1942

ally targeted on Rostov, also allowed Hitler time to seesense and pull Army Group A out of the Caucasus andback over the Don.[55]

On 31 January 1943, the 90,000 survivors of the300,000-man 6th Army surrendered. By that time theHungarian 2nd Army had also been wiped out. The So-viets advanced from the Don 500 km (310 mi) to thewest of Stalingrad, marching through Kursk (retaken on8 February 1943) and Kharkov (retaken 16 February1943). In order to save the position in the south, the Ger-mans decided to abandon the Rzhev salient in February,freeing enough troops tomake a successful riposte in east-ern Ukraine. Manstein's counteroensive, strengthenedby a specially trained SS Panzer Corps equipped withTiger tanks, opened on 20 February 1943 and fought its

4.6 Kursk: Summer 1943 9

way from Poltava back into Kharkov in the third week ofMarch, when the spring thaw intervened. This left a glar-ing Soviet bulge (salient) in the front centered on Kursk.

4.6 Kursk: Summer 1943

Main article: Battle of KurskAfter the failure of the attempt to capture Stalingrad,

Soldiers of the 1st SS Panzer Division near Kharkov, February1943

Hitler had delegated planning authority for the upcom-ing campaign season to the German Army High Com-mand and reinstated Heinz Guderian to a prominent role,this time as Inspector of Panzer Troops. Debate amongthe General Sta was polarised, with even Hitler ner-vous about any attempt to pinch o the Kursk salient.He knew that in the intervening six months the Sovietposition at Kursk had been reinforced heavily with anti-tank guns, tank traps, landmines, barbed wire, trenches,pillboxes, artillery andmortars. However, if one last greatblitzkrieg oensive could be mounted, just maybe the So-viets would ease o and attention could then be turnedto the Allied threat to the Western Front. The advancewould be executed from the Orel salient to the north ofKursk and from Belgorod to the south. Both wings wouldconverge on the area east of Kursk, and by that means re-store the lines of Army Group South to the exact points

German advances at Kharkov and Kursk, 19 February 1943 to1 August 1943:to 18 March 1943to 1 August 1943

that it held over the winter of 19411942.Although the Germans knew that the Red Armys re-serves of manpower had been bled dry in the summer of1941 and 1942, the Soviets were still re-equipping, sim-ply by drafting the men from the regions taken back.Under pressure from his generals, Hitler agreed to theattack on Kursk, little realising that the Abwehr's in-telligence on the Soviet position there had been under-mined by a concerted Stavkamisinformation and counter-intelligence campaign mounted by the Lucy spy ring inSwitzerland. When the Germans began the operation,it was after months of delays waiting for new tanks andequipment, by which time the Soviets had reinforced theKursk salient with more anti-tank repower than had everbeen assembled in one place before or since that day.

The Battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle ever fought with each side employing nearly 3,000 tanks

In the north, the entire German 9th Army had been rede-ployed from the Rzhev salient into the Orel salient andwas to advance from Maloarkhangelsk to Kursk. Butits forces could not even get past the rst objective atOlkhovatka, just 8 km (5.0 mi) into the advance. The 9thArmy blunted its spearhead against the Soviet mineelds,

10 4 CONDUCT OF OPERATIONS

frustratingly so considering that the high ground there wasthe only natural barrier between them and at tank coun-try all the way to Kursk. The direction of advance wasthen switched to Ponyri, to the west of Olkhovatka, butthe 9th Army could not break through here either andwent over to the defensive. The Soviets soaked up theGerman punishment and then struck back. On 12 July theRed Army battled through the demarcation line betweenthe 211th and 293rd divisions on the Zhizdra River andsteamed towards Karachev, right behind them and behindOrel.

Soviet T-34/76s and infantry advance past a destroyed PanzerIV. Kharkov, August 1943

The southern oensive, spearheaded by 4th PanzerArmy, led by Gen. Col. Hoth, with three Tank Corpsmade more headway. Advancing on either side of the up-per Donets on a narrow corridor, the II SS Panzer Corpsand the Grodeutschland Panzergrenadier divisions bat-tled their way through mineelds and over comparativelyhigh ground towards Oboyan. Sti resistance caused achange of direction from east to west of the front, butthe tanks got 25 km (16 mi) before encountering thereserves of the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army outsideProkhorovka. Battle was joined on 12 July, with aboutone thousand tanks being engaged. After the war, the bat-tle near Prochorovka was idealized by Soviet historians asthe largest tank battle of all time. The meeting engage-ment at Prochorovka was a Soviet defensive success, al-beit at heavy cost. The Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army,with about 800 light and medium tanks, attacked ele-ments of the II SS Panzer Corps. Tank losses on bothsides have been the source of controversy ever since. Al-though the 5th Guards Tank Army did not attain its ob-jectives, the German advance had been halted.At the end of the day both sides had fought each otherto a standstill, but regardless of the standstill in the northErich von Manstein intended to continue the attack withthe 4th Panzer Army. But the Soviets could absorb theattack, and the German strategic advance in OperationCitadel had been halted. Under the impression of the suc-cessful counter-attacks in the south, the RedArmy startedthe strong oensive operation in the northern Orel salientand achieved a breakthrough on the ank of the German9th Army. Also worried by the Allies landing in Sicilyon 10 July, Hitler made the decision to halt the oensiveeven as the German 9th Army was rapidly giving ground

in the north. The Germans nal strategic oensive in theSoviet Union ended with their defense against a majorSoviet counteroensive that lasted into August.The Kursk oensive was the last on the scale of 1940and 1941 that the Wehrmacht was able to launch, subse-quent oensives would represent only a shadow of previ-ous German oensive might.

4.7 Autumn and Winter 194344

Main articles: KorsunShevchenkovsky Oensive,Battle of Smolensk (1943), Lower Dnieper Oensive,LeningradNovgorod Oensive and Battle of Narva(1944)The Soviet juggernaut began rolling in earnest with the

"Katyusha" a notable Soviet rocket launcher

advance into the Germans Orel salient. The diversionof the well-equipped Grodeutschland Division fromBelgorod to Karachev could not stop it, and a strategicdecision was made to abandon Orel (retaken by the RedArmy on 5 August 1943) and fall back to the Hagen linein front of Bryansk. To the south, the Soviets blastedthrough Army Group Souths Belgorod positions andheaded for Kharkov once again. Although intense battlesof movement throughout late July and into August 1943saw the Tigers blunting Soviet tank attacks on one axis,they were soon outanked on another line to the west asthe Soviets advanced down the Psel, and Kharkov had tobe evacuated for the nal time on 22 August.

