78 years ago today in 1941, German artillery opened fire across the dividing line of Occupied Poland

78 years ago today in 1941, German artillery opened fire across the dividing line of Occupied Poland, their shells instantly followed by an onslaught of troops and Panzers along with gull-winged Stukas confidently bombing their helpless Soviet targets. 

Within hours almost all Soviet border defences would be eviscerated and the Wehrmacht and its allies would be knifing their way into the USSR. The Eastern Front had just begun, by the time the two blood-craving titans of totalitarianism had finished with each other tens of millions would be dead and millions more left homeless, displaced and dehumanized in what was not only one of the most devastating campaigns in terms of human life ever fought but was also the decisive front of the Second World War.

Ever since they had signed their devilish pact back in 1939 the two mutually admiring and mutually despising dictators had known that war between them would eventually come. The truce which allowed both of them to devour Poland had been but a mere truce or ceasefire between the irreconcilable forces of Bolshevism and Nazism, both of which had been hellbent on the destruction of the other since the time they had both properly emerged in the aftermath of the Great War. 

Hitler’s intentions to construct a Lebensraum for the German volk in Eastern Europe had been known since the publication of Mein Kampf and German geopolitical interests in the East had already been manifest since the closing years of the Great War. 

With France crushed and Britain effectively neutralised for the time being - much to the astonishment of Stalin whom had expected the belligerents to maul each other - Hitler could now start to focus on these territorial visions again and slowly but surely the Pact had begun to falter from the Fall of France onwards. 

As in 1914 so again in 1941, German fears ran high of the Russian army's modernisation being completed and potentially outgunning as well outmanning the Wehrmacht. After baring witness to the Red Army's disastrous campaign in Finland, Hitler became convinced that it was better to attack sooner than later while his enemy was still licking his wounds. 

Stalin however mistakenly believed that Hitler was merely another Bismarck, i.e. that he was a rational statesman like any other and insisted despite all the warnings and evidence that while war was inevitable it would not come in 1941. In the aftermath of the Great Terror no one was in a position to question his supreme power, making him practically infallible as far as policy was concerned, hence there was little scope to dissent against his approach.

 In fact, so sure of this was Stalin that in the run-up to war the Soviets had even increased grain shipments to the Nazis and pulled back their defences so as not to provoke their Fascist neighbours. When the hour of war finally came he still refused to believe and thus restrained his forces from effectively responding to the invaders. When the truth was laid bare before him that he had been wrong, he suffered a nervous breakdown and temporarily stepped down as Vozhd for a couple of days before his cronies begged him to come back since the Purges had saw to it that anyone else who could have led the country now had a bullet in their skull.

The Germans and their allies advanced in three army groups towards the cities of the the USSR. The Wehrmacht stormed forward with the utmost confidence, having not yet known the shame of defeat. Time and again the Red Army was surrounded and cut to pieces as the Panzers rumbled forward over the endless expanses of Russia. One Luftwaffe pilot described the experience of taking on Soviet aircraft as akin to 'infanticide' it was so easy. For a time it truly seemed as though nothing could stop them in their relentless conquest of the country. 

The entire world watched the unfolding events with keen unblinking eyes for if the Bolshevik regime collapsed then the war would be all but lost to Hitler as there would be little scope for the British to struggle on against him on their own, especially given that their overseas colonies would soon be under attack from the Japanese who were eagerly waiting for a German victory in Europe to make their move. Hitler himself was confident of victory and envisioned his panzers steamrolling into the East as far as Afghanistan and British India. 

Yet as is well known, the Germans ultimately were not destined to win for a multitude of reasons; from Hitler's constant idiotic interferences in military affairs such as diverting his panzers towards Kiev instead of on towards Moscow, to the bad timing of the invasion which soon became mired in autumn muds and then most notoriously in the frosts of winter which had strangled the armies of Napoléon and Charles XII of Sweden before them. At a more structural level it was merely a question of numbers of which the Soviets had an infinite advantage in both men and materiel.

 This was arguably the most decisive factor since it made every German victory ring hollow once their momentum had been lost. No matter their tactical brilliance on the battlefield, their enemy would always have yet another handful of expendable souls that Stalin could throw into the meat grinder. Only a regime governed by as cruel and pitiless a man as Stalin could have pursued a war in this fashion of hurling human waves at the enemy since anyone who objected to this could be shot or sent to the Gulag.

 The same cannot be said for the much more benevolent western democracies where the return of body bags has almost always been met with a pressure from civil society to bring an end to hostilities and almost certainly would not have been able to suffer the biblical sacrifices made by these two ruthless totalitarian regimes. Indeed, British and American casualties in the war were minimal compared to the slaughter inflicted on both sides on the Eastern Front.

 This is clearly exemplified by the fact that the amount of people who died in the Siege of Leningrad alone exceeds the combined US and British casualties of the war. As argued by Max Hastings however this has generally not been highlighted in the western historiography of the war since it would distort the war’s moral clarity a triumph of ‘good over evil’ rather than the defeat of one mass murderer at the hands of an even bigger mass murderer.

The Eastern Front however was not only apocalyptic in its scale and savagery on the battlefield, but also behind the front lines on both sides. Though there was nothing particularly new on the Soviet side with defeatists and deserters being shot without trial as had been the case since the Civil War, behind the German lines a new horror began to rapidly unfold as the Nazi regime assumed its full totalitarian nature now that it governed over a vast population whose very existence they had long perceived as superfluous and inferior and hence earmarked for death. Unlike in the Western theatre where they had fought their enemies on conventional lines, in the East they fought a war of annihilation. As the panzers advanced towards Moscow the Einsatzgruppen death squads followed behind, systematically scorching the earth and butchering the Jewish and Slavic population.

 Very often this was done, contrary to the post-war myth fostered by Erich Von Manstein, with the assistance of the Wehrmacht. Prince Dohna of the 60th Mechanized Infantry Division was shocked by his own callousness towards the enemy when he reread his diary many years later, commenting that 'Today it seems impossible to understand that I could have been caught up unprotesting in this megalomania, but we were dominated by the feeling of being part of this tremendous war machine."

 For every horror and atrocity which the Germans inflicted on their conquered subjects, the Russians would repay in kind with a vengeance once the war was suddenly pushed all the way back to the Reich itself, the maelstrom only ending once the Red Army captured Berlin and Hitler and his regime was finally defeated at an unimaginable cost to the peoples of both Russia and Germany, not to mention the plethora of other peoples, in particular the Jews, who were subjected to the wroth of and malice of the two brawling monsters they were caught between.