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→War in the West
===Operation Overlord===
===Operation Overlord===
{{See also|Operation Overlord}}
{{See also|Operation Overlord}}
==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.
[[File:Stalingrad1.jpg|left|300px|thumb|German tanks became the enduring symbol of Nazi oppression and atrocities in Russia for generations.]]
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.
All of Manstein’s field armies were in a state of complete mauling after the hard fighting of the previous three years. This was after all a force that had just been defeated spectacularly east of the Dnieper and now had to fight again to the west of the river. By the end of 1943, Manstein’s Army Group had at most 330,000 men upright in the field along with perhaps 100,000 non-German volunteers and allies, and despite nominally having fourteen Panzer Divisions in the inventory, the entire batch could scrape together barely 200 reliably operable tanks. In contrast, the Soviet fronts were at nearly full strength (the Red Army could provide as many as 600,000 replacements more per month than the Wehrmacht). On average, each of the four Soviet fronts had some 550,000 men and thus outnumbered Army Group South individually.
The Dnieper forms an enormous “S” as it bends back and forth across Ukraine, the line of the river is significantly longer than a line directly north to south from the same points. Attempting to defend a line along the course of the river from just north of [[Kiev]] to the [[Black Sea]] committed Army Group South to some 560 miles of front, though the actual north-south dimensions of the space were less than 300 miles - and that was already more than enough for this overstretched force.
===Warsaw Ghetto Uprising===
{{See also|Warsaw Ghetto Uprising}}
Word spread of the German defeat at Stalingrad causing resistance movements to rise.
Beginning at 3 am on April 19, 1943, [[Nazi]] tanks and SS troops began assaulting a Jewish ghetto in Poland.<ref>[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/peopleevents/pandeAMEX103.html The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]</ref> Jewish resistance fighters, totaling 700 to 750, opposed 2000 heavily armed Germans. The Jewish resistance fighters had some weapons, but no more than three light machine guns.
Waffen SS soldiers and elements of the Sicherheitsdienst sought to clear the ghetto of 60,000 Jewish residents in only three days. But the resistance fighters held off the Nazis for nearly a month, marking the first time in World War II that there was an uprising against Nazis in territory under German control. Eventually, SS forces destroyed the ghetto and its synagogue.
===Battle of Kursk===
{{See also|Battle of Kursk|Cherkassy-Korsun Pocket}}
The Battle of Kursk in 1943 was the largest [[tank]] battle in [[history]]. German forces attempted to encircle Soviet forces in the Kursk Salient on the eastern front, but strong Soviet resistance defeated the German assault. Kursk was the last German offensive of any strategic significance in the east; henceforth, they would conduct a fighting retreat. Germany already suffered from a grave shortage of war resources, when Hitler ordered the offensive and lost a huge number of tanks such as the new Tigertank and the Panther.
According to Colonel General and military historian Grigoriy Krivosheev, total Soviet casualties for the Kursk Strategic Defensive Operation (July 5-23, 1943) amounted to 177,847 with KIAs and MIAs count being 70,330. After that, Strategic Offensive Operation Kutuzov started (July 23-August 18, 1943), with total casualties resulting in 429,890, with KIAs and MIAs count being 112,529. From July 5 to August 18, 1943 in the two operations combined, the Red Army sustained 607,737 casualties, with total of KIAs and MIAs being 182,859.
===Balkans===
[[File:Nazi diversity.jpg|right|300px|thumb|[[Muslim]] members of the Waffen SS 13th division at prayer during their training at Neuhammer, Germany, in November 1943.]]
The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS ''Handschar'' (1st Croatian) was a mountain infantry division of the Waffen SS, an armed branch of the German [[Nazi Party]] that served alongside the [[Wehrmacht]]. From March to December 1944, the division fought a counter-insurgency campaign against Yugoslav anti-Nazi partisan resistance forces in Independent State of Croatia, a [[fascist]] [[puppet state]] of [[Nazi Germany]] and [[Italy]] that encompassed almost all of modern-day Croatia, all of modern-day [[Bosnia and Herzegovina]] and parts of [[Serbia]].
