Eastern Front (World War II)

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The Eastern Front (World War II) was the theater of war between Germany and its allies and the Soviet Union, fought from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945 across Eastern Europe and the western Soviet Union. It was the largest land front in history, larger in scale, in the number of soldiers engaged, and in the number of people killed than any other front of the Second World War.

More than 30 million people are estimated to have died as a result of the fighting on the Eastern Front, including soldiers and civilians, and the front stretched at its greatest extent for more than 2,000 kilometers, from the Barents Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.

The Eastern Front began with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and it ended with the Soviet capture of Berlin and the surrender of Germany. Between those two events lay the great battles that decided the Second World War in Europe: the encirclements at Minsk, Smolensk, and Kiev in 1941, the siege of Leningrad, the Battle of Moscow, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, Operation Bagration, and the Vistula-Oder offensive. These were battles involving millions of men, thousands of tanks and aircraft, and front lines that moved hundreds of kilometers in a single campaign.

The Eastern Front was also a war of ideology and extermination. Nazi Germany planned not only to defeat the Soviet Union but to colonize its western territories, enslave or destroy its peoples, and murder its Jewish population and other groups the Nazis targeted. The Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin, fought a war of national survival, mobilizing its entire society and economy, evacuating factories east of the Urals, and accepting enormous losses to hold Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. The brutality of the Eastern Front, including the treatment of prisoners of war, the siege starvation of Leningrad, and the mass murder of civilians, has no parallel on the Western Front (World War II) or in the Mediterranean Theater.

This article explains the Eastern Front as a geographic theater: where it was fought, why its vast distances, harsh climate, and poor roads shaped every campaign, who commanded its opposing armies, how its course turned at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk, what it cost in human lives, and what legacy it left for Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the whole of Europe. It links to the related theaters of the Western Front and the First World War Eastern Front (World War I), and to the great battles of Stalingrad and D-Day, so that readers can follow the war from Barbarossa to Berlin.

Key Facts

Field	Detail
Dates	22 June 1941 – 9 May 1945 (Germany signed the surrender on 8 May 1945; the Soviet Union marked the end of the war on 9 May)
Theater/Location	Eastern Europe and the western Soviet Union, including Poland, the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, western Russia, the Caucasus, Romania, Hungary, and eastern Germany
Result	Soviet victory; destruction of Nazi Germany; Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe; Germany divided; Poland shifted westward; the Soviet Union emerged as a superpower
Commanders	Soviet Union: Joseph Stalin, Georgy Zhukov, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Ivan Konev, Vasily Chuikov, Aleksandr Vasilevsky. Germany and allies: Adolf Hitler, Wilhelm Keitel, Fedor von Bock, Gerd von Rundstedt, Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian, Friedrich Paulus
Strength	Germany and allies: about 3,000,000 to 3,800,000 men at the start of Barbarossa, with about 3,000 tanks and about 2,700 aircraft; Soviet Union: about 2,900,000 to 5,500,000 men in the western military districts at the start, with about 11,000 to 15,000 tanks, many obsolete; both sides later fielded armies of several million men
Losses	Military deaths: Soviet military deaths are generally estimated at about 8,700,000 to 13,000,000; German military deaths on the Eastern Front are generally estimated at about 3,500,000 to 5,000,000; total deaths on the Eastern Front, military and civilian, are estimated at about 25,000,000 to 35,000,000, including Soviet civilian deaths estimated at about 13,000,000 to 17,000,000; German-allied military deaths, including Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, and Finnish forces, are estimated in the hundreds of thousands

Background

Nazi Germany and the Plan for the East

The roots of the Eastern Front lay in Nazi ideology and German expansionism. Adolf Hitler believed that Germany needed living space, Lebensraum, in the east, and that the Soviet Union, ruled by Communists and home to large Jewish and Slavic populations, was Germany’s principal enemy.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, which divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and gave the Soviet Union a free hand in the Baltic states and Bessarabia, was a temporary agreement. Hitler always intended to attack the Soviet Union, and he began planning Operation Barbarossa in late 1940, after the fall of France.

