Lieutenant General Eberhard Kinzel’s suicide was understandable, as he had known from the very start that Hitler and his cronies simply could not win a war of attrition against a country the size of the Soviet Union. He had the misfortune of witnessing not only the beginning of the terrible slaughter on the Eastern Front but also its bloody climax on the streets of Berlin. He felt bad that Heinrici had abandoned Reymann’s garrison to its miserable fate, but there was nothing they could do. Busse and Wenck were in an impossible position, yet Hitler in his final madness refused to believe their armies had given all they could.
Such were the pressures of war that Kinzel’s marriage broke down and he abandoned his wife and two children. Choosing to die together, he first shot his girlfriend in the head and then pulled the trigger on himself. Theirs was one of thousands of such tragedies enacted across defeated Nazi Germany. General de Guingand felt responsible for Kinzel’s death because he allowed him to keep his pistol. ‘Without knowing it I no doubt helped him on his way,’ recalled Guingand. ‘He wore an eyeglass and was in every respect the typical Prussian General Staff officer. If he had lived he might have made a fortune in Hollywood.’1
In contrast Reinhard Gehlen, who was equally culpable, set about saving his neck. He copied all his secret Soviet intelligence files on the Red Army with the intention of selling his services to the Americans. This he did, and went on to become the head of West Germany’s Intelligence Service.
General Erich Marcks, who had drafted the initial plans for Barbarossa, did not survive the war. Recovering from his injuries sustained on the Eastern Front, he got himself posted to France. Marcks was subsequently killed while serving as a corps commander in Normandy on 12 June 1944 – just six days after the D-Day landings and the opening of the Allies’ long-awaited second front. Ironically, this did not greatly help Stalin and the Red Army, which had torn the heart out of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front by August 1944.
Both Jodl and Keitel, two of the key architects of Operation Barbarossa, were hanged following the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1946. General Halder, the only man who tried to put a stop to Hitler’s military madness by speaking up, was retired and placed on the reserve list in the summer of 1942. Two years later, he was arrested following the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. Although not involved, Halder was implicated in earlier plots against the Führer and thrown into prison. At the end of the war he was handed over to the Americans and helped with the reconstruction of Germany.
Zeitzler, like Halder before him, never managed to get Hitler to moderate his strategic conduct of the war. Five times he tried to resign and each time Hitler refused, until Zeitzler claimed ill health in the summer of 1944. ‘Hitler’s distrust of him grew so great that he finally let him go,’ said Guderian.2 The Führer was so angry that he had Zeitzler thrown out of the army. Eventually captured by the British, he remained a POW until early 1947 and served as a witness during the Nuremberg Trials.
Zeitzler felt that Keitel had the 6th Army’s blood on his hands. He and Jodl could have tried to sway Hitler’s decision not to permit it to escape from Stalingrad, but they chose not to. After the war, Major von Loringhoven, who was miraculously ordered out of Stalingrad at the last minute and escaped the Führerbunker, was held as a prisoner with Zeitzler. They discussed the situation and Loringhoven recalled:
At a meeting of a select few, including Keitel and Jodl, Zeitzler had pleaded eloquently for such an operation. Visibly impressed by his presentation, Hitler hesitated and asked Jodl and Keitel for their advice. In contrast to Jodl, who gave a vague response, Keitel argued unequivocally against a break-out from Stalingrad by 6th Army. […] Given this endorsement of his own views, Hitler had refused to sanction Zeitzler’s proposals.3
After the war, Timoshenko and Zhukov sought to exonerate themselves of any blame for failing to hold Barbarossa. Both claimed that they did not see the intelligence reports coming from diplomatic sources. ‘Did the Defence Commissariat and the General Staff know anything about the reports Stalin was getting through these channels?’ wrote Zhukov. ‘Marshal Timoshenko assured me that he, at any rate, had known nothing about them. And I, too, declare as the then chief of staff, that I had no knowledge of them.’4
As these reports came through the Soviet Foreign Ministry this is quite conceivable, but it is hard to believe that Military Intelligence deliberately kept the General Staff in the dark. Timoshenko and Zhukov must have been aware of the work being conducted by Golikov. In addition, the military district HQs kept them well informed of German border activity. Yet Zhukov insisted that the Soviet Union did not know about Operation Barbarossa – he went on record as saying claims that they had full knowledge was ‘pure fiction’. However, this is at odds with Timoshenko and Zhukov’s heroic efforts to get the Red Army into a battle-ready condition during early 1941.
