The Eastern Front of World War II (1941 to 1945): Causes, Battles and Outcome

It was the largest and most brutal theater of World War II, and it decided the war in Europe: for most of the war, writes Robert Citino of the National WWII Museum, 75 to 80 percent of the German army was deployed in the East. It was also a war of annihilation against civilians and prisoners. For a ranking of its battles see our greatest battles of the Eastern Front, and for the whole war the greatest battles of World War II.²

Causes of the war on the Eastern Front

On 23 August 1939 Germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact, often called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September, and the Soviet Union invaded it from the east on 17 September; the two powers then partitioned the country (see our article on the Soviet invasion of Poland). The pact also let the Soviet Union attack Finland and, in 1940, occupy the Baltic states and take Bessarabia from Romania.³

Hitler regarded the pact as temporary. In July 1940 he decided to attack the Soviet Union, and on 18 December 1940 he signed the directive for Operation Barbarossa. Destroying the Communist Soviet state and conquering "living space" (Lebensraum) for German settlement in the East were longtime Nazi goals.⁴

From the start the campaign was planned as a war of annihilation, not an ordinary military operation. The army agreed to the deployment of SS mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, behind the front, and the "criminal orders" told troops to shoot captured Red Army commissars and shielded soldiers who committed crimes against civilians. German planners also expected tens of millions of Soviet citizens to starve as a result of their occupation policies.⁵

Hitler and his generals expected a quick victory over an army they underrated. Stalin, for his part, ignored repeated warnings of the German buildup, so the invasion achieved almost complete surprise.⁶

Who fought on the Eastern Front

Germany committed about 3 million men to the invasion: Britannica counts almost 150 divisions with some 3,000 tanks and 2,500 aircraft, the German Historical Museum 153 divisions and 3,600 tanks. Its allies added roughly 600,000 to 700,000 troops: Romania and Finland joined from the start, and Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia sent forces as well. Finland fought as a "co-belligerent" to regain the land it had lost in the Winter War and never signed the Axis pact.⁷

On the Soviet side, according to Britannica, German intelligence badly underestimated the reserves Stalin could bring up: by mid-August 1941 more than 200 fresh divisions had appeared. Over the whole war the Soviet Union mobilized 30.6 million soldiers, among them 820,000 women, according to the German Bundestag.⁸

The United States and Britain never fought on the Eastern Front, but they sent large amounts of aid. Under Lend-Lease the United States alone delivered about $11 billion worth of goods, including more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft and 13,000 tanks, and Nikita Khrushchev credited the trucks with making the mechanized offensives of 1944 and 1945 possible. Its weight is debated: Soviet accounts played it down, while the National WWII Museum stresses that it came when the Soviet Union was at a tipping point.⁹

The Axis coalition broke apart in 1944: Romania changed sides on 23 August, when King Michael had Marshal Ion Antonescu arrested; Bulgaria followed in September; and Finland, after a ceasefire on 4 September, signed an armistice in Moscow on 19 September. Hungary fought on, and Budapest held out until 13 February 1945 (see also Operation Konrad III).¹⁰

1941: Operation Barbarossa and the Battle of Moscow

The invasion began on 22 June 1941 along a front from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with three army groups: Wilhelm von Leeb's toward Leningrad, Fedor von Bock's, the strongest, toward Moscow, and Gerd von Rundstedt's toward Ukraine. Huge encirclements followed. Britannica counts about 200,000 prisoners near Smolensk in July, more than half a million east of Kyiv in September and 600,000 at Vyazma in October; the German Historical Museum gives over 300,000 at Smolensk, about 665,000 at Kyiv and about 670,000 at Vyazma and Bryansk.¹¹

In the north, German forces from the south and Finnish forces from the north closed around Leningrad, and on 8 September 1941 the fall of Shlisselburg on Lake Ladoga cut the city's last land link: the siege of Leningrad had begun. About 2.5 million people were trapped inside.¹²

