SECOND WORLD WAR: The Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 4

THE EASTERN FRONT

The war inflicted huge losses and suffering onto the civilian populations of the affected countries. Behind the front lines, atrocities against civilians in German-occupied areas were routine, including the Holocaust. German and German-allied forces treated civilian populations with exceptional brutality, massacring villages and routinely killing civilian hostages. Both sides practiced widespread scorched earth tactics. When the Red Army invaded Germany from 1944, many German civilians suffered from vengeance taken by Red Army soldiers. Indeed many German civilians committed suicide rather than face such retribution. Many German civilians were systematically raped, killed or tortured. After the war, following the Yalta conference agreements between the Allies, the German populations of East Prussia and Silesia were displaced to the west of the Oder-Neisse Line, in what became one of the largest forced migrations of people in world history.

Much of the combat took place in or close by populated areas, and the actions of both sides contributed to massive loss of civilian life.

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Russian Victims of German killings near Sebastopol, 1944

Destruction after the passage of Nazi troops. A ruined house in Krasnograd, Ukraine, 1943


Russian soldiers attack

German prisoners walk through a Russian town, July, 1944

German prisoner-of-war walk under the beady eyes of Russian soldiers

More Russian front pictures..

• SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 3...
• SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 2...
• SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Images from the Russian side: Part 1...

SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 3

Dead German soldiers buried near Leningrad

THE EASTERN FRONT

The Eastern Front was by far the largest and bloodiest theatre of World War II, and generally accepted as the most costly conflict in human history at anywhere from 25-30 million dead as a result. It involved more land combat than all other World War II theatres combined. The Eastern front resulted in such staggering losses and disregard for human life almost entirely as a consequence of the ideological premise for the war. To hardline Nazis in Berlin, the war against the Soviet Union was one of a struggle of Fascism against Communism, and the Aryan race against the "inferior" Slavic race. From the beginning of the conflict, Hitler referred it as a "war of annihilation". Aside from the ideological conflict, the mindframe of the leaders of Germany and the Soviet Union, Hitler and Stalin respectively, contributed to the escalation of terror and murder on an unprecedented scale. Hitler sought to enslave the Slavic race and wipe out the large Jewish population of Eastern Europe (Holocaust). Stalin and Hitler both disregarded human life in order to achieve their goal of victory. This included terrorization of their own people, as well as mass deportation (planned in the case of Germany) of entire populations. All these factors resulted in tremendous brutality both to combatants and civilians, which was not paralleled on the Western Front.

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Soviet Byelorussian partisans, 1944

Russian Jewish partisans

A Soviet Army officer briefs his men

Bodies of Russian people, killed and piled up

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• SECOND WORLD WAR: The Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 4...
• SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 2...
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SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 2

THE EASTERN FRONT

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 Ukrainians and 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.

Regions closer to the front were managed by military powers of the region, in other areas such as Baltic states annexed by USSR in 1940, Reichscommissariats were established. As a rule, the maximum in loot was extracted. 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."

Russian soldiers in action

Soviet Northern fleet, attacking Nazi submarines in the Barents sea

Survivor of a Jewish ghetto in Russia, after Nazi retreat

Soviet Rocker projectors "Katyusha" [the Stalin organ] near Viborg, Leningrad front, 1944

Start of the Russian offensive operation at the Leningrad front, 1943

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SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Images from the Russian side: PART 1

THE EASTERN FRONT

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

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 to seventeen million .

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

Soviet soldiers on Ukrainian soil, 1943

Battle near Moscow, 1941 | The first successful counterattack from the Red Army.

After bombing by German bombers near Nikolaev town, 1941

"Attack!" - fight near Varoshilovgrad, Ukraine 1941 | Soviet soldiers

22-06-1941 | Nazi warplanes on the route to bomb Soviet cities

More Russian front Pictures...

• SECOND WORLD WAR: The Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 4...
• SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 3...
• SECOND WORLD WAR: Russian Front: Pictures from the Russian side: Part 2...

AMAZING MOMENTS SECOND WORLD WAR: German soldiers retreating from Russia

Pictures of the war on the Russian front never seem to fail to fascinate us. May be because we know that this arena in the Second World War saw some of the most brutal and fiercest fighting.

Below are some shots of the disheartened German soldiers withdrawing from Russia beaten by the fierce Russian offensives and the heartless Russian winter.

Leaving a burning Russian town

Gloomily treading back on the Russian snow

They look like a shell of the once fierce and proud Nazi SS troops as they retreat.