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→Situation in the East
===Situation in the East===
===Situation in the East===
It is fairly common to describe the Nazi-Soviet War as a three-phase affair, with the phases largely determined by the degree of strategic initiative. In the first phase (call it June 1941 to November 1942) Germany had dominant strategic initiative and launched major offensive operations in Barbarossa and Case Blue. In this period, virtually all of the Red Army’s attempts to go on the strategic offensive collapsed with heavy casualties, as at Kharkov and Rzhev. In the second phase (roughly from December 1942 to November 1943) the Red Army was able to attack with great success, but the Germans still retained the ability to organize operations of their own (most notably the Battle of Kursk). In the third and final phase (December 1943 to the end of the war), the Red Army held full-spectrum dominance and the Wehrmacht could do little more than desperately try and fail to hold its positions.
The closing months of 1943 marked a new phase in the war, but the men in the Wehrmacht eastern army hardly noticed. There was no operational pause, no obvious phase change, only a continuous and rolling wave of Red Army offensives - sequential operations in action. The Soviet autumn offensives put the Red Army on the attack everywhere, with Field Marshal [[Erich von Manstein]]'s Army Group South falling back in a desperate state to get behind the Dnieper River.
The river, however, brought little solace, and would not offer a defensive buffer, simply because the Soviets were already across it in many places, and Marshall Zhukov threw everything at it to ensure that he had solid bridgeheads from the start. And so, despite another year of hard fighting weighing heavy upon them, Manstein and Army Group South had to turn and try to fight west of the Dnieper.
===Warsaw Ghetto Uprising===
===Warsaw Ghetto Uprising===
{{See also|Warsaw Ghetto Uprising}}
{{See also|Warsaw Ghetto Uprising}}