In the autumn the Germans drove on Moscow, and in early December the exhausted troops, not equipped for winter, stopped at the approaches to the capital. On 5 and 6 December the Red Army, with fresh armies massed by Georgy Zhukov, counterattacked and drove them back. The Battle of Moscow ended Hitler's hope of a quick victory, and the Soviet winter counteroffensive, Britannica notes, continued for more than three months (see also the Barvenkovo-Lozovaya offensive in Ukraine in January 1942).¹³

1942 and 1943: Stalingrad and Kursk, the turning points

In the summer of 1942 Germany attacked in the south, and its armies split, part toward the Caucasus oil fields and part toward the Volga at Stalingrad. By September the Germans had reached the outskirts of Stalingrad and approached Grozny in the Caucasus, the farthest extent of German power in Europe.¹⁴

The Battle of Stalingrad turned into months of house-to-house fighting. On 19 November 1942 the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, breaking through the Romanian Third Army on the weak flanks held by Germany's allies, and by 23 November it had encircled the German Sixth Army under Friedrich Paulus. Paulus surrendered on 31 January 1943 and the last resistance ended on 2 February, a catastrophic German defeat that became the turning point in the East.¹⁵

Germany's last great offensive in the East came at Kursk. Operation Citadel opened on 5 July 1943 with pincer attacks from the north and south on the Soviet salient. Estimates of the German assault force run from over 780,000 troops (the historian David Glantz, cited by the National WWII Museum) and about 800,000 (the German Historical Museum) to about 900,000 (Britannica); Glantz counts more than 1.9 million Soviet troops, the German Historical Museum about 1.35 million. Britannica and the National WWII Museum describe Kursk as a whole as the largest tank battle in history. The German attack stalled against deep defenses; the clash at Prokhorovka on 12 July is covered in its own article.¹⁶

The Soviet counteroffensives that followed, beginning with Operation Kutuzov against the Orel salient, retook Orel on 5 August, Britannica records, and Kharkiv on 23 August, and the Battle of Kursk ended German offensive capability in the East. The Red Army pushed on (see the Donbas offensive of July 1943 and the Smolensk operation), and retook Kyiv on 6 November 1943.¹⁷

1944 and 1945: Operation Bagration and the drive to Berlin

In January 1944 a Soviet offensive ended the siege of Leningrad, which had lasted almost 900 days, on 27 January (see the Leningrad-Novgorod offensive). In the Crimean offensive of April and May the Red Army retook the Crimea, liberating Sevastopol in May 1944.¹⁸

The decisive blow fell in Belorussia. Operation Bagration opened on 23 June 1944 (German and Polish accounts date it from 22 June), two and a half weeks after the Allied landings in Normandy, with about 2.4 million Soviet troops by the count of the Encyclopedia of Modern Europe. Minsk fell on 3 July, and by the end of August the Red Army had reached the Vistula and the border of East Prussia. German Army Group Center was shattered: the Imperial War Museums calls it arguably the greatest military defeat of all time, and the Russian Military Historical Society the greatest defeat in Germany's military history.¹⁹

On 1 August 1944, as Soviet spearheads approached, the Polish Home Army rose in Warsaw. The Red Army stayed on the far bank of the Vistula while German forces crushed the Warsaw Uprising, which ended with the Home Army's surrender on 2 October. Why it halted is debated. Britannica calls the halt intentional, though the advance had stalled almost everywhere; the National WWII Museum says historians generally agree the Red Army could not storm the city in the first weeks of August but could have given air and artillery support. The Museum of Polish History's portal says Stalin stopped all offensive action and waited for the Germans to crush the insurgents. Against the argument common in Russia that the troops could not fight on, the Russian historian Boris Sokolov holds that a new offensive was possible in late August. Stalin also barred Allied supply planes from Soviet-held airfields.²⁰

