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This footage is part of a German Newsreel from 25-01-1945 Soviet advance to Germany. ---------------------------------------- The Eastern Front of World War II (German: die Ostfront 1941-1945, der Rußlandfeldzug 1941-1945 (Russian campaign) or der Ostfeldzug 1941-1945 (Eastern Campaign) was a theatre of war between the German Reich and the Soviet Union which encompassed central and eastern Europe from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945. Nazi propaganda dubbed the conflict The Crusade against Bolshevism. In all Soviet and the majority of Russian sources, the conflict in Eastern Europe is referred to as the Great Patriotic War, but sometimes that phrase also includes operations against Japan in 1945. Some scholars of the conflict use the term Russo-German War, while others use Soviet-German War, Nazi-Soviet War, German-Soviet War, or Axis-Soviet War. It was the largest theatre of war in history and was notorious for its unprecedented ferocity, destruction, and immense loss of life. It bore the bulk of the Holocaust, and stands unparalleled in terms of the volume of scholarly analysis and cultural depictions it generated (films, books, video games etc.). More people fought and died on the Eastern Front than in all other theatres of World War II combined. With over 30 million dead, many of them civilians, the Eastern Front has been called a war of extermination. It resulted in the destruction of the Third Reich, the partition of Germany and the rise of the Soviet Union as a military and industrial superpower. The series of events preceding the opening of the Eastern Front included the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Nazi Germany and the resulting fourth partition of Poland when the Soviet Union used the invasion as a pretext to annex the eastern regions of the country, populated mostly by Ukrainians and Belarussians, as outlined in the secret codicil to the August 1939 Soviet-German non-aggression pact, which also paved the way for the 1940 Occupation of Baltic states and the occupation of Bessarabia. This article, however, concentrates on the much larger conflict fought from June 1941 to May 1945, in which the two principal belligerent powers were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet-Finnish Continuation War may be considered the northern flank of the Eastern Front. In addition, the joint German-Finnish operations across the northernmost Finnish-Soviet border and in the Murmansk region are considered part of the Eastern Front. Source: Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pa...