During World War II, as the pace of the German offensive into Moscow was halted in early December 1941 by more than 40 degrees below zero, a brutal war plunder was waged on the Eastern Front, with the Nazis treating their enemies as worthless "inferior peoples" on which millions of civilians and prisoners of war died with great brutality (one in battle, and the other by the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis).
Before the Barbarossa battle plan was implemented, Hitler had ordered that any captured Communist Party member must be executed immediately. As it had done during the invasion of Poland, the SS formed the "Einsitzkaya" to follow behind the advancing troops. These massacre squads, which numbered about 3,000 or so, were also ordered to eradicate all Jews and Communists. According to their own records, by the end of 1941, these detachments had slaughtered more than 600,000 Jews during their attack on the Soviet Union, with great cruelty.
More than 5 million Red Army soldiers were captured by the Germans during the battle, and in 1941 alone there were about 3.8 million; only about 35 percent of them survived. They treated prisoners of war, never gave them too much food, did not give them even the most basic treatment, and all the medical personnel and medical supplies captured from the Soviet side were collected for their own use. It is well documented that this abuse is not only due to scarcity and scarcity of resources, but also to the disregard for human life by ultra-nationalism in the core nazi ideology.
As a result, many attempts to surrender were often executed immediately, and the Waffen-SS or Waffen-SS (a regular German force later in the war) almost never accepted war criminals on the Eastern Front. However, the Soviet attitude towards prisoners of war and potential enemies was as extreme as the Nazis, as was evident in the Soviet massacre of 15,000 Polish Army officers in Katyn massacre and in 1939.
About one-fifth of the population in the Territories occupied by the Germans was either reduced to fugitives or evacuated by Soviet institutions. Many of them were sent to new factories for labor, which were built on the east side of the Ural River. There, the conditions for survival and work were extremely harsh. Those who remained in the rear, large part of whom might have been treated favorably by the Germans, had their lives and property in constant danger. Because the whole village was burned to the ground in the guerrilla retaliation.
Moscow's counter-offensive
Some of the most brutal and relentless battles took place in the winter of 1941-1942. On 6 December, Soviet forces launched a successful counterattack against the Moscow front, using reserves from the Far East with no combat experience. Unlike the Germans, the Soviet army had good winter clothing and armament, which allowed it to withstand the extreme cold climatic conditions in the Soviet Union. Hitler's reaction was to order a "frenzied resistance" not to retreat. His order not to retreat may have been correct in this case, and to some extent could have maintained the unity of the troops, but many of his closest generals disagreed with this and were dismissed for it.
Hitler personally served as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and personally formulated all major military deployments on the Eastern Front. Although in many places the Germans were repulsed to 160 km away, by early 1942 they were advancing again and continued until the thawing period on the Eastern Front, when all plans had to be suspended.