Commanders who sought to pull back faced tribunals, and foot soldiers faced “blocking detachments” of their own fellow soldiers, ready to gun down any who fled. 227 “Not a Step Back!” which forbid Soviet forces from retreating without direct orders. Later, as battles became desperate, Stalin issued Order No. To make things even more complex, forces within the Soviet Union were often fractured among themselves, early in the war, some groups had even welcomed the Germans and fought against the Red Army, in the hopes that Hitler’s troops would liberate them from Stalin.

Some 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians and nearly 4 million German troops lost their lives along the Eastern Front during those years of brutality. Over the course of four years, more than 400 Red Army and German divisions clashed in a series of operations along a front that extended more than 1,000 miles.

The Eastern Front, as the site of nearly all extermination camps, death marches, ghettos, and the majority of pogroms, was central to the Holocaust. They were characterized by unprecedented ferocity, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, exposure, disease, and massacres. The battles on the Eastern Front constituted the largest military confrontation in history. Sometime in the Autumn of 1942, Soviet soldiers advance through the rubble of Stalingrad.

T-34 tank battle of kursk documents