4.7 Autumn and Winter 194344 11

The German forces on the Mius, now comprising the 1stPanzer Army and a reconstituted 6th Army, were by Au-gust too weak to repulse a Soviet attack on their own front,and when the Soviets hit them they had to fall back all theway through the Donbass industrial region to the Dnieper,losing the industrial resources and half the farmland thatGermany had invaded the Soviet Union for to exploit.At this time Hitler agreed to a general withdrawal to theDnieper line, along which was meant to be the Ostwall,a line of defence similar to the Westwall (Siegfried Line)of fortications along the German frontier in the west.The main problem for the Germans was that these de-fences had not yet been built; by the time Army GroupSouth had evacuated eastern Ukraine and begun with-drawing across the Dnieper during September, the Sovi-ets were hard behind them. Tenaciously, small units pad-dled their way across the 3 km (1.9 mi) wide river andestablished bridgeheads. A second attempt by the Sovi-ets to gain land using parachutists, mounted at Kanev on24 September, proved as disappointing as at Dorogob-uzh eighteen months previously. The paratroopers weresoon repelled but not until still more Red Army troopshad used the cover they provided to get themselves overthe Dnieper and securely dug in. As September endedand October started, the Germans found the Dnieper lineimpossible to hold as the Soviet bridgeheads grew, andimportant Dnieper towns started to fall, with Zaporozhyethe rst to go, followed by Dnepropetrovsk. Finally, earlyin November the Soviets broke out of their bridgeheadson either side of Kiev and captured the Ukrainian capital,at that time the third largest city in the Soviet Union.Eighty miles west of Kiev, the 4th Panzer Army, stillconvinced that the Red Army was a spent force, wasable to mount a successful riposte at Zhytomyr duringthe middle of November, weakening the Soviet bridge-head by a daring outanking strike mounted by the SSPanzer Corps along the river Teterev. This battle also en-abled Army Group South to recapture Korosten and gainsome time to rest; however, on Christmas Eve the retreatbegan anew when the First Ukrainian Front (renamedfrom the Voronezh Front) struck them in the same place.The Soviet advance continued along the railway line un-til the 1939 PolishSoviet border was reached on 3 Jan-uary 1944. To the south, the Second Ukrainian Front (exSteppe Front) had crossed the Dnieper at Kremenchugand continued westwards. In the second week of Jan-uary 1944 they swung north, meeting Vatutins tankforces which had swung south from their penetrationinto Poland and surrounding ten German divisions atKorsunShevchenkovsky, west of Cherkassy. Hitlers in-sistence on holding the Dnieper line, even when facing theprospect of catastrophic defeat, was compounded by hisconviction that the Cherkassy pocket could break out andeven advance to Kiev, but Manstein was more concernedabout being able to advance to the edge of the pocket andthen implore the surrounded forces to break out. By 16February the rst stage was complete, with panzers sepa-rated from the contracting Cherkassy pocket only by the

Soviet sniper Roza Shanina in 1944. About 400,000 Sovietwomen served in front-line duty units[56]

swollen Gniloy Tikich river. Under shellre and pursuedby Soviet tanks, the surrounded German troops, amongwhom were the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking, foughttheir way across the river to safety, although at the costof half their number and all their equipment. They as-sumed the Soviets would not attack again, with the springapproaching, but on 3 March the Soviet Ukrainian Frontwent over to the oensive. Having already isolated theCrimea by severing the Perekop isthmus, Malinovskysforces advanced across the mud to the Romanian border,not stopping on the river Prut.One nal move in the south completed the 194344 cam-paigning season, which had wrapped up a Soviet ad-vance of over 500 miles. In March, 20 German divisionsof Generaloberst Hans-Valentin Hube's 1st Panzer Armywere encircled in what was to be known as Hubes Pocketnear Kamenets-Podolskiy. After two weeks of heavyghting, the 1st Panzer managed to escape the pocket,suering only light to moderate casualties. At this point,Hitler sacked several prominent generals, Manstein in-cluded. In April, the Red Army took back Odessa, fol-lowed by 4th Ukrainian Fronts campaign to restore con-trol over the Crimea, which culminated in the capture ofSevastopol on 10 May.Along Army Group Centres front, August 1943 saw thisforce pushed back from the Hagen line slowly, cedingcomparatively little territory, but the loss of Bryansk, andmore importantly Smolensk, on 25 September cost the

12 4 CONDUCT OF OPERATIONS

Soviet advances from 1 August 1943 to 31 December 1944:to 1 December 1943to 30 April 1944to 19 August 1944to 31 December 1944

Wehrmacht the keystone of the entire German defensivesystem. The 4th and 9th armies and 3rd Panzer Armystill held their own east of the upper Dnieper, stiing So-viet attempts to reach Vitebsk. On Army Group Northsfront, there was barely any ghting at all until January1944, when out of nowhere Volkhov and Second BalticFronts struck. In a lightning campaign, the Germans werepushed back from Leningrad and Novgorod was capturedby Soviet forces. After a 75-mile advance in January andFebruary, the Leningrad Front had reached the bordersof Estonia. To Stalin, the Baltic Sea seemed the quick-est way to take the battles to the German territory in EastPrussia and seize control of Finland.[57] The LeningradFront's oensives towards Tallinn, a main Baltic port,were stopped in February 1944. The German army groupNarwa included Estonian conscripts, defending the re-establishment of Estonian independence.[58][59]

4.8 Summer 1944

Main articles: Crimean Oensive (1944), OperationBagration, LvovSandomierz Oensive, Battle of Tan-nenberg Line, Warsaw Uprising, Slovak National Upris-ing, Battle of Romania (1944), Battle of Debrecen andVyborgPetrozavodsk OensiveWehrmacht planners were convinced that the Sovietswould attack again in the south, where the front wasfty miles from Lviv and oered the most direct routeto Berlin. Accordingly, they stripped troops from ArmyGroup Centre, whose front still protruded deep into theSoviet Union. The Germans had transferred some unitsto France to counter the invasion of Normandy twoweeks before. The Belorussian Oensive (codenamedOperation Bagration), which began on 22 June 1944, wasa massive Soviet attack, consisting of four Soviet armygroups totaling over 120 divisions that smashed into a

