The 'Eastern Front of the
European Theatre of World War II' encompassed the conflict in
central and
eastern Europe from
June 22,
1941 to
May 8,
1945. It was the largest theatre of war in history and was notorious for its unprecedented ferocity, destruction, and immense loss of life. More people fought and died on the Eastern Front than in all other theatres of
World War II combined. It resulted in the destruction of the
Third Reich and the
partition of Germany, and the rise of the
Soviet Union as a military and industrial
superpower.
In all Soviet and the majority of
Russian sources, the conflict is referred to as the 'Great Patriotic War'. Some scholars of the conflict use the term 'Russo-German War', while others use 'Soviet-German War', 'Nazi-Soviet War', 'German-Soviet War', or 'Axis-Soviet War'.
The series of events preceding World War II included the annexation of
Austria (''
Anschluss'') in
1938, the annexation of Czech
Sudetenland in
1938 as a result of the
Munich Agreement followed shortly thereafter by the annexation of the rest of
Czechoslovakia, and subsequently the
Invasion of Poland in
1939 by
Nazi Germany and the resulting third partition of
Poland when the Soviets invaded the eastern regions of the country as outlined in the secret codicil to the August 1939
Soviet-German non-aggression pact, which also paved the way for the
1940 Soviet annexation of the
Baltic States.
This article, however, concentrates on the much larger conflict which was fought from June
1941 to May
1945 in which the two principal
belligerent powers were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Russo-
Finnish Continuation War may be considered the northern flank of the Eastern Front.
Overview
Forces
The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union began on
22 June 1941, when Germany crossed borders, fixed in the
German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, invading the Soviet Union. The war ended on
8 May 1945, when Germany's armed forces
surrendered unconditionally following the
Battle of Berlin and the subsequent defeat of the German army by Soviet forces. Germany was able to call on the manpower of a number of other
Axis Powers—foremost
Romania,
Hungary,
Slovakia,
Croatia, and
Italy—to support them at the front and the subsequently occupied territories. The
anti-Soviet Finland, which had recently been at war with the Soviet Union, also joined the ranks of the Germans. The German forces were also assisted by anti-communist
partisans in places like Western Ukraine, Crimea and the Baltic states. There was even a
Spanish division, sent by Spanish dictator
Francisco Franco to keep his ties to the Axis intact. The Soviet Union had help from partisans in many countries in
Eastern Europe, notably those in Slovakia, Poland,
Bulgaria and
Yugoslavia. In addition the
Polish Armed Forces in the East, particularly the
First and
Second Polish armies, armed and trained by the Soviets, fought alongside the
Red Army at the front.
Free French forces also contributed to the Red Army by formation of
GC3 (''Groupe de Chasse 3'' or 3rd Fighter Group) unit to fulfill the commitment of
Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, who felt important that French servicemen serve in all fronts.
Ideologies
Hitler had argued in his autobiography ''
Mein Kampf'' for the necessity of
Lebensraum, acquiring new territory for German settlement in Eastern Europe. He envisaged settling Germans as a master race in western Russia, while deporting most of the Russians to
Siberia and using the remainder as
slave labour. After
the great purge of the
1930s, Hitler saw the Soviet Union as militarily weak and ripe for conquest: "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."
[1] In the aftermath of the
Battle of Kursk and the resulting dire German military situation, Hitler and Nazi propaganda proclaimed the war to be a German defense of European (Western) Civilization against destruction by the vast "
Bolshevik hordes" that were pouring into Europe.
Stalin's vision also included the occupation of foreign countries: using the occasion of world attention drawn to the
Western Front, he annexed the three
Baltic countries in
1940, thus gaining a ''place d'arme'' in case of a possible war with Hitler-Germany.
Soviet's active participation in the 1939 invasion of Poland should also not be underestimated. Yet, unlike Hitler, Stalin did not have any far-reaching plans of expanding Soviet territory to include Eastern Europe, let alone Germany; Soviet policy might rather be interpreted as the attempt to create a buffer zone between the USSR and Germany before Hitler's attack, which the Soviet Union had all the reasons to consider inevitable.
Results
The Eastern Front was by far the largest and bloodiest
theatre of World War II. It is generally accepted as being the most costly conflict in human history with over 30 million dead as a result. It involved more land combat than all other World War II theatres combined. The distinctly brutal nature of warfare on the Eastern Front was exemplified by an often willful disregard for human life by both sides. It was also reflected in the ideological premise for the war which also saw a momentous clash between two directly opposed and radical ideologies. To hardline Nazis in Berlin, the war against the Soviet Union was one of a struggle of
Fascism against
Communism, and the
Aryan race against the "
inferior"
Slavic race. Hitler referred to it in unique terms, calling it a "war of annihilation", one in which the Soviet Union was to be utterly destroyed and the populations of Eastern Europe and Russia were to be enslaved and exterminated. This would further German expansion and provide for the colonization of Eastern Europe and Western Russia. In addition, Hitler also sought to wipe out the large
Jewish population of Eastern Europe (see
The Holocaust). Aside from the ideological conflict, the mindframe of the leaders of Germany and the Soviet Union,
Hitler and
Stalin respectively, contributed to the escalation of terror and murder on an unprecedented scale. Stalin and Hitler both disregarded human life in order to achieve their goal of victory. This included terrorization of their own people, as well as
mass deportation (planned, in the case of Germany) of entire populations. All these factors resulted in tremendous brutality both to combatants and civilians that found no parallel on the
Western Front.
The war inflicted huge losses and suffering upon the civilian populations of the affected countries. Behind the front lines,
atrocities against civilians in German-occupied areas were routine, including the Holocaust. German and German-allied forces treated civilian populations with exceptional brutality, massacring villages and routinely killing civilian hostages. Both sides practiced widespread
scorched earth tactics, but the loss of civilian lives in the case of Germany was incomparably smaller than that of the Soviet Union, in which over 20 million civilians were killed by the Nazis and some by the Soviets themselves (mainly by the
NKVD). When the Red Army invaded Germany in 1944, many German civilians suffered from vengeance taken by Red Army soldiers (see
Red Army atrocities). After the war, following the
Yalta conference agreements between the Allies, the
German populations of
East Prussia and
Silesia were
displaced to the west of the
Oder-Neisse Line, in what became one of the largest
forced migrations of people in world history. The German minority scattered over large swaths of Eastern Europe was thus expelled and those who did not manage to leave were exterminated.
Much of the combat took place in or close by populated areas, and the actions of both sides contributed to massive loss of civilian life as well as a tremendous material damage. According to a summary, presented by Lieutenant General Roman Rudenko at the
International Military Tribunal in
Nuremberg, the property damage in the Soviet Union inflicted by the Axis invasion was estimated to a value of 679 billion rubles. This damage was consisted of, among others, complete or partial destruction of 2,508 church buildings, 1,710 towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, 31,850 industrial establishments, 40,000 miles of railroad, 4100 railroad stations, 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools, and 43,000 public libraries. Seven million horses, and 17 million sheep and goats were also slaughtered or driven off.
[2]
Background
The Anschluss
In 1938 the
Wehrmacht troops entered Austria thereby starting the
Anschluss, or the Nazi annexation of Austria. This was the first major step in
Adolf Hitler's long-desired creation of a
Grossdeutsches Reich, including German-speaking lands and territories Germany had lost after
World War I.
