Eastern Front (World War II)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Eastern Front of World War II began in the predawn hours of the 22nd of June 1941, when ninety-nine German divisions crossed into Soviet territory from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Historian Geoffrey Roberts has calculated that more than eighty percent of all combat during the Second World War took place here. Of the estimated seventy to eighty-five million deaths attributed to the entire conflict, around thirty million occurred on this single theatre, including nine million children. German historian Ernst Nolte called it "the most atrocious war of conquest, enslavement, and annihilation known to modern history." What drove two of the largest military machines in history into a four-year collision across a thousand kilometres of steppe and city? How did a campaign Hitler expected to finish in weeks drag into the most lethal struggle ever fought? And what role did ideology, economics, and sheer industrial weight play in deciding who survived?

• 2. Ideological Foundations

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  Hitler had spelled out his intentions in Mein Kampf as early as 1925. He argued that Germans needed Lebensraum, meaning living space, in Eastern Europe and particularly in Russia. The plan was not merely conquest. It envisioned settling Germanic people on the land while exterminating or deporting the existing inhabitants to Siberia and using the remainder as slave labour. Hitler had referred to Russians as inferior since at least 1917, believing that the Bolshevik Revolution had placed Jews in control over a mass of Slavs he considered incapable of self-rule. Heinrich Himmler and the broader Nazi leadership framed the war as a struggle between Nazism and what they called Jewish Bolshevism. Wehrmacht officers instructed their troops to target people described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", and the "Asiatic flood." The vast majority of German soldiers absorbed this framing and viewed the Soviet enemy in those terms. The blueprint for what victory would look like was Generalplan Ost, which called for the partial deportation of Central and Eastern European populations to West Siberia, their enslavement, and eventual extermination, with the conquered territories then colonised by German or Germanised settlers. After Germany's early success at the Battle of Kiev in 1941, Hitler addressed a crowd at the Berlin Sportpalast on the 3rd of October and declared, "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down." German planners therefore made no serious preparations for prolonged warfare, expecting another swift Blitzkrieg. That miscalculation would prove fatal to their ambitions.

• 3. Operation Barbarossa

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  At 03:15 on the 22nd of June 1941, the attack that would become the largest land invasion in history began. Ninety-nine of 190 German divisions crossed the border, including fourteen panzer divisions and ten motorised formations. Romanian, Italian, Slovak, and Hungarian units accompanied them. The Luftwaffe immediately struck Soviet airfields, destroying large numbers of aircraft before their pilots could take off; inexperienced Soviet pilots were then decimated in dogfights by their veteran German counterparts. Stalin had received warnings from multiple sources, including the Soviet spy Richard Sorge and the Lucy spy ring operating out of Switzerland, but treated the signals as disinformation. A directive signed by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and General Georgy Zhukov had explicitly ordered Soviet troops not to answer provocations and not to counterattack on German soil without specific orders. The result was that the Soviet military and civilian leadership were caught largely by surprise. For the first month the panzer forces encircled hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in enormous pockets, which slower-moving infantry then reduced while the tanks drove deeper into Russian territory. Army Group Centre's combined panzer force reached the Beresina River in just six days, having covered 650 kilometres from their start lines. Smolensk fell on the 16th of July. At Kiev, 400,000 Soviet prisoners were captured when the city surrendered on the 19th of September. As Soviet industry retreated eastward on flatcars to the Ural Mountains, Caucasus, and Central Asia, Stalin ordered the retreating Red Army to pursue a scorched-earth policy, and destruction battalions were formed with authority to summarily execute any suspicious person.

• 4. Stalingrad and the Turning Point

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  On the 28th of June 1942, Germany launched Fall Blau, or Case Blue, driving Army Group South toward the oil fields of the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad on the Volga. The 6th Army, advancing on Stalingrad, was for a long period unsupported by the 4th Panzer Army, which had been diverted elsewhere. When the two forces rejoined the offensive, Soviet resistance under the 62nd Army commanded by Vasily Chuikov had stiffened considerably. A German leap across the Don brought troops to the Volga on the 23rd of August, but for the next three months the Wehrmacht fought through the city street by street. Operation Uranus, launched on the 19th of November, saw two Soviet fronts punch through the Romanian lines on either side of Stalingrad and converge at Kalach on the 23rd of November, trapping 300,000 Axis troops. A German relief attempt, Operation Winter Storm, got underway on the 12th of December with three transferred panzer divisions but stalled 65 kilometres short of its goal. On the 31st of January 1943, the 90,000 survivors of the 300,000-man 6th Army surrendered. The Battle of Stalingrad is regarded as the bloodiest battle of the war and arguably in all of human history. Following the Soviet victory, Nazi propaganda shifted its framing entirely: instead of casting the war as a German conquest, it began portraying the conflict as Germany defending Western civilisation against what it called Bolshevik hordes.