The Red Army is greeted in Bucharest, August 1944

Soviet and Polish Armia Krajowa soldiers in Vilnius, July 1944

thinly held German line. They focused their massive at-tacks on Army Group Centre, not Army Group NorthUkraine as the Germans had originally expected. Morethan 2.3 million Soviet troops went into action againstGerman Army Group Centre, which boasted a strengthof fewer than 800,000 men. At the points of attack,the numerical and quality advantages of the Soviets wereoverwhelming: the Red Army achieved a ratio of ten toone in tanks and seven to one in aircraft over their en-emy. The Germans crumbled. The capital of Belarus,Minsk, was taken on 3 July, trapping some 100,000 Ger-mans. Ten days later the Red Army reached the prewarPolish border. Bagration was by any measure, one of thelargest single operations of the war. By the end of August1944, it had cost the Germans ~400,000 dead, wounded,missing and sick, from whom 160,000 were captured, aswell as 2,000 tanks and 57,000 other vehicles. In the op-eration, the Red Army lost ~180,000 dead and missing(765,815 in total, including wounded and sick plus 5,073Poles),[60] as well as 2,957 tanks and assault guns. Theoensive at Estonia claimed another 480,000 Soviet sol-diers, 100,000 of them classed as dead.[61][62]

The neighbouring LvovSandomierz operation waslaunched on 17 July 1944, rapidly routing the Germanforces in Western Ukraine. Lviv itself was occupiedagain by the Soviets on 26 July, the rst time being inSeptember 1939 during the NaziSoviet alliance and

4.9 Autumn 1944 13

joint invasion of Poland. This time, the city was retakenby the 1st Ukrainian Front, a Soviet force, relativelyeasily. Ukrainian hopes of independence were squashedamidst the overwhelming force of the Soviets, much likein the Baltic States. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army,UPA, would continue waging a guerrilla war against theSoviets well into the 1950s. The Soviet advance in thesouth continued into Romania and, following a coupagainst the Axis-allied government of Romania on 23August, the Red Army occupied Bucharest on 31 August.In Moscow on 12 September, Romania and the SovietUnion signed an armistice on terms Moscow virtuallydictated. The Romanian surrender tore a hole in thesouthern German Eastern Front causing the inevitableloss of the whole of the Balkans.

Soviet soldiers advance through the streets of Jelgava; summer1944

The rapid progress of Operation Bagration threatenedto cut o and isolate the German units of ArmyGroup North bitterly resisting the Soviet advance towardsTallinn. In a ferocious attack at the Sinimed Hills, Esto-nia, the Soviet Leningrad Front failed to break throughthe defence of the smaller, well-fortied army detach-ment Narwa in terrain not suitable for large-scale op-erations.[63][64]

On the Karelian Isthmus, the Soviets launched a massiveattack against the Finnish lines on 9 June 1944, (coor-dinated with the Allied Invasion of Normandy). Threearmies were pitted there against the Finns, among themseveral experienced guards rie formations. The attackbreached the Finnish front line of defence in Valkeasaarion 10 June and the Finnish forces retreated to their sec-ondary defence line, the VT-line. The Soviet attack wassupported by a heavy artillery barrage, air bombardmentsand armoured forces. The VT-line was breached on 14June and after a failed counterattack in Kuuterselk bythe Finnish armoured division, the Finnish defense had tobe pulled back to the VKT-line. After heavy ghting inthe battles of Tali-Ihantala and Ilomantsi, Finnish troopsnally managed to halt the Soviet attack.In Poland, as the Red Army approached, the Polish HomeArmy (AK) launched Operation Tempest. During the

Warsaw Uprising, the Soviet Army halted at the VistulaRiver, unable or unwilling to come to the aid of the Pol-ish resistance. An attempt by the communist controlled1st Polish Army to relieve the city was unsupported bythe Red Army and was thrown back in September withheavy losses.In Slovakia, the Slovak National Uprising started as anarmed struggle between German Wehrmacht forces andrebel Slovak troops between August and October 1944.It was centered at Bansk Bystrica.

4.9 Autumn 1944

Over three million German and axis personnel were awarded theEastern Front Medal for service during 15 November 1941 15April 1942 from its creation on 26 May 1942 until 4 Septem-ber 1944. Soon it was nicknamed as the Gefriereischorden frozen meat-medal.[65]

Main articles: Baltic Oensive (1944), Belgrade Oen-sive and Budapest Oensive

On 8 September 1944 the Red Army began an attack onthe Dukla Pass on the SlovakPolish border. Twomonthslater, the Soviets won the battle and entered Slovakia.The toll was high: 20,000 Red Army soldiers died, plusseveral thousand Germans, Slovaks and Czechs.

14 4 CONDUCT OF OPERATIONS

Under the pressure of the Soviet Baltic Oensive, theGerman Army Group North were withdrawn to ght inthe sieges of Saaremaa, Courland and Memel.

4.10 JanuaryMarch 1945

Soviet advances from 1 January 1945 to 11 May 1945:to 30 March 1945to 11 May 1945

Main articles: VistulaOder Oensive (JanuaryFebruary) with the follow-up East Pomeranian Oensiveand Silesian Oensives (FebruaryApril), East Prus-sian Oensive (JanuaryApril), Vienna Oensive(MarchApril)The Soviet Union nally entered Warsaw on 17 January1945, after the city was destroyed and abandoned by theGermans. Over three days, on a broad front incorporat-ing four army fronts, the Red Army began an oensiveacross the Narew River and from Warsaw. The Sovietsoutnumbered the Germans on average by ve~six to onein troops, six to one in artillery, six to one in tanks andfour to one in self-propelled artillery. After four days theRed Army broke out and started moving thirty to fortykilometres a day, taking the Baltic states, Danzig, EastPrussia, Pozna, and drawing up on a line sixty kilome-tres east of Berlin along the River Oder. During the fullcourse of the VistulaOder operation (23 days), the RedArmy forces sustained 194,191 total casualties (killed,wounded and missing) and lost 1,267 tanks and assaultguns.On 25 January 1945, Hitler renamed three army groups.Army Group North became Army Group Courland;Army Group Centre became Army Group North andArmy Group A became Army Group Centre. ArmyGroup North (old Army Group Centre) was driven intoan ever smaller pocket around Knigsberg in East Prussia.A limited counter-attack (codenamed Operation Sol-stice) by the newly created Army Group Vistula, un-der the command of Reichsfhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler,had failed by 24 February, and the Soviets drove on to