The Munich Agreement
After the Anschluss, the predominantly German
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia was taken over on 10 October 1938 , with the rest of the country becoming a protectorate of Germany in 1939. This was the outcome of the
Munich Agreement between
Adolf Hitler,
Neville Chamberlain,
Benito Mussolini and
Édouard Daladier signed in Germany on 29 September 1938. The agreement was made despite the military alliances between Czechoslovakia and
France and between France and
Britain.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The
Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 had established a
non-aggression agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and a secret
protocol outlined how
Finland,
Estonia,
Latvia,
Lithuania,
Poland and
Romania would be divided between them. In the
Invasion of Poland of 1939 the two powers invaded and partitioned Poland, in November 1939 the Soviet Union waged the
Winter War against Finland, and in June 1940, threatening to use force if its demands were not fulfilled, it won the diplomatic wars against
Romania and three
Baltic states which allowed it to peacefully
occupy Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania ''
de facto'', (while no Western state regarded the annexation of these states ''de jure'') and to return the
Ukrainian,
Belarusian, and
Moldavian territories in the North and North-Eastern regions of Romania (Northern
Bucovina and
Basarabia).
The decision for war
For nearly two years the border was quiet while Germany conquered
Denmark, Norway,
France, and the
Balkans. Hitler had however always intended to renege on the pact with the Soviet Union and invade, and appears to have made his decision of when to do so in the spring 1940. Hitler believed that the Soviets would quickly capitulate after an overwhelming German offensive and that the war could largely end before the onset of the fierce Russian winter.
Joseph Stalin was fearful of war with Germany or just did not expect Germany to start a
two-front war, and was reluctant to do anything to provoke Hitler. Even though Germany had been assembling very large numbers of troops in eastern Poland and making clandestine
reconnaissance flights over the border, Stalin ignored the warnings of his own as well as foreign intelligence. Moreover, on the very night of the invasion, Soviet troops received a directive undersigned by
Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and
General of the Army Georgy Zhukov that commanded (as it was demanded by Stalin): "do not answer to any provocations" and "do not undertake any actions without specific orders". The German invasion therefore caught the Soviet military and leadership largely by surprise, even though Stalin did receive a message from his spy detailing information on the attack.
For Soviet preparations, see
Operation Barbarossa: Soviet preparations.
Operations
Operation Barbarossa: Summer 1941
Soviet propaganda poster of 1941. The inscription reads: "Join the ranks of the front female helpmates, a companion is an aid and friend for fighter!".
''Main article:
Operation Barbarossa,
Battle of Bialystok-Minsk''
At 03:15 on
22 June 1941, three million German soldiers, to be joined by their Italian, Romanian, and other allies over the next weeks, burst over the borders and stormed into the Soviet Union. For a month the three-pronged offensive was completely unstoppable as the ''
Panzer'' forces
encircled hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in huge pockets that were then reduced by slower-moving
infantry divisions while the panzers charged on, following the ''
Blitzkrieg''
doctrine. As part of this lightning campaign the German airforce began immediate attacks on Soviet airfields destroying most of the initially antiquated and inept Soviet Air Force before it left the ground.
Army Group North's objective was
Leningrad via the Baltic States. Comprising the 16th and 18th Armies and 4th Panzer Group, this formation drove through
Lithuania,
Latvia,
Estonia, and the Russian cities of
Pskov and
Novgorod.
Army Group Centre comprised two Panzer groups (2nd and 3rd), which rolled east from either side of
Brest-Litovsk and converged ahead of
Minsk, followed by 2nd, 4th, and 9th Armies. The combined Panzer force reached the
Beresina River in just six days, 650 km (400 miles) from their start lines. The next objective was to cross the
Dnieper river, which was accomplished by
11 July. Following that, their next target was
Smolensk, which fell on
16 July, but the
engagement in the Smolensk area blocked the German advance until mid-September, effectively disrupting the ''blitzkrieg''.
Army Group South, with 1st Panzer Group, 6th, 11th and 17th Armies, was tasked with advancing through
Galicia and into
Ukraine. Their progress, however, was rather slow, and took heavy casualties in a major tank
battle. With only the corridor towards
Kiev secure by mid-July, the 11th Army, aided by two Romanian armies, fought its way through
Bessarabia towards
Odessa. The 1st Panzer Group turned away from Kiev for the moment, advancing into the Dnieper bend. When it joined up with the southern elements of Army Group South at
Uman, the group
captured 100,000 Soviet prisoners in a huge pocket.
As the
Red Army withdrew behind the Dnieper and
Dvina rivers, the Soviet hierarchy turned its attention to moving as much of the region's heavy industry as it could, dismantled and packed onto flatcars, away from the
front line, re-establishing it in more remote areas behind the
Urals and in
Central Asia. Most civilians could not be evacuated along with the equipment and were left behind to the mercy of the invading forces.
With the capture of Smolensk and the advance to the
Luga river, Army Groups Centre and North had completed their first major objective: to get across and hold the "land bridge" between the Dvina and Dnieper. The route to
Moscow, now only 400 km (250 miles) away, was wide open.
The German generals argued for an immediate drive towards Moscow, but Hitler overruled them, citing the importance of Ukrainian grain and heavy industry if under German possession, not to mention the massing of Soviet reserves in the
Gomel area between Army Group Centre's southern flanks and the bogged-down Army Group South to the south. The order was issued to 2nd Panzer Group to turn south and advance towards Kiev. This took the whole of August and into September, but when 2nd Panzer Group joined up with 1st Panzer Group at
Lokhvitsa on
14 September 665,000 Soviet prisoners were taken and
Kiev fell on
19 September.
Moscow and Rostov: Autumn 1941
''Main articles:
Operation Typhoon and
Battle of Rostov''
Hitler then decided to resume the advance to Moscow, renaming the Panzer Groups to Panzer Armies for the occasion.
Operation Typhoon, which was set in motion on
30 September, saw 2nd Panzer Army rush along the paved road from
Orel (captured
5 October) to the
Oka river at
Plavskoye, while the 4th Panzer Army (transferred from Army Group North to Centre) and 3rd Panzer Armies surrounded the Soviet forces in two huge pockets at
Vyazma and
Bryansk. Army Group North positioned itself in front of
Leningrad and attempted to cut the rail link at
Tikhvin to the east. Thus began the 900-day
Siege of Leningrad. North of the
Arctic Circle, a German-Finnish force set out for
Murmansk but could get no further than the
Litsa river, where they settled down.
Army Group South pushed down from the Dnieper to the
Sea of Azov coast, also advancing through
Kharkov,
Kursk, and
Stalino. The 11th Army moved into the
Crimea and had taken 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 gateway to the
Caucasus. However, the German lines were over-extended and the Soviet defenders counterattacked the 1st Panzer Army's spearhead from the north, forcing them to pull out of the city and behind the
Mius River; the first significant German
withdrawal of the war.
Just as Operation Typhoon got going, the Russian weather struck. For the second half of October it rained solidly, turning roads into
endless mud that trapped German vehicles, horses, and men alike. With 160 km (100 miles) still to go to Moscow, there was worse to come when the temperature plunged and snow started falling. The vehicles could move again, but the men could not, freezing with no winter clothing. The German leadership, expecting the campaign to be over in a few months, had not equipped their armies for winter fighting, and the Germans were in their summer uniforms. In addition to that, the gauge difference in railroad tracks between German and Soviet railroads delayed uniform and overall supply.
One last lunge on
15 November saw the Germans attempting to throw a ring around Moscow. On
27 November the 4th Panzer Army got within 30 km (19 miles) of the
Kremlin when it reached the last tramstop of the Moscow line at
Khimki, while the 2nd Panzer Army, try as it might, could not take
Tula, the last Soviet city that stood in its way of the capital. After a meeting held in
Orsha between the head of the
Army General Staff,
General Halder, and the heads of three
Army Groups and armies, it was decided to push forward to
Moscow since it was better, as argued by head of
Army Group Center,
Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, for them to try their luck on the battlefield rather than just sit and wait while their opponent gathered more strength.
