*By the end of 1941, Axis armies had pushed deep into Russia and the Baltic Republics, surrounded Leningrad (beginning an 872-day siege), captured Kiev, and approached Moscow. However, a late counterattack by the Red Army and the onset of winter stopped them.  

*Furthermore, although they did a great deal of damage, they did not destroy the USSR’s industrial capacity, as the Soviets actually dismantled their factories and shipped them beyond the Ural Mountains.

*In 1942 the German army was still kept away from Moscow, but began pushing towards the Don and the Volga, the USSR’s agricultural heartland and then move on to the Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus.  The most important city on the Volga was Stalingrad (and capturing a city named for the Soviet leader would be good propaganda as well).

*The Germans (and their allies--Italians, Hungarians, Roumanians, and Croats) began fighting around Stalingrad on 17 July, 1942, and by late November had bombed most of the city to rubble and occupied most of its territory.  However, to try to gain complete control of the city (and the area around it, from which the Soviets continued to counter-attack), the Germans had to fight house-to-house and room-to-room for it, sometimes capturing the kitchen in a house or aparment and then having to fight for the living room.  Furthermore, the Red Army began making plans to counter-attack.

*In the winter of 1942-43, the Red Army cut the Axis soldiers off from re-supply and they began to starve and freeze in the winter. One German general felt so bad for his men that he began eating the same diet they were given until he grew so emaciated that Hitler ordered him to start eating again.

*Soon the German army that had captured Stalingrad was itself captured, completely surrounded by the Red Army.

*The German commander, Friedrich Paulus wanted to try to break out of Stalingrad and retreat in order to save his men and fight again.  Many of Hitler’s other generals advised Hitler to let him, but Hitler refused, and Paulus fought on as well as he could, but by January it was clear he could not win.

*Hitler promoted Friedrich Paulus to Field Marshall on 30 January, 1943, and then, because no Prussian or German Field Marshall had ever been captured, expected him to fight to the death or commit suicide.  Paulus though, said later, "I have no intention of shooting myself for that Austrian corporal."  He surrendered on 2 February.  About 11,000 German soldiers refused to surrender, and hid in basements and ruined buildings and fought on until March.

*Around 91,000 (although perhaps as many as 110,000) Axis soldiers were captured in the Battle of Stalingrad, and most never made it home.  Of those that survived disease, starvation, slave labour, and terrible conditions in POW camps, most of the 5,000 or so survivors did not get to return to Germany until 1955.

*The Battle of Stalingrad may be the bloodiest battle in the history of the world.  The Axis lost about 850,000 men killed, wounded, and captured, and the Red Army at least 1,129,000 million casualties—close to two million men on both sides.  

*It was also nearly the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front, as the Germans were mostly on the defensive afterwards, only able to make one last major offensive, and that was an effort to repair the damage the loss of an entire army had done to Germany’s battle line.  Had thousands of German troops not been diverted to protect Italian forces in Africa and the Balkans, however, things might have gone very differently.

*The German Army had tried to relieve Stalingrad in December of 1942, but were prevented by the winter.  By the time the forces meant for this attack were able to move again, Stalingrad had fallen.  To regain lost land, the German High Command decided to attack the Soviets near the city of Kursk.  

*The resulting Battle of Kursk (really a series of battles) began on 4 July, 1943, and lasted throughout the month.  It was one last blitzkrieg of fast-moving armour supported by the Luftwaffe.  It ended up as the largest tank battle in the history of warfare, and was a German defeat, and one achieved in the early days of the campaign, not after the blitzkrieg had run its course—partly due, to successful use of infantry, artillery, and air support against the German Panzers.

*After this, the German army would be on the defensive, as the Red Army slowly pushed the Nazis west.  The losses at Stalingrad and Kursk convinced Hitler that his General Staff were incompetent, and convinced them that he was.

*Although there had been earlier plans to assassinate Hitler, and even failed attempts, in 1943 numerous Army officers, even some very high-ranking ones, began plotting Operation Valkyrie to assassinate Hitler and replace him with a new government made up of members of the military, the Church, and every major political party (except the Nazis and the Communists).  