The plan called for a rapid campaign, lasting weeks or a few months, in which German panzer armies would encircle and destroy the Soviet armies near the border, capture Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, and reach a line from Archangel to Astrakhan.

Nazi planning for the east was not only military. The Hunger Plan called for seizing Soviet food to feed Germany and starving millions of Soviet civilians. The Commissar Order called for the murder of captured Soviet political officers. Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units, followed the German armies and murdered Jews, Communists, and others. The war in the east was therefore planned from the start as a war of annihilation, and it was fought as such by both sides. The Soviet Union, for its part, had signed the pact with Germany to buy time to rearm, but Stalin refused to believe warnings of an imminent German attack, and the Soviet Union was caught unprepared in June 1941.

The Soviet Union Before Barbarossa

The Soviet Union in 1941 was a vast state with enormous resources but serious weaknesses. Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s had removed thousands of experienced officers from the Red Army, including three of its five marshals and many division and corps commanders. The Red Army had performed poorly in the Winter War against Finland in 1939-1940, revealing problems in training, leadership, and logistics. Soviet tanks, above all the new T-34 and KV-1, were in some respects superior to German tanks, but many Soviet units were still equipped with obsolete vehicles, and Soviet air forces were caught on the ground in the first days of the invasion.

The Soviet Union also faced a strategic problem: its western border had moved westward after the annexation of eastern Poland, the Baltic states, and Bessarabia, but its fortifications on the new border were incomplete, and its armies were deployed in forward positions that made them vulnerable to encirclement. When Germany attacked, the Soviet Union lost whole armies in the first weeks, and it took months to mobilize its reserves, evacuate its factories, and learn how to fight the German panzer divisions. The Soviet recovery, when it came, was based on the country’s size, its population, its industrial capacity east of the Urals, and the willingness of its people and soldiers to endure losses that no Western army would have accepted.

Operation Barbarossa and the First Six Months

Operation Barbarossa began before dawn on 22 June 1941, when more than three million German and allied soldiers crossed the Soviet border along a front of about 1,800 kilometers. German forces were organized into three army groups: Army Group North toward Leningrad, Army Group Center toward Moscow, and Army Group South toward Kiev and the Ukraine. In the first weeks German panzer divisions encircled Soviet armies at Minsk, Smolensk, and Uman, capturing hundreds of thousands of prisoners. By September, German forces had reached the gates of Leningrad and begun the siege that would last nearly 900 days, and they had encircled more than 600,000 Soviet soldiers at Kiev, according to commonly cited figures, in the largest encirclement in history.

By October, German forces were advancing on Moscow in Operation Typhoon, but rain, mud, and then the Russian winter slowed the advance. Soviet reserves, including fresh divisions from Siberia, counterattacked in December 1941 and drove the Germans back from Moscow. Barbarossa had failed to achieve its aim of a rapid victory. Germany now faced a long war in the east, a war its economy and manpower could not sustain against the combined resources of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States.

Opposing Forces

The Soviet Red Army

The Red Army that fought the Eastern Front was the largest army in the world by 1943, with millions of men under arms. It was commanded at the top by Stalin as Supreme Commander, with the Stavka, the Soviet high command, coordinating the fronts, as Soviet army groups were called. Its great commanders included Georgy Zhukov, who directed the defense of Moscow, the counteroffensive at Stalingrad, and the final assault on Berlin; Konstantin Rokossovsky, who commanded at Stalingrad, Kursk, and Operation Bagration; Ivan Konev, who commanded the drive through Ukraine and into Germany; and Aleksandr Vasilevsky, chief of the General Staff and coordinator of the Stalingrad counteroffensive.

