Eastern Front (World War II)
2008/9 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: World War II
| Eastern Front | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of World War II | |||||||
| Image:Reichstag flag.jpg Soviet soldiers of the 3rd Shock Army reenacting the raising of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag after the Battle of Berlin on May 2, 1945. |
|||||||
|
|||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||
 Soviet Union
|
 Germany Italy (to 1943) Romania (to 1944) Finland (to 1944) Hungary Slovakia Croatia Bulgaria (to 1944)Volunteers from Western Europe |
||||||
| Commanders | |||||||
| Aleksei Antonov Nikandr Chibisov Ivan Konev Rodion Malinovsky Ivan Bagramyan Ivan Fedyuninsky Valerian Frolov Vasiliy Gordov Leonid Govorov Mikhail Kirponos Mikhail Khozin Fyodor Kuznetsov Ivan Maslennikov Kirill Meretskov Ivan Petrov Markian Popov Maxim Purkayev Alexander Rodimtsev Konstantin Rokossovsky Pavel Rotmistrov Vasiliy Sokolovsky Semyon Timoshenko Fyodor Tolbukhin Aleksandr Vasilevsky Nikolai Vatutin Kliment Voroshilov
|
Ernst Busch Heinz Guderian Ewald von Kleist Günther von Kluge Georg von Küchler Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb Wilhelm List Erich von Manstein Walter Model Friedrich Paulus Gerd von Rundstedt Ferdinand Schörner Erhard Raus Walther von Reichenau Giovanni Messe, CSIR Italo Gariboldi, ARMIR Petre Dumitrescu, 3rd Army Constantin Constantinescu, 4th Army Karl Lennart Oesch Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim Gusztáv Vitéz Jány, 2nd Army Ferenc Szombathelyi |
||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| See below | See below | ||||||
|
|||||
The Eastern Front (German: Die Ostfront 1941-1945) of the European Theatre of World War II was a theatre 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 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 theatre 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 20 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 begun 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 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 received cooperation from 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 did not 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, atrocities 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 did not 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 did not 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 could not 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 do not apply any specific periodisation to the conduct of operations on the Eastern Front, the 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 (Russian: Первый период Великой Отечественной войны) (22 June 1941 - 18 November 1942)
- Summer-Autumn Campaign (Russian: Летне-осенняя кампания 1941 г.) (22 June - 4 December 1941)
- Winter Campaign of 1941-42 (Russian: Зимняя кампания 1941/42 г.) (5 December 1941 - 30 April 1942)
- Summer-Autumn Campaign (Russian: Летне-осенняя кампания 1942 г.) (1 May - 18 November 1942)
2. Second Period of war (Russian: Второй период Великой Отечественной войны) (19 November 1942 - 31 December 1943)
- Winter Campaign of 1942-43 (Russian: Зимняя кампания 1942-1943 гг.) (19 November 1942 - 3 March 1943)
- Summer-Autumn Campaign of 1943 (Russian: Летне-осенняя кампания 1943 г.) (1 July - 31 December 1943)
3. Third Period of war (Russian: Третий период Великой Отечественной войны) (1 January 1944 - 9 May 1945)
- Winter-Spring Campaign (Russian: Зимне-весенняя кампания 1944 г.) (1 January - 31 May 1944)
- Summer-Autumn Campaign of 1944 (Russian: Летне-осенняя кампания 1944 г.) (1 June - 31 December 1944)
- Campaign in Europe during 1945 (Russian: Кампания в Европе 1945 г.) (1 January - 9 May 1945)
Undoubtedly the best analytical works in English written on the history of the combat operation on the Eastern front in the past 20 years have been those by David Glantz, which deal with large strategic as well as smaller scale operational and tactical aspects of the conflict.
First period
Operation Barbarossa: Summer 1941
Main article: Operation Barbarossa, Battle of Bialystok-Minsk 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, drawn against the Soviet Union stormed it from Baltic to the Black Sea. 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 North-Western, Western and South-Western Fronts respectively. For a month the three-pronged offensive was completely unstoppable as the Panzer forces encircled hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in huge pockets that were then reduced by slower-moving infantry divisions while the panzers charged on, following the Blitzkrieg doctrine. As part of this lightning campaign the German airforce began immediate attacks on Soviet airfields destroying most of the initially antiquated and inept Soviet Air Force before it left the ground.
Army Group North's objective was Leningrad via the Baltic States. Comprising the 16th and 18th Armies and 4th Panzer Group, this formation drove through Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the Russian cities of Pskov and Novgorod.