*In 1943 a young officer named Philipp Freiherr von Boeslager was supposed to shoot Hitler and Himmler, but was unable to do so because he was not able to get a clear shot at both of them at once—and the plotters feared that if Himmler survived he would be at least as bad as Hitler.  

*By 1944, though, as it became clear the war was lost, the plotters became desperate and on 20 July Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg planted a bomb in a briefcase next to Hitler in a meeting in his headquarters bunker and then left.  Hitler bumped his foot on the briefcase, so another officer moved it behind a heavy table leg, and when it exploded it injured many people in the room, but not Hitler (four of the injured men later died).

*Stauffenberg and many other conspirators (and suspected conspirators, including Rommel who was probably not involved, and other enemies who could be blamed) were imprisoned and execute (or, in a few cases of widely respected men, allowed to commit suicide).  A few survived prison or managed to avoid being captured, including von Boeslager, who lived until 1 May 2008, the last of the plotters.

*The Soviets continued to advance in 1943 and 1944, retaking most of Ukraine and reaching the Romanian border by early 1944.  Leningrad was relieved on 27 January 1944 after 872 days of misery and starvation.  However, the Germans were still putting up a hard fight, and Stalin continued to ask the Allies to help him by invading France (as did the French resistance).  Furthermore, the US and UK had promised to do so.

*From 28 November to 1 December 1943, the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—had met in Tehran to work out the conclusion of the War.  The US and UK promised to invade Germany in 1944, Stalin would remain neutral against Japan for the moment, Poland’s post-war border with the USSR was agreed upon (allowing Stalin to keep most of the land taken under the Nazi-Soviet Pact), and early discussions on creating the United Nations began.

*Earlier in 1943, the US and Britain had begun to follow Churchill’s promise to ‘bomb the devils around the clock.’  This was called strategic bombing, an attack on German factories, roads, and other facilities to   The Air Corps, with good sights, bombed specific targets during the day.  The RAF, who could not aim as well, practised carpet bombing at night, dropping bombs indiscriminately on large areas.  They also used firebombs, which do not need to be aimed too well.  In Hamburg, fires raged out of control to the extent that they sucked all the oxygen out of the air in places, and the Hamburg fire department invented the term ‘firestorm’ to describe this type of massive, out-of-control fire.  More than 40,000 civilians died in four firebombings of that city alone.  To the British, though, this was just revenge for the Blitz, including attacks late in the war by V-1 buzz bombs and V-2 rockets.

*By 1944, the Allies were ready to make good on their promise to Stalin and invade France.

*To confuse the Germans, the Allies began Operation Fortitude in Britain to convince the Germans that they would attack Normandy and Calais.  In southern England, General Patton was put in charge of inflatable rubber tanks, plywood artillery, made-up infantry units, radio units that talked about fake manœuvers to each other, and a network of spies and double agents.  Similar groups were set up in Scotland.  The Germans were deceived about the Allies real intentions.

*In fact, the Allies under Eisenhower attacked Normandy on D-Day, 6 June, 1944.  The Normandy invasion involved over 130,000 troops supported by 195,700 naval and merchant marine personnel, making it the largest amphibious assault in history.

*Americans attacked Utah Beach, not actually landing where they were supposed to, and Theodore Roosevelt, junior, led a quick and easy landing.  Americans also landed at Omaha beach, where over 2,000 were killed or wounded in minutes, making it the worst part of the invasion.  The British attacked Gold and Sword beaches, and Canadians attacked Juno beach.  Soldiers from all the conquered nations of Europe also fought alongside the Americans, British, and Canadians.

*Although casualties were heavy, half a million troops landed within a week, and by late July there were 2 million Allied troops in Europe.  Eisenhower was in overall command; Montgomery commanded the British, and Omar Bradley led the Americans.