German refugees from East Prussia, February 1945

Pomerania and cleared the right bank of the Oder River.In the south, three German attempts to relieve the en-circled Budapest failed and the city fell on 13 Februaryto the Soviets. On 6 March, the Germans again counter-attacked; Hitler insisting on the impossible task of regain-ing the Danube River. By 16 March the attack had failedand the Red Army counterattacked the same day. On 30March they entered Austria and captured Vienna on 13April.OKW claim German losses of 77,000 killed, 334,000wounded and 292,000 missing, with a total of 703,000men, on the Eastern Front during January and February1945.[66]

On 9 April 1945, Knigsberg in East Prussia nally fell tothe Red Army, although the shattered remnants of ArmyGroup Centre continued to resist on the Vistula Spit andHel Peninsula until the end of the war in Europe. TheEast Prussian operation, though often overshadowed bythe VistulaOder operation and the later battle for Berlin,was in fact one of the largest and costliest operationsfought by the Red Army throughout the war. Duringthe period it lasted (13 January 25 April), it cost theRed Army 584,788 casualties, and 3,525 tanks and as-sault guns.The fall of Knigsberg allowed Stavka to free up GeneralKonstantin Rokossovsky's 2nd Belorussian Front (2BF)tomove west to the east bank of the Oder. During the rsttwo weeks of April, the Soviets performed their fastestfront redeployment of the war. General Georgy Zhukovconcentrated his 1st Belorussian Front (1BF), which hadbeen deployed along the Oder river from Frankfurt in thesouth to the Baltic, into an area in front of the SeelowHeights. The 2BF moved into the positions being va-cated by the 1BF north of the Seelow Heights. Whilethis redeployment was in progress gaps were left in thelines and the remnants of the German 2nd Army, whichhad been bottled up in a pocket near Danzig, managed toescape across the Oder. To the south General Ivan Konevshifted the main weight of the 1st Ukrainian Front (1UF)out of Upper Silesia north-west to the Neisse River.[67]The three Soviet fronts had altogether some 2.5 million

4.11 End of the War: AprilMay 1945 15

men (including 78,556 soldiers of the 1st Polish Army);6,250 tanks; 7,500 aircraft; 41,600 artillery pieces andmortars; 3,255 truck-mounted Katyusha rocket launch-ers, (nicknamed Stalin Organs); and 95,383 motor ve-hicles, many of which were manufactured in the USA.[67]

4.11 End of the War: AprilMay 1945Main articles: Battle of Berlin, Battle of Halbe, PragueOensive

14,933,000 Soviet and Soviet-allied personnel were awarded theMedal for Victory over Germany from 9 May 1945

All that was left for the Soviets to do was to launch anoensive to capture central Germany (which would even-tually become East Germany after the war). The Sovietoensive had two objectives. Because of Stalins suspi-cions about the intentions of the Western Allies to handover territory occupied by them in the post-war Sovietzone of occupation, the oensive was to be on a broadfront and was to move as rapidly as possible to the west,to meet theWestern Allies as far west as possible. But theoverriding objective was to capture Berlin. The two werecomplementary because possession of the zone could not

A ag of the Soviet 150th Rie Division raised over the Reichstag(the Victory Banner)

be won quickly unless Berlin was taken. Another consid-eration was that Berlin itself held strategic assets, includ-ing Adolf Hitler and part of the German atomic bombprogram.[68]

The oensive to capture central Germany and Berlinstarted on 16 April with an assault on the German frontlines on the Oder and Neisse rivers. After several daysof heavy ghting the Soviet 1BF and 1UF punched holesthrough the German front line and were fanning outacross central Germany. By 24 April, elements of the1BF and 1UF had completed the encirclement of theGerman capital and the Battle of Berlin entered its nalstages. On 25 April the 2BF broke through the German3rd Panzer Armys line south of Stettin. They were nowfree to move west towards the British 21st Army Groupand north towards the Baltic port of Stralsund. The 58thGuards Rie Division of the 5th Guards Army made con-tact with the US 69th Infantry Division of the First Armynear Torgau, Germany at the Elbe river.[69][70]

Soviet soldiers celebrating the surrender of the German forces inBerlin, 2 May 1945

On 29 and 30 April, as the Soviet forces fought their wayinto the centre of Berlin, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braunand then committed suicide by taking cyanide and shoot-ing himself. Helmuth Weidling, defence commandant ofBerlin, surrendered the city to the Soviets on 2 May.[71]Altogether, the Berlin operation (16 April 2 May) costthe Red Army 361,367 casualties (dead, wounded, miss-ing and sick) and 1,997 tanks and assault guns. German

16 5 RESULTS

losses in this period of the war remain impossible to de-termine with any reliability.[72]

At 02:41 on the morning of 7May 1945, at SHAEF head-quarters, German Chief-of-Sta General Alfred Jodlsigned the unconditional surrender documents for all Ger-man forces to the Allies at Reims in France. It includedthe phrase All forces under German control to cease ac-tive operations at 2301 hours Central European time on 8May 1945. The next day shortly before midnight, FieldMarshal Wilhelm Keitel repeated the signing in Berlin atZhukovs headquarters. The war in Europe was over.[73]

In the Soviet Union the end of the war is considered tobe 9 May, when the surrender took eect Moscow time.This date is celebrated as a national holiday Victory Day in Russia (as part of a two-day 89 May holiday) andsome other post-Soviet countries. The ceremonial Vic-tory parade was held in Moscow on 24 June.The German Army Group Centre initially refused to sur-render and continued to ght in Czechoslovakia untilabout 11 May.[74]

A small German garrison on the Danish island of Born-holm refused to surrender until after being bombed andinvaded by the Soviets. The island was returned to theDanish government four months later.

4.12 Soviet Far East: August 1945Main article: Soviet invasion of Manchuria (1945)

The Soviet invasion of Manchuria began on 8 August1945, with an assault on the Japanese puppet states ofManchukuo and neighbouring Mengjiang; the greater of-fensive would eventually include northern Korea, south-ern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. It marked the initialand only military action of the Soviet Union against theEmpire of Japan; at the Yalta Conference, it had agreedto Allied pleas to terminate the neutrality pact with Japanand enter the Second World Wars Pacic theatre withinthree months after the end of the war in Europe. Whilenot a part of the Eastern Front operations, it is includedhere because the commanders and much of the forcesused by the Red Army, came from the European Theatreof operations and beneted from the experience gainedthere. In many ways this was a 'perfect' operation, deliv-ered with the skill gained during the bitter ghting withthe Wehrmacht and Luftwae over four years.[75]

5 ResultsThe Eastern Front was the largest and bloodiest theatre ofWorld War II. It is generally accepted as being the dead-liest conict in human history, with over 30 million killedas a result.[7] The German armed forces suered 80%of its military deaths in the Eastern Front.[76] It involved

more land combat than all other World War II theatrescombined. The distinctly brutal nature of warfare on theEastern Front was exemplied by an often willful disre-gard for human life by both sides. It was also reected inthe ideological premise for the war, which also saw a mo-mentous clash between two directly opposed ideologies.

