Eastern Front (World War II)

The Eastern Front of World War II was the theatre of war covering the conflict in eastern Europe. Many sources include the German-Polish War of 1939 in this World War II theatre but this article concentrates on the much larger conflict which was fought from June 1941 to May 1945 in which the two principal belligerent nations were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It resulted in the rise of the Soviet Union as a military and industrial superpower, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, and the partition of Germany.

Occupation and repression

The enormous territorial gains of 1941 presented Germany with vast areas to pacify and administer. Some Soviet citizens, especially in the non-Russian republics, greeted their conquerors as liberators from Stalinist repression. But they were soon to learn that their new masters were every bit as repressive and brutal as the old. Nascent national liberation movements among Belarusians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, and other were viewed by Hitler with suspicion; some were co-opted into the Axis armies and others brutally suppressed. None of the conquered territories gained any measure of self-rule. Instead, the racist Nazi ideologues saw the future of the East as one of settlement by German colonists, with the natives killed, expelled, or reduced to slave labour.

Related Topics:
Belarusians - Ukrainians - Cossack - Racist - Nazi ideologues - Settlement by German colonists

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Some captured regions, like the Baltic states, were incorporated into Greater Germany; in others Commissariats were established to extract the maximum in loot. In September 1941, Erich Koch was appointed to the Ukrainian Commissariat. His opening speech was clear about German policy: "I am known as a brutal dog ? Our job is to suck from Ukraine all the goods we can get hold of ? I am expecting from you the utmost severity towards the native population."

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Atrocities against the Jewish population in the conquered areas began almost immediately, with the dispatch of Einsatzgruppen (task groups) to round up Jews and shoot them. Local anti-semites were encouraged to carry out their own pogroms. In July 1941 Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski's SS unit began to carry out more systematic killings, including the massacre of 30,000 at Babi Yar. By the end of 1941 there were more than 50,000 troops devoted to rounding up and killing Jews. The gradual industrialization of killing led to adoption of the Final Solution and the establishment of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps: the machinery of the Holocaust. In three years of occupation, between one and two million Soviet Jews were killed. Other ethnic groups were targeted for extermination, including the Roma and Sinti; see Porajmos.

Related Topics:
Einsatzgruppen - Anti-semite - Pogrom - Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski - Babi Yar - Final Solution - Operation Reinhard - Holocaust - Roma - Sinti - Porajmos

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The massacres of Jews and other ethnic minorities were only a part of the deaths from the Nazi occupation. Many thousands of Soviet civilians were executed, but millions died from starvation as the Germans requisitioned food for their armies and fodder for their draft horses. As they retreated from Ukraine and Belarus in 1943–1944, the German occupiers systematically applied a scorched earth policy, burning towns and cities, destroying infrastructure, and leaving civilians to starve or die of exposure. Estimates of total civilian dead in the Soviet Union in the war range from seven million (Encyclopedia Britannica) to seventeen million (Overy).

Related Topics:
Scorched earth - Encyclopedia Britannica

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The Nazi ideology and the maltreatment of the local population and Soviet POWs encouraged partisan fighting behind the front, motivated even anti-communinists or non-Russian nationalists to ally with the Soviets, and greatly delayed the formation of German allied divisions consisting of Soviet POWs (see Vlasov army). These results and missed opportunities contributed to the defeat of the Wehrmacht.

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