The Russian Front(also known as the Eastern Front) Was a deadly
part of the war. Russians survived this Blitzkreig for two reasons #1 The
russian winter, and #2 The Russian sniper. The Russian sniper was by far the
most deadly force on the entire eastern front. The sniper struck fear and
terror into the invading germans hearts and was relentless in its attack.
The chosen weapond was the Mosin-Nagant bolt action rifle, it was deadly in
the hands of an experienced russian sniper. Below is a picture of this deadly
weapond, and an account of the russian front as found on Wikipedia.
The Eastern Front was by far the largest and bloodiest theatre of World War
II. It is generally accepted as being the most costly conflict in human history
with over 30 million dead as a result. It involved more land combat than all
other World War II theatres combined. The Eastern Front resulted in 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 that found no parallel on the Western Front. The
war inflicted huge losses and suffering upon 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, but the loss of civilian lives in case of Germany was incomaprably
smaller than that of the Soviet Union, in which over 20 million civilians were
killed by the Nazis and by the Soviets themselves (mainly by the NKVD). When
the Red Army invaded Germany from 1944, many German civilians suffered from
vengeance taken by Red Army soldiers (see Red Army atrocities). 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.
The German minority scattered over large swaths of Eastern Europe was thus expelled
and those who did not manage to leave were exterminated. 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. Internet war author Gary Brecher postulates
that this conflict ultimately reshaped the genetic map of Europe.
