Barbarossa opened history's largest military confrontation
The Eastern Front—Great Patriotic War to Soviets—pitted European Axis forces against the USSR and its allies after Germany launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Stalin ignored warnings; what followed became the war's decisive, and by historians' verdicts most annihilatory, land struggle.
Fought from 22 June 1941 until 9 May 1945 across the Baltics, the Balkans and Central and Eastern Europe, this theatre claimed around 30 million of the war's 70 to 85 million dead, 9 million of them children. Historian Geoffrey Roberts reckoned that over four-fifths of all Second World War combat took place here, making it the main reason Nazi Germany lost. Britain and the United States sent no ground troops but shipped huge quantities of Lend-Lease supplies and gave naval and air support, while joint German-Finnish operations near Murmansk formed its northern flank.
Hitler had long wanted this war. His 1925 book Mein Kampf demanded living space in the East, and in August 1939 he told League of Nations commissioner Carl Burckhardt that everything he did was aimed at the Russians and that he needed Ukraine's grain. That same month the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact secretly split Central Europe. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, the Soviets entered from the east on 17 September, Moscow attacked Finland that November, and in June 1940 it annexed the three Baltic states.
Nazi leaders framed the campaign as a racial and ideological war of annihilation. Generalplan Ost and the Hunger Plan envisaged deporting, enslaving or killing more than a hundred million Eastern Europeans to make room for German settlers, and scorched earth, starvation and massacres marked the occupation. Ernst Nolte called it the most atrocious war of conquest in modern history.
Stalin dismissed every warning and banned defensive preparations, so the invasion caught the Red Army unready, and Axis armies drove almost to Moscow before stalling. After victory at Kiev, Hitler boasted in October 1941 that one kick would bring the whole structure down. In 1942 Case Blue turned south toward the Caucasus oil fields, but Stalingrad, perhaps the bloodiest battle ever fought, reversed the tide, and defeat at Kursk ended Germany's capacity to attack. Operation Bagration destroyed Army Group Centre, Romania and Bulgaria switched sides, and the fall of Berlin preceded the surrender signed on 8 May 1945.
Source: Eastern Front (World War II)