Army Group Centre comprised two Panzer groups (2nd and 3rd), which rolled east from either side of Brest-Litovsk and converged ahead of Minsk, followed by 2nd, 4th, and 9th Armies. The combined Panzer force reached the Beresina River in just six days, 650 km (400 miles) from their start lines. The next objective was to cross the Dnieper river, which was accomplished by 11 July. Following that, their next target was Smolensk, which fell on 16 July, but the engagement in the Smolensk area blocked the German advance until mid-September, effectively disrupting the blitzkrieg.
Army Group South, with 1st Panzer Group, 6th, 11th and 17th Armies, was tasked with advancing through Galicia and into Ukraine. Their progress, however, was rather slow, and took heavy casualties in a major tank battle. With only the corridor towards Kiev secure by mid-July, the 11th Army, aided by two Romanian armies, fought its way through Bessarabia towards Odessa. The 1st Panzer Group turned away from Kiev for the moment, advancing into the Dnieper bend. When it joined up with the southern elements of Army Group South at Uman, the group captured 100,000 Soviet prisoners in a huge pocket.
As the Red Army withdrew behind the Dnieper and Dvina rivers, the Soviet hierarchy turned its attention to moving as much of the region's heavy industry as it could, dismantled and packed onto flatcars, away from the front line, re-establishing it in more remote areas behind the Urals and in Central Asia. Most civilians could not be evacuated along with the equipment and were left behind to the mercy of the invading forces.
With the capture of Smolensk and the advance to the Luga river, Army Groups Centre and North had completed their first major objective: to get across and hold the "land bridge" between the Dvina and Dnieper. The route to Moscow, now only 400 km (250 miles) away, was wide open.
The German generals argued for an immediate drive towards Moscow, but Hitler overruled them, citing the importance of Ukrainian grain and heavy industry if under German possession, not to mention the massing of Soviet reserves in the Gomel area between Army Group Centre's southern flanks and the bogged-down Army Group South to the south. The order was issued to 2nd Panzer Group to turn south and advance towards Kiev. This took the whole of August and into September, but when 2nd Panzer Group joined up with 1st Panzer Group at Lokhvitsa on 14 September 665,000 Soviet prisoners were taken and Kiev fell on 19 September.
Moscow and Rostov: Autumn 1941
Hitler then decided to resume the advance to Moscow, renaming the Panzer Groups to Panzer Armies for the occasion. Operation Typhoon, which was set in motion on 30 September, saw 2nd Panzer Army rush along the paved road from Orel (captured 5 October) to the Oka river at Plavskoye, while the 4th Panzer Army (transferred from Army Group North to Centre) and 3rd Panzer Armies surrounded the Soviet forces in two huge pockets at Vyazma and Bryansk. Army Group North positioned itself in front of Leningrad and attempted to cut the rail link at Tikhvin to the east. Thus began the 900-day Siege of Leningrad. North of the Arctic Circle, a German-Finnish force set out for Murmansk but could get no further than the Litsa river, where they settled down.
Army Group South pushed down from the Dnieper to the Sea of Azov coast, also advancing through Kharkov, Kursk, and Stalino. The 11th Army moved into the Crimea and had taken control of all of the peninsula by autumn (except Sevastopol, which held out until 3 July 1942). On 21 November the Germans took Rostov, the gateway to the Caucasus. However, the German lines were over-extended and the Soviet defenders counterattacked the 1st Panzer Army's spearhead from the north, forcing them to pull out of the city and behind the Mius River; the first significant German withdrawal of the war.
One last lunge on 15 November saw the Germans attempting to throw a ring around Moscow. On 27 November the 4th Panzer Army got within 30 km (19 miles) of the Kremlin when it reached the last tramstop of the Moscow line at Khimki, while the 2nd Panzer Army, try as it might, could not take Tula, the last Soviet city that stood in its way of the capital. After a meeting held in Orsha between the head of the Army General Staff, General Halder, and the heads of three Army Groups and armies, it was decided to push forward to Moscow since it was better, as argued by head of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, for them to try their luck on the battlefield rather than just sit and wait while their opponent gathered more strength.
However, by 6 December it became clear that the Wehrmacht was too weak to capture Moscow and the attack was put on hold. General Zhukov thus began his counter-attack, employing fresh, well-trained Siberian reserves transferred from the east following the guarantee of neutrality from Japan.
Soviet counter-offensive: Winter 1941
During the autumn, Zhukov had been transferring fresh and well-equipped Soviet forces from Siberia and the far east to Moscow (these troops had been stationed there in expectation of a Japanese attack, but Stalin's master spy Richard Sorge indicated that the Japanese had decided to attack Southeast Asia and the Pacific instead). On 5 December 1941, these reinforcements attacked the German lines around Moscow, supported by new T-34 tanks and Katyusha rocket launchers. The new Soviet troops were prepared for winter warfare, and they included several ski battalions. The exhausted and freezing Germans were routed and