Citizens of Leningrad during the 872-day siege, in which aboutone million civilians died

Aside from the ideological conict, the mindframe ofthe leaders of Germany and the Soviet Union, Hitler andStalin respectively, contributed to the escalation of terrorand murder on an unprecedented scale. Stalin and Hitlerboth disregarded human life in order to achieve their goalof victory. This included the terrorization of their ownpeople, as well as mass deportations of entire populations.All these factors resulted in tremendous brutality bothto combatants and civilians that found no parallel on theWestern Front. According to Time magazine: By mea-sure of manpower, duration, territorial reach and casual-ties, the Eastern Front was as much as four times the scaleof the conict on the Western Front that opened withthe Normandy invasion.[77] Conversely, George Mar-shall calculated that without the Eastern Front, the UnitedStates would have had to double the number of its soldierson the Western Front.[78]

The war inicted huge losses and suering upon thecivilian populations of the aected countries. Behindthe front lines, atrocities against civilians in German-occupied areas were routine, including the Holocaust.German and German-allied forces treated civilian pop-ulations with exceptional brutality, massacring whole vil-lage populations and routinely killing civilian hostages.Both sides practiced widespread scorched earth tactics,but the loss of civilian lives in the case of Germany wasincomparably smaller than that of the Soviet Union, inwhich at least 20 million civilians were killed. Accordingto Georey A. Hosking, The full demographic loss tothe Soviet peoples was even greater: since a high propor-tion of those killed were young men of child-begettingage, the postwar Soviet population was 45 to 50 millionsmaller than post-1939 projections would have led oneto expect.[79] When the Red Army invaded Germany in1944, many German civilians suered from reprisals byRed Army soldiers (see Soviet war crimes). After thewar, following the Yalta conference agreements between

6.1 Adolf Hitler 17

the Allies, the German populations of East Prussia andSilesia were displaced to the west of the OderNeisseline, in what became one of the largest forced migrationsof people in world history.The Soviet Union came out of World War II militarilyvictorious but economically and structurally devastated.Much of the combat took place in or close by popu-lated areas, the actions of both sides contributed to mas-sive loss of civilian life and tremendous material damage.According to a summary, presented by Lieutenant Gen-eral Roman Rudenko at the International Military Tri-bunal in Nuremberg, the property damage in the SovietUnion inicted by the Axis invasion was estimated to avalue of 679 billion rubles. The largest number of civiliandeaths in a single city was 1.2 million citizens dead dur-ing the Siege of Leningrad. The combined damage con-sisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,710 citiesand towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, 2,508 church build-ings, 31,850 industrial establishments, 40,000 miles ofrailroad, 4,100 railroad stations, 40,000 hospitals, 84,000schools, and 43,000 public libraries; leaving 25 millionhomeless. Seven million horses, 17 million cattle, 20million pigs, 27 million sheep were also slaughtered ordriven o.[80] Wild fauna were also aected. Wolves andfoxes eeing westward from the killing zone, as the Sovietarmy advanced 194345, were responsible for a rabiesepidemic which spread slowly westwards, reaching thecoast of the English Channel by 1968.[81]

6 LeadershipThe Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were both ideolog-ically driven states (Soviet communism and Nazism re-spectively), in which the leader had near-absolute power.The character of the war was thus determined by the lead-ers and their ideology to a much greater extent than in anyother theatre of World War II.

6.1 Adolf Hitler

Main article: Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler exercised a tight control over the Germanwar-eort, spending much of his time in his commandbunkers (most notably at Rastenburg in East Prussia, atVinnitsa in Ukraine, and under the garden of the ReichChancellery in Berlin). At crucial periods in the war heheld daily situation conferences at which he used his re-markable talent for public speaking to overwhelm oppo-sition from his generals and the OKW sta with rhetoric.In part because of the unexpected success of the Battle ofFrance (despite the warnings of the professional military)Hitler believed himself a military genius, with a graspof the total war-eort that eluded his generals. In Au-gust 1941 when Walther von Brauchitsch (commander-in-chief of theWehrmacht) and Fedor von Bock were ap-

Adolf Hitler led Germany during World War II

pealing for an attack on Moscow, Hitler instead orderedthe encirclement and capture of Ukraine, in order to ac-quire the farmland, industry, and natural resources of thatcountry. Some historians like Bevin Alexander in HowHitler Could Have Won regard this decision as a missedopportunity to win the war.In the winter of 19411942 Hitler believed that his ob-stinate refusal to allow the German armies to retreat hadsaved Army Group Centre from collapse. He later toldErhard Milch:

Hitler with generals Friedrich Paulus and Fedor von Bock inPoltawa, German-occupied Ukraine, June 1942

I had to act ruthlessly. I had to send evenmy closest generals packing, two army gen-erals, for example I could only tell thesegentlemen, 'Get yourself back to Germany as

18 6 LEADERSHIP

rapidly as you can but leave the army in mycharge. And the army is staying at the front.'

The success of this hedgehog defence outsideMoscow ledHitler to insist on the holding of territory when it made nomilitary sense, and to sack generals who retreated with-out orders. Ocers with initiative were replaced withyes-men or fanatical Nazis. The disastrous encirclementslater in the war at Stalingrad, Korsun and many otherplaces were the direct result of Hitlers orders. Thisidea of holding territory led to another failed plan, dubbed"Heaven-boundMissions", which involved fortifying eventhe most unimportant or insignicant of cities and theholding of these fortresses at all costs. Many divisionsbecame cut o in fortress cities, or wasted uselessly insecondary theatres, because Hitler would not sanction re-treat or voluntarily abandon any of his conquests.Frustration at Hitlers leadership of the war was one ofthe factors in the attempted coup d'etat of 1944, but af-ter the failure of the 20 July Plot Hitler considered thearmy and its ocer corps suspect and came to rely on theSchutzstael (SS) and Nazi party members to prosecutethe war.Hitlers direction of the war was disastrous for the Ger-man Army, though the skill, loyalty, professionalism andendurance of ocers and soldiers enabled him to keepGermany ghting to the end. F. W. Winterbotham wroteof Hitlers signal to Gerd von Rundstedt to continue theattack to the west during the Battle of the Bulge:

From experience we had learned that whenHitler started refusing to do what the generalsrecommended, things started to go wrong, andthis was to be no exception.

