Furthermore, the losses of the small-scale cracking of the Siege left two of the Soviet fronts assigned to this operation already weaker than they needed to be to achieve the Stavka VGK's goals. Against it was an Army Group North in the midst of retooling its lines for a more compact defense, and an Army Group North that had taken only a relatively limited hit against an overwhelmingly powerful offensive on a dual axis. Like Operation Mars, Polar Star was thus a very large offensive, conducted for what proved to be extremely over-ambitious goals. Prior to this offensive, however, the Soviets had successively hammered through a corridor around Schlisselburg, one that would ultimately prove decisive in breaking the siege, but one which was still vulnerable to regular doses of German artillery fire.
No less than three Soviet fronts were allotted to this offensive, the Leningrad, Volkhov, and Northwestern Fronts in a campaign designed to rupture the lines of Army Group North and to provide the basis for a rolling back of Axis lines altogether in the north. The case of Operation Polar Star is illustrative here. This in no small part is due to the performance of Army Group North, on the whole the most effective and skilled of the German army groups in the Axis-Soviet War. Glantz estimated as many as 10% of overall Soviet casualties occurred in this prolonged set of trench warfare battles, the fighting and campaigns in the Soviet north remain far more obscure than they might otherwise be. While in his book on the Siege of Leningrad Col. This has become a contentious issue naturally since for many of the nations involved the second world war and those who fought it are considered borderline sacrosanct (ironic really when you listen to the veterans themselves and how down to earth they are about their role in the XXth century's defining moment).Ī german historian whose book is only in german yet so haven't been able to read it claims much higher numbers for american rapes in occupied germany, but her methodology to arrive to those numbers was torn apart by anthony beevor who in turn got torn apart by the russians when he delivered his own numbers on the red army rapes which the russians are very sensitive but have admitted enough over the decades that we know the scale was massive and the reality brutal, women were killed by rape in the east.While the Soviet Union's wars in the center and in the south have received more focus from Western scholars, the bitterness of fighting in the Siege of Leningrad has tended to fall into a greater historical vacuum. There were only a few British cases, very individual case to case thing, the french had some units (said to be north Africans) that raped heavily in the southwest German area, soviets arguably raped the most and Americans on a lesser scale.
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