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Army Group Centre (Heeresgruppe Mitte in German) was one of three German army formations assigned for the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, code-named Operation Barbarossa. This Heersgruppe remained in existence until it was destroyed during the Red Army's Operation Bagration offensive.
On 22 June 1941, Nazi Germany and its Axis allies launched their surprise attack against the Soviet Union. Their armies, totalling over three million men, were divided into three main geographical directions. Army Group North was to advance through the Baltic region and capture the city of Leningrad. Army Group Centre was to defeat the Soviet armies in Byelorussia and to advance towards Moscow. Army Group South was to occupy the Ukraine. Blitzkrieg tactics were to ensure a rapid advance and a quick and decisive victory over the Soviet Union by mid-November.
Army Group Centre was the strongest of the three German formations. Commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, it included the 4th and 9th Army, the 2nd and 3rd Panzer Groups and the 2nd Air Fleet. By mid-August 1941 it had crushed Soviet forces in huge encirclement battles at Minsk and Smolensk. Once they had conquered the territories in the West of the Soviet Union, the Germans began their brutal genocide regime, burning thousands of cities and villages, shooting and deporting hundreds of thousands of civilians. Soviet prisoners of war, 300,000 after the battle of Minsk alone, were either killed in concentration camps, or literally starved to death in prisoners camps, mostly nothing more than fields surrounded with barbed wire in the open air.
In spite of terrible losses, Soviet resistance was fierce and self-sacrificing. A partisan movement started to organise a struggle on occupied land, disrupting German supply lines. Bitter fighting in the Battle of Smolensk for instance delayed the German advance for several weeks. The advance of Army Group Centre was further delayed as Hitler ordered a postponement of the offensive against Moscow, and to conquer the Ukraine first. The German offensive against Moscow was resumed on 30 September 1941.
The delays turned out to be fatal to the German forces fighting their way on the approaches to the Soviet capital. Autumn rains turned roads into mud. In November, an unusually harsh winter set in, catching the Germans ill-equipped for winter warfare. Meanwhile, Soviet resistance grew plainly desperate, as soldiers engaged in infantry combat against German tanks. Suffering tremendous losses, the Soviets finally stopped the German advance in late November 1941, when the Germans had the Moscow Kremlin already in sight. The Soviet counter-offensive in the Battle of Moscow, starting on 6 December 1941 would mark the first decisive blow against the German invaders, and the failure of the German Blitzkrieg. Army Group Centre was driven back out of reach of Moscow by April 1942.
June 1942 saw the preparation of another German summer offensive. Instead of again striking at the heart of the Soviet Union, however, German command turned to long-term economic warfare, seeking to capture Soviet industrial areas and oil fields in the South. Army Group Centre was meanwhile to consolidate its positions. The German advance to the Caucasus and the Volga culminated in the unseen carnage of the Battle of Stalingrad. After months of bloody urban warfare in the ruined city, the Soviets surrounded the German forces inside Stalingrad in November 1942. That counter-offensive was co-ordinated with an offensive in the Moscow area, code-named Operation Mars, to distract German attention from the lower Volga. The Soviet counter-offensive at Stalingrad was a success, and the German forces trapped in the pocket finally surrendered on 2 February 1943. From that moment on, the Soviets would seize the strategic initiative. Having prevailed in the battle of Kursk, they pushed the Germans back West in 1943, liberating Kiev in November 1943.
In spring 1944 Soviet command started concentrating massive forces along the frontline in central Russia for a huge summer offensive against Army Group Centre. The offensive, code-named Operation Bagration, was launched on 22 June 1944, on exactly the third anniversary of the German invasion and the beginning of the Great Patriotic War in 1941. 185 Soviet divisions comprising about 2.5 million soldiers and 6,000 tanks smashed against the German positions on a frontline of 1,000 km. The 500,000-strong German Army Group Centre was crushed. 350,000 Germans were killed or captured. Soviet forces raced forward, liberating Minsk and the rest of Byelorussia by the end of August, crossing the pre-war border and advancing into East Prussia and Poland by the end of the year. Five months later, in May 1945, Nazi Germany would finally surrender as Soviet troops captured Berlin.
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