The Second World War in Europe stage by stage, with the front lines on the map: Poland, the fall of France, Barbarossa, Stalingrad, El Alamein, Kursk, D-Day and Bagration, the Bulge and the fall of Berlin.
Stop 01 · March 1938 – April 1939
Hitler's Expansion
Adolf Hitler, in power in Germany since 1933, set out to overturn the peace settlement of 1919. In March 1938 German troops marched into Austria, which was annexed in the Anschluss. At Munich in September, Britain and France agreed to let Germany take the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border regions of Czechoslovakia. In March 1939 Hitler broke that deal and occupied Prague; Slovakia became a German client state. In April Fascist Italy invaded Albania. Britain and France now promised to defend Poland.
Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten German Party (SdP), a branch of the Nazi Party of Germany in CzechoslovakiaUnknown author · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Who holds what
Germany, Italy and their allies · striped where occupied
Britain and the Western Allies
Soviet Union
Unshaded: neutral or out of the war. Front lines are simplified.
Adolf Hitler, in power in Germany since 1933, set out to overturn the peace settlement of 1919. In March 1938 German troops marched into Austria, which was annexed in the Anschluss. At Munich in September, Britain and France agreed to let Germany take the Sudetenland, the German-speaking border regions of Czechoslovakia. In March 1939 Hitler broke that deal and occupied Prague; Slovakia became a German client state. In April Fascist Italy invaded Albania. Britain and France now promised to defend Poland.
On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the west, north and south. Britain and France declared war on 3 September but could send no real help. The Polish army fought its largest battle on the Bzura river, west of Warsaw. On 17 September the Soviet Union, secretly allied with Germany by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, invaded from the east. Warsaw surrendered on 28 September, and the two dictatorships divided Poland between them along the line shown here.
BattlesWesterplatte, 1 September · Battle of the Bzura, 9–19 September · Warsaw surrenders, 28 September
In November 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland. The Finns held out through the bitter Winter War and kept their independence, but in March 1940 they had to give up Karelia. In the west, months of 'Phoney War' passed with little fighting. Then, on 9 April 1940, Germany struck north: Denmark surrendered within hours, and German troops landed along the Norwegian coast to secure the iron ore shipped from Narvik. British, French and Polish troops took Narvik back in May but were withdrawn in June as France collapsed, and Norway surrendered.
BattlesThe Winter War on the Karelian Isthmus · Narvik, April–June 1940
On 10 May 1940 Germany attacked the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Its tanks pushed through the Ardennes forest, which the French thought impassable, crossed the Meuse at Sedan and raced to the Channel, trapping the Allied armies in Belgium. Over 330,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk. On 10 June Italy declared war on France and Britain. France signed an armistice on 22 June: Germany occupied the north and the Atlantic coast, and a collaborating French government based at Vichy ran the south and France's empire.
BattlesRotterdam bombed, 14 May · Sedan: the breakthrough, 13 May · Dunkirk evacuation, 26 May – 4 June
Britain, led since May by Winston Churchill, fought on alone. To invade, Germany first had to control the skies. From July to October 1940 the Luftwaffe fought the Royal Air Force over southern England; radar, and pilots from Britain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Commonwealth and elsewhere, helped the RAF hold on, and the invasion was called off. Germany turned to bombing British cities at night, the Blitz, which killed over 40,000 civilians by May 1941. Meanwhile, in June 1940 the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and took Bessarabia from Romania.
BattlesLondon: the Blitz, September 1940 – May 1941 · Coventry, 14 November 1940 · Liverpool, the most bombed city outside London
Mussolini wanted his own empire around the Mediterranean. In September 1940 Italian troops in Libya advanced a short way into Egypt, where Britain guarded the Suez Canal, and in October Italy invaded Greece from Albania, only to be driven back. In December the British struck back in the desert: in two months Operation Compass advanced some 800 km and took around 130,000 Italian prisoners. Germany came to its ally's rescue, and in February 1941 General Erwin Rommel landed in Tripoli with the first units of the Afrika Korps. Hungary, Romania and Slovakia had joined the Axis in November 1940; Bulgaria followed in March 1941.
BattlesTaranto: British air raid on the Italian fleet, November 1940 · Sidi Barrani, December 1940 · Beda Fomm, February 1941
To secure his southern flank before attacking the Soviet Union, Hitler invaded Yugoslavia and Greece on 6 April 1941. Yugoslavia collapsed in eleven days and was carved up; a fascist Ustaše regime ruled a puppet Croatia. British and Commonwealth troops sent to help Greece were driven out. In May German paratroopers took Crete, at such cost that Germany never again tried a large airborne invasion. In North Africa Rommel pushed the British back to the Egyptian border, but Australian and British troops held out in besieged Tobruk. In East Africa, meanwhile, British and Commonwealth forces conquered Italy's empire.
BattlesBelgrade bombed, 6 April 1941 · Crete: the airborne invasion, May 1941 · Siege of Tobruk, April–November 1941
On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, with some three million German soldiers in three great army groups aimed at Leningrad, Moscow and Kyiv. Vast encirclements at Białystok–Minsk, Smolensk and Kyiv captured millions of Soviet troops, and Finland joined the attack in the north. By September Leningrad was cut off. In August British and Soviet troops occupied Iran to open a supply route. But the Soviet state did not collapse. In early December, with German troops in sight of Moscow, the Red Army counter-attacked in the snow and threw them back. The map shows the furthest German advance.