In January 1945 the Red Army broke out over the Vistula, took Warsaw and carried the front into Germany. The final offensive began on 16 April with the assault across the Oder at the Seelow Heights. Zhukov's and Ivan Konev's fronts, about 2.5 million soldiers by the German Historical Museum's count, encircled Berlin and fought their way into the city (see also our article on the battle of Halbe). Hitler killed himself on 30 April, the Battle of Berlin ended on 2 May, and Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May 1945.²¹

War crimes and atrocities on the Eastern Front

The Holocaust by bullets. From the first days the Einsatzgruppen, helped by SS and police units, the army, Romanian forces and local collaborators, shot Jews, Communist officials and Roma behind the front. At Babyn Yar, a ravine outside Kyiv, an SS detachment and police battalions shot 33,771 Jews on 29 and 30 September 1941, one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust. The USHMM estimates that at least 1.5 million and possibly more than 2 million Holocaust victims died in mass shootings or gas vans on Soviet territory.²²

The Hunger Plan. Herbert Backe of the Reich Food Ministry planned to feed the German army and home front with Soviet grain that normally fed the northern cities; officials expected some 30 million Soviet civilians to starve, according to the historian Jeff Rutherford. The siege of Leningrad, where an estimated 800,000 to one million people died, mostly of hunger and cold, is its best-known example.²³

Soviet prisoners of war. Of about 5.7 million Red Army soldiers captured, the USHMM counts 3.3 million, about 57 percent, dead by the end of the war; the German Bundestag gives about three million. Some 2 million died within months, of deliberate starvation, cold and disease in open-air camps; others were shot on capture or murdered as Jews or commissars. After the Jews, Soviet prisoners of war were the largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy.²⁴

Reprisals against civilians. German orders called for collective punishment of communities near partisan attacks; anti-partisan sweeps devastated villages across the occupied territory, and the retreating army left "scorched earth" behind it in 1943 and 1944. In Belarus, Smithsonian Magazine reports, occupying forces killed all the inhabitants of 629 villages and burned 5,454 more; at Khatyn, on 22 March 1943, 149 villagers, 75 of them children, were murdered.²⁵

Soviet crimes. As the Red Army retreated in June 1941, the NKVD shot political prisoners in the jails of western Ukraine: historians cited by the National WWII Museum estimate 10,000 to 40,000 victims, and Ukraine's Institute of National Memory about 22,000 in two weeks. German propaganda then used the killings to incite violence against Jews. Besieged Leningrad was held under ruthless control by the Soviet security forces. Stalin deported entire peoples he accused of disloyalty: the Soviet Germans (905,000 people, according to Novaya Gazeta Europe), about half a million Chechens and Ingush in February and March 1944 (by the Russian historian Pavel Polian's estimate) and the whole Crimean Tatar people in May 1944 (191,000 people by Novaya Gazeta Europe's count, more than 200,000 by Radio Free Europe's), in conditions that killed many of them.²⁶

As the Red Army entered Germany in 1945, its soldiers committed rape on a vast scale. Estimates differ. As the Bundestag research service summarizes them, Gerhard Reichling counted 1.9 million German women and girls raped by Red Army soldiers and Miriam Gebhardt 860,000 victims of all the occupying armies from 1944 to 1955; historians cited by NPR put the total at about two million, most of them raped by Soviet soldiers. Soviet prisoners who survived German camps faced a second ordeal: after forced repatriation many were screened in filtration camps, convicted of collaboration and sent to Soviet forced labor camps. According to the Bundestag, more than three million German soldiers became Soviet prisoners, held mostly in inhumane conditions.²⁷

How many people died on the Eastern Front?

