For some reason I’ve always had a fascination for the war within a war between Hitler and Stalin. It was an incredibly brutal war with atrocities committed by everyone to everyone. The scale of this conflict, and the staggering losses, defy imagination.
Stalin was an absolutely ruthless dictator, willing to force his subjects to pay any price. Both dictators cared not a whit for the lives of their soldiers or their peoples.
This conflict was also filled with great ironies, most notably the two related to the Non-Aggression Pact. The first irony is that Stalin, the man who trusted no one, trusted the one man no one should have trusted; Adolph Hitler. Stalin’s trust that Hitler would not attack him led to a good deal of the Soviet losses in the first year of the war. The second irony is that Stalin entered the Pact in the first place in the belief that the Western Allies were not serious about fighting Hitler themselves. Stalin believed they just wanted the USSR to defeat Hitler at the cost of copious amounts of Russian blood. So he cut his deal with Hitler with the intent that it would keep him from being drawn into the war. But by entering the Non-Aggression Pact, Stalin gave Hitler a free hand to defeat France, and then turn on him. Thus, it turned out that the only way to defeat Hitler was for the USSR to do all the heavy fighting. And in the end, Hitler was defeated at the cost of copious amounts of Russian blood.
I have an interesting book that I recommend for specialists:
” Slaughterhouse: The Handbook of the Eastern Front”
by David Glantz
It is not an easy read, but has great information. Glantz had significant access to the Soviet archives, which he compares favorably to German military archives. He notes that every event has separate reports from command and commissar channels, so there are usually multiple views of major events.