BattlesBiałystok–Minsk pocket, June–July · Smolensk, July–September · Kyiv encircled, September · Leningrad: the 872-day siege · Moscow: the counter-attack, 5 December
Behind the front, Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust, the systematic murder of Europe's Jews. From the invasion of the Soviet Union, mobile killing units shot hundreds of thousands of Jews in the occupied east; at Babyn Yar, outside Kyiv, more than 33,000 were murdered in two days in September 1941. From 1942 Jews from across Europe were deported by train to death camps in occupied Poland, among them Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor and Bełżec. About six million Jews were murdered, along with millions of others, including Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war and Poles. The map shows German-ruled Europe at its largest, in late 1942.
In the summer of 1942 Germany struck again, this time in the south, towards the oilfields of the Caucasus and the city of Stalingrad on the Volga. German mountain troops raised their flag on Mount Elbrus in August, and the Sixth Army reached the Volga at Stalingrad, where the fighting went on street by street. In North Africa Rommel took Tobruk in June and drove into Egypt, until he was stopped at El Alamein, about 100 km from Alexandria. This was the high tide of the Axis: the map shows its furthest extent, in the autumn of 1942.
BattlesSevastopol falls, July 1942 · Stalingrad: street fighting from September · Tobruk falls, 21 June 1942 · First Battle of El Alamein, July 1942
At El Alamein in October and November 1942, Montgomery's Eighth Army broke Rommel's line and chased him back across Libya. On 8 November American and British troops landed in Morocco and Algeria, in Operation Torch, and Germany answered by occupying the rest of France. On 19 November the Red Army launched Operation Uranus and encircled the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad; it surrendered on 2 February 1943, and about 91,000 men went into captivity. Squeezed from both sides, the last Axis forces in Africa surrendered in Tunisia in May 1943, with some 250,000 prisoners.
BattlesSecond Battle of El Alamein, October–November 1942 · Stalingrad: the Sixth Army surrenders, 2 February 1943 · Kasserine Pass, February 1943 · Tunis: the Axis surrenders in Africa, May 1943
Britain depended on ships for food, fuel and weapons. German U-boats hunted the convoys crossing from North America, often in 'wolf packs' that attacked together at night, and from 1941 Allied convoys also carried supplies round Norway to the Soviet port of Murmansk. In 1942 U-boats sank more than six million tons of Allied shipping. Then the balance turned: long-range aircraft closed the mid-Atlantic 'air gap', escorts grew stronger, and codebreakers at Bletchley Park read German naval signals. In 'Black May' 1943 the U-boats lost so heavily that they were withdrawn from the North Atlantic.
In July 1943 Germany launched its last great offensive in the east, against the Soviet bulge around Kursk. In one of the largest tank battles in history, around Prokhorovka, it was stopped within a week, and the Red Army went over to an offensive that hardly paused: it freed Kharkiv in August, Smolensk in September and Kyiv in November. On 10 July the Western Allies landed in Sicily. Mussolini was overthrown, and on 8 September Italy surrendered; German troops seized the north and centre, and the Allies fought their way up from the south until they were held at the Gustav Line, south of Rome.
BattlesKursk and Prokhorovka, July 1943 · Sicily landings, 10 July 1943 · Salerno landings, September · The Gustav Line at Monte Cassino
Rome fell to the Allies on 4 June 1944. Two days later, on D-Day, the largest seaborne invasion in history landed on five beaches in Normandy: American, British and Canadian troops, with Free French, Polish and others. After weeks of hard fighting in the hedgerows they broke out in late July; a second landing in Provence on 15 August swept up the Rhône, and Paris was liberated on 25 August. In the east, on 22 June, the Red Army launched Operation Bagration and destroyed Germany's Army Group Centre in Belarus, advancing about 500 km to the Vistula. In Warsaw the Polish Home Army rose against the Germans on 1 August. On 23 August Romania changed sides.
BattlesNormandy beaches, 6 June 1944 · Falaise pocket, August · Minsk liberated, 3 July · Warsaw Uprising, August–October
Autumn 1944: Liberation in the West and the Balkans
Allied armies swept through France and Belgium; Brussels was freed on 3 September. In mid-September Operation Market Garden tried to leap the Rhine with airborne troops but failed at Arnhem, and in October the Americans took Aachen, the first German city to fall. In the east the Warsaw Uprising was crushed in October while the Red Army stood on the Vistula. Instead the Soviets drove into the Balkans: Bulgaria changed sides in September, Belgrade was freed by Yugoslav Partisans and Soviet troops on 20 October, the Germans left Greece, and by the end of December Budapest was surrounded. Finland made peace with the Soviet Union in September.
BattlesArnhem: Market Garden fails, September · Aachen falls, 21 October · Belgrade freed, 20 October · Siege of Budapest, from 26 December
On 16 December 1944 Hitler gambled on a surprise offensive through the snowbound Ardennes, aiming for Antwerp. It drove a deep 'bulge' into the American lines, but the defenders held on at crossroads towns such as Bastogne, and by late January the Germans were back where they had started, having spent reserves they could not replace. On 12 January 1945 the Red Army attacked from the Vistula and in three weeks reached the Oder, about 80 km from Berlin. On 27 January Soviet soldiers entered Auschwitz. Budapest fell on 13 February after a seven-week siege.
BattlesBastogne, besieged December 1944 · Fortress Breslau, besieged February–May · Budapest falls, 13 February
In March 1945 the Western Allies crossed the Rhine, surrounded the Ruhr and raced east, while in Italy the German armies surrendered on 2 May. The Red Army broke through on the Seelow Heights and encircled Berlin. American and Soviet troops met on the Elbe at Torgau on 25 April, and Hitler killed himself in his bunker on 30 April. Germany surrendered unconditionally on 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day. The map shows where the armies stood at the end, the line that would soon divide Europe. The war in Europe had killed tens of millions of people, more than half of them civilians.
BattlesRemagen: a Rhine bridge taken, 7 March · Seelow Heights, April 1945 · Berlin falls, 2 May 1945