Operation Bagration

In the summer of 1944 the Red Army launched Operation Bagration, a vast offensive in Belorussia that destroyed German Army Group Centre, the greatest single defeat in German military history. The Soviet plan masked its build-up with elaborate deception, and when the attack came on 22 June, three years to the day after Barbarossa, it struck at the very points the Germans had left weakest. Soviet forces broke through, surrounded and annihilated entire armies, and then raced westwards for hundreds of kilometres, reaching the Vistula and the borders of East Prussia. Bagration, combined with the Normandy landings in the west, placed Germany in a strategic vice. Yet the advance paused at the Vistula, and the failure to relieve the Warsaw Uprising that summer left a bitter political legacy. So complete was the collapse that tens of thousands of German prisoners were marched through Moscow in July, a spectacle staged for the world press.