Beyond Barbarossa: The Eastern Front of World War 2

The #6 Top World War 2 podcast continues following the Red Army’s advance into Hungary and Germany—and the expensive failure of the German Operation Spring Awakening. 

Map 1: Front lines in Europe, 1 March 1945
 

 

Map 2: Operation Southwind/Sudwind 

 

Map 3a: German plans for Operation Spring Awakening 

Map 4: The Soviet counter-attack, The Lake Balaton counter-offensive 
 
 
Map 5: Following Operation Spring Awakening

 

Map 6: Upper Silesian locations in 2026 

 

Map 7: The front lines, Europe, 1 April 1945
 

People

Rodion Malinovsky

 

 

Fyodor Tolbukhin 

Heinz Guderian

 

Friedrich Schorner

 

Walther Nehring (right)

The Red Army penetrates deep into Germany, leading to the redrawing of eastern European borders after. 

Map 1: The Oder offensive–March 1945

 

Map 2: The Lower Silesian Offensive

 

Map 3: The East Pomeranian Offensive
 

Map 4a: European fronts, 15 February 1945

 

 

Map 4b: European fronts, 15 March 1945 
 

Photos

Marshal Ivan Konev, Commander of the 1st Ukrainian Front

 

General Walther Wencke, chief of staff, Army Group Vistula, February 1945

 

Child soldiers in the wehrmacht: Hitler Youth in Breslau (Wroclaw), February 1945 

 

Breslau (Wroclaw) in fighting, 1945

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