No other theater of World War II killed so many people, and every total is an estimate. The Soviet figure most often cited, 26.6 million dead, was given by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 from an official demographic study, and Russia's statistics service Rosstat still uses it; the National WWII Museum gives 24 million. Soviet deaths were heavily concentrated in what are now Ukraine and Belarus: Ukraine's Institute of National Memory counts more than eight million dead on Ukrainian soil in 1939 to 1945, about three million soldiers and five million civilians.²⁸

Military losses are disputed too. A team of military historians led by Colonel General Grigory Krivosheev put Soviet military dead at about 8.6 million, out of some 11.4 million in the records, after subtracting returned prisoners and men counted twice; Rosstat gives the same 8.6 million, the National WWII Museum 8.8 to 10.7 million, and Britannica calls 11 million killed and missing a conservative total.²⁹

On the German side, the Bundestag counts more than 5.3 million German military dead in the whole war, over 2.7 million of them on the Eastern Front, while the German Historical Museum puts the Eastern Front dead at almost 3.5 million in one article and more than 3.8 million, over two thirds of the total, in another.³⁰

Key commanders of the Eastern Front

Germany. Hitler took over command of the army himself in December 1941 and overruled his generals, insisting for example on the Kursk offensive despite doubts voiced by Heinz Guderian. The invasion was led by the army group commanders Leeb, Bock and Rundstedt; Friedrich Paulus surrendered the Sixth Army at Stalingrad; and in 1944 Ernst Busch and then Walter Model commanded Army Group Center during its destruction.³¹

Soviet Union. Joseph Stalin directed the Soviet war effort. Georgy Zhukov led the counterstrike before Moscow, oversaw Operation Bagration with Aleksandr Vasilevsky and, with Ivan Konev, took Berlin; Britannica writes that both marshals accepted enormous casualties in the race for the city. Konstantin Rokossovsky's armies broke through north of the Pripet Marshes in 1944 and reached the Vistula opposite Warsaw.³²

Who won the Eastern Front, and why did Germany lose?

The Soviet Union won. The Red Army drove the armies of Germany and its allies back from the Volga to Berlin and destroyed Nazi Germany, and most German soldiers who died in the war died in the East. Germany underrated Soviet reserves, sent an army unequipped for winter along a front some 1,000 miles long and never secured the Caucasus oil; Lend-Lease trucks helped the Soviet offensives; and from June 1944 Germany also fought in Normandy, though it still kept over 235 divisions in the East against about 85 in the West.³³

The victory freed the occupied Soviet territories and eastern Europe from German rule, but it did not bring freedom to the countries the Red Army took. In Poland Stalin had a Communist body ready to take power, the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), which claimed authority over the liberated areas and denounced the government in exile in London. See our hubs on the military history of Germany and the military history of Poland.³⁴

Major battles of the Eastern Front

Our articles on the battles and operations of the Eastern Front, from the siege of Odessa in 1941 to Halbe in 1945, are listed below in date order.

1. 1941
   The Siege of Leningrad, 1941 to 1944Soviet Union vs Germany and Finland

   872 days, the 125-gram ration, the Road of Life and Tanya Savicheva's diary.

   
2. 1941
   The Battle of Moscow, 1941USSR vs Nazi Germany

   The first great defeat of the Wehrmacht, in the snow.

   
3. 1941
   Siege of Odessa, 1941Romania (4th Army), with German support vs Soviet Union (Coastal Army, Black Sea Fleet)

   From August to October 1941 Soviet troops held Odessa, cut off by land and supplied by sea, against Romania's 4th Army, then slipped away by ship.

   
4. 1942
   Barvenkovo-Lozovaya offensive, 1942Soviet Union vs Germany

   In January 1942 the Red Army broke through on the Donets near Izyum and drove toward the Dnieper, but the Germans held the shoulders and the gain became the Izyum bulge.

   
5. 1942
   The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942-1943USSR vs Germany and allies

   Five months of street fighting on the Volga, a surprise encirclement, and the surrender that turned the whole war in the East.

   
6. 1942
   Operation Uranus, 1942Soviet Union vs Germany and Romania

   On 19 November 1942 the Red Army struck the Romanian armies on both flanks of Stalingrad. Four days later the German Sixth Army was encircled.

   
7. 1943
   The Battle of Kursk, 1943USSR vs Germany (Operation Citadel)

   Hitler's doomed 1943 gamble and the greatest tank battle of the war, told scene by scene.

