After the initial German dominance over Russia during Operation Barbarossa - the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union - in 1941,

After the initial German dominance over Russia during Operation Barbarossa - the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union - in 1941,

they were halted at the Battle of Moscow in April 1942 and then devastated at the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943. Hitler had thought that all he would have to do was kick in the door and the Soviets would crumble. Far from it, they proved fierce, determined warriors with excellent generals. By the summer of 1943, the Soviet Red Army had completely turned the tables and began to bear down on Berlin.

German soldiers on the Eastern Front knew the terrible reality of what was coming. And German civilians were familiar enough with Nazi crimes to want to escape Soviet revenge. All who could flee west to escape the Soviets did so, even as Hitler’s generals tried to hold off the onrushing tide.

Without the effectiveness of this Soviet Red-wave, the actions of the Allies in the West on D-Day could have very likely been thwarted. This is stated, not to downplay the incredible bravery of the soldiers who fought in the West, but to illuminate what many more people experienced in the East, and many less people in the West are aware of today.

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In the aftermath of the Battle for Stalingrad in late 1942 and early 1943, the Soviets pushed the retreating Germans back several hundred miles to central Russia before running out of momentum in late spring 1943. From that point on, the dynamic of the war looked quite different. Until Stalingrad, the Germans took initiatives, and the Soviets had to respond. Starting in 1943, things began to change. The Germans were depleting their reserves of men and material while the Soviet war machine was hitting its stride, producing tens of thousands of tanks and planes. In addition, Soviet commanders were mastering their trade as Stalin was giving them a longer leash to enact their military expertise.

It didn’t help the Germans that Hitler had increasingly taken direct and personal control of the military campaign. The command organization for the war effort - the OKW - was itself run by Hitler’s reliable lackey, Wilhelm Keitel, who was noteworthy for his total subservience. The army high command itself was in Hitler’s personal control. And his grasp of military operations was limited, to put it lightly.

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The Soviet offensive after Stalingrad left a giant bulge in the front line around the city of Kursk, Russia, about 300 miles south of Moscow. Both sides recognized it as a natural target for a German counteroffensive. Hitler now pulled together his scarce reserves of tanks, aircraft, and men in what became known as Operation Citadel. It was a pincer movement designed to attack the Kursk bulge from the north and south, cutting it off along with the Soviet troops inside it.

The Soviets new this was coming, and devoted enormous resources - artillery, tanks, infantry, mines, and barbed wire - to create deep, elaborate defensive belts north and south of the city, ready for the German attack. So when Operation Citadel began on July 5, 1943, it went off the rails almost immediately. On the northern flank, the German attack ground to a halt. On the southern flank, the Germans advanced farther, but the Soviets committed an entire tank army to halt their progression. This led to a clash of as many as 1,000 tanks in perhaps the largest such battle in history. Known as the Battle of Prokhorovka, the Soviets took significantly more losses than the Germans but blunted the German attack. Hitler was ultimately forced to call off Operation Citadel, blaming slow progress and the British and American landings at Sicily. It was the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front.

Operation Citadel showed how strategically bankrupt Hitler’s war effort had become. There was little sense of how that battle might be used to achieve some bigger purpose. It was, essentially, a battle for battle’s sake.

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After thwarting Operation Citadel, the Soviets had started the next stage of their plan: attacking north and south of the bulge with overwhelming force. The Germans simply couldn’t hold and had to retreat. They were giving up territory they could never regain. In turn, the Soviets scooped up fresh manpower as they went through liberated peasant villages.

The political significance of their advance was enormous. The more the Soviets won, the more that populations under German occupation knew that cooperation with the Nazis spelled a death sentence once the communists came back.

Through the summer and fall of 1943, the Germans simply found no point at which to stop, turn, and hold back the Soviet onslaught. Any German stand would be bypassed and cut off by Soviet tank formations and left to be crushed by Soviet infantry and artillery.

Soviet offensives liberated southern Russia and raced on into eastern Ukraine. By September 1943, the Soviets had reached the Dnieper River in central Ukraine. The German high command hoped that the Dnieper River would serve as a geographical barrier that they could use to break Soviet momentum, at least for a brief time. But it was not to be. The Soviets captured some small footholds on the west bank of the Dnieper north of Kiev - the Ukrainian capital - and then liberated Kiev itself at the beginning of November 1943.

Most German forces retreated another 200 miles west, letting the Soviets retake western Ukraine. Hitler ordered his troops at Korsun - near the mouth of the Dnieper - to hold onto this isolated position, defying military logic. The Soviets, accordingly, pinched off and destroyed them in January and February 1944.

