The siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Kiev, the biggest battle in the history of the world #ww2

The siege of Leningrad was a military blockade undertaken by the Axis powers against the city of Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg) in the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front of World War II from 1941 to 1944. Leningrad, the country's second largest city, was besieged by Germany and Finland for 872 days, but never captured. The siege was the most destructive in history and possibly the most deadly, causing an estimated 1.5 million deaths, from a prewar population of 3.2 million. It was not classified as a war crime at the time, but some historians have since classified it as a genocide due to the intentional destruction of the city and the systematic starvation of its civilian population.
In August 1941, Germany's Army Group North reached the suburbs of Leningrad as Finnish forces moved to encircle the city from the north. Land routes from Leningrad to the rest of the Soviet Union were cut on 8 September 1941, beginning the siege. The Germans decided to bomb the city and starve its inhabitants rather than attempt to capture it; many residents starved during the winter of 1941–1942. Supplies were delivered to city by air, by ship over Lake Ladoga, or over the Road of Life, a highway built on the lake when it was frozen. A Red Army offensive opened a narrow land corridor to Leningrad on 18 January 1943, but the siege was not fully broken until 27 January 1944.

The First Battle of Kiev or Kiev operation, known as the Battle of Kiev on the German side (Schlacht bei Kiew), was a major battle that resulted in an encirclement of Soviet troops in the vicinity of Kiev during World War II, the capital and most populous city of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This encirclement is the largest in the history of warfare by number of troops. The battle lasted from 7 July to 26 September 1941 as part of Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Although it is known as the "Battle of Kiev", the city played only a peripheral role in the overall battle; for the Soviets, a strategic defensive operation. The battle took place over a large area in eastern Ukraine, with Kiev being the focal point of Soviet defenses and of the German encirclement.
Much of the Southwestern Front of the Red Army, commanded by Mikhail Kirponos, was encircled, but small groups of Red Army troops managed to escape the pocket in the days after the German panzers attacked east of the city, including the forces of Marshal Semyon Budyonny, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Commissar Nikita Khrushchev. Kirponos was trapped behind German lines and was killed while trying to break out.
The battle was an unprecedented defeat for the Red Army, and was more damaging than the Battle of Białystok–Minsk of June–July 1941. The encirclement trapped 452,700 Soviet soldiers, 2,642 guns and mortars, and 64 tanks of which only 15,000 soldiers escaped from the encirclement by 2 October. The Southwestern Front suffered 700,544 casualties, including 616,304 killed, captured, or missing during the battle. The 5th, 37th, 26th, 21st, and 38th armies, consisting of 43 divisions, were almost annihilated and the 40th Army suffered many losses. Like the Western Front before it, the Southwestern Front had to be recreated almost from scratch.
Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Third Reich, described the Battle of Kiev as "the biggest battle in the history of the world", and Joseph Goebbels, the German minister of propaganda, called it "the greatest battle of annihilation of all time". The historian Evan Mawdsley described the battle as the Ostheer's "greatest triumph of the war in the East and the Red Army’s greatest single disaster", and the historian Michael Jones dubbed the battle to be "the Wehrmacht’s greatest victory of the war".

#worldwar2 #germanarmy #military #history