However, by
6 December it became clear that the ''
Wehrmacht'' was too weak to capture Moscow and the attack was put on hold.
General Zhukov thus began his
counter-attack, employing fresh, well-trained Siberian
reserves transferred from the east following the guarantee of neutrality from Japan.
Soviet counter-offensive: Winter 1941
''Main article:
Battle of Moscow,
Second Battle of Kharkov''
During the autumn, Zhukov had been transferring fresh and well-equipped Soviet forces from Siberia and the far east to Moscow (these troops had been stationed there in expectation of a Japanese attack, but
Stalin's master
spy Richard Sorge indicated that the Japanese had decided to attack
Southeast Asia and
the Pacific instead). On
5 December 1941, these reinforcements attacked the German lines around Moscow, supported by new
T-34 tanks and
Katyusha rocket launchers. The new Soviet troops were prepared for winter warfare, and they included several
ski battalions. The exhausted and freezing Germans were routed and driven back between 100 and 250 km (60 to 150 miles) by
7 January 1942.
A further Soviet attack was mounted in late January, focusing on the junction between Army Groups North and Centre between
Lake Seliger and
Rzhev, and drove a gap between the two German army groups. In concert with the advance from
Kaluga to the south-west of Moscow, it was intended that the two offensives converge on Smolensk, but the Germans rallied and managed to hold them apart, retaining a
salient at Rzhev. A Soviet
parachute drop on German-held
Dorogobuzh was spectacularly unsuccessful, and those paratroopers who survived had to escape to the partisan-held areas beginning to swell behind German lines. To the north, the Soviets surrounded a German
garrison in
Demyansk, which held out with air supply for four months, and established themselves in front of
Kholm,
Velizh, and
Velikie Luki.
In the south the Red Army crashed over the
Donets River at
Izyum and drove a 100-km (60-mile) deep salient. The intent was to pin Army Group South against the
Sea of Azov, but as the winter eased the Germans were able to counter-attack and cut off the over-extended Soviet troops in the
Second Battle of Kharkov.
Don, Volga, and Caucasus: Summer 1942
''Main articles:
Battle of Voronezh,
Battle of the Caucasus,
Battle of Stalingrad''
Although plans were made to attack Moscow again, on
28 June 1942, the offensive re-opened in a different direction. Army Group South took the initiative, anchoring the front with the
Battle of Voronezh and then following the
Don river southeastwards. The grand plan was to secure the Don and
Volga first and then drive into the Caucasus towards the
oilfields, but operational considerations and Hitler's vanity made him order both objectives to be attempted simultaneously. Rostov was recaptured on
24 July when 1st Panzer Army joined in, and then that group drove south towards
Maikop. As part of this,
Operation Shamil was executed, a plan whereby a group of
Brandenburger commandos dressed up as Soviet
NKVD troops to destabilise Maikop's defenses and allow the 1st Panzer Army to enter the oil town with little opposition.
Meanwhile, 6th Army was driving towards
Stalingrad, for a long period unsupported by 4th Panzer Army who had been diverted to help 1st Panzer Army cross the Don. By the time 4th Panzer Army had rejoined the Stalingrad offensive, Soviet resistance (comprising the 62nd Army under
Vasily Chuikov) had stiffened. A leap across the Don brought German troops to the Volga on
23 August but for the next three months the ''
Wehrmacht'' would be fighting the
Battle of Stalingrad street-by-street.
Towards the south 1st Panzer Army had reached the Caucasian foothills and the
Malka River. At the end of August Romanian mountain troops joined the Caucasian spearhead, while the Romanian 3rd and 4th Armies were redeployed from their successful task of clearing the Azov
littoral. They took up position on either side of Stalingrad to free German troops for the proper fighting. Mindful of the continuing antagonism between Axis allies Romania and
Hungary over
Transylvania, the Romanian army in the Don bend was separated from the Hungarian 2nd army by the Italian 8th Army. Thus all of Hitler's allies were in it — including a
Slovakian contingent with 1st Panzer Army and a
Croatian
regiment attached to 6th Army.
The advance into the Caucasus bogged down, with the Germans unable to fight their way past
Malgobek and to the main prize of
Grozny. Instead they switched the direction of their advance to come at it from the south, crossing the Malka at the end of October and entering North
Ossetia. In the first week of November, on the outskirts of
Ordzhonikidze, the 13th Panzer Division's spearhead was snipped off and the Panzer troops had to fall back. The offensive into Russia was over.
Stalingrad: Winter 1942
''Main articles:
Battle of Stalingrad,
Operation Saturn,
Second Rzhev-Sychevka offensive,
Third Battle of Kharkov,
Battle of Velikiye Luki''
While the German 6th Army and 4th Panzer Army had been fighting their way into Stalingrad, Soviet armies had congregated on either side of the city, specifically into the Don
bridgeheads that the Romanians had been unable to reduce, and it was from these that they struck on
19 November 1942. In
Operation Uranus, two Soviet fronts punched through the Romanians and converged at
Kalach on
23 November, trapping 300,000 Axis troops behind them. A simultaneous offensive on the Rzhev sector known as
Operation Mars was supposed to advance to Smolensk, but was a failure, with German tactical flair winning the day.
The Germans rushed to transfer troops to Russia for a desperate attempt to relieve Stalingrad, but the offensive could not get going until
12 December, by which time the 6th Army in Stalingrad was starving and too weak to break out towards it.
Operation Winter Storm, with three transferred Panzer divisions, got going briskly from
Kotelnikovo towards the
Aksai river but became bogged down 65 km (40 miles) short of its goal. To divert the rescue attempt the Soviets decided to smash the Italians and come down behind the relief attempt if they could, that operation starting on
16 December. What it did accomplish was to destroy many of the aircraft that had been transporting relief supplies to Stalingrad. The fairly limited scope of the Soviet offensive, although still eventually targeted on Rostov, also allowed Hitler time to see sense and pull Army Group A out of the Caucasus and back over the Don.
On
31 January 1943, the 90,000 survivors of the 300,000-man 6th Army surrendered. By that time the Hungarian 2nd Army had also been wiped out. The Soviets advanced from the Don 500 km (300 miles) to the west of Stalingrad, marching through
Kursk (retaken on
8 February 1943) and
Kharkov (retaken
16 February 1943). In order to save the position in the south, the decision was taken in February to abandon the Rzhev salient, freeing enough German troops to make a successful
riposte in eastern Ukraine.
Manstein's counteroffensive, strengthened by a specially trained SS Panzer Corps equipped with
Tiger tanks, opened on
20 February 1943, and fought its way from
Poltava back into Kharkov in the third week of March, upon which the spring thaw intervened. This had left a glaring bulge in the front centered on Kursk.
Kursk: Summer 1943
''Main article:
Battle of Kursk''
After the failure of the attempt to capture Stalingrad, Hitler had deferred planning authority for the upcoming campaign season to the
German Army High Command and reinstated
Guderian to a prominent role, this time as Inspector of Panzer Troops. Debate among the General Staff was polarised, with even Hitler nervous about any attempt to pinch off the Kursk salient. He knew that in the intervening six months the Russian position at Kursk had been reinforced heavily with
anti-tank guns,
tank traps,
landmines,
barbed wire,
trenches,
pillboxes,
artillery and
mortars. But if one last great ''
blitzkrieg'' offensive could be mounted, just maybe the Soviets would ease off and attention could then be turned to the Allied threat to the
Western Front. The advance would be executed from the Orel salient to the north of Kursk and from
Belgorod to the south. Both wings would converge on
Tim, and by that means restore the lines of Army Group South to the exact points that it held over the winter of 1941–1942.
