Though never engaged in military action in the Eastern Front, the Germany and the Soviet Union remained unsatisfied with the outcome of Everything I undertake is directed against the Russians.

The Eastern Front or Eastern Theater of World War I (German: Ostfront, Russian: Восточный фронт, Vostochny front) was a theater of operations that encompassed at its greatest extent the entire frontier between the Russian Empire and Romania on one side and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and the German Empire on the other. OKW claim German losses of 77,000 killed, 334,000 wounded and 292,000 missing, with a total of 703,000 men, on the Eastern Front during January and February 1945.On 9 April 1945, Königsberg in East Prussia finally fell to the Red Army, although the shattered remnants of Army Group Centre continued to resist on the The fall of Königsberg allowed Stavka to free up General The Soviet offensive had two objectives.


For the majority of people of the Soviet Union, the Nazi invasion was viewed as a brutal act of unprovoked aggression. Micheal Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts, p. 449 When the German offensive finally commenced, they were met by a storm of mines and artillery fire that eventually destroyed hundreds of tanks and left a total of some 350,000 men dead on both sides. Romania's oil production amounted to approximately 6,000,000 tons annually. He also accepted Hitler’s cover story that the sudden presence of German troops on the Soviet border was merely a move to keep them out of range of British bomb strikes, and even ordered his troops to not fire on German spy planes despite numerous “accidental” invasions of Soviet airspace.

The Red Army eventually encircled the German Sixth Army, trapping nearly 300,000 German and Romanian soldiers in a narrow pocket.In February of 1943, a Soviet soldier stands guard behind a captured German soldier. Mass repression occurred in the occupied portions of Poland as well as in the Baltic states and Bessarabia. Krivosheev, G.F. (1997). The Germans wiped out scores of villages during their advance through Russia, and Jews and other minorities were regularly rounded up and shot or poisoned in mobile gassing vans.

While the western Allies released their final World War II prisoners in 1948, many German POWs in the U.S.S.R. were kept under lock and key for several more years.

3 min read. Hitler delayed the attack by several weeks to allow the Nazis’ new Tiger tanks to reach the front, which gave the Soviets time to fortify the entire region. In areas such as This was particularly true for the territories of Western Ukraine, recently rejoined to the Soviet Union, where the anti-Polish and anti-Soviet Regions closer to the front were managed by military powers of the region, in other areas such as the Baltic states annexed by the USSR in 1940, Reichscommissariats were established.
This image may contain graphic or objectionable content. This production represents 35% of the total fuel production of the Axis including the synthetic products and the substitutes and 70% of the total production of crude oil.The defeat of Germany in 1945 freed approximately 11 million foreigners (categorised as "displaced persons"), most of whom were forced labourers and POWs. In Leskinen, Jari; Juutilainen, Antti. However, access to (and control of) the During the war, as Germany acquired new territories (either by direct annexation or by installing puppet governments in defeated countries), these new territories were forced to sell raw materials and agricultural products to German buyers at extremely low prices. 1944–1951 годы // История СССР.