The Red Army learned from its defeats. It rebuilt its officer corps, developed effective tank armies, improved its artillery and air forces, and mastered the deep operation, a Soviet doctrine of breaking through the front, exploiting with mobile forces, and encircling enemy armies. Soviet industry, evacuated east of the Urals in 1941, produced tens of thousands of T-34 tanks, Il-2 attack aircraft, and artillery pieces. Lend-Lease aid from the United States and Britain, including trucks, food, and raw materials, helped supply the Red Army, although Soviet production provided the bulk of its tanks and guns. By 1944 the Red Army was a modern, well-equipped force that could outnumber and outgun the German Army on every front.

The German Wehrmacht and Its Allies

The German Army, the Wehrmacht, entered the Soviet Union in 1941 as the most experienced and tactically skilled army in the world. Its panzer divisions, combining tanks, motorized infantry, artillery, and air support, had conquered Poland, France, and the Balkans in rapid campaigns. Its commanders included Fedor von Bock, who commanded Army Group Center in 1941; Erich von Manstein, one of Germany’s most gifted operational commanders, who commanded in the Crimea, at Stalingrad, and at Kursk; Heinz Guderian, the theorist of the panzer arm; and Gerd von Rundstedt, who commanded in the south and later on the Western Front.

Germany fought the Eastern Front with allies that included Romania, Hungary, Italy, Finland, and Slovakia, which provided hundreds of thousands of soldiers, above all on the southern front and at Stalingrad. These allied armies were generally less well equipped than German divisions, and their collapse at Stalingrad in November 1942 helped encircle the German Sixth Army. Germany’s weaknesses in the east were strategic: it lacked the manpower, oil, and industrial capacity to defeat the Soviet Union in a long war, its supply lines stretched for hundreds of kilometers over poor roads, and its forces were divided between the Eastern Front, the Western Front after 1944, and the Mediterranean Theater.

Tanks, Aircraft, and Artillery on the Eastern Front

The Eastern Front was the largest tank war in history. At Kursk in July 1943, more than 2,000 German tanks and assault guns faced more than 3,000 Soviet tanks, according to commonly cited estimates, in the largest tank battle ever fought.

Soviet T-34 tanks, produced in enormous numbers, became the symbol of the Red Army, while German Tiger and Panther tanks were technically superior but produced in far smaller numbers and prone to breakdowns. Air power mattered, but less decisively than on the Western Front, because the front was so long and the distances so great.

Soviet Il-2 ground-attack aircraft supported the advancing armies, while German Stukas and later fighter-bombers supported German counterattacks. Artillery, the god of war in Soviet doctrine, decided many battles: Soviet offensives began with massive artillery bombardments that destroyed German defenses before the tanks advanced. The Eastern Front was therefore a war of mass, in which numbers, production, and the ability to replace losses mattered more than any single weapon.

The Eastern Front, 1941-1945

Barbarossa and the Advance to Moscow, 1941

The first year of the Eastern Front was a year of German advance and Soviet retreat. After the encirclements at Minsk and Smolensk, German forces advanced on Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the center, and Kiev and the Donets Basin in the south.

The siege of Leningrad began on 8 September 1941 and lasted until January 1944, killing more than a million civilians, according to commonly cited estimates, from starvation, cold, and bombing. The Battle of Moscow, from October 1941 to January 1942, was the first major German defeat. German forces reached within about 30 kilometers of Moscow, but the winter, Soviet reinforcements, and overextended supply lines halted the advance.

The Soviet counteroffensive in December 1941, directed by Zhukov, drove the Germans back and saved the Soviet capital. The failure at Moscow meant that Germany would not win a quick victory, and that the war in the east would be long and costly.

The Drive to Stalingrad and the Caucasus, 1942

In 1942 Germany launched a new offensive in the south, aimed at the oil fields of the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River. German forces under Army Group South advanced across the Don steppe, captured Rostov, and reached the Volga at Stalingrad in August 1942. The Battle of Stalingrad lasted from August 1942 to February 1943 and became the most famous battle of the Eastern Front.