   
8. 1943
   Battle of Prokhorovka, 1943Soviet Union vs Germany

   On 12 July 1943 the Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army attacked the II SS Panzer Corps at Prokhorovka. What really happened and why the legend grew.

   
9. 1943
   Operation Kutuzov, 1943Soviet Union vs Germany

   On 12 July 1943, at the height of Kursk, the Red Army attacked the German bulge around Orel. Five weeks later it had taken Orel and pushed the Germans back.

   
10. 1943
    Donbas offensive, July 1943Soviet Union vs Germany

    In July 1943 the Red Army attacked on the Mius and at Izyum. It gained little and was thrown back, but the attack pulled German panzers south from Kursk.

    
11. 1943
    Smolensk operation, 1943Soviet Union vs Germany

    From August to October 1943 two Soviet fronts ground through the forest defenses of Army Group Center and retook Smolensk on 25 September.

    
12. 1944
    Leningrad-Novgorod offensive, 1944Soviet Union vs Germany

    On 14 January 1944 two Soviet fronts struck from Oranienbaum, Leningrad and Novgorod. Within two weeks the German ring was broken and the 872-day siege was over.

    
13. 1944
    Siege of Budapest, 1944 to 1945Soviet Union and Romania vs Germany and Hungary

    Hitler forbade a breakout, three relief attacks failed and the garrison died in the hills of Buda. The siege that cost some 38,000 civilian lives.

    
14. 1944
    Crimean offensive, 1944Soviet Union vs Germany and Romania

    In April and May 1944 the Red Army broke into the Crimea, drove the German 17th Army into Sevastopol and took the city in three days of assault.

    
15. 1945
    Operation Konrad III, 1945Germany and Hungary vs Soviet Union

    On 18 January 1945 German panzers struck from Lake Balaton to relieve encircled Budapest. They reached the Danube in 27 hours and retook Székesfehérvár, but stalled about 25 km short of the city.

    
16. 1945
    The Battle of Berlin, 1945USSR vs Nazi Germany

    The ferocious final battle for Hitler's capital in 1945, told scene by scene.

    
17. 1945
    Battle of the Seelow Heights, 1945Soviet Union and Poland vs Germany

    On 16 April 1945 Zhukov's armies attacked the Seelow Heights, the last ridge before Berlin. Searchlights blinded the wrong side, and the breakthrough took four bloody days.

    
18. 1945
    Battle of Halbe, 1945Soviet Union vs Germany

    In late April 1945 the encircled German Ninth Army and thousands of refugees tried to break out through Halbe, south of Berlin. About 40,000 died; 25,000 soldiers reached the Elbe.

    

Timeline of the Eastern Front

1. 22 June 1941
   Germany invades the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa).³⁵
2. 8 September 1941
   The siege of Leningrad begins.³⁶
3. 29 and 30 September 1941
   The massacre of Jews at Babyn Yar, outside Kyiv.³⁷
4. 5 and 6 December 1941
   The Soviet counteroffensive at Moscow begins.³⁸
5. 2 February 1943
   The Battle of Stalingrad ends with the German surrender.³⁹
6. 5 July 1943
   Germany attacks the Kursk salient (Operation Citadel); the Battle of Kursk ends with the fall of Kharkiv on 23 August.⁴⁰
7. 23 June 1944
   Operation Bagration opens in Belorussia.⁴¹
8. 1 August to 2 October 1944
   The Warsaw Uprising; the Red Army halts on the Vistula.⁴²
9. 16 April 1945
   The final Soviet offensive begins at the Seelow Heights.⁴³
10. 2 May 1945
    Berlin falls to the Red Army; Germany surrenders on 8 May.⁴⁴

Where to read next

The Eastern Front was one theater of World War II: see also our hub on the Pacific War, the greatest battles of World War II and the greatest battles of the Eastern Front. Our articles on the siege of Odessa in 1941 and the end of the war in Austria cover its southern flank. Read the biographies of Georgy Zhukov and Władysław Anders and test yourself with the World War II battles quiz.