Golikov, who had help persuade Stalin that invasion was not imminent, after fighting in defence of Moscow went on to command both the Bryansk and Voronezh Fronts during 1942 and 1943. Stalin’s fall guy after Stalingrad and Kharkov, he was not given another combat command. Golikov complained personally to Stalin about his treatment at Stalingrad and Stalin almost dismissed Yeremenko for his conduct. It was only after Khrushchev intervened and explained that Golikov had lost his nerve that Stalin spared Yeremenko.
Golikov spent the rest of the war in Moscow, out of harm’s way, where he was responsible for the repatriation of Soviet POWs – which usually meant a one-way ticket back to the Red Army or to the Gulag. He continued to serve with the military until his retirement in 1962. Likewise, Admiral Kuznetsov, who had said Hitler would not attack, remained commander-in-chief of Soviet naval forces until the end of the war.
Budenny, who had done great harm to the defence of the Soviet Union, survived the disasters of Uman and Kiev. Clearly another Stalin favourite, he went on to briefly command the Reserve Front and the North Caucasus Front. From the summer of 1943 he was packed off to do his ideal job as inspector of the cavalry. General Biriuzov, who had despaired at the Red Army gaining the wrong lessons from the Winter War, also survived the war only to be killed in a plane crash in 1964.
The hard men of Europe, who were deluded by Hitler that Barbarossa was a good idea and that victory was achievable, all paid the price. Italian partisans executed Mussolini just two days before Hitler took his own life. Antonescu was toppled in the summer of 1944 and was put on trial for war crimes two years later and executed.
Tragically, Jewish novelist and playwright Iosif Hechter, who chronicled the war from the Romanian perspective, was killed in a road accident on 29 May 1945.
Horthy, having swapped sides, was permitted to go into exile in Portugal where he wrote his memoirs.
Mannerheim was elected Finnish President in 1944, but resigned shortly after the end of the war. Due to ill health, he spent much of the rest of his life in hospital in Switzerland. Tiso was put on trial in Czechoslovakia as a Nazi collaborator and hanged in 1947.
Resistance to Hitler by King Boris III of Bulgaria had proved futile. Following a meeting with the Führer in the summer of 1943, he was allegedly poisoned for refusing to declare war on the Soviet Union and deport Bulgarian Jews.
Hitler was clearly seduced by how easily Europe had fallen to the Wehrmacht’s triumphant blitzkrieg during 1939–41. The initial creation of the Soviet reserve front and reserve armies by Timoshenko and Zhukov gave warning of Stalin’s enormous manpower reserves. Hitler chose to ignore this, and the massive strategic depth of the Soviet Union. The generation of further reserve fronts in 1942 and again in 1943 inevitably spelt defeat, first at Stalingrad and then Kursk. Ultimately, Hitler simply could not compete with Stalin’s resources.
Barbarossa was to have been a quick and decisive campaign. After the intoxicating success of the summer of 1941, by the winter, Hitler’s plans had become horribly unravelled. When he launched Barbarossa, his replacement army had about 450,000 men available, his fuel reserve had just three months’ worth of petrol and one month of diesel. He gambled with the fate of his nation and lost.
By August 1941, although Hitler’s losses were but a fraction of those endured by Stalin, they were still significant, totalling 440,000, of whom 94,000 were dead. Crucially by the end of the year only 217,000 replacements had been allotted and they still had to reach their designated units. Hitler would not hear of it when General Halder, chief of General Staff, recommended breaking up twelve existing infantry divisions to provide much-needed replacements for other battered units.
