Eastern Front · Soviet Union vs Germany
Operation Bagration
22 June 1944 – 19 August 1944
Launched three years to the day after Barbarossa, the Soviet summer offensive destroyed Army Group Centre in Belorussia. Four fronts encircled the fortified cities of Vitebsk, Bobruisk and Minsk and advanced 500 km to the Vistula and the East Prussian border. It was the worst German defeat of the war.
Explore Operation Bagration on the interactive map · Wikipedia
Day by day
— Three years to the day
Army Group Centre holds a balcony 700 kilometres deep pushed east around Vitebsk, Orsha, Mogilev and Bobruisk, four towns Hitler has declared fortified places to be held to the last. Four Soviet fronts, 1.7 million men, have been assembled behind a maskirovka that pointed everything at the Ukraine. Reconnaissance battalions go in this morning; the main blow falls at dawn tomorrow.
— The fortified places
Vitebsk falls today with LIII Corps destroyed inside it, and Orsha with it; Mogilev goes tomorrow. At Bobruisk the two arms of the 1st Belorussian Front met yesterday and 70,000 men of the Ninth Army are shut in east of the Berezina, where the 16th Air Army bombs them for an hour and a half in the open. Every fortified place has cost a corps and bought nothing.
— Minsk
Tanks of the 2nd Guards Tank Corps are in Minsk before nine this morning and the 1st Guards Tank Corps comes in from the south the same day. Most of the Fourth Army, some 100,000 men, is left behind in the woods east of the city with the Berezina bridges gone. Busch has been sacked and Model has a 400-kilometre hole with nothing to put in it.
— Vilnius
Vilnius has taken a week of street fighting, with the Home Army's Operation Ostra Brama joining in from inside the city; its officers are arrested by the NKVD within days. The advance is now 500 kilometres past its start line and running for the Niemen. Baranovichi fell on the 8th, Pinsk yesterday, Grodno goes on the 16th.
— To the Vistula
Brest falls today with three German divisions cut off east of it, and Bialystok fell yesterday. Lublin was taken on the 23rd and the camp at Majdanek found with its gas chambers standing, the first the world sees of them. Fifty-seven thousand prisoners of Army Group Centre were marched through Moscow on the 17th.
— The offensive ends
Four fresh panzer divisions counter-attacked the tank corps that had reached Radzymin on 3 August and threw it back from the eastern suburbs of Warsaw, where the Home Army had risen two days before. The Red Army holds bridgeheads over the Vistula at Magnuszew and Pulawy and has crossed into East Prussia, but it has come 600 kilometres and its supply has not. Army Group Centre has lost about 400,000 men and twenty-eight divisions.
.jpg){kind=link}