This is the first of two snapshots – of Germany in 1945, when it became the hub of the largest migration movement of modern European times. The short snapshots consist of direct quotations from representatives of the key transmigrant, migrant, and immigrant groups and set the tone for the chapters that follow. In 1945 these were nearly 3 million soldiers of the Allied armies (Britain, France, United States, USSR); demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers; millions of ethnic German expellees from Eastern Europe who fled the advancing Red Army; 10 million Displaced Persons, especially liberated Allied POWs and forced laborers, mainly from Eastern Europe or the USSR, as well as survivors of the Nazi extermination and concentration camps; and 9 million German civilian evacuees who returned from the countryside to the urban centers. The snapshot highlights the conflicts between these groups, which brought perpetrators and victims in close contact; the fight for limited resources like food and housing in a largely destroyed Germany; and the pervasive sense of a devastated continent on the move.

This chapter covers the Soviet-German war after the December 1941 Battle of Moscow and the failure of the initial Blitzkrieg; the Red Army takes the initiative after the Battle of Stalingrad and drives the Wehrmacht back to the western borderlands of the USSR by the spring of 1944. The Soviet winter offensive in 1941-2. Stalin’s over-optimism leads to setbacks at Kharkov and in Crimea. Hitler’s spring 1942 ‘second offensive’, Operation BLUE, concentrated in southern Russia. The Battle of Stalingrad; reasons for the success of Russian counter-attack. The responsibility of Hitler and his generals. Improvements in the Red Army are critically important. Spring 1943 and Hitler’s delayed attempt at a limited offensive in Operation CITADEL. The Battle of Kursk is followed by a successful Red Army counter-offensive across Ukraine in 1943-4. Developing diplomatic relations between Russia, Britain, and America. The Communist International disbanded. The first meeting of the ‘Big Three’ leaders at Tehran in late 1943: agreements about Polish borders and the timing of the British and American cross-Channel landing.

The American Civil War presented an exceptional state of affairs in modern warfare, because strong personalities could embed their own command philosophies into field armies, due to the miniscule size of the prior US military establishment. The effectiveness of the Union Army of the Tennessee stemmed in large part from the strong influence of Ulysses S. Grant, who as early as the fall of 1861 imbued in the organization an aggressive mind-set. However, Grant’s command culture went beyond simple aggressiveness – it included an emphasis on suppressing internal rivalries among sometimes prideful officers for the sake of winning victories. In the winter of 1861 and the spring of 1862, the Army of the Tennessee was organized and consolidated into a single force, and, despite deficits in trained personnel as compared to other Union field armies, Grant established important precedents for both his soldiers and officers that would resonate even after his departure to the east. The capture of Vicksburg the following summer represented the culminating triumph of that army, cementing the self-confident force that would later capture Atlanta and win the war in the western theater.

The story of Red Army military culture in 1917–1945 is a story of selective continuity with centuries of Russian military tradition, as well as dramatic innovation and discontinuity. The Bolshevik Party set out to create a new kind of state, a new kind of army, even a new kind of human being, the New Soviet Man. It never achieved the total transformation it envisioned, but the attempt shaped a unique military culture that blended new ideals with old traditions. For all the discontinuities in the revamped Red Army, the military culture of the Soviet era cannot be considered sui generis; continuities with the old imperial army were also in evidence. However, it was not the intention of the new Soviet state to allow such continuity. In fact, the state had intended just the reverse. Military culture in the Soviet period was dynamic. There were attempts to "change everything" with dramatic pendulum shifts from one end of the spectrum to the other, in terms of organization, recruitment, hierarchies, and political oversight. Most of those efforts settled somewhere in the middle through a long process of debate and compromise. This produced a unique dialectic that distinguished Soviet military culture in 1917–1945 from any other.