When the Battle of Kiev ended on 26 September 1941, the German official news service claimed the pocket had given up 665,000 Red Army prisoners, 884 tanks and 3,718 field guns and mortars. Staggeringly, five Soviet armies amounting to fifty divisions had been wiped off the Red Army’s order of battle. Subsequently, the Soviets contested these figures, claiming they lost no more than 175,000 men. The general feeling is that Moscow was trying to play down the situation, rather than the Germans overinflating their victory. Despite the efforts of Khrushchev and Budenny, Stalin remained content to leave these vast forces to their fate. When he did relent, it was too late and thousands were killed trying to escape, including General Kirponos.
Stalin steadfastly refused to learn from this. Nonetheless, in some instances this produced dividends, such as in the case of the garrison of the Black Sea port of Odessa. Surrounded by the Romanian Army on 5 August 1941, General Petrov’s Special Maritime Army held out until 16 October, inflicting 100,000 casualties on their attackers. During the two battles of Vyazma and Bryansk the Germans claimed to have captured 657,000 prisoners, 1,241 tanks and 5,396 pieces of artillery. This massive victory, coupled to the fact that the Soviets in many instances had shown little fighting spirit, convinced Hitler that his advance on Moscow would be swift.
To Halder’s alarm, he found that their escalating casualty figure had risen to 686,000, of whom 145,000 had been killed and 29,000 were missing. From the remaining wounded, about two-thirds were expected to return to duty at some point. From 22 June to 26 November 1941 Hitler lost 187,000 men killed and missing on the Eastern Front. His wounded totalled 555,000, of whom only two-thirds might be expected to return to their units.
The official Soviet history, The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, recorded German casualties sustained before Moscow during 16 November to 5 December 1941 as 155,000 (55,000 dead and over 100,000 wounded and frostbitten). Equipment losses amounted to 777 panzers, 297 field guns and mortars and 1,500 aircraft. The Red Army’s general winter offensive of 1942 routed fifty German divisions (i.e. they lost over half their manpower and equipment); by the Germans’ own admission this totalled almost 400,000 men.
From 27 November 1941 to 31 March 1942 Germany’s killed and missing amounted to 108,000 and 268,000 wounded, giving a total of 376,000. However, the weather also took its toll, with 228,000 frostbite cases and over 250,000 sick. This meant that 900,000 men were lost, of whom only half could be replaced. By the close of the winter fighting of 1941–42, Hitler’s casualties had reached over 1.6 million, not including sick, and he simply did not have enough replacements.
By the end of September 1941, the Wehrmacht had accounted for over 2 million Soviet troops, 22,000 guns, 18,000 tanks and 14,000 aircraft. Between 22 June 1941 and 20 March 1942, the Red Army lost 3,461,000 captured alone. Hitler let 1,981,000 of these men die in captivity and another 1,308,000 died or disappeared in transit. By this stage total losses were in the region of 6 million; Stalin, however, had the ability to replace such appalling losses.
German estimates of Soviet manpower proved horribly wrong; they had assumed by December 1941 the Red Army would be able to muster 300 divisions, and Stalin managed twice that. This incredibly enabled him to shrug off the loss of 200 divisions and 4 million men by the end of 1941 – effectively the Red Army’s entire peacetime strength. No other army has ever achieved such a feat and it is little short of a miracle.
By the end of 1941 the Soviet mobilisation system had provided 285 rifle divisions, eighty-eight cavalry divisions, twelve re-formed tank divisions, 174 rifle brigades and ninety-three tank brigades. This gave the Red Army the equivalent of 592 divisions. Stalin’s manpower, despite all the terrible losses, had risen from 5,373,000 on 22 June to 8 million by December. These included ninety-seven divisions transferred from the Far East and twenty-five ‘People’s Militia’ divisions raised from Muscovites and Leningraders. Also, by the end of the first six months of the war Soviet military academies had provided 192,000 new officers, easily making up for the detrimental effects of Stalin’s purges and combat losses.