Fighting was house by house, street by street, in a ruined city where Soviet soldiers under General Vasily Chuikov held a narrow strip along the Volga. In November 1942 the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, encircling the German Sixth Army under General Friedrich Paulus.

After weeks of fighting in the cold, with no hope of relief, Paulus surrendered on 2 February 1943 with about 90,000 surviving soldiers, according to commonly cited figures. Stalingrad cost Germany an entire army and its allies two more, and it marked the turning point of the war in the east.

Kursk and the Soviet Advance, 1943

After Stalingrad, Germany sought to regain the initiative with an offensive at Kursk in July 1943, Operation Citadel. German forces attacked the Kursk salient from north and south, aiming to encircle Soviet armies. The Soviet Union, warned by intelligence, had built deep defenses, with minefields, anti-tank guns, and reserves. The Battle of Kursk, including the great tank battle at Prokhorovka on 12 July 1943, ended in German failure. Soviet forces then launched counteroffensives that liberated Orel and Belgorod, crossed the Dnieper River, and liberated Kiev in November 1943. Kursk was the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front. From Kursk onward, the Red Army held the initiative and advanced westward, while Germany could only retreat and counterattack.

Operation Bagration and the Liberation of Eastern Europe, 1944

In June 1944, on the third anniversary of Barbarossa and shortly after D-Day in Normandy, the Red Army launched Operation Bagration, the destruction of German Army Group Center in Belarus. Bagration was one of the largest operations in history, involving more than 2,000,000 Soviet soldiers, according to commonly cited figures, and it destroyed about 25 to 30 German divisions, according to commonly cited estimates.

Soviet forces advanced hundreds of kilometers, liberated Minsk, Vilnius, and much of Poland, and reached the Vistula River and the border of East Prussia. In the south, Soviet forces liberated Romania and Bulgaria, which changed sides, and advanced into Hungary and Yugoslavia. In the north, Soviet forces lifted the siege of Leningrad and advanced into the Baltic states and Finland, which signed an armistice in September 1944.

By the end of 1944, the Red Army stood on the borders of Germany, and the war in the east was entering its final phase.

The Road to Berlin, 1945

In January 1945 the Red Army launched the Vistula-Oder offensive, advancing from Poland to the Oder River, within about 70 kilometers of Berlin, in a matter of weeks. In the south, Soviet forces captured Budapest after a long siege and advanced into Austria, capturing Vienna in April 1945. In the north, Soviet forces captured East Prussia and Pomerania.

The final Battle of Berlin began on 16 April 1945, when Soviet forces under Zhukov and Konev attacked the Seelow Heights and encircled the German capital. Fighting in Berlin was house by house, with heavy losses on both sides and very heavy civilian suffering. On 30 April Hitler killed himself in his bunker. On 2 May Berlin surrendered.

On 8 May Germany signed the unconditional surrender, which took effect on 9 May in Moscow. The Eastern Front was over, and the Soviet Union had paid the highest price of any nation in the Second World War.

Turning Point

Why Stalingrad Changed the War

The Battle of Stalingrad, from August 1942 to February 1943, is the most commonly identified turning point of the Eastern Front, and of the Second World War in Europe. Before Stalingrad, Germany had won almost every major campaign and held the initiative. After Stalingrad, Germany never regained it.

The loss of the Sixth Army, about 300,000 men killed, wounded, or captured according to commonly cited estimates, was a blow that German manpower could not absorb, and the loss of its Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian allies on the flanks destroyed the southern front.

Stalingrad also showed that the Red Army could encircle and destroy a German army, a skill it would repeat at Korsun, in Belarus, and in East Prussia. The psychological impact was as great as the material loss: for the first time, a German field marshal, Paulus, had surrendered, and the myth of German invincibility was broken.

Moscow and Kursk as Earlier and Later Turning Points

Some historians argue that the Battle of Moscow in December 1941 was the true turning point, because it was the first German defeat and it proved that Barbarossa had failed. Others argue that Kursk in July 1943 was the decisive turning point, because it was the last German offensive and it destroyed the German panzer reserve.

