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The Russian Front was the decisive theatre of World War II. Here the great mass of the German army and the Luftwaffe was locked in battle with the Red Army in the largest land campaign in history.
On a 1,200 mile front from the Arctic Circle to the Caspian Sea, in baking summer heat and winter temperatures of -40C, millions of men and women fought the most vital battle of the war. For Hitler, the Russian front had absolute priority. Yet despite this, the German offensive ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow. The
slaughter of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, the catastrophic defeat at Kursk, and the series of superbly planned and executed Soviet offensives during late 1944 and early 1945 turned the tide of the war, with dramatic consequences.
Indeed it was the flawed objectives of Hitler's War in the East that brought about the end of the "Thousand Year Reich" - and all in little over a thousand days.