The Eastern Front during World War II includes the area of military confrontation involving the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviet Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht clashed along the extended Eastern Front, which stretched thousands of miles from the Black Sea in the south to Finland and the approaches to the Arctic Circle in the north.
Eastern Front
By the end of 1944, the Soviet Red Army had surrounded the Hungarian capital of Budapest and established strong defensive positions running from Esztergom on the Danube to Lake Balaton. Read more
Eastern Front
Overshadowed by the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Soviet Union’s Operation Bagration on June 23 is one of the least-covered campaigns of World War II. Read more
Eastern Front
Many consider the Battle of Moscow in late 1941 to be the first turning point of World War II on the Eastern Front. Read more
Eastern Front
By Blaine Taylor
The Russian winter of 1941-1942 hit with terrible ferocity. Battling the deadly, numbing cold as well as the massive numbers of Red Army troops were soldiers from sunny Spain. Read more
Eastern Front
In the village of Seiferdau, Southern Prussia, an eight-year-old boy with an umbrella jumped out of a second-story window. Read more
Eastern Front
When Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, chief of the German General Staff, presented German leader Adolf Hitler with estimates of Russian strength for Operation Barbarossa, Hitler declared that the numbers were “completely idiotic” and “pure bluff.” Read more
Eastern Front
Leningrad was the sacred city of Soviet Communism. The port city on the Neva River, 400 miles northwest of Moscow, began life in 1703 as Petrograd, or St. Read more
Eastern Front
By Flint Whitlock
His world was literally crashing down in flames around him. Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which he had created out of nothing but his own will—an empire that he had once boasted would last for a millennium—was on fire and being torn apart by shot and shell, besieged on all sides. Read more
Eastern Front
Warsaw was burning. Captain Jack Van Eyssen first saw it as a dull glow on the night horizon, 35 miles distant. Read more
Eastern Front
“We felt that we were already dead men,” wrote former Captain Albrecht Wüstenhagen in a May 1988 letter to the author of his time in the fortress garrison of Küstrin. Read more
Eastern Front
December 1941 was a dark month and the end of a dark year for the Soviets as the Germans pressed ever onward toward Moscow, the lair where Joseph Stalin and his minions plotted what to do next against the Nazi juggernaut that had, in a few short months, rolled over everything before them. Read more
Eastern Front
The three Soviet T-34 tanks edged forward slowly as the drivers scanned for the concealed Germans that lay ahead. Read more
Eastern Front
By Richard Z. Freemann, Jr.
“War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.”
—Winston Churchill (1950)
On Sunday, June 22, 1941, as the sun slumbered, 3.6 million soldiers, 2,000 warplane pilots, and 3,350 tank commanders under skilled German command crouched at the border of Soviet-occupied Poland ready to invade the Communist nation Joseph Stalin had ruled with steel-fisted brutality for years. Read more
Eastern Front
The troops of Germany’s Army Group Center were more than a week into a fresh offensive to capture Moscow on July 14 when they approached the historic battlefield of Borodino where the Russians delayed Napoleon’s advance on Moscow in 1812. Read more
Eastern Front
As the fateful day drew to a close, the exhausted World War I soldiers of the German 25th and 82nd Reserve Divisions huddled in their trenches. Read more