*After landing in Normandy in June 1944, the Allies began to move across France.  Although initially slowed down by the bocage, American troops, especially George Patton’s Third Army, which used tactics very similar to those of the German blitzkrieg, moved so fast that their biggest problem was getting so far ahead of their supply lines that they could not get fuel for their tanks.

*In Paris, the French Resistance started an uprising that threw the Germans out on 25 August, 1944.  After over four years of occupation, Paris was free.

*A few days later the British and Canadians freed Belgium, and in September British and American troops moved into the Netherlands, and even crossed the border into Germany despite German attempts to blow up the bridges across the Rhine to slow the Allies down (and succeeded in destroying all but the bridge at Remagen).  However, many German troops were captured or killed because Hitler delayed the German retreat (even when his generals wanted to move back to a more defensible position) because he believed that would only delay the inevitable battle.

*After liberating most of Hitler’s conquests in Western Europe, the attack slowed at the Rhine, as the Germans fought harder in their Fatherland.  Hitler also reinforced the western army with new recruits, even Hitler Youth as young as 15.  In mid-December, 1944, the Germans threw all their force into a massive counterattack.

*Hitting First Army hard, the Germans pushed deep into the centre of Allies, creating a bulge in the line.  This and the lengthy series of battles that followed was known therefore as the Battle of the Bulge.  Many Allied troops in small groups were cut off from the rest of the Allies, the most famous being a detachment of the 101st Airborne trapped at Bastogne, who, when asked to surrender, replied ‘Nuts.’  They held out until rescued by Patton.

*In the ensuing weeks, First and Third Armies pushed the Germans back, and began to move into Germany again.  Lasting from 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945, the Battle of the Bulge was the largest battle on the Western Front and the largest single battle ever fought by the US Army, involving 600,000 GIs, with 80,000 American casualties, and an estimated 100,000 German casualties.

*After the Battle of the Bulge, though, most Germans knew they were defeated, and in many cases put up less resistance to Eisenhower’s forces in Germany than they had in France and the Low Countries.

*In the East, the Soviets were also pushing into German territories, both Germany’s allies and conquered nations, and into Germany herself.  

*After the fall of Stalingrad, the German army had been repeatedly pushed back.  About 5 million Germans and their allies and 11 million Soviet soldiers died on the Eastern Front, either in battle, from wounds, or in POW camps (where the Germans and Soviets treated each other with much greater cruelty than they showed any other POWs, or even than the Japanese showed to most of their POWs—Germans were shipped to Siberia and Soviets to concentration camps); both sides were also extremely cruel to the other’s civilian populations.  

*After their terrible struggle with the Germans, the Soviets wanted to take Berlin as a matter of honour, and fought hard for it, often house by house as the Germans fell back.

*This was a problem for the Allies.  Although Stalin was very useful to us, he was still a Communist, and an evil, tyrannical, murderous dictator.  We did not want him occupying too much of Europe, so as he pushed west we pushed east, meeting at the Elbe River near the centre of Germany on 25 April 1945.

*With the war almost over, the Allies had to decide what to do.  In February 1945, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Yalta in the Crimea in the USSR.  There they agreed to divide both Germany and the city of Berlin into four occupation zones, for Britain, America, France, and the USSR.  They also made plans whereby Stalin would allow free elections in the other Eastern European countries he occupied after driving the Nazis out.  Stalin also promised to enter the war against Japan three months after Germany’s surrender.

*The Allies insisted upon an unconditional surrender and would only take it after invading and clearly conquering Germany on their own soil because no-one wanted another generation of Germans to grow up with a new version of the old stab-in-the-back legend that might lead to the rise of another demagogue like Hitler.

*As the Soviets surrounded Berlin and moved through its streets, Hitler refused to flee the city.  He holed up in a bunker deep underground, where he committed suicide on 30 April 1945.  The German U-boat commander, Admiral Karl Dönitz, was named the next Führer of the Third Reich on 1 May and on 7 May 1945, he offered Germany’s unconditional surrender on V-E Day.