The death in the snow. Few nations suffered more during World War II than the Soviet Union, which - not least thanks to Stalin's purges within the officer corps in the late 1930s - by an large was taken by surprise when 2.9 million German soldiers on the morning of January 22nd 1941 suddenly headed east. Three years later the Soviet forces, now better trained and better equipped, hit Wehrmacht like a boomerang and rapidly all German land reclamations were gone. The total number of perished people on the Eastern Front between June 1941 and April 1945 is believed to have been 30 million - including civilians.