Beyond Barbarossa: The Eastern Front of World War 2

Why did the Yalta Conference end the way it did? Why did Churchill try an end-run around Roosevelt? Why did Roosevelt try to curry Stalin’s favour? What would this mean to post-war history?

Author Giles Milton joins to discuss some of the Second World War’s most perplexing questions. 

People

Author Giles Milton

His latest book, The Stalin Affair: The impossible alliance that won the war
 

The Big Three: Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill
 

Kathleen “Kathy” or “Puff” Harriman, daughter of Roosevelt’s right hand and Ambassador to the USSR in 1945, Averell Harriman
 

Averell Harriman
 

Pamela Churchill, WInston Churchill’s daughter-in-law in 1945, and later, Mrs. Averell Harriman
 

Stalin and Churchill at the Moscow Conference, 1944
 

Franklin Roosevelt in 1945
Map 1: The division of Germany after May 1945
 

Map 2: Invasion of Poland, 1939

Map 3: Poland moves 100 km west 
 

Sources
Giles Milton, author: https://www.gilesmilton.com/

Books

podcast: Ministry of Secrets

Why were the Yalta Conference’s decisions so vague? Why did Stalin get everything he wanted? And why did Roosevelt act so naively? 

Giles Milton, bestselling author of The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War, joins the podcast today to help understand the relationships that had the greatest impact on the second meeting of the Big Three of the Second World War.

Photos

Author Giles Milton

 

The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War by Giles Milton

 

The Big Three at Yalta, February 1945. Roosevelt would be dead in two months. 

 

Map 1: Yalta in Crimea, on the Black Sea, site of the 1945 Yalta Conference of the Big Three

 

Map 2: The tortured road from Saky Airfield to Yalta

Sources
Giles Milton, author: https://www.gilesmilton.com/

Books

podcast: Ministry of Secrets

Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt meet in Malta in the Mediterranean in February 1945, to prepare to meet Josef Stalin in the second Big Three conference on Soviet territory—Yalta. 

It was a meeting that shaped the world for decades. 

Map 1: Malta to Yalta

 

Map 2: The Western Front, 1 February 1945

 

Map 3: The Pacific Theatre, 1 February 1945

Map 4:  Poland’s shift west, 1945

Photos
 

Left: Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. Right: Roosevelt and Churchill at Malta, 2 February 1945.  

 

 

Averell Harriman and daughter Kathleen

 

The Vorontsov Palace, quarters for the British delegation

 

The Livadia Palace, quarters for the American delegation 

 

The Yusupov Palace, housing the Soviet delegation

The Red Army continues its continual advance onto German soil—and the flight of German civilians and military. 

Map 1: The siege of Kongisberg 
 

Map 2: Samland

The Samland Peninsula in 1905, showing city and town names still present in 1945. 

Map 3: The (second) East Prussian Offensive 

Map 4: The advance across Poland 
 

Historical photos
 

Franklin Roosevelt meets Winston Churchill in Malta, 2 February 1945 

 

 

Civilians from Konigsberg walk across frozen Vistula Lagoon, January 1945 

 

CIvilians flee Lodz, Poland, January 1945 

 

 

Red Army arrives in Lodz, Poland, January 1945

 

 

Hitler shakes hands with Col. Claus von Stauffenberg at the “Wolf’s Lair," July 1944.

 

Ruins of the Wolfsschanze, “Wolf’s Lair,” Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia

Sources
Antony Beevor, The Second World War. New York, NY, USA: Little, Brown and Company, 2012. 

Scott Bury, Walking Out of War: Volume 3 of the Eastern Front Trilogy. Ottawa, Canada: The Written Word, 2017.

Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941–1945. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 

Anthony Tucker-Jones, Slaughter on the Eastern Front: Hitler and Stalin’s War, 1941–1945. Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2017.

David Sumner, Europe at War: A podcast about lesser-known battles of the Second World War. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/europe-at-war-a-ww2-podcast/id1788043665 

Larysa Zariczniak, Wandering the Edge: Ukrainian history and culture https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/wandering-the-edge/id1547149262

David Sumner, Europe at War: A WW2 podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/europe-at-war-a-ww2-podcast/id1788043665

Morse code by Thane Brown

Music composed and recorded by Nicolas Bury

After 10 shattering blows on the Eastern Front in 1944, the Western Allies and the USSR continue to compress nazi Germany in January 1945. 

Map 1: The compressing front
 

1a: 1 January 1944

 

 

1b: 1 January 1945 

 

 

1c: 15 January 1945 

 

Map 2: The siege of Budapest, January 1945
 

Map 3: The Vistula-Oder campaign, January 1945
 

Map 4: The East Prussia offensive

Photos

The Budapest Chain Bridge destroyed, January 1945

 

 

Ruins of Warsaw, even in 1947

 

Source: New York photographer Henry N. Cobb, taken in 1947, via Rare Historical Photos.