6.2 Joseph Stalin

Main article: Joseph StalinJoseph Stalin bore the greatest responsibility for some ofthe disasters at the beginning of the war (for example, theBattle of Kiev (1941)), but equally deserves praise for thesubsequent success of the Soviet Army, which dependedon the unprecedentedly rapid industrialization of the So-viet Union, which Stalins internal policy had made therst priority throughout the 1930s. Stalins Great Purgeof the Red Army in the late 1930s involved the legal pros-ecution of many of the senior command, many of whomthe courts convicted and sentenced to death or to impris-onment. The executed included Mikhail Tukhachevsky,a proponent of armoured blitzkrieg. Stalin promotedsome obscurantists like Grigory Kulik who opposed themechanization of the army and the production of tanks,but on the other hand purged the older commanders whohad held their positions since the Russian Civil War of19171922, and who had experience, but were deemedpolitically unreliable. This opened up their places to the

Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union during World War II

promotion of many younger ocers that Stalin and theNKVD regarded as in line with Stalinist politics. Manyof these newly promoted commanders proved terribly in-experienced, but some later became very successful. So-viet tank output remained the largest in the world. Sincethe foundation of the Red Army in 1918, political distrustof the military had led to a system of dual command,with every commander paired with a political commis-sar, a member of the Communist Party of the SovietUnion. Larger units had military councils consisting ofthe commander, commissar and chief of sta, who en-sured the loyalty of the commanding ocer and imple-mented Party orders.Following the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, of theBaltic states and of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovinain 19391940, Stalin insisted on the occupation of everyfold of the newly Sovietized territories; this move west-ward positioned troops far from their depots, in salientsthat left them vulnerable to encirclement. There was anassumption that, in the event of a German invasion, theRed Army would take the strategic oensive and ght anywar mostly outside the borders of the Soviet Union; thusfew plans were made for strategic defensive operations.However, fortications were built. As tension heightenedin spring 1941, Stalin desperately tried not to give Hitlerany provocation that Berlin could use as an excuse fora German attack; this caused him to refuse to allow themilitary to go on the alert even as German troops gath-ered on the borders and German reconnaissance planesoverew installations. This refusal to take the necessaryaction was instrumental in the destruction of major por-tions of the Red Air Force, lined up on its airelds, in therst days of the German-Soviet war.

19

Stalins insistence on repeated counterattacks without ad-equate preparation led to the loss of almost the whole ofthe Red Armys tank corps in 1941 many tanks simplyran out of fuel on their way to the battleeld through faultyplanning or ignorance of the location of fuel dumps.While some regard this oensive strategy as an argumentfor Soviet aggressive strategic plans, the oensive opera-tional planning was not, by itself, evidence of any aggres-sive foreign-policy intent.Unlike Hitler, Stalin was able to learn lessons and im-prove his conduct of the war. He gradually came to re-alize the dangers of inadequate preparation and built upa competent command and control organization based onthe Stavka. Incompetent commanders were gradually butruthlessly weeded out.At the crisis of the war, in the autumn of 1942, Stalinmade many concessions to the army: the government re-stored unitary command by removing the Commissarsfrom the chain of command. Under order 25 of 15 Jan-uary 1943, shoulderboards were introduced for all ranks;this represented a signicant symbolic step, since shoul-derboards had connotations as a symbol of the old rgimeafter the Russian Revolution of 1917. Beginning in au-tumn 1941, units that had proved themselves by supe-rior performance in combat were given the traditionalGuards title. But these concessions were combinedwith ruthless discipline: Order No. 227, issued on 28July 1942, threatened commanders who retreated with-out orders with punishment by court-martial. Infractionsby military and politruks were punished with transferralto penal battalions and penal companies, and the NKVD'sbarrier troops would shoot soldiers who ed.As it became clear that the Soviet Union would win thewar, Stalin ensured that propaganda always mentioned hisleadership of the war; he sidelined the victorious gener-als and never allowed them to develop into political ri-vals. After the war the Soviets once again purged the RedArmy (though not as brutally as in the 1930s): many suc-cessful ocers were demoted to unimportant positions(including Zhukov, Malinovsky and Koniev).

7 Repression in occupied states

The enormous territorial gains of 1941 presented Ger-many with vast areas to pacify and administer. For themajority of people of the Soviet Union, the Nazi inva-sion was viewed as a brutal act of unprovoked aggression.While it is important to note that not all parts of Sovietsociety viewed the German advance in this way, the ma-jority of the Soviet population viewed German forces asoccupiers. In areas such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania(which had been annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940)theWehrmacht was tolerated by a relatively more signif-icant part of the native population. This was particularlytrue for the recently rejoined to the Soviet Union territo-

ries of Western Ukraine, where the anti-Polish and anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist underground falsely hopedto establish the independent state, relying on Germanarmed force. However, Soviet society as a whole washostile to the invading Nazis from the very start. Thenascent national liberation movements among Ukrainiansand Cossacks, and others were viewed by Hitler with sus-picion; some, (especially those from the Baltic States),were co-opted into the Axis armies and others brutallysuppressed. None of the conquered territories gained anymeasure of self-rule. Instead, the Nazi ideologues sawthe future of the East as one of settlement by Germancolonists, with the natives killed, expelled, or reduced toslave labour. The cruel and brutally inhumane treatmentof Soviet civilians, women, children and elderly, the dailybombings of civilian cities and towns, Nazi pillaging ofSoviet villages and hamlets and unprecedented harsh pun-ishment and treatment of civilians in general were someof the primary reasons for Soviet resistance to Nazi Ger-manys invasion. Indeed, the Soviets viewed Germanysinvasion as an act of aggression and an attempt to conquerand enslave the local population.Regions closer to the front were managed by militarypowers of the region, in other areas such as the Balticstates annexed by the USSR in 1940, Reichscommissari-ats were established. As a rule, the maximum in loot wasextracted. In September 1941, Erich Koch was appointedto the Ukrainian Commissariat. His opening speech wasclear about German policy: I am known as a brutal dog... Our job is to suck from Ukraine all the goods we canget hold of ... I am expecting from you the utmost severitytowards the native population.