The division was named Handschar, after a local fighting knife or scimitar carried by [[Ottoman]] [[police]]men during the centuries that the region was part of the [[Ottoman Empire]]. It was the first non-Germanic Waffen-SS division, and its formation marked the expansion of the Waffen-SS into a [[multiculturalism|multi-ethnic]] military force. Composed mainly of [[Bosnian]] [[Muslims]] and mostly German Yugoslav ''Volksdeutsche'' officers and non-commissioned officers, the members of the division took an oath of allegiance to [[Adolf Hitler]] and the Croatian ''Poglavnik'' Ante Pavelić.
The division earned a reputation for brutality and savagery, not only during [[combat]] operations but also for atrocities committed against [[Serb]] and [[Jew]]ish civilians. Most of the members became [[prisoners of war]] of the [[British]]. Subsequently, 38 officers were extradited to communist [[Yugoslavia]] after the war to face criminal charges, and ten were executed. Hundreds of former members of the division fought in the 1947–48 [[jihad]] in [[Mandatory Palestine]] and against the [[1948 Israeli War for Independence]].
===Operation Bagration and the Vistula front===
{{See also|Vistula-Oder Operation}}
After a time of comparatively slow progress, the brilliant Soviet officer, Konstantin Rokossovsky, engineered "Operation Bagration", named-so after the Napoleonic Russian hero. The operation was extremely successful for the Soviets, leading to around 600,000 Soviet casualties and over 500,000 German casualties, including over 60,000 German vehicles and tanks. Furthermore, the German Army Group Center (Heeresgruppe Mitte) ceased to exist as an effective fighting force, due to its massive losses in men and material. Even the Germans' best officer, Erich von Manstein, couldn't turn the situation around.
The Vistula-Oder Operation took place on the Eastern Front between January 12 and February 2, 1945. Hitler appointed [[Heinrich Himmler]], who dreamed of being a combat leader but never had any combat training or duty, in charge of German operations on the Vistula front. Soviet troops, led by Marshals [[Georgi Zhukov]] and [[Ivan Konev]], advanced from the [[Vistula]] river in [[Poland]] to the Oder river which was only 50 miles from Berlin. The extermination camp at [[Auschwitz]] was liberated on January 27, 1945. The Wehrmacht suffered enormous losses as a result of the operation.
The Waffen-SS Division Charlemagne was formed in September 1944 from French collaborationists, many of whom were already serving in various other German units. Named after [[Charlemagne]], the 9th-century Frankish emperor, it superseded the existing Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism formed in 1941 within the German Army and the SS-Volunteer ''Sturmbrigade'' France formed in July 1943. The division also included French recruits from other German military and paramilitary formations and ''Miliciens'', who were created by the Vichy regime to help fight the French Resistance. The SS Division Charlemagne had 7,340 men at the time of its deployment to the Eastern Front in February 1945. It fought against Soviet forces in Pomerania where it was almost annihilated within a month.
[[File:Depiction of Soviet flag over the Reichstag.jpg|right|415px|thumb|[[Victory Day]] depiction of the Soviet flag raised over the [[Reichstag]].]]
===Battle of Berlin===
[[V-E Day|Finally, in 1945, Soviet troops stormed Berlin, and forced Nazi Germany into capitulation]]. Around 300 members of the Waffen-SS Division Charlemagne participated in the Battle in Berlin in April–May 1945 and were among the last Axis forces to surrender.
===Potsdam Agreement===
{{See also|Potsdam conference}}
The UK, US and Russia reached an agreement at Potsdam called the Potsdam Agreement on 30 July 1945. The Allied Control Council was constituted in Berlin to execute the Allied resolutions known as “Four Ds":
*[[Denazification]] of the German society to eradicate Nazi influence
*Demilitarization of the former Wehrmacht forces and the German arms industry
*Democratization, including the formation of political parties and trade unions, freedom of speech, of the press and religion
*Decentralization resulting in German federalism, along with disassemblement as part of the industrial plans for Germany.
{{clear}}
== Far East and Pacific ==
== Far East and Pacific ==