Eastern Front (World War II)
The Eastern Front, also known as the Great Patriotic War, or the German–Soviet War, was a theatre of World War II fought between the European Axis powers and Allies, including the Soviet Union and Poland. It encompassed Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northeast Europe, and Southeast Europe, and lasted from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945. Of the estimated 70–85 million deaths attributed to the war, around 30 million occurred on the Eastern Front, including 9 million children. The Eastern Front was decisive in determining the outcome in the European theatre of operations in World War II and is the main cause of the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis nations. Historian Geoffrey Roberts noted that "more than 80 percent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front".
The Axis forces, led by Germany, invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Despite warnings and the deployment of Axis armies on his borders, Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would invade and forbade any defensive preparations as to not provoke possible German retaliation. Thus, the Soviets were caught completely unprepared. They were unable to halt deep Axis advances into Russia, which came close to seizing Moscow. However, the Axis offensive stalled and failed to capture the city, and Hitler shifted his focus to the oil fields of the Caucasus the following year. German forces advanced into the Caucasus under Fall Blau, launched on 28 June 1942. The Soviets decisively defeated the Axis at the Battle of Stalingrad—the bloodiest battle in the war and arguably in all of history—making it one of the key turning points of the front. A second great Axis defeat, at the Battle of Kursk, crippled German offensive capabilities permanently and cleared the way for Soviet offensives. Following the Red Army's enormous success in Operation Bagration, when they destroyed Germany's Army Group Center, several Axis allies defected to the Communists, such as Romania and Bulgaria. The Eastern Front concluded with the capture of Berlin, followed by the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender on 8 May, ending the Eastern Front and the war in Europe.
The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history. In pursuit of its "Lebensraum" settler-colonial agenda, Nazi Germany waged a war of annihilation throughout Eastern Europe. Nazi military operations were characterised by brutality, scorched earth tactics, wanton destruction, mass deportations, starvation, wholesale terrorism, and massacres. These included the genocidal campaigns of Generalplan Ost and the Hunger Plan, which sought the extermination and ethnic cleansing of more than a hundred million Eastern Europeans.
German historian Ernst Nolte called the Eastern Front "the most atrocious war of conquest, enslavement, and annihilation known to modern history", while British historian Robin Cross expressed that "In the Second World War no theatre was more gruelling and destructive than the Eastern Front, and nowhere was the fighting more bitter".
The two principal belligerent powers in the Eastern Front were Germany and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies. Though they never sent ground troops to the Eastern Front, the United States and the United Kingdom both provided substantial material aid to the Soviet Union in the form of the Lend-Lease program, along with naval and air support.
The joint German–Finnish operations across the northernmost Finnish–Soviet border and in the Murmansk region are considered part of the Eastern Front. In addition, the Soviet–Finnish Continuation War is generally also considered the northern flank of the Eastern Front.
Background
The German Empire was defeated in World War I. The Russian Empire and the subsequent Russian Republic belonged to the victorious bloc of the Allies, but following the October Revolution in Russia, the Bolshevik government signed the separate Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, therefore violating its agreement with the other two members of the Triple Entente and breaking the alliance. The Bolsheviks also issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia which formally provided the peoples of the former Russian Empire the right to self-determination, including secession and creation of separate states; Russia had lost substantial territory in Eastern Europe as a result of the treaty, where the Bolsheviks in Petrograd conceded to German demands and ceded control of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, and other areas, to the Central Powers. Subsequently, when Germany in its turn surrendered to the Allies and these territories became independent states under the terms of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 at Versailles, Soviet Russia was in the midst of a civil war, and the Allies did not recognise the Bolshevik government and supported White governments of Russia, so no Soviet Russian representation attended.Adolf Hitler had declared his intention to invade the Soviet Union on 11 August 1939 to Carl Jacob Burckhardt, League of Nations Commissioner, by saying:
Everything I undertake is directed against the Russians. If the West is too stupid and blind to grasp this, then I shall be compelled to come to an agreement with the Russians, beat the West and then after their defeat turn against the Soviet Union with all my forces. I need the Ukraine so that they can't starve us out, as happened in the last war.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed in August 1939 was a non-aggression agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union. It contained a secret protocol aiming to return Central Europe to the pre–World War I status quo by dividing it between Germany and the Soviet Union. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania would return to the Soviet control, while Poland and Romania would be divided. The Eastern Front was also made possible by the German–Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement in which the Soviet Union gave Germany the resources necessary to launch military operations in Eastern Europe.
On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded Eastern Poland, and, as a result, Poland was partitioned among Germany, the Soviet Union and Lithuania. Soon after that, the Soviet Union demanded significant territorial concessions from Finland, and after Finland rejected Soviet demands, the Soviet Union attacked Finland on 30 November 1939 in what became known as the Winter War – a bitter conflict that resulted in a peace treaty on 13 March 1940, with Finland maintaining its independence but losing its eastern parts in Karelia.
In June 1940 the Soviet Union occupied and illegally annexed the three Baltic states. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact ostensibly provided security to the Soviets in the occupation both of the Baltics and of the north and northeastern regions of Romania, although Hitler, in announcing the invasion of the Soviet Union, cited the Soviet annexations of Baltic and Romanian territory as having violated Germany's understanding of the pact. Moscow partitioned the annexed Romanian territory between the Ukrainian and Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republics.
Ideologies
German ideology
Hitler had argued in his autobiography Mein Kampf for the necessity of Lebensraum : acquiring new territory for Germans in Eastern Europe, in particular Russia. He envisaged settling Germans there, as according to Nazi ideology the Germanic people constituted the "master race", while exterminating or deporting most of the existing inhabitants to Siberia and using the remainder as slave labour.Hitler as early as 1917 had referred to the Russians as inferior, believing that the Bolshevik Revolution had put the Jews in power over the mass of Slavs, who were, in Hitler's opinion, incapable of ruling themselves and had thus ended up being ruled by Jewish masters.
The Nazi leadership, including Heinrich Himmler, saw the war against the Soviet Union as a struggle between the ideologies of Nazism and Jewish Bolshevism, ensuring territorial expansion for the Germanic Übermenschen - who according to Nazi ideology were the Aryan Herrenvolk - at the expense of the Slavic Untermenschen. Wehrmacht officers told their troops to target people who were described as "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "red beast". The vast majority of German soldiers viewed the war in Nazi terms, seeing the Soviet enemy as sub-human.
Hitler referred to the war in radical terms, calling it a "war of annihilation" which was both an ideological and racial war. The Nazi vision for the future of Eastern Europe was codified most clearly in the. The populations of occupied Central Europe and the Soviet Union were to be partially deported to West Siberia, enslaved and eventually exterminated; the conquered territories were to be colonised by German or "Germanized" settlers. In addition, the Nazis also sought to rid themselves of the large Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe as part of their program aiming to exterminate all European Jews.
Psychologically, the German surge to the east in 1941 marked a high point in some Germans' feeling of - an intoxication with the idea of colonising the East.
After Germany's initial success at the Battle of Kiev in 1941, Hitler saw the Soviet Union as militarily weak and ripe for immediate conquest. In a speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on 3 October, he announced, "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down." Thus the German authorities expected another short Blitzkrieg and made no serious preparations for prolonged warfare. However, following the decisive Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 and the resulting dire German military situation, Nazi propaganda began to portray the war as a German defence of Western civilisation against destruction by the vast "Bolshevik hordes" that were pouring into Europe.