Although the Germans knew that the Red Army's massive reserves of manpower had been bled dry in the summer of 1941 and 1942, the Soviets were still re-equipping, simply by drafting the men from the regions recaptured.
Under pressure from his generals, Hitler bit the bullet and agreed to the attack on Kursk, little realising that the ''
Abwehr's intelligence on the Soviet position there had been undermined by a concerted ''
Stavka'' misinformation and
counter-intelligence campaign mounted by the
Lucy spy ring in
Switzerland. When the Germans began the operation, it was after months of delays waiting for new tanks and equipment, by which time the Soviets had reinforced the Kursk salient with more anti-tank firepower than had ever been assembled in one place before or since.
In the north, the entire 9th Army had been redeployed from the Rzhev salient into the Orel salient and was to advance from Maloarkhangelsk to Kursk. But its forces could not even get past the first objective at
Olkhovatka, just 8 km (5 miles) into the advance. The 9th Army blunted its spearhead against the Soviet
minefields, frustratingly so considering that the high ground there was the only natural barrier between them and flat tank country all the way to Kursk. The direction of advance was then switched to
Ponyri, to the west of Olkhovatka, but the 9th Army could not break through here either and went over to the defensive. The Soviets simply soaked up the German punishment and then struck back. On
12 July the Red Army ploughed through the demarcation line between the 211th and 293rd Divisions on the
Zhizdra river and steamed towards
Karachev, right behind them and behind Orel.
The southern offensive, spearheaded by
4.Panzer-Armee, led by
Gen. Col. Hoth, with three Tank Corps made more headway. Advancing on either side of the upper Donets on a narrow corridor, the
SS Panzer Corps and the
Großdeutschland Panzergrenadier Divisions battled their way through minefields and over comparatively high ground towards
Oboyan. Stiff resistance caused a change of direction from east to west of the front, but the tanks got 25 km (15 miles) before encountering the reserves of the
Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army outside
Prokhorovka. Battle was joined on
12 July, with about one thousand tanks doing battle. After the war, the battle near Prochorovka was idealized by the Soviet
historians as the biggest tank battle of all time. The meeting engagement at Prochorovka was a Soviet defensive success, albeit at heavy cost. The Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army, with about 800 light and medium tanks, attacked elements of the II SS Panzer Corps. Tank losses on both sides have been the source of controversy ever since. Although the 5th Guards Tank Army did not attain their terrain objectives, the German advance was halted. At the end of the day both sides had fought each other to a standstill, but regardless of the standstill in the north
Manstein intended to continue the attack with the 4th Panzer Army. But the Soviets could absorb the fearful losses of men and equipment, and German strategic advance in
Operation Citadel had been halted. Under the impression of the successful
counter-attack operations in the south the Red Army started the strong offensive operation in the northern Oriel salient and achieved a breakthrough on the flank of the German 9th Army. Also worried by the Allies'
landing in Sicily on
10 July, Hitler made the decision to halve the offensive even as the German 9th Army was rapidly giving ground in the north. The Germans' final strategic offensive in the Soviet Union ended with their defense against a major Soviet counteroffensive that lasted into August. A detailed analysis of this campaign is available in the
Battle of Kursk article.
The Kursk offensive was the last on the scale of 1940 and 1941 the ''Wehrmacht'' was able to launch, and subsequent offensives would represent only a shadow of previous German offensive might. Following the defeat, Hitler would not trust his generals to the same extent again, and as his own mental condition deteriorated the quality of German strategic decision fell correspondingly. The Battle of Kursk cost Hitler over 500,000 troops and 1,000 tanks, forever hampering future war efforts on the Eastern Front.
Autumn and Winter 1943
''Main articles:
Korsun-Cherkassy Pocket,
Battle of Smolensk (1943),
Battle of the Lower Dnieper and
Battle of Narva (1944)''
The Soviet juggernaut got rolling in earnest with the advance into the Germans' Orel salient. The diversion of Hitler's favourite ''
Grossdeutschland Division'' from Belgorod to Karachev could not halt the tide, and a strategic decision was made to abandon Orel (retaken by the Red Army on
5 August 1943) and fall back to the Hagen line in front of
Bryansk. To the south, the Soviets blasted through Army Group South's Belgorod positions and headed for Kharkov once again. Though intense battles of movement throughout late July and into August 1943 saw the
Tigers blunting Soviet tanks on one axis, they were soon outflanked on another line to the west as the Soviets advanced down the
Psel, and Kharkov had to be evacuated for the final time on
22 August.
The German forces on the
Mius, now constituting the 1st Panzer Army and a reconstituted 6th Army, were by August too weak to sustain a Soviet onslaught on their own front, and when the Soviets hit them they had to fall back all the way through the
Donbass industrial region to the Dnieper, losing the industrial resources and half the farmland that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union to exploit. At this time Hitler agreed to a general withdrawal to the Dnieper line, along which was meant to be the ''Ostwall'', a line of defence similar to the
Westwall of fortifications along the German frontier in the west. Trouble was, it hadn't been built yet, and by the time Army Group South had evacuated eastern Ukraine and begun withdrawing across the Dnieper during September, the Soviets were hard behind them. Tenaciously, small units paddled their way across the 3-km (2-mile) wide river and established
bridgeheads. A second attempt by the Soviets to gain land using parachutists, mounted at
Kanev on
24 September, proved as luckless as at Dorogobuzh eighteen months previously, and the paratroopers were soon repelled — but not before still more Red Army troops had used the cover they provided to get themselves over the Dnieper and securely dug in. As September proceeded into October, the Germans found the Dnieper line impossible to hold as the Soviet bridgeheads grew and grew, and important Dnieper towns started to fall, with
Zaporozhye the first to go, followed by
Dnepropetrovsk. Finally, early in November the Soviets broke out of their bridgeheads on 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, still convinced that the Red Army was a spent force, was able to mount a successful riposte at
Zhitomir during the middle of November, blunting the Soviet bridgehead via a daring outflanking strike mounted by the SS Panzer Corps along the river Teterev. This battle also enabled Army Group South to recapture Korosten and gain some time to rest; however, on
Christmas Eve the retreat began anew when the First Ukrainian Front (renamed from Voronezh Front) struck them in the same place. The Soviet advance continued along the railway line until the 1939 Polish-Soviet border was reached on 3 January 1944. To the south, Second Ukrainian Front (ex
Steppe Front) had crossed the Dnieper at
Kremenchug and continued westwards. In the second week of January 1944 they swung north, meeting Vatutin's tank forces who had swung south from their penetration into Poland and surrounding ten German divisions at Korsun-Shevenkovsky, west of
Cherkassy. Hitler's insistence on holding the Dnieper line, even when facing the prospect of catastrophic defeat, was compounded by his conviction that the Cherkassy pocket could break out and even advance to Kiev, but Manstein was more concerned about being able to advance to the edge of the pocket and then implore the surrounded forces to break out. By 16 February the first stage was complete, with panzers separated from the contracting Cherkassy pocket only by the swollen Gniloy Tikich river. Under furious shellfire and pursued by Soviet tanks and cavalry, the surrounded German troops, among whom were the
SS Division Wiking, fought their way across the river to safety, losing half their number and all their equipment. Surely the Russians would not attack again, with the spring approaching - but in March 3 Ukrainian Front went over to the offensive. Having already isolated the Crimea by severing the neck of the
Perekop isthmus, Malinovsky's forces advanced across the mud to the
Romanian border, not stopping on the river
Prut.
