Starting on 12 January 1945, the Red Army began the Vistula–Oder Offensive across the Narew River; and, from Warsaw, a three-day operation on a broad front, which incorporated four army Fronts.[16] On the fourth day, the Red Army broke out and started moving west, up to 30 to 40 km (19 to 25 mi) per day, taking East Prussia, Danzig, and Poznań, drawing up on a line 60 km (37 mi) east of Berlin along the Oder River.[17] The newly created Army Group Vistula, under the command of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler,[18] attempted a counter-attack, but this had failed by 24 February.[19] The Red Army then drove on to Pomerania, clearing the right bank of the Oder River, thereby reaching into Silesia.[17] In the south the Siege of Budapest raged. Three German attempts to relieve the encircled Hungarian capital city failed, and Budapest fell to the Soviets on 13 February.[20] Adolf Hitler insisted on a counter-attack to recapture the Drau-Danube triangle.[21] The goal was to secure the oil re...
Operation Barbarossa (German: Unternehmen Barbarossa ) was the code name for Nazi Germany 's World War II invasion of the Soviet Union , which was launched on 22 June 1941. The operation was driven primarily by an ideological desire to conquer the Western Soviet Union so that it could be repopulated by Germans. In the two years leading up to the invasion, the two countries signed political and economic pacts for strategic purposes. Nevertheless, the German High Command began planning an invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1940 (under the codename Operation Otto ), which Hitler authorized on 18 December 1940. Over the course of the operation, about four million Axis personnel invaded the western Soviet Union along a 2,900-kilometer (1,800 mi) front, the largest invasion force in the history of warfare. In addition to troops, the Wehrmacht employed some 600,000 motor vehicles and between 600,000 and 700,000 horses....