Beyond Barbarossa: The Eastern Front of World War 2

David Sumner of the Europe at War podcast joins to provide deeper insight into the last major battle in the European Theatre of the Second World War.

Two huge Red Army fronts, the 1st Belorussian and the 1st Ukrainian, crush the nazi capital between them, and bring an end to the Second World War in Europe.

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In the 99th episode of the first English-language podcast that focuses on the full story of the Eastern Front of World War 2, Stalin’s top Marshals, Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev, race to be the first to raise the Red Banner over the Reichstag. Who will get there first?

Maps

Map 1: The Red Army’s Vistula to Oder operation

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"From the moment Stalin heard that the Americans were across the Rhine, he knew that the race for Berlin was on.”—Antony Beevor. 

WIth the Allies on the Elbe, and the Red Army on the Oder, nazi Germany was being terminally squeezed by April 1945. But before they can drive on the prize, Berlin, the Red Army must take Vienna. 

Map 1: The Red Army’s advance, 1944–1945

Map 2: The Red Army on the Oder and Niesse

Map 3: Advance into Vienna

Map 4a: European front line, 1 April 1945

Map 4b: European front line, 15 April 1945

Historical photos

Georgy Zhukov, Marshal of 1st Belorussian Front

Fyodor Tolbukhin, Marshal, 3rd Ukrainian Front

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The #6 Top World War 2 podcast continues following the Red Army’s advance into Hungary and Germany—and the expensive failure of the German Operation Spring Awakening. 

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The Red Army penetrates deep into Germany, leading to the redrawing of eastern European borders after. 

Map 1: The Oder offensive–March 1945

Map 2: The Lower Silesian Offensive

Map 3: The East Pomeranian Offensive

Map 4a: European fronts, 15 February 1945

Map 4b: European fronts, 15 March 1945 

Photos

Marshal Ivan Konev, Commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front

General Walther Wencke, chief of staff, Army Group Vistula, February 1945

Child soldiers in the wehrmacht: Hitler Youth in Breslau (Wroclaw), February 1945 

Breslau (Wroclaw) in fighting, 1945

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Why did the Yalta Conference end the way it did? Why did Churchill try an end-run around Roosevelt? Why did Roosevelt try to curry Stalin’s favour? What would this mean to post-war history?

Author Giles Milton joins to discuss some of the Second World War’s most perplexing questions. 

People

Author Giles Milton

His latest book, The Stalin Affair: The impossible alliance that won the war

The Big Three: Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill

Kathleen “Kathy” or “Puff” Harriman, daughter of Roosevelt’s right hand and Ambassador to the USSR in 1945, Averell Harriman

Averell Harriman 

Pamela Churchill, WInston Churchill’s daughter-in-law in 1945, and later, Mrs. Averell Harriman

Stalin and Churchill at the Moscow Conference, 1944

Franklin Roosevelt in 1945Map 1: The division of Germany after May 1945

Map 2: Invasion of Poland, 1939Map 3: Poland moves 100 km west 

Sources

Giles Milton, author: https://www.gilesmilton.com/

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Why were the Yalta Conference’s decisions so vague? Why did Stalin get everything he wanted? And why did Roosevelt act so naively? 

Giles Milton, bestselling author of The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War, joins the podcast today to help understand the relationships that had the greatest impact on the second meeting of the Big Three of the Second World War.

Photos

Author Giles Milton

The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War by Giles Milton

The Big Three at Yalta, February 1945. Roosevelt would be dead in two months. 

Map 1: Yalta in Crimea, on the Black Sea, site of the 1945 Yalta Conference of the Big Three

Map 2: The tortured road from Saky Airfield to Yalta

Sources

Giles Milton, author: https://www.gilesmilton.com/

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Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt meet in Malta in the Mediterranean in February 1945, to prepare to meet Josef Stalin in the second Big Three conference on Soviet territory—Yalta. 

It was a meeting that shaped the world for decades. 

Map 1: Malta to Yalta
Map 2: The Western Front, 1 February 1945
Map 3: The Pacific Theatre, 1 February 1945
Map 4:  Poland’s shift west, 1945

Photos
Left: Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. Right: Roosevelt and Churchill at Malta, 2 February 1945.  

Averell Harriman and daughter Kathleen

The Vorontsov Palace, quarters for the British delegation

The Livadia Palace, quarters for the American delegation 

The Yusupov Palace, housing the Soviet delegation

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The Red Army continues its continual advance onto German soil—and the flight of German civilians and military. 

Map 1: The siege of Kongisberg 

Map 2: Samland
The Samland Peninsula in 1905, showing city and town names still present in 1945. 

Map 3: The (second) East Prussian Offensive 

Map 4: The advance across Poland 

Historical photos
Franklin Roosevelt meets Winston Churchill in Malta, 2 February 1945 

Civilians from Konigsberg walk across frozen Vistula Lagoon, January 1945 

Civilians flee Lodz, Poland, January 1945 

Red Army arrives in Lodz, Poland, January 1945

Hitler shakes hands with Col. Claus von Stauffenberg at the “Wolf’s Lair," July 1944.

Ruins of the Wolfsschanze, “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia

Sources

Antony Beevor, The Second World War. New York, NY, USA: Little, Brown and Company, 2012. 

Scott Bury, Walking Out of War: Volume 3 of the Eastern Front Trilogy. Ottawa, Canada: The Written Word, 2017.

Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 

Anthony Tucker-Jones, Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin’s War, 1941–1945. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2017.

David Sumner, Europe at War: A podcast about lesser-known battles of the Second World War. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/europe-at-war-a-ww2-podcast/id1788043665 

Larysa Zariczniak, Wandering the Edge: Ukrainian history and culture https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/wandering-the-edge/id1547149262

David Sumner, Europe at War: A WW2 podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/europe-at-war-a-ww2-podcast/id1788043665

Morse code by Thane Brown

Music composed and recorded by Nicolas Bury

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After 10 shattering blows on the Eastern Front in 1944, the Western Allies and the USSR continue to compress nazi Germany in January 1945. 

Map 1: The compressing front

1a: 1 January 1944
1b: 1 January 1945
1c: 15 January 1945

Map 2: The siege of Budapest, January 1945

Map 3: The Vistula-Oder campaign, January 1945

Map 4: The East Prussia offensive

Photos
The Budapest Chain Bridge destroyed, January 1945
Ruins of Warsaw, even in 1947
Source: New York photographer Henry N. Cobb, taken in 1947, via Rare Historical Photos.

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