One final move in the south completed the 1943-44 campaigning season, which had wrapped up an advance of over 500 miles. In March, 20 German divisions of ''
Generaloberst''
Hans-Valentin Hube's
1st Panzer Army were encircled in what was to be known as
Hube's Pocket near Kamenets-Podolskiy. After two weeks hard fighting, the 1st Panzer managed to escape the pocket, suffering only light to moderate casualties. At this point, Hitler sacked several prominent generals, Manstein included. April saw the capture of
Odessa in April 1944, followed by 4th Ukrainian Front's campaign to recapture the Crimea, which culminated with the recapture of
Sevastopol on 10 May.
Along Army Group Centre's front, August 1943 saw this force pushed back from the Hagen line slowly, ceding comparatively little territory, but the loss of Bryansk and more importantly, Smolensk, on
25 September cost the Wehrmacht the keystone of the entire German defensive system. The 4th and 9th Armies and 3rd Panzer Armies still held their own east of the upper Dnieper, stifling Soviet attempts to reach Vitebsk. On Army Group North's front, there was barely any fighting at all until January
1944, when out of nowhere Volkhov and Second Baltic Fronts struck. In a lightning campaign, Leningrad was liberated and
Novgorod was recaptured; by February the Red Army had reached the borders of
Estonia after a 75-mile advance.
Summer 1944
''Main articles:
Battle of the Crimea (1944),
Belorussian Offensive,
Lvov-Sandomir Offensive,
Lublin-Brest Offensive,
Warsaw Uprising,
Slovak National Uprising,
Battle of Romania (1944),
Battle of Debrecen''
''Wehrmacht'' planning was convinced that the Soviets would attack again in the south, where the front was fifty miles from
Lvov and offered the most direct route to
Berlin. Accordingly they denuded of troops Army Group Centre, whose front still protruded deep into the Soviet Union. The Belorussian Offensive (codenamed
Operation Bagration) started on
June 22 1944, it was a massive Soviet attack, consisting of four Soviet army groups totaling over 120 divisions that smashed into a thinly-held German line. They focused their massive attacks on Army Group Centre, not Army Group South as the Germans had originally expected. The Germans had transferred units to France to counter the
invasion of Normandy two weeks before. The Red Army achieved a ratio of ten to one in tanks and seven to one in
aircraft over the enemy. At the points of attack, the numerical and quality advantages of the Soviets were overwhelming. More than 2.3 million Soviet troops went into action against the German Army Group Centre, which could boast a strength of less than 800,000 men. The Germans crumbled. The capital of
Belarus,
Minsk, was taken on
July 3, trapping 50,000 Germans. Ten days later the Red Army reached the prewar
Polish border. The rapid progress cut off and isolated the German units of
Army Group North fighting in
Courland. ''Bagration'' was by any measure one of the largest single operations of the war. By the end of August 1944 it had cost the Red Army 765,815 dead, missing, wounded and sick, as well as 2,957 tanks and assault guns. The Germans lost approximately 670,000 dead, missing, wounded and sick, out of whom 160,000 were captured, as well 2,000 tanks and 57,000 other vehicles.
Red Army soldiers restoring the USSR border sign. By the end of 1944 practically the entire pre-war Soviet territory was liberated.
The neighbouring
Lvov-Sandomierz operation was launched on
17 July 1944, rapidly routing the German forces in the western Ukraine. The Soviet advance in the south continued into
Romania and, following a coup against the Axis-allied government of Romania on
August 23, the Red Army occupied
Bucharest on
August 31. In Moscow on
September 12, Romania and the Soviet Union signed an
armistice on terms Moscow virtually dictated. The Romanian surrender tore a hole in the southern German Eastern Front causing the loss of the whole of the
Balkans.
In Poland, as the Red Army approached, the
Polish Home Army (AK) launched
Operation Tempest. During the
Warsaw Uprising, the Soviet Army halted at the
Vistula River, unable or unwilling to come to the aid of the Polish resistance. An attempt by the communist controlled
1st Polish Army to relieve the city was unsupported by the Red Army and was thrown back in September with heavy losses.
In
Slovakia, the
Slovak National Uprising started as an armed struggle between German ''Wehrmacht'' forces and rebel Slovak troops in August to October 1944. It was centered at
Banská Bystrica.
Autumn 1944
:''Main articles
Baltic Offensive (September-November),
Budapest Offensive (October-February)''
On 8 September 1944 the Red Army begun an attack on the
Dukla Pass on the Slovak-Polish border. Two months later, the Russians won the battle and entered Slovakia. The toll was high: 85,000 Red Army soldiers lay dead, plus several thousand Germans, Slovaks and
Czechs.
Early 1945
''Main articles:
Vistula-Oder Offensive (January-February) with the follow-up
East Pomeranian Offensive and
Silesian Offensives (February-April),
East Prussian Offensive (January-April),
Vienna Offensive (March-April)''
The Soviet Union finally entered
Warsaw in January
1945, after it was destroyed and abandoned by the Germans. Over three days, on a broad front incorporating four army
fronts, the Red Army began an offensive across the
Narew River and from Warsaw. The Soviets outnumbered the Germans on average by nine to one in troops, ten to one in artillery, and ten to one in tanks and
self-propelled artillery. After four days the Red Army broke out and started moving thirty to forty kilometres a day, taking the Baltic states,
Danzig,
East Prussia,
Poznań, and drawing up on a line sixty kilometres east of
Berlin along the
Oder River. During the full course of the Vistula-Oder operation (23 days), the Red Army forces sustained 194,000 casualties and lost 1,267 tanks and assault guns.
On
25 January 1945, Hitler renamed three army groups.
Army Group North became
Army Group Courland; Army Group Centre became Army Group North and
Army Group A became Army Group Centre. Army Group North (old Army Group Centre) was driven into an ever smaller pocket around
Königsberg in
East Prussia.
A
counter-attack by the newly created
Army Group Vistula, under the command of ''
Reichsführer-SS''
Heinrich Himmler, had failed by
February 24, and the Soviets drove on to
Pomerania and cleared the right bank of the Oder River. In the south, three German attempts to relieve the encircled
Budapest failed and the city fell on
February 13 to the Soviets. Again the Germans counter-attacked,
Hitler insisting on the impossible task of regaining the
Danube River. By
March 16 the attack had failed and the Red Army counterattacked the same day. On
March 30 they entered
Austria and captured
Vienna on
April 13.
On
April 9,
1945,
Königsberg finally fell to the Red Army, although the shattered remnants of Army Group North continued to resist on the
Heiligenbeil and
Danzig beachheads until the end of the war in Europe. The East Prussian operation, though often overshadowed by the Vistula-Oder operation and the later battle for Berlin, was in fact one of the largest and costliest operations fought by the Red army through the war. During the period it lasted (13 January - 25 April), it cost the Red Army 584,788 casualties, and 3,525 tanks and assault guns.
By early April, the
Stavka freed up General
Konstantin Rokossovsky's
2nd Belorussian Front (2BF) to move west to the east bank of the Oder river. During the first two weeks of April the Soviets performed their fastest front redeployment of the war. General
Georgy Zhukov concentrated his
1st Belorussian Front (1BF) which had been deployed along the Oder river from
Frankfurt in the south to the Baltic, into an area in front of the
Seelow Heights. The 2BF moved into the positions being vacated by the 1BF north of the Seelow Heights. While this redeployment was in progress gaps were left in the lines and the remnants of the German 2nd Army which had been bottled up in a pocket near
Danzig managed to escape across the Oder. To the south General
Ivan Konev shifted the main weight of the
1st Ukrainian Front (1UF) out of
Upper Silesia north-west to the
Neisse River.
