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January 12, 1945 was an important day in the life of the typical German soldier on the Eastern Front of World War II. It was the day they realized that fighting in support of Nazism was a really bad idea, and that they were ever so fucked.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 12, 1945--
It was called the Vistula-Oder offensive, and you did not want to be on the defensive in this fight. The Soviet Union was pissed at having its lands depopulated by about 27 million people, half of which were civilians, by fucking Nazis and it was time for some motherfucking payback.
The Soviets massed 2.2 million soldiers, outnumbering the fucking Nazi forces about five to one. They’d taken their time to get ready for the big push, taking it easy the previous five months to build up and prepare for the mass offensive. Part of such a buildup meant they left the Polish resistance hanging during the Warsaw Uprising against the occupying Nazis, and the resistance got slaughtered.
But in early January the Soviets were mostly ready. They moved the offensive up eight days because it looked like there was going to be a thaw and their tanks needed hard ground. Later, Stalin said to his Western Allies that he was doing it to help take pressure off them in the Battle of the Bulge, but that was just him being a lying commie fuck. Anyway, Hitler was warned that a mega offensive was coming and he did fuck all about it because he was a dipshit Nazi asshole penisface.
The offensive got its name from a couple of rivers. The Vistula is the longest river in Poland, and that’s where the fighting started. The Oder is a river in Central Europe, 300 miles west of the Vistula, and that’s how far the offensive made it in only three weeks. By February 2 the Soviets were only 43 miles from Berlin, but the Soviet commander called a halt because there was still strong German resistance on their northern flank, buying Hitler a few more months of miserable life.
The fighting was fucking brutal. In only three weeks 43,000 Soviet soldiers died. In that same time, almost 300,000 German soldiers were killed, and another 147,000 were taken prisoner. Only a handful of German soldiers escaped west. FYI, being a German POW of the Soviets was the opposite of fun. A lot of those prisoners never saw home again.
Being Nazi cockwaffles, as they fled west the German commanders ordered the evacuation of most of the prisoners in their death camps and sent them on death marches westward. Only the sickest were left behind. It was during the Vistula-Oder offensive that Auschwitz and other fucking Nazi death camps were liberated.
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For some reason my brain read that as offensive pustule odour....good enough name for fucking nazi's and stalinists i guess.