Sixty-nine-years ago today, 3.5 million German troops, plus another million from Nazi allies, invaded the USSR. (Geographically, the land now makes up Lithuania, Belarus, eastern Poland, Ukraine, and Moldavia). It was the largest army ever assembled, the most ambitious invasion ever attempted, and it led to the most staggering land battles ever fought—and to casualty rates that can only be rivaled by the mass starvations of the worst twentieth century tyrannies.

That the opposing sides were in fact two of those tyrannies is not incidental.  The Nazi’s goals were to kill Jews, enslave Slavs, steal resources (especially food and oil), and provide “living space” for Germans.  The Soviet goal was simply to survive.  But “survival” entailed, in Stalin’s mind, many measures that an ordinarily ruthless tyrant would have shrunk from, including mass deportations, purges, seemingly random arrests and imprisonments, and special units whose only task was to murder any soldier who retreated.  The cruelties inflicted in pursuit of these goals transformed what would have been by any measure a terrible conflict into an apocalypse.  Something close to half of all who died in the entire Second World War—upwards of 30 million—perished on the Eastern Front.