A German soldier is shot standing by a Soviet sniper on the Eastern Front in World War II. The dying German soldier raised both upper limbs and threw his rifle out of his right hand. On the front lines of the Eastern Front, a German soldier fell to the battlefield after receiving a bullet that would end his life. Shortly after a Soviet Red Army sniper fired his rifle, a photograph of his death in battle was taken by a Soviet frontline photographer.
Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion of Nazi Germany's forces in World War II, began on June 22, 1941. After crossing the Soviet border, some four million German soldiers, supported by some 600,000 vehicles and 750,000 horses, attacked a front line that stretched some 3,000 kilometers long. In just the first seven days of the invasion, Nazi German troops had invaded about 300 kilometers into Soviet territory, about a third of the way to Moscow. The Blitzkrieg initially went well, the Nazi German offensive overwhelmed the Soviets with threats, and early Soviet losses were catastrophic. Most devastating were the human losses: by December 1941, the Soviets had killed about 2.7 million soldiers across their armed forces and captured about 3.3 million. For every German soldier lost, the Soviets lost about 20 soldiers. In just the first nine days of the Soviet invasion, the Luftwaffe lost about 40% of its fighters in the entire Soviet air force, about 1,400 in the air and 3,200 on the ground. The Nazi Germans lost only about 330 fighters. Furthermore, by mid-August 1941, the Soviets had disintegrated about 3,300 tanks, while the Nazi Germans had lost only about 220, an astonishing ratio of losses of about 15:1.
From the end of 1941, as the Soviets recovered from the blitzkrieg of the Nazi Germans, their resistance hardened, and German losses gradually piled up. by August 1941, the Nazi Germans had lost about 46,000, and by December 1941, about 25% had been killed or wounded in action. by November 1941. By November 1941, the situation for the Soviet army was extremely dire. By November 1941, the Soviet army was in a state of extreme misery. Nazi Germany claimed to have won the war. About 2 million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner, about 22,000 artillery pieces were seized and destroyed, about 18,000 tanks were destroyed, and 14,500 fighter planes were shot down. The Nazi German army was only about 16 kilometers from the capital, Moscow. The Soviets had only about 90,000 soldiers and about 150 tanks left. The fall of Moscow seemed imminent, and on November 7, 1941, Stalin held a military parade in Moscow's Red Square.
In December 1941, the temperature plummeted to -35 degrees Celsius. It was unusually extremely cold in Russia, even colder than the normal year. From January 1942, resupplied and equipped Soviet troops pushed the exhausted and weakened Nazi German army back about 100 to 200 kilometers to the west. The Soviet army, supplied and equipped since January 42, pushed the exhausted and weakened Nazi German army back about 100 to 200 kilometers to the west. This was the first major defeat and retreat suffered by the Nazi German army in World War II. In the bloodiest battle of the war, the Battle of Moscow, about one million German soldiers lost their lives.