Colonel Gehlen estimated that Stalin had in the region of 17–19 million able-bodied men available to the Soviet armed forces. Taking into account Soviet losses since Barbarossa and as a result of the Winter War with Finland, he calculated the Soviet Union had suffered 7,530,000 casualties up to 1 May 1942. This left Stalin with at least 9.5 million men with which to wage the war. He had 7.8 million troops under arms, of whom 6 million were in the Red Army, 1.5 million in the air force and 300,000 in the navy. This meant that, on paper, Stalin could still call on 1.7–2 million men.
In his memoirs, General von Mellenthin lauded the Wehrmacht’s accomplishments and recognised the lack of manpower was its undoing:
The achievements of the German soldiers in Russia clearly prove that the Russians are not invincible. In the late autumn of 1941 the German Army was definitely in sight of victory in spite of vast spaces, the mud and slush of winter, and our deficient equipment and inferior numbers. Even in the critical years of 1944–45 our soldiers never had the feeling of being inferior to the Russians – but the weak German forces were like rocks in the ocean, surrounded by endless waves of men and tanks which surged around and finally submerged them.5
Nevertheless, it would be spurious to claim that Stalin’s victory was based purely on superior numbers. The Red Army deserves more credit than that. Von Mellenthin goes on to claim:
Experience gathered in the war shows that the Germans fought successful actions with a strength ratio of 1:5, as long as the formations involved were more or less intact and adequately equipped. Success was sometimes achieved with an even more unfavourable strength ratio, and it is unlikely that any other Western army could do better.6
Praise indeed. It was the Germans themselves who recognised that the Soviet victory was also in part due to the Red Army’s ability to learn and adapt. General Kleist assessed:
The men were first-rate fighters from the start, and we owed our success simply to superior training. They became first-rate soldiers with experience. They fought most toughly, had amazing endurance, and could carry on without most of the things other armies regard as necessities. The Staff were quick to learn from their early defeats, and soon became highly efficient.7
Kleist also acknowledged the vast improvement in Soviet equipment:
The Russians’ weakest period had been in 1942. They had not been able to make up their 1941 losses, and throughout the year they were very short of artillery in particular. […] But from 1943 on their equipment position became better and better.8
The Soviets’ preference for standardisation of equipment also paid dividends. Captain von Senger, who after losing an arm on the Eastern Front served as adjutant to the Inspector of Panzer Forces, noted:
Our panzer division in 1942 had twelve different types of armoured vehicle and twenty types of other vehicle. The Russian armoured corps then had mostly only one type of tank, the T-34, and one other vehicle, the Ford truck! […]
This simplicity of the Russian organisation had its drawbacks, but also its advantages, compared with the German – which suffered from having too many types of vehicle, of varying performance and design, thus complicating movement calculations as well as spare part supplies.9
Soviet troops also proved to be very fatalistic – if ordered to fight to the last, they often did – whereas German troops would disobey such orders when resistance became futile. This Soviet characteristic was observed very early in the war, but few appreciated its implications, as General Blumentritt observed:
It was in this war, however, that we first learnt to realise what ‘Russia’ really means. The opening battle in June, 1941, revealed to us for the first time the new Soviet Army. Our casualties were up to fifty per cent. The OGPU [NKVD] and women’s battalion defended the old citadel at Brest-Litovsk for a week, fighting to the last, in spite of bombardment with our heaviest guns and from the air. Our troops soon learnt to know what fighting the Russians meant. The Führer and most of our highest chiefs didn’t know. That caused a lot of trouble.10
Some German generals felt that they should not have dallied on the flanks and mounted Operation Typhoon much sooner. Nonetheless, if Kirponos’ armies had not been surrounded at Kiev, then Stavka would have had an extra 500,000 troops with which to threaten Army Group Centre’s flank. Also, if the 4th Panzer Group had been released from Leningrad sooner, that would have eased the pressure there.
Not only did Hitler underestimate Stalin’s manpower, he also grossly underestimated Soviet industrial capacity and resilience. Prior to Barbarossa commencing, General Thomas, OKW’s armaments expert, wrongly assessed that Stalin would lose most of his military factories once the invasion had reached Moscow. This he believed would prevent Stalin from re-equipping the Soviet armed forces. Hitler and Thomas deliberately chose to ignore the possibility of these factories escaping before they were overrun by the Wehrmacht. Furthermore when they did escape Hitler’s grasp and resumed work they easily outstripped German military production.