Both arguments have merit, and the turning point is best understood as a period, not a single battle. Moscow stopped the German advance and saved the Soviet Union. Stalingrad destroyed a German army and shifted the initiative. Kursk destroyed the German ability to attack and confirmed that the Red Army would advance until Germany surrendered.

Together, Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk form a sequence of turning points, each building on the last, that carried the Eastern Front from German advance to Soviet victory.

The Industrial and Demographic Turning Point

Behind the battles lay an industrial and demographic turning point. The Soviet Union evacuated more than 1,500 factories east of the Urals in 1941, according to commonly cited figures, and by 1943 Soviet industry was producing more tanks, guns, and aircraft than Germany. The United States and Britain supplied trucks, locomotives, food, and raw materials through Lend-Lease, which helped the Red Army move and supply its forces.

Germany, by contrast, faced a war on two fronts after 1944, a bombing campaign that damaged its industry, and a shortage of manpower and oil. The Soviet Union could replace its losses, at enormous human cost, while Germany could not.

The Eastern Front was therefore won not only on the battlefield but in the factories of the Urals, the oil fields of the Caucasus, and the farms of Siberia and Central Asia.

Casualties and Losses

Military Losses on the Eastern Front

The military losses on the Eastern Front were the largest of any front in the Second World War. Soviet military deaths are generally estimated at about 8,700,000 to 13,000,000, a wide range that reflects the difficulty of counting deaths in a war in which millions of soldiers were captured, wounded, or listed as missing.

About 3,000,000 to 3,500,000 Soviet prisoners of war are estimated to have died in German captivity, according to commonly cited estimates, from starvation, disease, and murder. German military deaths on the Eastern Front are generally estimated at about 3,500,000 to 5,000,000, including deaths in combat, from wounds, and in Soviet captivity.

Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, and Finnish military deaths on the Eastern Front are estimated in the hundreds of thousands, with Romanian losses alone estimated at about 300,000 to 500,000. These figures make the Eastern Front the deadliest theater of the Second World War, with military deaths alone exceeding the total deaths of many other theaters.

Civilian Losses and War Crimes

Civilian deaths on the Eastern Front were even larger than military deaths. Soviet civilian deaths are generally estimated at about 13,000,000 to 17,000,000, including deaths from German occupation, mass murder, starvation, and disease. The siege of Leningrad alone killed more than 1,000,000 civilians, according to commonly cited estimates, from starvation and cold.

The Holocaust, the murder of about 6,000,000 Jews, was carried out in large part on the Eastern Front, in the ghettos and killing fields of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, and in extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor. Soviet civilians, above all Jews, were murdered by Einsatzgruppen and by German police and SS units, and millions more died as forced laborers in Germany.

German civilians also suffered, above all in the final months of the war, when Soviet offensives into East Prussia and Silesia caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from fighting, flight, and reprisals. The Eastern Front was a war in which civilians were not bystanders but targets, and its civilian losses remain a central part of its history.

Material Losses and the Destruction of Cities

Material losses on the Eastern Front were vast. The Soviet Union lost tens of thousands of tanks and aircraft in 1941 alone, and Germany lost thousands of tanks, guns, and aircraft at Stalingrad, Kursk, and Bagration. Entire cities were destroyed: Stalingrad, Minsk, Kiev, Kharkov, Smolensk, and Berlin were reduced to rubble, and thousands of villages were burned.

Soviet industry lost a large part of its capacity in 1941, when German forces occupied the industrial regions of Ukraine and western Russia, and it took years to rebuild. Germany lost its eastern territories, its industry was damaged by bombing, and its army was destroyed in the final battles of 1945.

The material destruction of the Eastern Front shaped the postwar reconstruction of Europe and the Soviet Union, and its cost is still felt in the landscapes and cities of Eastern Europe today.

