This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

“Soldiers! The year 1944 will be very difficult. It is our joint task to transcend the purely defensive in its course and deal the adversary such heavy blows that finally the hour will come in which Providence can grant the victory to that nation which deserves it the most.” 

As the broadcaster turned historian Jonathan Dimbleby goes on to detail in his excellent book Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War, it would not be Germany who would come out on top. In probably his finest book thus far, the titanic ideological war Hitler began against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 climaxes in 1944 with the systematic destruction of the Führer’s armies in the east.

It has been a slightly odd experience to read this book during the great celebration and commemoration of the D-Day landings in Normandy 80 years ago. While we rightly give grateful thanks to the allied forces who assaulted Hitler’s Fortress Europa, it has been difficult, amid Putin’s bloody war against Ukraine, to give similar plaudits to the Red Army of the Great Patriotic War despite the fact over five million Ukrainians fought in its ranks. 

Make no mistake, the German war machine that had conquered Western Europe by the summer of 1940 was ultimately broken on the Eastern Front. As Dimbleby outlines many times, the sheer scale of the numbers involved, the destruction wrought, and the mass killings of civilians, was biblical and murderous. A war bereft of pity.

EndGame displays Dimbleby’s skill at researching not just the great political figures — Hitler, Stalin, and Churchill — but also those that served them and the countless voices of the forgotten who followed their orders. He deftly takes the reader on a bloody path right along the thousands of miles of frontlines that moved back and forward over the three years of bitter fighting, from the Baltic to the oilfields of the Caucasus. 

I particularly enjoyed the clash of egos between the Führer and his military commander Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. As the book reminds us, however, many German commanders — like Manstein — were ardent believers in the type of war they fought on the eastern front.

Consider the Soviets’ spectacular success with Operation Bagration, launched two weeks after the allied landings in France. Over the course of two months they demolished Hitler’s Army Group Centre (28 of 38 divisions were destroyed) and penetrated more than 500 miles westwards to the gates of Warsaw. 

Dimbleby charts the battle, arguably the finest operation of the whole war, weaving in and out like a modern-day Ukrainian drone from the tactical overview right down to the Red Army soldier advancing remorselessly towards a hapless, terrified German landser. Both sides suffered horrendous casualties. The Soviets could handle such losses, their adversaries could not.

Dimbleby does not flinch from recording the barbarity of the war in the east during this period. The rape of Budapest in December 1944 was as pitiless as anything the city had suffered in centuries of war. One communist lying undercover in the city’s suburbs recanted his devotion to the cause once he had witnessed the brutality of the Soviet occupiers: 

“For decades the workers of the world have been looking to Moscow like the ignorant labourer to Christ. It was from there that they expected … liberation from the barbaric vandalism of fascism. After long and painful persecution, the glorious longed-for Red Army has come, but what a Red Army! Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their children and husbands.”

The city’s and country’s fate would be a dark precursor of what awaited millions of German women and young girls as Stalin’s forces prepared for their onslaught into the Third Reich in the spring of 1945. Though shocking and remorseless, the savagery served as a natural consequence of everything that had gone before on the Eastern Front — where both sides ignored the Geneva Convention. 

Apart from a few isolated incidents of Nazi brutality against the French people, the war in the west was fought within certain principles of engagement. Dimbleby does not spare the reader from realising how much the conflict in the east was the exact opposite. Even though the allies celebrated the Red Army’s tremendous successes in 1944, the Soviet advance was not one of liberation. 

Rather it was Stalin fulfilling his own plans of conquest, and extermination of any opposition that thwarted it. Nothing augured well for the people of the east in 1945. There would be no winners, only the dead and the subjugated. They had simply swapped one occupier for a new master.