In these circumstances, Stalin could afford to trade bodies for military gain – Hitler could not. Operation Spark, conducted to break the blockade of Leningrad from mid-January 1943 till the end of the month, while a success, cost the Red Army a staggering 115,082 casualties, including 33,940 dead, captured or missing and 81,142 wounded from a force of 302,800. The Germans lost 12,000 killed.
Axis losses from 22 June 1941 to mid-November 1942 amounted to almost 2 million officers and men. To put this into perspective, during the First World War German casualties were just over 1.9 million. According to Zhukov, German losses in the Volga–Don–Stalingrad area, just from 19 November 1942 to 2 February 1943, amounted to thirty-two divisions destroyed, with another sixteen having lost 50–75 per cent of their effective strength. This totalled about 1.5 million men, 3,500 tanks and assault guns, 12,000 guns and 3,000 aircraft.
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Red Army on 23 February 1943, in his Order of the Day, Stalin proclaimed:
When Hitlerite Germany began the war against the USSR she enjoyed numerical superiority in troops already mobilised and ready for battle as compared with the Red Army. It was here that she had the advantage. In twenty months, however, the situation has changed in this sphere also. In the defensive and offensive battles, the Red Army, since the beginning of the war, has put out of action about 9,000,000 German-fascist officers and men, of which no less than 4,000,000 were killed on the battlefield.
The Romanian, Italian and Hungarian armies hurled by Hitler on to the Soviet–German front have been completely routed. In the last three months alone the Red Army has routed 112 enemy divisions, killing more than 700,000 men and taking over 300,000 prisoners.11
However accurate these figures were, they illustrated a trend that could not be ignored. Stalin recognised that Hitler did not have the resources to replace such manpower losses, and even if he did, Germany simply did not have the time to assemble or train them.
The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union records that in the period from November 1942 to March 1943 the Red Army destroyed over 100 enemy divisions, claiming that the German General Staff acknowledged losses of 1.2 million. The Soviets claim the Axis lost 1.7 million men, 3,500 tanks, 24,000 field guns and 4,300 aircraft during the winter campaign. The Battle of Kursk, which ran from 12 July to 23 August 1943, lasted fifty days and again according to Soviet sources cost the Germans thirty divisions, including seven panzer divisions. Zhukov recorded that German casualties amounted to 500,000 men, 1,500 tanks, 3,000 guns and more than 3,700 aircraft.
Across the Eastern Front, Hitler and his generals simply could not match the Red Army’s swelling manpower in the face of continuing heavy losses. In the north, from mid-July to mid-October 1943, it expanded from 734,000 men (with 491,000 in reserve) to 893,000 (with 66,000 in reserve). By contrast, Army Group North had 601,000 troops in the field, down from 760,000. To make matters worse, the replacement and reinforcement requirements of Army Groups Centre and South were always considered a priority, meaning that it was regularly stripped of units.
The near total annihilation of Army Group Centre in June 1944, in the space of just under two weeks, cost Hitler 670,000 men – 300,000 dead, 250,000 wounded and about 120,000 captured. Only about 20,000 troops escaped. In addition, he lost 2,000 panzers and 57,000 other vehicles. Stalin’s losses were 60,000 killed, 110,000 wounded and about 8,000 missing, 2,957 tanks, 2,447 artillery pieces and 822 aircraft.
Hitler’s defence of East Prussia proved particularly dogged. Between 13–29 March 1945 the Red Army claimed to have killed 93,000 enemy troops and captured over 46,000. When Königsberg finally capitulated, the garrison lost 42,000 dead and 92,000 taken prisoner. The Soviets claimed to have destroyed twenty-five German divisions and routed another twelve. Hitler’s last desperate counter-offensive in Hungary in March 1945 cost the German armed forces 40,000 troops, 500 tanks and 300 guns and mortars.