[Ziemke, ''Berlin'', see References page 71] The three Soviet fronts had altogether 2.5 million men (including 78,556 soldiers of the
1st Polish Army); 6,250 tanks; 7,500 aircraft; 41,600
artillery pieces and
mortars; 3,255
truck-mounted
Katyushas
rockets, (nicknamed "Stalin Organs"); and 95,383 motor vehicles, many manufactured in the USA.
End of War: April–May 1945
''Main articles: Battle of Berlin, Battle of Halbe, Prague Offensive''
All that was left for the Soviets to do was to launch an offensive to capture what was to become East Germany. The Soviet offensive had two objectives. Because of Stalin's suspicions about the intentions of the Western Allies to hand over territory occupied by them in the post-war Soviet zone of occupation, the offensive was to be on a broad front and was to move as rapidly as possible to the west, to meet the Western Allies as far west as possible. But the overriding objective was to capture Berlin. The two were complementary because possession of the zone could not be won quickly unless Berlin was taken. Another consideration was that Berlin itself held strategic assets, including Adolf Hitler and the German atomic bomb program.[3]
The offensive to capture East Germany and Berlin started on April 16 with an assault on the German front lines on the Oder and Neisse rivers. After several days of heavy fighting the Soviet 1BF and 1UF had punched holes through the German front line and were fanning out across East Germany. By the April 24 elements of the 1BF and 1UF had completed the encirclement of Berlin and the Battle of Berlin entered its final stages. On April 25 the 2BF broke through the German 3rd Panzer Army's line south of Stettin. They were now free to move west towards the British 21st Army Group and north towards the Baltic port of Stralsund. The Soviet 58th Guards Division of the 5th Guards Army made contact with the US 69th Infantry Division of the First Army near Torgau, Germany at the Elbe river.[Beevor, ''Berlin'', see References pp. 217-233][Ziemke , ''Berlin'', see References page 81-111]
On April 30, as the Soviet forces fought their way into the centre of Berlin, Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun and then committed suicide by taking cyanide and shooting himself. Helmuth Weidling, defence commandant of Berlin, surrendered the city to the Soviets on May 2.[Beevor, ''Berlin'', see References pp. 259-357, 380-381] Altogether, the Berlin operation (16 April - 8 May) cost the Red Army 81,367 casualties (dead, missing, wounded and sick) and 1,997 tanks and assault guns. German losses in this period of the war remain impossible to determine with any reliability.
At 22:41 on the morning of May 7, 1945, at the SHAEF headquarters, German Chief-of-Staff General Alfred Jodl signed the unconditional surrender documents for all German forces to the Allies. It included the phrase ''All forces under German control to cease active operations at 2301 hours Central European time on May 8 1945''. The next day shortly before midnight, Jodl repeated the signing in Berlin at Zhukov's headquarters. The war in Europe was over.[4]
In the Soviet Union the end of the war is considered to be May 9, when the surrender took effect Moscow time. This date is celebrated as a national holiday - Victory Day - in Russia (as part of a two-day May 8-9 holiday) and some other post-Soviet countries. The ceremonial Victory parade was held in Moscow on June 24.
German Army Group Centre initially refused to surrender and continued to fight in Czechoslovakia until about May 11.[Ziemke, ''Berlin'', References p. 134]
A small German garrison on the island of Bornholm (Denmark) refused to surrender until after being bombed and invaded by the Russians. The island was returned to the Danish government four months later.
Manchuria: August 1945
''Main article: Operation August Storm''
The Battle of Manchuria began on August 8, 1945, with the Soviet invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo; the greater invasion would eventually include neighbouring Mengjiang, as well as northern Korea, southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. It marked the initial and only military action of the Soviet Union against the Empire of Japan; at the Yalta Conference, it had agreed to Allied pleas to terminate the neutrality pact with Japan and enter the Second World War's Pacific theatre within three months after the end of the war in Europe.
Leadership
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were ideologically driven states in which the leader had near-absolute power. The character of the war was thus determined by the leaders and their ideology to a much greater extent than in any other theatre of World War II.
Adolf Hitler exercised a tight control over the war, spending much of his time in his command bunkers (most notably at Rastenburg in East Prussia, at Vinnitsa in Ukraine, and under the garden of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin). At crucial periods in the war he held daily situation conferences, at which he used his remarkable talent for public speaking to overwhelm opposition from his generals and the OKW staff with rhetoric.
He believed himself a military genius, with a grasp of the total war effort that eluded his generals. In August 1941 when Walther von Brauchitsch (commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht) and Fedor von Bock were appealing for an attack on Moscow, Hitler instead ordered the encirclement and capture of Ukraine, in order to acquire the farmland, industry, and natural resources of that country. Some historians believe that this decision was a missed opportunity to win the war.
In the winter of 1941–42 Hitler believed that his obstinate refusal to allow the German armies to retreat had saved Army Group Centre from collapse. He later told Erhard Milch,
:I had to act ruthlessly. I had to send even my closest generals packing, two army generals, for example … I could only tell these gentlemen, "Get yourself back to Germany as rapidly as you can — but leave the army in my charge. And the army is staying at the front."
The success of this hedgehog defence outside Moscow led Hitler to insist on the holding of territory when it made no military sense, and to sack generals who retreated without orders. Officers with initiative were replaced with yes-men or fanatical Nazis. The disastrous encirclements later in the war — at Stalingrad, Korsun and many other places — were the direct result of Hitler's orders. Many divisions became cut off in "fortress" cities, or wasted uselessly in secondary theatres, because Hitler would not sanction retreat or abandon voluntarily any of his conquests.
Frustration at Hitler's leadership of the war was one of the factors in the attempted coup d'etat of 1944, but after the failure of the July 20 Plot Hitler considered the army and its officer corps suspect and came to rely on the Schutzstaffel and Nazi party members to prosecute the war. His many disastrous appointments included that of Heinrich Himmler to command Army Group Vistula in the defence of Berlin in 1945 — Himmler suffered a mental breakdown under the stress of the command and was quickly replaced by Gotthard Heinrici.
Hitler's direction of the war was disastrous for the German army, though the skill, loyalty, professionalism and endurance of officers and soldiers enabled him to keep Germany fighting to the end. F. W. Winterbotham wrote of Hitler's signal to Gerd von Rundstedt to continue the attack to the west during the Battle of the Bulge:
:From experience we had learned that when Hitler started refusing to do what the generals recommended, things started to go wrong, and this was to be no exception.
Joseph Stalin bore the greatest responsibility for the disasters at the beginning of the war, but can be equally praised for the subsequent success of the Soviet Army, which would have been impossible without the unprecedentedly rapid industrializaion of the Soviet Union, which was the first prioriy of Stalin's internal policy throughout the 1930s.
Stalin's Great Purge of the Red Army in the late 1930s consisted of the legal prosecution of many of the senior command, many of whom were convicted and sentenced to death or imprisonment. Those executed included Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the brilliant proponent of armoured blitzkrieg. Stalin promoted some obscurantists like Grigory Kulik (who opposed the mechanization of the army and the production of tanks), but on the other hand the purge of the older commanders who had had their positions since the Russian Civil War opened up those places to the promotion of many younger officers, many of whom proved excellent commanders. Soviet tank output remained the largest in the world. Distrust of the military led, since the foundation of the Red Army in 1918, to a system of "dual command", in which every commander was paired with a political commissar, a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Larger units had military councils consisting of the commander, commissar and chief of staff, who ensured that the commanding officer was loyal and implemented Party orders.
