We read all the lead to present a different history.
It's an endless showdown between superpowers.
At the beginning, the German side dispatched 190 divisions, 5.5 million people, 4900 aircraft, 3700 tanks, 47000 cannons, and 190 warships, divided into three army groups, to launch a lightning attack on the Soviet Union, and the Soviet-German war broke out in full swing.
Such a huge scale also indirectly led to the fierceness of the Soviet-German war.
How tragic is it? The data speaks for the 3950344 of Nazi Germany and 5097552 of the Soviet Union.
Such a huge number of casualties also made the Eastern European Plains the largest, most intense and most deadly battlefield in the Second World War.
Why is it so tragic?
01
The game between war blocs
The Soviet-German war was not simply a war between two countries, but a showdown between two war groups.
At that time, the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world by land area and the third most populous country, consisting of a union of 15 Soviet Socialist republics.
The army led by Germany at that time also included the armies of Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland and other Allied countries and vassal countries, in addition to integrating the military industry of Czechoslovakia, the agriculture of France, and the food industry of Belgium and the Netherlands as war support.
So the essence of the Soviet-German war was that Germany integrated most of the European forces and went to the soviet union, the most populous country in the world at that time! Because the national strength of the two sides was not much different, and both had the determination to fight to the death, and never retreated, the Soviet-German war lasted for 1418 days, until the unconditional surrender of the German Nazis.
02
Gentle Eastern European plains
The outbreak of the Soviet-German war was concentrated on the plains of Eastern Europe.
Because the terrain is gentle, it is very suitable for large corps to fight in groups, so it is inevitable that the casualties will be huge.
Germany's strategy before the invasion was rapid blitzkrieg, but the Soviet Union set up multiple layers of defense on the eastern European plain, and the two sides fell into a brutal tug-of-war.
The Germans and soviets constantly drew a large number of troops into the battlefield, which made the density and scale of the war constantly escalate, and also made the Soviet-German war more bloody and cruel.
03
The military industry is strong
Both the Soviet Union and Germany were absolute powers in heavy industry, so the use of a large number of weapons with a wide range of killing range, high lethal power and high precision also intensified the cruelty of the Soviet-German war.
Coupled with the gentle terrain of the eastern European plains, tanks, automatic artillery, aircraft, and chemical weapons weapons of war were invincible, taking the lives of a large number of officers and soldiers on the bloody battlefield.
In addition, Germany's military industry is more developed, producing sophisticated weapons of war such as Tiger tanks, Leopard tanks, Ferdinand self-propelled guns, and Stuka dive bombers.
The equipment of these sophisticated weapons made the Nazi German army in the early stages of the war into no man's land, which brought a devastating blow to the Soviet Red Army.
The Soviets had to implement a scorched-earth policy to slow down the German advance, that is, to destroy anything that might be useful to the Germans when they entered or withdrew somewhere.
On May 9, 1945, Germany announced its unconditional surrender, and the Soviet-German war ended.
The war caused the Soviet Union to completely destroy the powerful Nazi Germany in the west, and almost all the Eastern European countries between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union became vassals of the Soviet Union.
Thus the Soviet Union became a superpower.
Germany, on the other hand, was divided into West Germany and East Germany.
Among them, the United States controlled West Germany, and the Soviet Union controlled East Germany to take the socialist line.
The world pattern has slowly entered a bipolar pattern between the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Today, the world pattern has changed a new step, and Germany is moving towards a new reunification in 1990.
But all this has nothing to do with the nearly nine million soldiers and officers buried in the plains of Eastern Europe because of the Soviet-German war.