At the very end, fighting losses were simply colossal. In the battle from the Oder to Berlin alone, Zhukov and Konev lost around 100,000 men. The cost of overrunning the Nazi capital was simply enormous, the entire offensive cost the Red Army 81,116 killed; in addition, another 280,251 were wounded or sick. Included in that total are Polish forces which lost 2,825 killed or missing, and 6,067 wounded.
Initial Soviet estimates based on kill claims, placed German losses at 458,080 killed and 479,298 captured. The number of civilian casualties is unknown. Rampaging Soviet troops raped an estimated 100,000 women, and murdered innocent civilians along with Nazi Party officials. During the Berlin operation, the Germans destroyed over 800 Soviet tanks and self-propelled guns, most were lost on the very streets of Berlin itself.
The official Soviet history claims that during the Berlin operation the Red Army destroyed seventy infantry, twelve panzer and eleven motorised divisions, capturing 480,000 prisoners, 1,500 tanks and assault guns, 8,600 field guns and mortars and 4,500 aircraft. It puts the losses for the 1st and 2nd Byelorussian and 1st Ukrainian fronts between 16 April and 8 May 1945 at almost 300,000 killed and wounded, as well as 2,156 tanks and self-propelled guns, 1,220 field guns and mortars and 527 aircraft.
The conquest of Czechoslovakia during the final death throes of Hitler’s Third Reich was intended to neutralise the 900,000 enemy troops there, equipped with 2,200 tanks, 10,000 field guns and mortars and about 1,000 aircraft. Soviet operations conducted on Czechoslovak territory from September 1944 to May 1945 cost the Red Army 140,000 dead. There was never any let-up in the bloodletting on the Eastern Front. From January to May 1945 the German Army lost over 1 million dead. The Red Army smashed ninety-eight divisions and overran another fifty-six. When Germany surrendered, another ninety-three divisions finally laid down their weapons.
The Red Army received no respite at the end of the Second World War. In early August 1945, Stalin drove the Japanese from the Mongolian border, Manchuria and Korea. In just twenty-three days, the Red Army destroyed the Japanese Kwantung Army at the cost of another 32,000 Soviet and 84,000 Japanese lives.
The scale of the losses on the Eastern Front are inconceivable, although total casualty estimates vary enormously. Published estimates of Soviet military war dead, including missing in action, POWs and Soviet partisan losses, range from 8.6 to 10.6 million. An additional 127,000 were killed during the Winter War with Finland. According to Soviet research, 13,684,692 Soviet civilians died during the war: of these, 7,420,000 were killed as a result of the fighting; 4,100,000 died under the Nazi occupation, and another 2,164,313 died after being deported (the Germans deported 5,269,513 Soviet civilians).
The Red Army’s irrevocable losses amounted to 8,668,400 (this includes all services): these comprised 5,226,800 killed in action; 1,783,300 missing in action or died in captivity; 1,102,800 who died of their wounds and 555,5000 non-combat fatalities. Figures include navy losses of 154,771 and non-combat deaths include 157,000 sentenced to death by court martial. The Red Army’s wounded totalled 14,685,593, including 2,576,000 permanently disabled. The Soviets also lost about 5 million captured, from whom 2,775,700 missing in action or POWs eventually returned to the ranks.
In total, 26.6 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died as a result of Barbarossa. Some 2.4 million people were officially considered missing in action and of the 9.5 million buried in mass graves, 6 million were unidentified. In comparison, German deaths amounted to 10,223,700 (German military dead have been estimated at about 5 million); France 328,671; Britain 462,762 and America 292,100. Soviet sources list the deaths of 474,967 of the 2,652,672 German POWs.
Equipment losses and, therefore, raw materials were equally massive. The Red Army lost 96,500 tanks and self-propelled guns and 218,000 field guns and mortars. The Soviets also lost over 106,400 aircraft including 88,300 combat types. On all fronts, Germany lost an estimated 116,875 aircraft, of which 70,000 were total losses and the remainder significantly damaged.
