On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union with more than three million troops, the largest invasion force in history. Operation Barbarossa was meant to win in a few months. Instead the east became the war's decisive theater, where most German soldiers who died in the war were killed.
A war of annihilation
Hitler told his generals this would be no ordinary war but a war of annihilation between ideologies and races. Orders issued before the invasion told troops to shoot captured Soviet political commissars and shielded soldiers from prosecution for crimes against civilians. Planners accepted that millions of Soviet civilians would starve as food was taken for Germany. Prisoners suffered terribly: of roughly 5.7 million Red Army soldiers captured, about 3 million, more than half, died in German captivity, most from starvation, exposure and disease. The murder of Soviet Jews, which began behind the advancing armies, is covered in Level 5.
From Moscow to Stalingrad
The first months brought vast German victories, with whole Soviet armies encircled and captured. Stalin's purges of the officer corps in 1937 and 1938 and his refusal to believe warnings of attack made the disaster worse. But German supply lines stretched, autumn rains turned roads to mud, and winter arrived before Moscow fell. In December 1941 a Soviet counteroffensive drove the Germans back from the capital. In the north, the siege of Leningrad lasted nearly 900 days, from September 1941 to January 1944, and around 800,000 or more civilians died, most of them from hunger.
In the summer of 1942 Germany struck south toward the oil of the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad on the Volga. Stalin's Order No. 227 forbade retreat without orders and set up blocking units behind the lines to stop men from fleeing. Fighting raged house by house through the autumn. In November the Red Army encircled the German Sixth Army, and on 2 February 1943 the trapped German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad. Of about 91,000 Germans taken prisoner there, only around 5,000 ever returned home.
How the Soviet Union fought back
In 1941 the Soviets carried out an extraordinary feat of logistics, moving over 1,500 factories east to the Urals and beyond, out of reach of German bombers. By 1943 Soviet factories were outproducing Germany in tanks and aircraft. American and British aid mattered too: Lend-Lease sent hundreds of thousands of trucks and jeeps, along with food, aluminum and radios that kept the Red Army moving. Historians debate the weight of that aid. Soviet accounts played it down, while some Western writers overstate it. A fair verdict is that the Red Army did most of its fighting with its own weapons, and Western supplies made its later advances faster.
In July 1943 Germany's last major offensive in the east failed at Kursk, a battle remembered for its huge tank clashes. From then on the Red Army advanced. Women played a larger part than in any other army: around 800,000 served, as medics and signalers but also as snipers, tank crews and pilots. Behind German lines, partisan bands grew into a large movement, and German reprisals burned hundreds of villages in Belarus together with their inhabitants. In June 1944, weeks after the Normandy landings, Operation Bagration destroyed German Army Group Centre in Belarus, one of the worst German defeats of the war.
The Soviet war was also a story of Stalin's own repression. Whole peoples, including Chechens, Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, were branded traitors and deported to Central Asia and Siberia, and many died on the way or in exile. Soldiers who had been prisoners of the Germans often faced suspicion and punishment when they returned. The cost of the war was staggering. Estimates put Soviet deaths at about 27 million, soldiers and civilians together, more than any other country, and Belarus lost roughly a quarter of its people.
The fighting in the east also shaped how the war ended. Because the Red Army drove the Germans out of Eastern Europe, Soviet troops stood in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and eastern Germany in 1945, and Stalin used that presence to install friendly governments.
Worked example: two readings of Stalingrad
A Soviet poster from 1943 shows Stalingrad as a victory of the people, the Party and Stalin's genius. German radio that February presented the Sixth Army's end as a heroic sacrifice, like the Spartans at Thermopylae. Neither is simply false; each selects. A historian reading both asks what is left out. The Soviet poster omits the blocking units and the executions of Soviet soldiers for retreating. The German broadcast omits that Hitler forbade a breakout, dooming the army to protect his prestige. Then the historian adds sources the propagandists ignored: letters from soldiers, civilian diaries and prisoner records. Setting those beside the official versions produces a truer picture of a battle won through immense courage and immense coercion at the same time, and it is a method you can use on any official story of a war.