Following the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia in 1939–40, Stalin insisted that every fold of the new territories should be occupied; this move westward left troops far from their depots in salients that left them vulnerable to encirclement. There was an assumption that, in the event of a German invasion, the Red Army would take the strategic offensive and fight the war mostly outside the borders of the Soviet Union; thus few plans were made for strategic defensive operations. However, fortifications were built. As tension heightened in spring 1941, Stalin was desperate not to give Hitler any provocation that could be used as an excuse for an attack; this caused him to refuse to allow the military to go onto the alert even as German troops gathered on the borders and German reconnaissance planes overflew installations. This refusal to take the necessary action was instrumental in the destruction of major portions of the Red Air Force, lined up on its airfields, in the first days of the war.
Stalin's insistence on repeated counterattacks without adequate preparation led to the loss of almost the whole of the Red Army's tank corps in 1941 — many tanks simply ran out of fuel on their way to the battlefield through faulty planning or ignorance of the location of fuel dumps. While some regard this offensive strategy as an argument for Soviet aggressive strategic plans, the offensive operational planning was not, by itself, evidence of any aggressive foreign policy intent.
Unlike Hitler, Stalin was able to learn lessons and improve his conduct of the war. He gradually came to realise the dangers of inadequate preparation and built up a competent command and control organization — the Stavka — under Semyon Timoshenko, Georgy Zhukov and others. Incompetent commanders were gradually but ruthlessly weeded out.
At the crisis of the war, in autumn 1942, Stalin made many concessions to the army: unitary command was restored by removing the Commissars from the chain of command. After the Battle of Stalingrad, shoulderboards were introduced for all ranks; this was a significant symbolic step, since they had been seen as a symbol of the old regime after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Beginning in autumn 1941, units that had proved themselves by superior performance in combat were given the traditional "Guards" title. But these concessions were combined with ruthless discipline: Order No. 227, issued on 28 July 1942, threatened commanders who retreated without orders with punishment by court-martial. Infractions by military and ''politruks'' were punished with transferral to penal battalions and penal companies, and the NKVD's barrier troops would shoot soldiers who fled.
As it became clear that the Soviet Union would win the war, Stalin ensured that propaganda always mentioned his leadership of the war; the victorious generals were sidelined and never allowed to develop into political rivals. After the war the Red Army was once again purged (but not as brutal as in the 1930s): many successful officers were demoted to unimportant positions (including Zhukov, Malinovsky and Koniev).
Occupation and repression
A member of ''Einsatzgruppe D'' murders a Jew who is kneeling before a filled mass grave in Vinnitsa,
Ukraine, in 1942. The back of the photo is inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa".
The enormous territorial gains of 1941 presented Germany with vast areas to pacify and administer. Some Soviet citizens, especially in the recently annexed territories of Western Ukraine and the Baltic States greeted their conquerors as liberators from the Soviet rule. However, nascent national liberation movements among Ukrainians and Cossacks, and other were viewed by Hitler with suspicion; some (especially those from the Baltic States) were co-opted into the Axis armies and others brutally suppressed. None of the conquered territories gained any measure of self-rule. Instead, the racist Nazi ideologues saw the future of the East as one of settlement by German colonists, with the natives killed, expelled, or reduced to slave labour (Generalplan Ost).
Regions closer to the front were managed by military powers of the region, in other areas such as Baltic states annexed by USSR in 1940, Reichscommissariats were established. As a rule, the maximum in loot was extracted. In September 1941, Erich Koch was appointed to the Ukrainian Commissariat. His opening speech was clear about German policy: "I am known as a brutal dog … Our job is to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of ... I am expecting from you the utmost severity towards the native population."
Atrocities against the Jewish population in the conquered areas began almost immediately, with the dispatch of ''Einsatzgruppen'' (task groups) to round up Jews and shoot them. Local anti-semites were encouraged to carry out their own pogroms. In July 1941 Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski's SS unit began to carry out more systematic killings, including the massacre of over 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar. By the end of 1941 there were more than 50,000 troops devoted to rounding up and killing Jews. The gradual industrialization of killing led to adoption of the Final Solution and the establishment of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps: the machinery of the Holocaust. In three years of occupation, between one and two million Soviet Jews were killed. Other ethnic groups were targeted for extermination, including the Roma and Sinti; see Porajmos.
The massacres of Jews and other ethnic minorities were only a part of the deaths from the Nazi occupation. Many hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians were executed, and millions more died from starvation as the Germans requisitioned food for their armies and fodder for their draft horses. As they retreated from Ukraine and Belarus in 1943–44, the German occupiers systematically applied a scorched earth policy, burning towns and cities, destroying infrastructure, and leaving civilians to starve or die of exposure. In many towns, the Germans also fought Soviet forces right within towns and cities with trapped civilians caught in the middle. Estimates of total civilian dead in the Soviet Union in the war range from seven million (Encyclopedia Britannica) to seventeen million (Richard Overy).
The Nazi ideology and the maltreatment of the local population and Soviet POWs encouraged partisans fighting behind the front, motivated even anti-communists or non-Russian nationalists to ally with the Soviets, and greatly delayed the formation of German allied divisions consisting of Soviet POWs (see Vlasov army). These results and missed opportunities contributed to the defeat of the ''Wehrmacht''.
A Russian historian Vadim Erlikman has detailed Soviet losses totaling 26.5 million war related deaths. Military losses of 10.6 million include 7.6 million killed or missing in action and 2.6 million POW dead, plus 400,000 paramilitary and Soviet partisan losses. Civilian deaths totaled 15.9 million which included 1.5 million from military actions; 7.1 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals; 1.8 million deported to Germany for forced labor; and 5.5 million famine and disease deaths. Additional famine deaths which totaled 1 million during 1946-47 are not included here. These losses are for the entire territory of the USSR including territories annexed in 1939-40.[1]
Belarus lost a quarter of its pre-war population, including practically all its intellectual elite. Following bloody encirclement battles, all of the present-day Belarus territory was occupied by the Germans by the end of August 1941. The Nazis imposed a brutal regime, deporting some 380,000 young people for slave labour, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians more. More than 600 villages like Khatyn were burned with their entire population.[2] More than 209 cities and towns (out of 270 total) and 9,000 villages were destroyed. Himmler has pronounced a plan according to which 3/4 of Belarusian population was designated to "eradication" and 1/4 of racially cleaner population (blue eyes, light hair) would be allowed to serve Germans as slaves.
Some recent reports raise the number of Belarusians who perished in War to "3 million 650 thousand people, unlike the former 2.2 million. That is to say not every fourth inhabitant but almost 40% of the pre-war Belarusian population perished (considering the present-day borders of Belarus)." [3]
Sixty percent of Soviet POWs died during the war. Millions of Soviet POWs and forced laborers transported to Germany were on their return to the USSR (in many cases forcefully repatriated by the Western Allies) treated as traitors and deserters and were executed or deported to the Soviet prison camps. Over 1.5 million Red Army soldiers imprisoned by the Germans were sent to the Gulag in Siberia and the far north (25 years was the usual term).[4]
The official Polish government report of war losses prepared in 1947 reported 6,028,000 war victims out of a population of 27,007,000 ethnic Poles and Jews; this report excluded ethnic Ukrainian and Belarusian losses.
Industrial output
A
T-34 tank rolls off the line at the ''Krasnoye Sormovo'' Factory No. 112 in Gorki. The Soviet Union manufactured 58,000 T-34s during the war.
The Soviet victory owed a great deal to the ability of her war industry to outperform the German economy, despite the enormous loss of population and land. Stalin's five-year plans of the 1930s had resulted in the industrialization of the Urals and central Asia. In 1941, the trains that shipped troops to the front were used to evacuate thousands of factories from Belarus and Ukraine to safe areas far from the front lines.