The Red Air Force claimed to have destroyed 55,000 German aircraft and dropped 30,450,00 bombs. Soviet air defence forces claimed another 7,000 aircraft, 40 per cent of which were brought down by anti-aircraft artillery fire. Soviet losses should be measured against a total of 3,125,000 combat sorties, of which only 168,000 were ground-attack sorties against enemy transportation. Other organisations flew an additional 3,852,000 sorties, including 350,000 flights by Soviet naval aviation and 109,000 flights in support of Soviet partisans.
The Soviet Navy lost 137 vessels, including about 100 submarines, while the Germans lost 840 vessels (the bulk of which were submarines). Soviet torpedo boats, submarines and naval aircraft claimed over 700 enemy vessels. Space does not permit the coverage of naval operations on the periphery of the Eastern Front, however, the Soviet Baltic fleet lost a battleship, fifteen destroyers, thirty-nine submarines, forty minesweepers, and many smaller ships. Hitler’s forces lost 3 battleships, 3 cruisers, 19 destroyers, 48 submarines, 67 minesweepers, 129 smaller warships and landing craft, and 160 merchantmen; the Finns lost a monitor, 6 mine sweepers, 39 merchantmen and about a dozen smaller ships.
Hitler’s Axis allies likewise paid a terrible price for the war in the east. Hungary suffered about 310,000 casualties, of whom 110,000 were fatalities and 200,000 were missing in action or captured. However, the Soviets claim to have taken 513,700 prisoners, of whom 54,700 died in captivity. Similarly, Romania lost about 100,000 killed and 200,000 captured. Slovak forces lost 7,000 troops on the Eastern Front, although another 30,000 men were also lost serving in the Hungarian Army. Significant casualties were then incurred fighting the Germans. The Finns, in their unequal struggle, lost 59,151.
Poland, caught in the middle, suffered its own agony, losing 239,800 soldiers and resistance fighters. During the 1939 invasion, killed and missing amounted to about 95,000 and 130,000 wounded, including 17,000–19,000 killed by the Soviets in the Katyn Massacre. Polish forces in exile lost 33,256 killed in action, 8,548 missing in action, 42,666 wounded and 29,385 interned. The Warsaw Uprising cost 16,000 Polish resistance fighters and 120,000 civilians.
Overall, civilian losses were 2.9 million in Poland and about 2.5 million in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. An official Polish report in the late 1940s assessed that 6,028,000 people died at the hands of the Nazis (including 123,178 military deaths, 2.8 million Poles and 3.2 million Jews), out of a population of 27 million ethnic Poles and Jews. About 108,000 Poles of German descent were also killed serving with the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland from 1940–41 resulted in about 350,000 deaths (previously assessed as high as 1 million) and about 100,000 Poles were killed in 1943–44 during the massacres in Volhynia by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
In Moscow, the Red Army was feted for its achievements. Stalin held a reception for all his commanders on 24 May 1945. The following month, units of the Red Army triumphantly rolled through Moscow’s Red Square, and this culminated in 200 captured Wehrmacht flags being symbolically placed at the foot of Lenin’s mausoleum.
Despite his almost complete disregard for human life, Stalin ensured his people were rewarded for their sacrifice. To honour those who had fought on the Eastern Front the Soviet government awarded the ‘Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45’ medal to 13,660,000 Soviet soldiers. Seven million men received other decorations including the Orders of Lenin, the Red Banner and Red Star. Medals for valour and merit were granted to 7,580,000 servicemen. Those who fought behind enemy lines were also recognised. Over 127,000 partisans, from a force of 250,000 men at its peak, received the ‘Partisan of the Great Patriotic War’ medal. Over 184,000 were decorated with other awards.
After the devastation wrought by Operation Barbarossa, Stalin had every reason to be bitter. He saw no reason to seek reconciliation with the defeated Axis countries. His response to the pain and suffering his country had endured at the hands of Germany and her satellites was to draw an iron curtain across Eastern Europe and to impose a totalitarian political system that in many ways mirrored the Nazis. Hitler and Stalin’s war also led to a new conflict, known as the Cold War. The Red Army, however, stood proud in the knowledge that it had turned utter disaster into a victory that changed the political shape of Europe and ensured the security of the Soviet Union.