At the time, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein was only waiting for the Soviets to overextend themselves. The Soviets seemed unstoppable, recapturing the major city of Kharkov from the Germans on February 14, 1943, roughly five months before the Battle of Kursk. In less than six months, Hitler’s forces destroyed 124 Red Army divisions, took 3.8 million prisoners of war, and captured an area the size of Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined.With the German Sixth Army destroyed at Stalingrad, the Soviet juggernaut lunged west and southwest across the River Donets. Despite warnings of the coming invasion, Soviet units were not put to combat readiness until only hours before the attack and suffered appalling losses as a result. More than three million German troops, accompanied by 600,000 allies, marched east into the Soviet Union.
On 22 June 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. As the war progressed, the Red Army turned the tide on Nazi Germany and its allies, eventually pushing Hitler’s forces back to Berlin. Early German successes were stopped by desperate battles, such as those that took place at Moscow (1941) and Stalingrad (1942–43). The war on the Eastern Front was fought between millions of soldiers in thousands of cities, towns and villages across hundreds of kilometres of territory. In 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told Parliament that “the guts of the German army have been largely torn out by Russian valour and generalship”. The Soviet Union was crucial to the Allied war effort: three quarters of all German military and materiel losses in the Second World War occurred on the Eastern Front. Some 27 million Soviet citizens – roughly two-thirds of whom were civilians – lost their lives as a result. Between June 1941 and May 1945, Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union fought a war unparalleled in scale and brutality. The Nazi–Soviet war of 1941–45, also known as the Eastern Front of the Second World War, was the largest and most costly conflict in human history.
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