Eastern Front

Eastern Front

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

Nazi Stuka Ace Hans Rudel

By Ludwig Heinrich Dyck

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

German Spymaster Reinhard Gehlen

By William F. Floyd, Jr.

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

siege of Leningrad

Eastern Front

Savage Struggle for Leningrad

By Blaine Taylor

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

Adolf Hitler's final days

Eastern Front

Hitler’s Death in the Führerbunker

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

Heroic Warsaw Airlift

By Patrick J. Chaisson

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

Operation Barbarossa: How Stalin was Blindsided by Berlin

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

Race to Moscow

By Victor Kamenir

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