• 5. Kursk and the End of German Offense

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  After Stalingrad, Hitler reinstated Heinz Guderian to a prominent role as Inspector of Panzer Troops. The German General Staff debated whether to attempt to pinch off a massive Soviet salient centred on Kursk. Hitler was nervous. He knew the Soviets had spent six months reinforcing the position with anti-tank guns, tank traps, landmines, barbed wire, trenches, pillboxes, artillery, and mortars. Nevertheless, the offensive was ordered. In the north, the entire German 9th Army, redeployed from the Rzhev salient, could not advance even eight kilometres past its first objective at Olkhovatka. In the south, the 4th Panzer Army made more headway, and on the 12th of July, about one thousand tanks were engaged near Prokhorovka in a battle that Soviet historians would later idealise as the largest tank battle of all time. Although the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army did not attain its objectives, it stopped the German advance. Concerned simultaneously by the Allies' landing in Sicily on the 10th of July, Hitler halted the offensive. The Kursk campaign was the last offensive the Wehrmacht was able to launch on the scale of 1940 and 1941. Subsequent German offensives would represent only a shadow of previous capability, and from this point forward the Red Army held the strategic initiative.

• 6. Operation Bagration and Collapse

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  Wehrmacht planners were convinced the Red Army's next major blow would fall in the south. They transferred troops accordingly, stripping Army Group Centre, whose front still jutted deep into Soviet territory. They were wrong. Operation Bagration, agreed upon by the Allies at the Tehran Conference in December 1943, launched on the 22nd of June 1944, exactly three years after Barbarossa. More than 2.3 million Soviet troops attacked Army Group Centre, which had fewer than 800,000 men. At the points of attack the Red Army achieved a ratio of ten to one in tanks and seven to one in aircraft. The capital of Belarus, Minsk, fell on the 3rd of July, trapping roughly 100,000 Germans. By the end of August 1944 the operation had cost Germany approximately 400,000 dead, wounded, missing, and sick, with 160,000 captured, along with 2,000 tanks and 57,000 other vehicles. Following a coup against Romania's Axis-aligned government on the 23rd of August, the Red Army occupied Bucharest on the 31st of August, and Romania and the Soviet Union signed an armistice on the 12th of September. Bulgaria followed. Several former Axis allies had defected to the Soviet side, and the strategic map of Europe was shifting faster than Germany could respond.

• 7. Lend-Lease and the Material War

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  Behind the Red Army's mounting strength was a supply line that stretched across the Atlantic and through Arctic convoys. Lend-Lease delivered 58 percent of the USSR's high-octane aviation fuel and 93 percent of its railway equipment, including locomotives, freight cars, and wide-gauge rails. Aluminium shipments alone totalled about 350,000 tons of the 800,000 tons of nonferrous metals sent; Soviet statistics indicated that without this aluminium, aircraft production would have been less than half of the 137,000 planes eventually produced. The Soviet Union received war materials, military equipment, and other supplies worth 12.5 billion dollars, roughly a quarter of total American Lend-Lease aid. Stalin acknowledged in 1944 that two-thirds of Soviet heavy industry had been built with American help and the remaining third with assistance from Britain and Canada. Total Lend-Lease aid across all recipients during the war was estimated between forty-two and fifty billion dollars. Professor Albert L. Weeks noted that, in any definitive sense of establishing how crucial this aid was to Soviet victory, "the jury is still out." On the German side, resources flowed in by different means: Romania supplied Germany and its allies with roughly thirteen million barrels of oil between 1941 and 1943, and Rolf Karlbom estimated that Swedish iron may have accounted for forty-three percent of Germany's total iron consumption between 1933 and 1943.

• 8. The Final Drive to Berlin

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  The Soviet Union entered Warsaw on the 17th of January 1945, after the city had been destroyed and abandoned by the Germans. Three days later, the Red Army launched the Vistula-Oder Offensive across a broad front of four army groups. Soviet forces outnumbered the Germans by an average of five to six to one in troops, six to one in artillery, and six to one in tanks. After four days of fighting the Red Army broke out and began advancing thirty to forty kilometres a day, sweeping through the Baltic states, Danzig, East Prussia, and Poznan, before drawing up on a line sixty kilometres east of Berlin along the Oder River. The full Vistula-Oder operation lasted twenty-three days and cost the Red Army 194,191 total casualties and 1,267 tanks and assault guns. A limited German counterattack codenamed Operation Solstice, commanded by Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, had failed by the 24th of February 1945. The Battle of Berlin followed, and Germany's armed forces surrendered unconditionally on the 9th of May 1945, the date that marks the end of the Eastern Front and the war in Europe. The German Instrument of Surrender had been signed the previous day, on the 8th of May. The forced-labour dimension of the German war economy then unwound as well: defeat freed approximately eleven million foreigners classified as displaced persons, most of them forced labourers and prisoners of war, among them 5.2 million repatriated to the Soviet Union and 1.6 million to Poland.