Map and Geography

A Front of Vast Distances

The Eastern Front was fought across a landscape of vast distances, flat plains, great rivers, and harsh climate. From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the front stretched for more than 2,000 kilometers. From the German border to Moscow is more than 1,000 kilometers, and from Moscow to the Volga is hundreds of kilometers more.

Armies advanced and retreated over distances that dwarfed the Western Front, where the distance from Normandy to Berlin is about 1,000 kilometers. The sheer size of the Eastern Front meant that encirclements could trap hundreds of thousands of men, that supply lines stretched for hundreds of kilometers, and that the side with the greater manpower and industrial capacity had a decisive advantage.

The geography of the Eastern Front favored the defender in winter and the attacker in summer, and it shaped every campaign from Barbarossa to Berlin.

Rivers, Forests, and the Russian Winter

The great rivers of Eastern Europe, the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, the Vistula, and the Oder, were natural defensive lines and obstacles to attack. Soviet forces used the Dnieper as a defensive line in 1941 and 1943, and German forces used the Vistula and Oder in 1945.

The forests of Belarus and the Baltic states sheltered partisans who attacked German supply lines, while the steppes of Ukraine and southern Russia offered open ground for tank warfare. The Russian winter, with temperatures falling to minus 30 degrees Celsius or lower, halted German offensives in 1941 and 1942, froze vehicles, and killed soldiers who lacked winter clothing.

The spring rasputitsa, the mud season, turned roads into impassable quagmires and stopped both sides for weeks. The climate and terrain of the Eastern Front were as much an enemy as the opposing army, and they punished the unprepared.

Cities as Fortresses

Cities on the Eastern Front became fortresses and symbols. Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad were not only military objectives but political symbols whose fall would have meant the collapse of the Soviet Union. German forces besieged Leningrad for nearly 900 days, bombed Moscow, and fought house by house in Stalingrad, but they never captured Leningrad or Moscow, and they lost an army at Stalingrad.

Later, Soviet forces besieged Budapest, Breslau, and Berlin, fighting street by street in cities that had been fortified by German defenders. The urban fighting on the Eastern Front was among the most destructive of the war, and it left cities in ruins and populations decimated.

The geography of the Eastern Front was therefore not only a matter of plains and rivers but of cities that became battlefields and of the civilians who lived and died in them.

Outcome and Legacy of Eastern Front (World War II)

The Destruction of Nazi Germany

The Eastern Front ended with the destruction of Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union captured Berlin, Hitler killed himself, and Germany surrendered unconditionally. The German Army was destroyed, its cities were in ruins, and its eastern territories were lost. Germany was divided into four occupation zones, and later into two states, West Germany and East Germany, a division that lasted until 1990. The Nuremberg Trials and other war crimes trials held German leaders accountable for aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, including the Holocaust. The Eastern Front therefore ended the Nazi regime and the war in Europe, and it established the Soviet Union as one of the two superpowers of the postwar world.

The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe After the War

The victory on the Eastern Front came at an enormous cost to the Soviet Union, but it also gave the Soviet Union control of Eastern Europe. Soviet forces occupied Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union installed Communist governments in those countries, creating the Eastern Bloc.

Poland was shifted westward, losing territory to the Soviet Union in the east and gaining German territory in the west. Millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe, and millions of people were displaced by the war. The Cold War, the division of Europe into East and West, began on the Eastern Front, and its legacy shaped European politics for more than forty years.

The Eastern Front also left a legacy of memory: in Russia, the Great Patriotic War, as the war is called in Russia, remains a central event in national identity, commemorated every year on 9 May.

The Eastern Front in Memory and History

The Eastern Front left a lasting legacy in military thought and in the memory of the nations that fought it. It established the importance of mass, mobility, and deep operations in land warfare, and it showed that a war of annihilation could not be won by a state that lacked the resources to sustain it.

It also left deep wounds: the Holocaust, the siege of Leningrad, the destruction of Stalingrad, and the suffering of prisoners of war and civilians remain subjects of remembrance and debate. Historians continue to study the Eastern Front as the decisive theater of the Second World War in Europe, the theater in which Germany lost the war, and the theater that shaped the political map of Europe for the rest of the twentieth century.

