Everything about Eastern Front World War Ii totally explained
The
Eastern Front of the
World War II was a
theater of war between the
German Reich and the
Soviet Union which encompassed
central and
eastern Europe from
June 22,
1941 to
May 9,
1945. The German term for this conflict is the 'Russlandfeldzug 1941–1945' (Russian campaign) or more commonly the 'Russian front'. Nazi propaganda dubbed the conflict
The Crusade against Bolshevism. In all Soviet and the majority of
Russian sources, the conflict in Europe is referred to as the
Great Patriotic War, but that phrase also includes operations against Japan in 1945. 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.
It was the largest theater 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 theaters of
World War II combined. With over 30 million dead, many of them civilians, the Eastern Front has been called a
war of extermination. 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.
The series of events preceding the opening of the Eastern Front included the
invasion of Poland in
1939 by
Nazi Germany and the resulting fourth partition of
Poland when the Soviet Union used the invasion as a pretext to occupy 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, and the
annexation of Bessarabia.
This article, however, concentrates on the much larger conflict fought from June 1941 to May 1945, in which the two principal belligerent powers were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet-Finnish
Continuation War may be considered the northern flank of the Eastern Front.
Forces
The war was fought between the German Reich, its Allies, and many pro-Nazi volunteers from occupied states, against the Soviet Union, and eventually its Allies of the
British Commonwealth, France and the United States. The conflict began on
22 June 1941 as part of the
Operation Barbarossa Offensive, when
Axis forces crossed the borders, described in the
German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, thereby invading the Soviet Union. The war ended on
9 May 1945, when
Germany's armed forces surrendered unconditionally following the
Berlin Offensive, a strategic operation executed by the
Red Army,or the Communist Army, also known as the
Battle of Berlin.
The states that provided forces and other resources for the German war effort included the
Axis Powers — foremost
Italy,
Romania,
Hungary, and pro-Nazi
Slovakia and
Croatia. The
anti-Soviet Finland, which had fought two conflicts with the Soviet Union, also joined the Offensive. The Wehrmacht forces were also assisted by anti-
Communist partisans in places like
Western Ukraine, the
Baltic states and later
Crimean Tatars. Among the most prominent volunteer army formations was the
Spanish division, sent by Spanish dictator
Francisco Franco to keep his ties to the Axis intact.
The Soviet Union offered support to the partisans in many Wehrmacht-occupied countries in
Eastern Europe, notably those in Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and the
Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In addition the
Polish Armed Forces in the East, particularly the
First and
Second Polish armies, were armed and trained, and would eventually fight alongside the
Red Army. The
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 thought that it was important for French servicemen to serve on all fronts.
British and Commonwealth forces contributed directly to the fighting on the Eastern Front through their service in the
convoys and training Red Air Force pilots, as well as in provision of early material and intelligence support. The later massive material support of the
Lend-Lease by the United States and Canada played a significant part particularly in the
logistics of the war.
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." Thus, another short Blitzkrieg was expected, no serious preparations for warfare in winter, or prolonged over years, were made. In the aftermath of the
Battle of Kursk in 1943 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 active participation in the 1939 invasion of Poland should also not be underestimated. Yet, unlike Hitler, Stalin didn't 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 deadliest conflict in human history, with over 30 million killed 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 hard line 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, 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 at least 20 million civilians were killed by the Nazis. 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 didn't 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. The largest number of civilian deaths in a single city was 1,2 million citizens dead during the
Siege of Leningrad. The combined damage consisted of complete or partial destruction of 1,710 cities and towns, 70,000 villages/hamlets, 2,508 church buildings, 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.
Background
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. The two powers invaded and partitioned
Poland in 1939. 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, The Low Countries, 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.
Some say
Joseph Stalin was fearful of war with Germany or just didn't expect Germany to start a
two-front war, and was reluctant to do anything to provoke Hitler. Others say that Stalin was eager for Germany to be at war with other capitalist countries. Another viewpoint is that Stalin expected war in 1942 (the time when all his preparations would be complete) and stubbornly refused to believe its early arrival.
British historians Alan S. Milward and W. Medicott show that Nazi Germany--unlike Imperial Germany--was prepared for only a short-term war (Blitzkrieg).[125] According to Andreas Hillgruber, without the necessary supplies from the USSR and the strategic security in the East, Germany couldn't have succeeded in the West. Had the Soviets joined the Anglo-French blockade, the German war economy would have been starved. With its own raw materials in September 1939, Germany could have been supplied for a mere 9 to 12 months.
Even though Germany had been assembling very large numbers of troops in eastern Poland and making repeated
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.
Conduct of operations
While German historians don't apply any specific periodisation to the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front, some unspecified Soviet and Russian historians divide the war against Germany and its allies into three periods, which are further subdivided into the major
Campaigns of the
Theatre of war:
1.
