Lifetime Learners Institute at Norwalk Community College

The Great Patriotic War: The Titanic Clash Between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union Mark Albertson [email protected] or [email protected]

Week 1: Road to War Traces the course of events leading up to Hitler’s massive attack on the Soviet Union, June 22, 1941. Includes Hitler’s rise to power; Stalin’s program of forced industrialization; Stalin’s purges of the 1930s; the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of August 23-24, 1939; the dismemberment of Poland; the Winter War; Blitzkrieg in the West; the Hitler-Molotov summit, November 1940.

Week 2: 1941: Barbarossa Hitler hurls 139 divisions—3.3 million men—against the Soviet Union. This session follows the first year of the conflict. Includes a comparison of the opposing forces; the importance of the tank on the Eastern Front; the battles of Leningrad, Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Vyazma, Bryansk and Moscow. The significance of the horse. An analysis of how the war in Europe became a global conflict.

Week 3: 1942: Year of Decision The second year of the decisive land campaign. Hitler launches his second summer offensive in the East. His objectives? The Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus; the industrial region of the Donbas; the siege of Sevastopol; the clash at Stalingrad; and, to annihilate once and for all the Red Army. The resulting contest of attrition on the banks of the Volga is one of the turning points of World War II.

Week 4: The Siege: Leningrad From September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944, the city founded by Peter the Great was cut off and besieged by Hitler’s armies. For 872 days, Leningraders endured the worst of the Nazis. The stirring epic of this heroic city stands as one of the greatest sagas of the 20th century. The price for this storied place in history cost Leningrad more lives than the combined war dead of Britain and the United States.

Week 5: 1943: Turning Point Operation: CITADEL will command center stage: On the heels of the great battle of Stalingrad, Hitler’s beleaguered forces are able to regroup and check the Red Army’s winter offensive. Thus the stage was set for the greatest air-land battle in history—Kursk. The decisive Soviet victory ends the German Army’s ability to wage a war-winning offensive; thus, Kursk determines the course of the land campaign for the rest of the war.

Week 6: 1944: Steamroller The inexorable Soviet advance west towards Europe, as the Red Army develops into the world’s premier killing machine on land. Attention will be on Operation: BAGRATION, the grandest Allied land offensive thus far in the war; and, the Warsaw Uprising. Insight: Soviet battle doctrine: Deep Penetration, Deep Battle.

Week 7: Gotterdammerung The battle of Berlin and the fiery death of the Third Reich.

Week 8: Uncertain Victory, Forlorn Hopes The conflict started by the European colonial powers in 1914 was won in 1945 by outsiders, the United States and the Soviet Union. The end of the Grand Alliance. Lend-Lease and the Soviet Union. Analysis of the postwar Soviet threat . . . World Domination? Security? Cold War and Empire . . . Pax Americana.

Lifetime Learners Institute at NCC, Room W102, 188 Richards Avenue, Norwalk, CT 06854 [email protected]