The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was the largest and deadliest land conflict of the Second World War. It was not only a contest between armies. German plans aimed to seize territory, destroy Soviet power and reorder eastern Europe through starvation, forced labour, deportation and mass murder.
Operation Barbarossa
Germany and its allies invaded on 22 June 1941 along a vast front. Surprise, operational skill and earlier Soviet losses allowed German forces to encircle large armies and advance hundreds of miles. Soviet commanders nevertheless raised new forces, moved factories east and continued resistance despite catastrophic losses.
German planning assumed the Soviet Union would collapse quickly. Logistics failed to keep pace with the advance, railways required conversion and vehicles wore out. The battle for Moscow ended that expectation. Soviet counter-attacks in December pushed exhausted German units back from the capital.
Occupation and mass murder
The invasion radicalised the Holocaust. Mobile killing units, police formations, local collaborators and military authorities murdered Jewish communities in mass shootings. Soviet prisoners of war were deliberately denied food and shelter; millions died in German captivity.
Occupation produced different forms of collaboration and resistance, neither of which can be reduced to simple national categories. Civilians faced requisition, forced labour, partisan warfare and brutal reprisals. Nazi policy treated the region as space for a German racial empire rather than as territory to govern conventionally.
Stalingrad and Kursk
Germany renewed its offensive in 1942 towards the Caucasus and Volga. Fighting consumed Stalingrad, where Soviet forces held a narrow bridgehead. In November, Soviet armies struck the weaker Romanian-held flanks and surrounded the German Sixth Army. Its surrender in February 1943 destroyed an entire field army and became a global symbol of reversal.
Germany's attack around Kursk in July 1943 met deep Soviet defences. The battle did not alone decide the war, but Germany could no longer regain a lasting strategic initiative. Soviet production, manpower and improving operational methods sustained repeated offensives.
From Bagration to Berlin
Operation Bagration in June 1944 destroyed much of Army Group Centre and carried Soviet forces into Poland. The advance also exposed political conflicts over the future of eastern Europe. The Soviet response to the Warsaw Uprising remains debated within the constraints of military position and Stalin's hostility to the Polish government-in-exile.
Soviet forces entered Germany in 1945 and captured Berlin in May after intense fighting. Soldiers and civilians experienced enormous violence, including widespread sexual violence. Victory ended Nazi rule in the east while extending Soviet political power across central and eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union suffered about 27 million military and civilian deaths, though estimates and categories vary. That scale is essential to explaining Soviet memory, policy and post-war claims, without excusing the crimes of Stalin's regime.
Why It Matters
The Eastern Front determined much of Nazi Germany's military defeat and was central to the Holocaust, occupation policy and the political division of post-war Europe.