Joseph Stalin
By the late summer of 1944, the Third Reich was almost surrounded. Two years earlier Adolf Hitler had ground 10 European countries under his heel along with vast expanses of North Africa and Soviet Russia. Read more
Joseph Stalin
Georgina’s mother sat next to me at her dining room table. She and her husband were veterans of the Great Patriotic War, and back in 1996 we all sat about the table on Victory Day and talked about the siege. Read more
Joseph Stalin
At 11:02 am on August 9, 1945, an American warplane dropped an atomic device nicknamed “Fat Man” onto the city of Nagasaki, Japan. Read more
Joseph Stalin
After Adolf Hitler’s audacious invasion of Russia finally ground to a halt in December 1941 on the forested outskirts of Moscow, the exhausted German Army stabilized its winter front in a line running roughly from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. Read more
Joseph Stalin
Adolf Hitler was obsessed with Leningrad. When planning his invasion of the Soviet Union, the Führer demanded that the capture of the city, which he regarded as the cradle of Bolshevism, be one of the top priorities of the campaign, giving it precedence over the capture of Moscow. Read more
Joseph Stalin
Months after the Red Army stormed across the Polish frontier from the east and occupied approximately half of Poland in the autumn of 1939, the Soviet secret police (NKVD) rounded up thousands of Polish Army officers and summarily executed them at various locations around the war-torn country. Read more
Joseph Stalin
On July 22, 1941, exactly one month after invading the Soviet Union, German aviation conducted its first air strike on Moscow. Read more
Joseph Stalin
Promoted to full colonel in the German Army and an award of the prestigious Knight’s Cross were significant accomplishments, even in the waning days of World War II. Read more
Joseph Stalin
During the last weekend of September 1938, the attention of the world’s capitals was transfixed by the diplomatic pas de deux Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain were enacting to determine the fate of Czechoslovakia and ultimately the world. Read more
Joseph Stalin
It was fated to be the last wartime conference of the Big Three Allies of World War II, but it was the first not attended by the late American President Franklin D. Read more
Joseph Stalin
The Great Patriotic War, as World War II came to be known in the Soviet Union, provided the stage upon which Marshal Georgy Zhukov achieved lasting fame. Read more
Joseph Stalin
After crushing the first-line Soviet armies in brutal three-week cauldron battles at the border, the steamroller of German Army Group Center continued deeper into Soviet territory during the opening days of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on June 22, 1941. Read more
Joseph Stalin
On the evening of June 16, 1940, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain was appointed Prime Minister of France. It was a critical time. Read more
Joseph Stalin
By early 1945, less than a year before General George S. Patton’s mysterious death, Adolf Hitler’s armies were almost exhausted. Read more
Joseph Stalin
“They had lost their country but kept their honor,” future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said of General Wladyslaw Anders and the Polish II Corps, men in the strange position of trying to win the liberation of their homeland by fighting in Italy. Read more
Joseph Stalin
An estimated four million Red Army soldiers were captured by the Germans during the six months after the launching of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, on June 22, 1941. Read more
Joseph Stalin
Officer corps expect to suffer heavy losses in war. The entire 1914 class of France’s St. Read more
Joseph Stalin
Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin harbored a great suspicion of the people of Leningrad, even after the war.
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Stalin had always suspected that the non-conformist and spirited Leningraders might one day rise up against him as they had done against their leaders in the 1917 revolution. Read more
Joseph Stalin
On orders from Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, the offensive that resulted in the capture of the Nazi capital of Berlin in April 1945, developed into a race between the army groups of two Soviet commanders, Marshal Georgy Zhukov and Marshal Ivan Konev. Read more
Joseph Stalin
Nazi war propaganda was designed in large part by the dictates of Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897-1 May 1945), based on his read of German public opinion. Read more
