I am watching this, a couple of episodes a day if I have the time, each episode about 49 minutes long, 22 episodes total, 5 DVD set

http://www.amazon.com/War-WWII-Battl.../dp/B004NJC0I4

I've seen most of the World War 2 documentaries: World at War, World War 2, World War 2 in HD, Ken Burns' the War, etc etc

but this one takes the cake!!

they say they went thru million of feet of footage shot by the soviets during the war and never before seen in the West and they weren't kidding!

This documentary has some pretty brutal and graphic footage!!

Hitler invaded Russia on June 22nd, 1941 and by August 1941, he was already being pushed back by the Russian Army: he'd already lost half a million men, 1,300 tanks and 2000 planes

yet he kept going

the end results by the end of World War 2, 5 million men lost on the German Side, 25 million men, women and children lost on the Russian side - 3 million of those were POW of which 2/3 of them were never seen alive

for what?

it's pretty brutal!!

like at one village, the Nazi SS killed 10,000 civilians including babies and children

and they showed footage of it; dead mothers still clinging their babies/children in their arms and both the mothers and their babies had bullet holes in them!!

Just sad that the human race will do this to one another.

Even animals in the African Safari behaves better than we do, they only kill each other for food.

Stalin was not a Saint either, he even killed his own Generals, Commanders and Officers who failed him and then replaced them with new ones

I just finished the Battle of Smolensk episode, the Russian city on the way to Moscow

by late September 1941 - 3 months after Hitler's armies invaded Russia,

Russia has already lost over 2 1/2 million men overall

that's a lot of people!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Smolensk_(1941)

2 1/2 million men is by the way, the figure German Intelligence put at the total number of Soviet Troops Russia could muster before Operation Barbarossa began

I guess German Intelligence failed

by the end of the Battle of Smolensk, Hitler was arguing that Russia had no fighting troops left and he thought he had a clear way all the way to Moscow, 230 miles away

did you know Hitler came within 22 miles of the Kremlin and if he did, he would had won the war but he shot himself in the foot by recalling his units and telling them to drive South toward the Oil Fields in the Caucasus

he had 1.6 million troops encircling Moscow that was only defended by 400,000 troops, old men and women and he didn't take advantage of it!!

also the main reason Hitler was defeated was not only because of the Russian Winter

it was also his armies were stretched across a front 1800 miles long and he didn't have the logistics to keep them supplied and the units replaced

fighting units were not getting replacements for their losses or being replaced with fresh units and it was just the constant fighting, attrition and fatigue that worn them down

Before Operation Barbarossa even began, his units were already not fully equipped, many units were not at full strength and many other units lacked transports and armor support and fighting vehicles

yeah, good planning there, Adolf!!