Einsatzgruppe Amembers shoot Jews on the outskirts of Kaunas,19411942

Atrocities against the Jewish population in the conqueredareas began almost immediately, with the dispatch ofEinsatzgruppen (task groups) to round up Jews and shootthem.[82]

The massacres of Jews and other ethnic minorities wereonly a part of the deaths from the Nazi occupation. Manyhundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians were executed,and millions more died from starvation as the Germansrequisitioned food for their armies and fodder for their

20 7 REPRESSION IN OCCUPIED STATES

draft horses. As they retreated from Ukraine and Belarusin 194344, the German occupiers systematically applieda scorched earth policy, burning towns and cities, destroy-ing infrastructure, and leaving civilians to starve or dieof exposure.[83] In many towns, the battles were foughtwithin towns and cities with trapped civilians caught inthe middle. Estimates of total civilian dead in the SovietUnion in the war range from seven million (EncyclopdiaBritannica) to seventeen million (Richard Overy).

Soviet partisans hanged by German forces in January 1943

The Nazi ideology and the maltreatment of the localpopulation and Soviet POWs encouraged partisans ght-ing behind the front, it motivated even anti-communistsor non-Russian nationalists to ally with the Soviets andgreatly delayed the formation of German allied divisionsconsisting of Soviet POWs (see Vlasov army). These re-sults and missed opportunities contributed to the defeatof theWehrmacht.Vadim Erlikman has detailed Soviet losses totaling 26.5million war related deaths. Military losses of 10.6 mil-lion include six million killed or missing in action and3.6 million POW dead, plus 400,000 paramilitary andSoviet partisan losses. Civilian deaths totaled 15.9 mil-lion, which included 1.5 million from military actions;7.1 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals; 1.8million deported to Germany for forced labor; and 5.5million famine and disease deaths. Additional faminedeaths, which totaled one million during 194647, arenot included here. Soviet repressions seems also to benot included. These losses are for the entire territory ofthe USSR including territories annexed in 193940.Belarus lost a quarter of its pre-war population, includ-ing practically all its intellectual elite. Following bloodyencirclement battles, all of the present-day Belarus ter-ritory was occupied by the Germans by the end of Au-gust 1941. The Nazis imposed a brutal regime, deport-ing some 380,000 young people for slave labour, andkilling hundreds of thousands (civilians) more.[84] Morethan 600 villages like Khatyn were burned with their en-tire population.[85] More than 209 cities and towns (outof 270 total) and 9,000 villages were destroyed. Himmlerpronounced a plan according to which 34 of the Belaru-sian population was designated for eradication and 14of the racially 'cleaner' population (blue eyes, light hair)

Homeless Russian children in occupied territory (about 1942)

would be allowed to serve Germans as slaves.Some recent reports raise the number of Belarusians whoperished in the war to 3million 650 thousand people, un-like the former 2.2 million. That is to say not every fourthinhabitant but almost 40% of the pre-war Belarusian pop-ulation perished (considering the present-day borders ofBelarus).[86]

Mass grave of Soviet POWs, killed by Germans in prisoner-of-war camp in Dblin, German-occupied Poland

Sixty percent of Soviet POWs died during the war. By itsend, large numbers of Soviet POWs, forced laborers andNazi collaborators (including those who were forcefully

21

repatriated by the Western Allies) went to special NKVDltration camps. By 1946, 80 per cent of civilians and20 per cent of PoWs were freed, others were re-drafted,or sent to labor battalions. Two per cent of civilians and15 per cent of the PoWs were sent to the Gulag.[87][88]

The ocial Polish government report of war losses pre-pared in 1947 reported 6,028,000 victims out of a pop-ulation of 27,007,000 ethnic Poles and Jews; this reportexcluded ethnic Ukrainian and Belarusian losses.Although the Soviet Union had not signed the GenevaConvention (1929), it is generally accepted that it con-sidered itself bound by the provisions of the Hague con-vention[89] A month after the German invasion in 1941,an oer was made for a reciprocal adherence to Hagueconvention. This 'note' was left unanswered by Third Re-ich ocials.[90]

Soviet repressions also contributed into the EasternFronts death toll. Mass repression occurred in the oc-cupied portions of Poland as well as in the Baltic statesand Bessarabia. Immediately after the start of the Ger-man invasion, the NKVD massacred large numbers ofinmates in most of their prisons in Western Belarus andWestern Ukraine, while the remainder was to be evac-uated in death marches.[91] Most of them were politicalprisoners, imprisoned and executed without trial.[92]

8 Industrial outputThe Soviet victory owed a great deal to the ability of itswar industry to outperform the German economy, despitethe enormous loss of population and land. Stalins ve-year plans of the 1930s had resulted in the industrializa-tion of the Urals and central Asia. In 1941, the trains thatshipped troops to the front were used to evacuate thou-sands of factories from Belarus and Ukraine to safe areasfar from the front lines. Once these facilities were re-assembled east of the Urals, production could be resumedwithout fear of German bombing.As the Soviet Unions manpower reserves ran low from1943 onwards, the great Soviet oensives had to dependmore on equipment and less on the expenditure of lives.The increases in production of materiel were achieved atthe expense of civilian living standards the most thor-ough application of the principle of total war and withthe help of Lend-Lease supplies from the United King-dom and the United States. The Germans, on the otherhand, could rely on a large slave workforce from the con-quered countries and Soviet POWs.Although Germany produced more raw materials, it didnot equal the Soviets in the quantity of military produc-tion (in 1943, the Soviet Union manufactured 24,089tanks to Germanys 19,800). The Soviets incremen-tally upgraded existing designs, and simplied and renedmanufacturing processes to increase production. Mean-while, German industry engineered more advanced but

complex designs such as the Panther tank, the Tiger II orthe Elefant from a 1943 decision for quality over quan-tity.Two-thirds of Germanys iron ore, much needed for itsmilitary production, came from Sweden. Soviet produc-tion and upkeep was assisted by the Lend-Lease programfrom the United States and the United Kingdom. In thecourse of the war the US supplied $11 billion of materielthrough Lend-Lease. This included 400,000 transport ve-hicles, 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks),11,400 aircraft and 1.75 million tons of food.[98] Soonafter the German attack, the British supplied a unit, No.151 Wing RAF, to defend Murmansk and to train Sovietpilots on British Hurricane ghters. After the RAF per-sonnel left, the British continued to supply aircraft: 3,000more Hurricanes and 4,000 other aircraft during the war.Five thousand tanks were provided by the British andCanada. As Soviet tank production increased these for-eign tanks were used on less important fronts such as theCaucasus. Total British supplies were about four milliontons.[99] Germany on the other hand had the resourcesof conquered Europe at its disposal; those numbers arehowever not included into the tables above, such as pro-duction in France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark,and so on.After the defeat at Stalingrad, Germany geared com-pletely towards a war economy, as expounded in a speechgiven by Joseph Goebbels, (the Nazi propaganda minis-ter), in the Berlin Sportpalast, increasing production insubsequent years under Albert Speer's (the Reich arma-ments minister) astute direction, despite the intensifyingAllied bombing campaign.