First period of war (22 June 1941 - 18 November 1942)
Excellent analytical works in English written on the history of the combat operation on the Eastern front in the past 20 years include those by
David Glantz, which deal with large strategic as well as smaller scale operational and tactical aspects of the conflict.
Operation Barbarossa: Summer 1941
Operation Barbarossa began just before dawn on June 22, 1941. The Germans wrecked the wire network in all Soviet western
military districts to undermine Soviet communications. At 03:15 on
22 June 1941 ninety-nine (including fourteen
Panzerdivisions and ten motorized) of 190 German divisions, deployed against the Soviet Union began the offensive from the Baltic to the Black Seas. They were accompanied by ten Romanian divisions, nine Romanian and four Hungarian
brigades. On the same day the
Baltic,
Western and
Kiev Special military districts were renamed to
Northwestern,
Western and Southwestern Fronts respectively. 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.
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
58th Guards Rifle 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.
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. 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, Field Marshal
Wilhelm Keitel repeated the signing in Berlin at Zhukov's headquarters.
The war in Europe was over.
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.
A small German garrison on the island of Bornholm (Denmark) refused to surrender until after being bombed and invaded by the Soviets. The island was returned to the Danish government four months later.
Manchuria: August 1945
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. While not a part of the Eastern Front operations, it's included here because the commanders and much of the forces used by the Red Army, came from the European Theatre of operations and benefited from the experience gained there. In many ways this was a 'perfect' operation, delivered with the benefit gained during the bitter fighting with the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe over four years.
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
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.
In part because of the unexpected success of the
Battle of France despite the warnings of the professional military, Hitler 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'd to act ruthlessly. I'd 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 wouldn't 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'd 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
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 priority 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. The 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, and had experience, but were deemed “politically unreliable”. This opened up those places to the promotion of many younger officers that Stalin and the NKVD thought were in line with Stalinist politics, many of whom proved to be terribly inexperienced, but some were later very successful. 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'd 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 brutally as in the 1930s): many successful officers were demoted to unimportant positions (including
Zhukov,
Malinovsky and
Koniev).
Occupation and repression
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 others 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'm 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 (
Encyclopædia 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.
(External Link
)
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.
(External Link) More than 209 cities and towns (out of 270 total) and 9,000 villages were destroyed.
Himmler 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)."
(External Link)
Sixty percent of Soviet
POWs died during the war. Large numbers 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.
The
Soviet Union hadn't signed the
Geneva Convention (1929). However, a month after the German invasion in 1941, an offer was made for a reciprocal adherence to the
Hague convention. This 'note' was left unanswered by Third Reich officials .
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
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'd 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 couldn't 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.
1>
| 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
|
|
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
|
1>
| 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
|
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're 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've 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 the broadest land front in military history. 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), 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.
1>
| 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
|
2>
| 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 | 10,000 |
10,000 |
Unknown |
Unknown
|
| Total | 10,651,000 |
6,651,000 |
5,280,000 |
3,600,000
|
1 Rűdiger Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000. ISBN 3-486-56531-1, Richard Overy The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia (2004), ISBN 0-7139-9309-X
2 Vadim Erlikman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke: spravochnik. Moscow 2004. ISBN 5-93165-107-1;
Mark Axworthy, Third Axis Fourth Ally. Arms and Armour 1995, p. 216. ISBN 1-85409-267-7
Total Soviet losses includes Deaths Partisans-250,000 and Deaths Militia-150,000
KIA/MIA above = Killed in action / Missing in action
Polish Armed Forces in the East, initially consisting of Poles from Eastern Poland or otherwise in Soviet Union in 1939-1941, began fighting alongside the Red Army in 1943, and grew steadily as more Polish territory was liberated from the Nazis in 1944-1945.
When the Axis countries of Eastern Europe were occupied by the Soviets, they were forced to change sides and declare war on Germany. (see Allied Commissions).
Some of the Soviet citizens would side with the Germans and join Andrey Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army. Most of those who joined were Russian POWs. Most who joined hated communism and actually saw the Nazis as liberators from communism. These men were primarily used in the Eastern Front but some were assigned to guard the beaches of Normandy.
The other main group of men joining the German army were citizens of the Baltic countries annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 or from Ukraine. They fought in their own Waffen-SS units.
A comparison of the losses demonstrates the cruel treatment of the Soviet POWs by the Nazis. Most of the Axis POWs were released from captivity after the war, but the fate of the Soviet POWs differed markedly. Nazi troops who captured Red Army soldiers frequently shot them in the field or shipped them to concentration camps and executed them. Hitler's notorious Commissar Order implicated all the German armed forces in the policy of war crimes.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Eastern Front World War Ii'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://eastern_front__world_war_ii.totallyexplained.com">Eastern Front (World War II) Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
