Eine rechtzeitige Erinnerung an diesen historischen Tag: Der Hammer des D-Days hat Hitler am Amboss Russlands zerkleinert

Not sure what the point of this is. What a weird post given the abhorrent actions of Russia since 2014.

Everybody knows about the sacrifices of the Soviet Union during WWII, including the bloodlands of Ukraine where 10 million people died.

I think the sentiment here is true, and would’ve definitely borne greater emphasis 20 years ago, but I think there has been somewhat of an over-correction with respect to the relative importance of the western front vs. the east. Certainly the east was where most of the war was fought and most Germans died – but that does not diminish the strategic importance of the west and how it interacted with the east. There seems to be a phenomenon where people treat the two as completely unconnected. See for example from this article:

>A fact, apparently now largely forgotten in the West, is that about 80 per cent of the German Army’s casualties were inflicted by the Red Army, which after June 1944 cleared the Wehrmacht from Eastern Europe, wiped out an entire German Army Group, and opened the road to Berlin.

The clearing of Eastern Europe was made significantly easier because of the action in the west. Certainly if you were to have asked Hitler which was the more important – east or west – he would’ve told you the west. In November 1943 – over half a year *before* the Allied invasion – he designated the west as the most strategically important front and directed that it be given priority for future streams of new formations and equipment in [Fuhrer Directive no. 51.](https://ww2db.com/doc.php?q=331) Certainly there was a great imbalance between east and west in terms of the best-equipped German units; the elite offence-capable Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions were deployed mostly in the west so that even though the east had many more German soldiers in total an outright majority of German mobile formations were deployed in the west. When the great summer Soviet offensive Bagration kicked off on June 22, the entire 1000 km front of the German Army Group Center had just a single half-strength panzer division; meanwhile that same week the Brits and Canadians alone were facing [six(!) in a 30 km arc](https://i.imgur.com/tt9PCs3.jpeg) around Caen in Normandy.

Soviet successes were directly and indirectly reliant on western Allied support. Not just in the enormous amounts of materiel, food, and equipment the western Allies sent them, but also that the Germans constantly had to pull resources from the war in the east to fight the air, naval, and land campaigns against them. From even before the time that the Allies were established in France the Germans were using the majority of what remained of their best formations against them.