The Soviet advance finally ran out of steam only when it got to Romania in early spring 1944. However, on balance, momentum was clearly on the Soviets’ side.

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Germany’s smaller allies - Hungary, Finland, and Romania - needed to get off Hitler’s sinking ship before drowning themselves. As the tide of war turned, Hungary’s dictator Miklós Horthy replaced the most pro-German members of his government and sent out secret feelers to the Allies to explore the possibility of breaking with the Nazis and surrendering. Hitler caught wind of this, invaded Hungary, and installed a puppet regime, thereby ensuring that Hungary would fight to the bitter end. Once Hungary was under German occupation, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were shipped out of the country to die at Auschwitz.

In the north, Finland found itself in a similarly difficult position. From the Finns’ point-of-view, they were just trying to take back what they’d lost to the Soviets in 1940 in fighting now referred to as the Continuation War. From 1941 through early 1943, the Finns had cooperated with the Germans in surrounding and besieging Leningrad. As the tide of war turned, the Soviets broke the siege of Leningrad in January 1944 and signaled to the Finns that it was time to reconsider their place in the war. In an armistice agreement signed in September 1944, Finland lost territory while keeping its independence.

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June 1944 saw the largest and most momentous operation of World War II. No, I’m not talking about the invasion of northern France at Normandy on D-Day in the West, I’m talking about the Soviet summer offensive in Belorussia (today’s Belarus). Among the Germans and Western historians, it’s usually called the Destruction of Army Group Center. To the Soviets, it’s Operation Bagration, named after the imperial Russian prince and general Pyotr Bagration who died heroically fighting against Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia in 1812.

Fighting on the Eastern Front in the winter of 1943–1944 had pushed the Germans back in the north, breaking the siege of Leningrad. In the south, the fighting had liberated most of Ukraine. Remaining was a vast German bulge in the center, stretching 200 miles north to south, and almost another 200 miles forward. The Soviet offensive on this bulge began on June 22, 1944, three years to the day after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Soviet deception was so effective that it took the Germans several days to realize the scale of the offensive they were faced with. By that point, it was too late. The relentless Soviet advances in the south had pulled Germany’s scarce tanks there, leaving the German infantry in Belarus without sufficient tanks to meet Soviet armored offensives and without sufficient trucks to escape Soviet pursuit. Army Group Center in Belarus had almost no armor and very little in the way of motorized transport. The Soviets, by contrast, had thousands of tanks and other armored vehicles, supported by Lend-Lease trucks from the United States. Soviet armor ripped through German lines and headed west to destroy headquarters, supply dumps, and transportation links.

Still, Hitler instructed German Field Marshal Ernst Busch - the commander of Army Group Center - that retreat was not acceptable. Busch dutifully passed that order onto his troops, dooming them to death or years in Soviet prison camps. In just two weeks, Army Group Center was wiped out, tearing a 200-mile gap in the German front line. Around 450,000 German soldiers perished during the fighting. The Soviet’s were now in position to march towards Berlin.

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Operation Bagration left little doubt that German defeat on the Eastern Front was now inevitable. However, because Hitler showed no signs of wanting to end the war, a number of German officers decided that Germany’s best chance was to get rid of him and then cut a deal with the Allies. As German losses mounted, more Germans began to think about getting rid of Hitler and getting out of the war. Because Hitler had already killed, imprisoned, or driven into exile most of his left-wing opposition, the remaining dissidents were on the German right wing or from the military.

Bill Donovan, head of the OSS intelligence service, brought a number of secret German proposals to US President Roosevelt. However, Donovan and Roosevelt were always fundamentally skeptical. Any German offer of a separate peace might just be a fake, designed to sow division. Even if an offer were genuine, the danger of alienating Stalin was too great.

The German opposition to Hitler, however, didn’t know that a separate peace with the US was impossible. The German officers plotting against Hitler got their chance on July 20, 1944. While Hitler was visiting the Eastern Front, a conservative officer and wounded combat veteran named Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb under a meeting room conference table. When the bomb went off and shattered the building, Stauffenberg was certain that no one could have survived. He now raced to fly to Berlin to seize power.

However, Hitler survived the blast - protected by the heavy conference table - and once word got out that he was alive, the coup fell apart. Those directly implicated were arrested and shot. The Gestapo began rolling up those involved in planning and even those who had known about the plot but not participated. The ultimate death toll was as high as 5,000.

The Soviet‘s were knocking on the door of Berlin, and their dominance left little doubt about who would ultimately win the war. However, as long as Hitler was still breathing, negotiations or peace were not possible.

The war would drag on for another year, killing millions more.

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