As the Soviet Union's manpower reserves ran low from 1943 onwards, the great Soviet offensives had to depend more on equipment and less on the expenditure of lives. The increases in production of war materiel were achieved at the expense of civilian living standards — the most thorough application of the principle of total war — and with the help of Lend-Lease supplies from the United Kingdom and the United States. The Germans, on the other hand, could rely on a large slave workforce from the conquered countries and Soviet POWs.
Germany's raw material production was higher than the Soviets' and her labour force was far greater, but the Soviets were more efficient at using what resources they had and chose to build low-cost, low-maintenance vehicles whilst the Germans built high-cost, high-maintenance vehicles.
Germany chose to build very expensive and very complicated vehicles and even though Germany produced many times more raw materials she could not compete with the Soviets on the quantity of military production (in 1943, the Soviet Union manufactured 24,089 tanks to Germany's 19,800). The Soviets incrementally upgraded existing designs, and simplified and refined manufacturing processes to increase production. Meanwhile, German industry was forced to engineer more advanced but complex designs such as the Panther tank, the King Tiger or the Elefant.
Summary of German and Soviet Raw Material production during the war1| Year | Coal
(million tonnes) | Steel
(million tonnes) | Aluminium
(thousand tonnes) | Oil
(million tonnes) |
|---|
| German | Soviet | German | Soviet | German | Soviet | German | Soviet | Italian | Hungarian | Romanian | Japanese |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1941 | 315.5 | 151.4 | 28.2 | 17.9 | 233.6 | – | 5.7 | 33.0 | 0.12 | 0.4 | 5.5 | - |
|---|
| 1942 | 317.9 | 75.5 | 28.7 | 8.1 | 264.0 | 51.7 | 6.6 | 22.0 | 0.01 | 0.7 | 5.7 | 1.8 |
|---|
| 1943 | 340.4 | 93.1 | 30.6 | 8.5 | 250.0 | 62.3 | 7.6 | 18.0 | 0.01 | 0.8 | 5.3 | 2.3 |
|---|
| 1944 | 347.6 | 121.5 | 25.8 | 10.9 | 245.3 | 82.7 | 5.5 | 18.2 | - | 1 | 3.5 | 1 |
|---|
| 19452 | – | 149.3 | – | 12.3 | – | 86.3 | 1.3 | 19.4 | - | - | - | 0.1 |
|---|
Summary of Axis and Soviet Tank and Self-
propelled Gun production during the war1| Year | Tanks and self-
propelled guns |
|---|
| Soviet | German | Italian | Hungarian | Japanese |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1941 | 6,590 | 5,2003 | 595 | - | 595 |
|---|
| 1942 | 24,446 | 9,3003 | 1,252 | 500 | 557 |
|---|
| 1943 | 24,089 | 19,800 | 336 | 558 |
|---|
| 1944 | 28,963 | 27,300 | - | 353 |
|---|
| 19452 | 15,400 | – | - | - | 137 |
|---|
Summary of Axis and Soviet Aircraft production during the war1| Year | Aircraft |
|---|
| Soviet | German | Italian | Hungarian | Romanian | Japanese |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1941 | 15,735 | 11,776 | 3,503 | - | 1,000 | 5,088 |
|---|
| 1942 | 15,556 | 2,818 | 6 | 8,861 |
|---|
| 1943 | 34,845 | 25,527 | 967 | 267 | 16,693 |
|---|
| 1944 | 40,246 | 39,807 | - | 773 | 28,180 |
|---|
| 19452 | 20,052 | 7,544 | - | - | 8,263 |
|---|
Summary Of German and Soviet Industrial Labour (including those classified as handworkers), and Summary of Foreign, Voluntary, Coerced and POW Labour 4| Year | Industrial Labour | Foreign Labour | Total Labour |
|---|
| Soviet | German | Soviet | German | Total Soviet | Total German |
|---|---|
| 1941 | 11,000,000 | 12,900,000 | - | 3,500,000 | 11,000,000 | 16,400,000 |
|---|
| 1942 | 7,200,000 | 11,600,000 | 50,000 | 4,600,000 | 7,250,000 | 16,200,000 |
|---|
| 1943 | 7,500,000 | 11,100,000 | 200,000 | 5,700,000 | 7,700,000 | 16,800,000 |
|---|
| 1944 | 8,200,000 | 10,400,000 | 800,000 | 7,600,000 | 9,000,000 | 18,000,000 |
|---|
| 19452 | 9,500,000 | – | 2,900,000 | - | 12,400,000 | - |
|---|
Notes:
# Figures from Richard Overy, ''Russia's War'', p. 155 and ''Campaigns of World War II Day By Day'', by Chris Bishop and Chris McNab, pp. 244-52.
# If numbers are not stated then they are unknown. Soviet numbers for 1945 are for the whole of 1945 even after the war was over.
# German figures for 1941 and 1942 include tanks only. (Self-propelled guns cost 2/3 of a tank (mainly because they have no turret) and were more appropriate in a defensive role. The Germans therefore favored their production in the second half of the war.)
# Figures are from ''The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia'' by Richard Overy p. 498.
It should be noted that the Axis allies Italy, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria added to the German numbers. Two-thirds of Germany's Iron ore, much needed for her military production, came from Sweden. Soviet production and upkeep was assisted by the Lend-Lease program from the United States and Britain. After the defeat at Stalingrad, Germany geared completely towards a war economy, as expounded in Goebbels' Sportpalast speech, increasing production in subsequent years under Albert Speer's astute direction, despite the intensifying Allied bombing campaign.
Casualties
The Eastern Front was unparalleled for its high intensity, ferocity, and brutality. The fighting involved millions of German and Soviet troops along a broad front. It was by far the deadliest single theatre of war in World War II, with over 5 million deaths on the Axis Forces; Soviet military deaths were about 10.6 million (out of which 3.6 million Soviets died in German captivity[5]), and civilian deaths were about 14 to 17 million. Soviet and Russian historiography often uses the so-called irretrievable casualties term. According to the Narkomat of Defence order (№ 023, February 4, 1944), the irretrievable casualties include killed, missed, those who died due to war-time or subsequent wounds, maladies and chilblains and those who were captured.
The genocidal death toll was attributed to several factors, including brutal mistreatment of POWs and captured partisans by both sides, multiple atrocities by the Germans and the Soviets against the civilian population and each other, the wholesale use of weaponry on the battlefield against huge masses of infantry. The multiple battles, and most of all, the use of scorched earth tactics destroyed agricultural land, infrastructure, and whole towns, leaving much of the population homeless and without food.
Military losses on the Eastern Front during World War II1| Forces fighting with the Axis |
|---|
| Total Dead | KIA/MIA | POWs taken by the Soviets | POWs that died in Captivity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Greater Germany | 4,300,000 | 4,000,000 | 3,300,000 | 374,000 |
|---|
| Soviet residents who joined German army | 215,000+ | 215,000 | 1,000,000 | Unknown |
|---|
| Romania | 281,000 | 81,000 | 500,000 | 200,000 |
|---|
| Hungary | 300,000 | 100,000 | 500,000 | 200,000 |
|---|
| Italy | 82,000 | 32,000 | 70,000 | 50,000 |
|---|
| Total | 5,178,000+ | 4,428,000 | 5,450,000 | 824,000 |
|---|
Military losses on the Eastern Front during World War II2| Forces Fighting with the Soviet Union |
|---|
| Total Dead | KIA/MIA | POWs taken by the Axis | POWs that died in captivity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soviet | 10,600,000 | 6,600,000 | 5,200,000 | 3,600,000 |
|---|
| Poland | 24,000 | 24,000 | Unknown | Unknown |
|---|
| Romania | 17,000 | 17,000 | 80,000 | Unknown |
|---|
| Bulgaria |
|---|
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