Some of the war’s most savage fighting occurred on the Eastern Front, where the Axis powers had set out to conquer the Balkan Peninsula and the immense reaches of the Soviet Union.
More combatants were killed on the Eastern Front than in all other theaters of World War II combined. These bitterly contested, racial battles prevented Germany from mounting a more resolute defense against Allied armies in Normandy, and later on the Reich’s western borders.
During World War II, Nazi authorities condemned millions of Eastern Europeans to forced labor as part of an aggressive campaign to conquer and establish a colony in Eastern Europe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin appeals to memories of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany to justify his invasion of Ukraine.
During World War II, millions of Eastern Europeans were involuntarily deported to serve as forced laborers in Germany.
The Holocaust in Ukraine represents the first phase of the Holocaust in which an estimated 1.5 million Jews were shot to death at close range in ravines, open fields, and forests.
The Warsaw Uprising created a rift between Stalin and his Western Allies, which some historians argue anticipated the Cold War.
The German response to the Warsaw Uprising was characterized by ruthless terror and unrelenting bloodshed, which caused civilian support to drastically diminish.
Polish civilians played a critical role in the two-month long conflict in Warsaw.
This essay offers some ways of thinking about how to make sense of the complicated post-war moment through the case of Yugoslavia.
How Soviet occupation policy in Austria took shape warrants more attention.
The Polish Home Army’s plan to launch a series of uprisings throughout Poland during the Soviet Union’s summer offensive in 1944 had important consequences for how the Warsaw Uprising unfolded.
Be careful about superlatives when you’re discussing military history, until you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa.
During the German invasion of the USSR, the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) brutally murdered between 10,000 and 40,000 political prisoners in Western Ukraine over the course of eight days, which sparked waves of ethnic violence following the German occupation of the region.