The last place a German soldier wanted to be in 1944 was the Eastern Front. That summer, Stalin hurled millions of men and thousands of tanks and planes against German forces across a broad front. In a series of massive, devastating battles, the Red Army decimated Hitler’s Army Group Center in Belorussia, annihilated Army Group South in the Ukraine, and inflicted crushing casualties while taking Rumania and Hungary. By the time Budapest fell to the Soviets in February 1945, the German Army had been slaughtered--and the Third Reich was in its death throes.
