12/5/2023 0 Comments Hitler flat earth mapWar in the East 2, from publisher Matrix Games, is as titanic as the conflict it depicts. And a new computer wargame helps explains why. An unending series of Soviet military disasters in the summer and fall of 1941-including the killing or capture of 650,000 Soviet soldiers at Kyiv-only reinforced that opinion.īut the red banner flying over the Reichstag in May 1945 proved the experts wrong. and British experts agreed, mindful of then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s officer corps purges and the Red Army’s incompetent performance against tiny Finland in the 1939 to 1940 Winter War. “Bolshevism will collapse as a house of cards,” predicted Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Yet when more than 3 million German and German-allied troops surged across the border on June 22, 1941, many expected Operation Barbarossa to be a walkover. The T-34 tanks that drove from Moscow to Berlin-and now clank through Moscow’s streets on Victory Day parades-are a reminder of what Russia once was and what nationalists hope Russia might be again. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, glorifying the Great Patriotic War isn’t just commemoration of 27 million dead Soviet soldiers and civilians but also a political lifeline. Eastern Europe was redrawn, leaving contested borders, bitter feelings, and smoldering conflicts from Poland and Ukraine to Chechnya. Whatever the answer to these questions are, there is no question World War II transformed the world we live in. Why did the invasion come so close to victory before faltering? How did Russia turn catastrophe into a triumph that made the Soviet Union a superpower for the next 50 years? Even 80 years after a fateful Sunday in June 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, questions still abound.
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