![]() The Soviet Union was one of only two countries (the other was the United States) Germany could not defeat. By September, the Red Army had sustained some 2.5 million casualties. The invasion was spectacularly effective in its early stages. On June 22, 1941, Hitler took his greatest gamble, unleashing Operation Barbarossa, a three million-man invasion of the Soviet Union. “The sooner Russia is smashed the better,” he told his generals. This action was permitted under the terms of the nonaggression pact, but it endangered Hitler’s plans for expansion eastward. Germany was free to attack Poland and France without worrying about a Soviet invasion, and the Soviets could take control over parts of eastern Europe without fear of German retaliation.Īfter Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Soviet troops moved into parts of eastern Europe, occupying 286,000 square miles of territory containing 20 million people. Neither country fully trusted the other, but the agreement achieved short-term goals for both parties. The treaty also included a secret agreement to divide Poland, the Baltic States (Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania), Finland, and Romania into German and Soviet spheres of influence. But he didn’t want to fight both countries at the same time, especially if Great Britain came to the defense of France.Īccordingly, in August 1939, Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. ![]() These bitterly contested, racial battles (Adolf Hitler had vowed to exterminate the eastern Slavs) prevented Germany from mounting a more resolute defense against Allied armies in Normandy, and later, on the Reich’s western borders.Īs early as 1923, when Hitler authored Mein Kampf, he believed Germany’s destiny lay in defeating its historic enemy, France, and pushing eastward into the Soviet Union, exterminating both communism and the Slavic peoples. More combatants were killed on the Eastern Front than in all other theaters of World War II combined. The US involvement in the European theater of operations was mainly confined to western Europe and Italy, but some of the war’s most savage fighting occurred on the Eastern Front, where the Axis powers had set out to conquer the Balkan Peninsula and the immense reaches of the Soviet Union. Primary image: map showing the advance of the Allied armies from both the east and west at the end of World War II. ![]()
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