9 Casualties

World War II military deaths in Europe by front and by year

Further information: World War II casualties, WorldWar II casualties of the Soviet Union and German

22 10 SEE ALSO

casualties in World War II

The ghting involved millions of Axis and Soviet troopsalong the broadest land front in military history. It wasby far the deadliest single theatre of war in World WarII, with over 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side(out of which 3.6 million died in German captivity[100]);Axis military deaths were over 5 million (out of which800,000 died in Soviet captivity).[101] Included in this g-ure of Axis losses is the majority of the 2 million Germanmilitary personnel listed as missing or unaccounted forafter the war. Rdiger Overmans states that it seems en-tirely plausible, while not provable, that one half of thesemenwere killed in action and the other half dead in Sovietcustody.[102]

Estimated civilian deaths range from about 14 to 17million. Over 11.4 million Soviet civilians within pre-1939 borders were killed, and another estimated 3.5 mil-lion civilians were killed in the annexed territories.[103]The Nazis exterminated one to two million SovietJews (including the annexed territories) as part of theHolocaust.[104] Soviet and Russian historiography oftenuses the term irretrievable casualties. According to theNarkomat of Defence order ( 023, 4 February 1944),the irretrievable casualties include killed, missing, thosewho died due to war-time or subsequent wounds, mal-adies and chilblains and those who were captured.The huge death toll was attributed to several factors, in-cluding brutal mistreatment of POWs and captured par-tisans, large deciency of food and medical supplies inSoviet territories, multiple atrocities by the Germans andthe Soviets against the civilian population and each other.The multiple battles, and most of all, the use of scorchedearth tactics destroyed agricultural land, infrastructure,and whole towns, leaving much of the population home-less and without food.Polish Armed Forces in the East, initially consisting ofPoles from Eastern Poland or otherwise in Soviet Unionin 19391941, began ghting alongside the Red Armyin 1943, and grew steadily as more Polish territory wasliberated from the Nazis in 19441945.When the Axis countries of Central Europe were occu-pied by the Soviets, they were forced to change sides anddeclare war on Germany. (see Allied Commissions).Some Soviet citizens would side with the Germans andjoin Andrey Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army. Mostof those who joined were Russian POWs. These menwere primarily used in the Eastern Front but some wereassigned to guard the beaches of Normandy. The othermain group of men joining the German army were citi-zens of the Baltic countries annexed by the Soviet Unionin 1940 or from Western Ukraine. They fought in theirown Waen-SS units.Most Axis POWs were released from captivity severalyears after the war, but Axis troops who captured Red

Soviets bury their fallen, July 1944

Dead Soviet soldiers in Cholm, January 1942

Army soldiers frequently shot them in the eld or shippedthem to concentration camps to die.[107] Hitlers notoriousCommissar Order called for Soviet political commissars,who were responsible for ensuring that Red Army unitsremained politically reliable, to be summarily shot whenidentied amongst captured troops.

10 See also Timeline of the Eastern Front of World War II Historiography of World War II

23

Captured German equipment in Soviet use on theEastern front

Horses in World War II Italian war in Soviet Union, 19411943

The Italian Alpini infantry corps in Russia List of military operations on the Eastern Front ofWorld War II

Operation Silberfuchs Axis attack on the So-viet Arctic

Manchurian Strategic Oensive Operation the So-viet campaign against Japan in Manchuria, InnerMongolia, Korea, Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands

Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany Belgium in World War II Bulgaria during World War II Estonia in World War II Finland during World War II France in World War II Hungary during World War II Romania during World War II Severity Order The Battle of Russia lm from the Why We Fightpropaganda lm series

Victory Day and Ribbon of Saint George Western Front (World War II) Women in the Russian and Soviet military

11 Notes[1] Germanys allies, in total, provided a signicant num-

ber of troops and material to the front. There were alsonumerous foreign units recruited by Germany, notablythe Spanish Blue Division and the Legion ofFrench Volunteers Against Bolshevism.

[2] Toomas Alatalu. Tuva: A State Reawakens. Soviet Stud-ies, Vol. 44, No. 5 (1992), pp. 881895.

[3] russlandfeldzug.de

[4] Der Rulandfeldzug (in German). Balsi.de.

[5] torweihe.de

[6] WorldWar II: The Eastern Front. TheAtlantic. Septem-ber 18, 2011. Retrieved November 26, 2014.

[7] According to G. I. Krivosheev. (Soviet Casualties andCombat Losses. Greenhill 1997 ISBN 1-85367-280-7), in the Eastern Front, Axis countries and Ger-man co-belligerents sustained 1,468,145 irrecoverablelosses (668,163 KIA/MIA), Germany itself 7,181,100(3,604,800 KIA/MIA), and 579,900 PoWs died in Sovietcaptivity. So the Axis KIA/MIA amounted to 4.8 millionin the East during the period of 19411945. This is morethan a half of all Axis losses (including the Asia/Pacictheatre). The USSR sustained 10.5 million military losses(including PoWs who died in German captivity, accordingto Vadim Erlikman. Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke :spravochnik. Moscow 2004. ISBN 5-93165-107-1), sothe number of military deaths (the USSR and the Axis)amounted to 15 million, far greater than in all otherWorldWar II theatres. According to the same source, total So-viet civilian deaths within post-war borders amounted to15.7 million. The numbers for other Central Europeanand German civilian casualties are not included here

[8] Bellamy 2007, p. xix

[9] W. Churchill: Red Army decided the fate of Germanmilitarism. Source: Correspondence of the Council ofMinisters of the USSRwith the U.S. Presidents and PrimeMinisters of Great Britain during the Great Patriotic Warof 19411945., V. 2. M., 1976, pp. 204