Eastern Front (World War II)
Background
Ideologies
German ideology
Adolf 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 there as a master race, while exterminating or deporting most of the inhabitants to Siberia and using the remainder as slave labour. To hard-line Nazis in Berlin (like Himmler), the war against the Soviet Union was a struggle of Nazism against Communism, and of the Aryan race against Slavic Untermenschen (subhumans). Hitler referred to it in unique terms, calling it a "war of annihilation". In a plan called Generalplan Ost, the population of occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was to be partially deported to West Siberia, partially enslaved and eventually exterminated; the conquered territories were to be colonized by German or "Germanized" settlers. In addition, the Nazis also sought to wipe out the large Jewish population of Eastern Europe as part of the Nazi program aimed to exterminate all European Jews.
After Germany's initial success at the Battle of Kiev, Adolf Hitler saw the Soviet Union as militarily weak and ripe for immediate conquest. On October 3, 1941, he announced, "We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down." Thus, Germany expected another short Blitzkrieg and made no serious preparations for prolonged warfare. However, following the decisive Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad and the resulting dire German military situation, Hitler and Nazi propaganda proclaimed the war to be a German defence of Western civilization against destruction by the vast "Bolshevik hordes" that were pouring into Europe.
Soviet ideology
The Soviet regime, led by Joseph Stalin, planned the expansion of their ideology (Marxist-Leninism) and lent lip service to the advancement of world revolution. In reality, Stalin adhered to the Socialism in one country doctrine and used it to justify the massive industrialization of the USSR during the 1930s. Nazi Germany, who positioned itself as a consistently anti-Communist regime, and who formalised this position by signing the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan and Italy, was a direct ideological antipode of the Communist Soviet Union. The ideological tensions had transformed into the proxy war between Nazi Germany and the USSR, when, in 1936, Germany and Fascist Italy interfered in the Spanish Civil War, supporting Spanish Nationalists, while the Soviets supported the predominantly socialist and communist-led Second Spanish Republic.
German Anschluss of Austria in 1938 and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia demonstrated the impossibility of establishing a collective security system in Europe, a policy advocated by the Soviet ministry of foreign affairs Maxim Litvinov. This, as well as inability of the British and French leadership to sign a full scale anti-German political and military alliance with USSR, led to signing a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany in late August, 1939. Signing of the non-aggression pact led to a turn of Soviet propaganda. The Nazis were not portrayed as sworn enemies any more, and the media of the Soviet Union portrayed the Germans as neutrals, blaming Poland, United Kingdom and France for the start of the war. However, after the German attack the position of the Soviet government shifted completely to encourage the beating back of the Nazi hordes.
Forces
The war was fought between Nazi Germany, its allies and Finland, against the Soviet Union. The conflict began on 22 June 1941 with 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, 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 Romania, Hungary, Italy, 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 Blue Division, sent by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco to keep his ties to the Axis intact.
Conduct of operations
Operation Barbarossa: Summer 1941
Moscow and Rostov: Autumn 1941
Soviet counter-offensive: Winter 1941
Don, Volga, and Caucasus: Summer 1942
Stalingrad: Winter 1942
Kursk: Summer 1943
Autumn and Winter 1943–44
Summer 1944
Autumn 1944
January–March 1945
End of War: April–May 1945
Main articles: Battle of Berlin, Battle of Halbe, Prague Offensive
Soviet Far East: August 1945
Results
The Eastern Front was 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. The German armed forces suffered 80% of its military deaths in the Eastern Front. 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 ideologies.
Leadership
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were both ideologically driven states (Soviet communism and Nazism respectively), 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
Joseph Stalin
Occupation and repression
Industrial output
The Soviet victory owed a great deal to the ability of its 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. Once these facilities were reassembled east of the Urals, production could be reassumed without fear of German bombing.
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 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.
Although Germany produced many times more raw materials, it 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 engineered more advanced but complex designs such as the Panther tank, the King Tiger or the Elefant from a 1943 decision for "quality over quantity".
Casualties
Bibliography
See also
Notes
External links
- Marking 70 Years to Operation Barbarossa on the Yad Vashem website
- Prof Richard Overy writes a summary about the eastern front for the BBC
- Rarities of the USSR photochronicles. Great Patriotic War 1941–1945 Borodulin Collection. Excellent set of war photos
- OnWar maps of the Eastern Front
- Memories of Leutnant d.R. Wilhelm Radkovsky 1940–1945 Experiences as a German soldier on the Eastern and Western Front
- Pobediteli: Eastern Front flash animation (photos, video, interviews, memorials. Written from a Russian perspective)
- Feldgrau.com The German Armed Forces 1919–1945
- Information about the Eastern front up to September 1943
- RKKA in World War II
- 27 Million
- Pictures of German Occupation in the USSR
- Small Unit Actions During German Campaign in Russia German and Soviet tactics explained, written by former German commanders in the East
- Armchair General maps, year by year
- Dedicated to The War on the Eastern Front
- The Atrocities committed by German-Fascists in the USSR (Soviet documentary film) on YouTube
- World War II Eastern Front Order Of Battle
- Western Europe
- Eastern Europe
- Africa
- Mediterranean
- Asia and the Pacific
- Atlantic
| General | |
|
Retrieved from : http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)&oldid=464343636