Commanders

Georgy Zhukov and the Soviet High Command

Marshal Georgy Zhukov was the most famous Soviet commander of the Eastern Front. He directed the defense of Moscow in 1941, coordinated the counteroffensive at Stalingrad in 1942, commanded at Kursk in 1943, and led the final assault on Berlin in 1945. Zhukov was known for his toughness, his willingness to accept heavy losses, and his skill in planning large operations. He worked under Stalin, who as Supreme Commander made the final decisions, and with other commanders such as Rokossovsky, Konev, and Vasilevsky. Zhukov’s career after the war was shaped by his fame and by Stalin’s suspicion of popular generals, but his role in the victory on the Eastern Front remains central to Soviet and Russian memory of the war.

Erich von Manstein and the German Command

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein was one of Germany’s most gifted commanders on the Eastern Front. He planned the invasion of France in 1940, commanded in the Crimea and at Sevastopol in 1942, and directed the German counteroffensive at Kharkov in early 1943, one of the last German victories in the east.

Manstein argued for a mobile defense, trading space for time and counterattacking Soviet advances, but Hitler insisted on holding every position, and Manstein was dismissed in March 1944. Other German commanders included Heinz Guderian, who commanded panzer forces in 1941 and later became chief of the General Staff; Fedor von Bock, who commanded Army Group Center in 1941; and Friedrich Paulus, who commanded the Sixth Army at Stalingrad and surrendered there.

German commanders fought with skill, but they were constrained by Hitler’s interference, by shortages of men and supplies, and by a strategy that demanded holding a front too long for Germany’s resources.

Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler as War Leaders

The Eastern Front was shaped by its two dictators, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. Stalin, who had purged the Red Army and ignored warnings of invasion in 1941, learned to trust his generals and to coordinate the war effort through the Stavka. Hitler, who had planned Barbarossa and directed the war in the east, increasingly interfered in operations, forbade retreats, and dismissed generals who disagreed with him.

Both leaders were responsible for enormous suffering, including the deaths of their own soldiers and civilians, and both saw the war as a struggle for survival and for the future of Europe. The contrast between Stalin’s eventual willingness to delegate and Hitler’s increasing micromanagement is one of the reasons the Soviet Union won the war in the east and Germany lost it.

Related articles

• Battle of Stalingrad
• Battle of Kursk
• Battle of Moscow

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the Eastern Front start and end?

The Eastern Front began on 22 June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and ended on 9 May 1945 with the surrender of Germany. The Soviet Union marks Victory Day on 9 May.

What was the largest battle on the Eastern Front?

The Battle of Stalingrad, from August 1942 to February 1943, is often called the largest and bloodiest battle, with total casualties estimated in the range of about 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 for both sides. The Battle of Kursk was the largest tank battle.

Why was the Eastern Front so deadly?

The Eastern Front was deadly because it was a war of annihilation, fought over vast distances, with millions of soldiers, and with civilians targeted by both sides. Prisoners of war, above all Soviet prisoners, died in large numbers in captivity.

How many people died on the Eastern Front?

Total deaths are estimated at about 25,000,000 to 35,000,000, including Soviet military deaths estimated at about 8,700,000 to 13,000,000 and Soviet civilian deaths estimated at about 13,000,000 to 17,000,000. Exact figures remain debated.

What was Operation Bagration?

Operation Bagration was the Soviet offensive in Belarus in June and July 1944 that destroyed German Army Group Center. It was one of the largest operations in history and it liberated Belarus and much of Poland.

Did the Eastern Front decide the Second World War in Europe?

Most historians agree that the Eastern Front was the decisive theater in Europe, because Germany lost the bulk of its army there. The Western Front and the bombing campaign also mattered, but Germany was defeated above all by the Soviet Union.

Sources

• Eastern Front (World War II)