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to -30, even -40C, enhanced by the strong frozen winds, so that the military vehicles of the German troops and their allied had more and more working problems, while the very long communication ways (mainly, railways) necessary to carry supplies to the front were longer and longer and unsafe, for the guerrilla attacks by the Russians.

The German army and SS special troops (the most ferocious, that made "the dirtiest work") reacted ferociously, not only during the winter, with massacres of the Russian civilians, a ferocious chase to the Jewish people living there

(an important and painful chapter of the Holocaust).
More than 20 millions of Russians, soldiers and civilians, were killed during that really heroic resistance against Nazi invasion.

The Russian environment was featured by a wide, immense plane, with rare and modest hills, wide cultivated fields (sunflower, wheat, barley,...) in the South (Ukraine, Belarus and Caucasian regions) and a higher presence of woods, lakes and swamps, totally frozen in winter going northward, to Moscow and Leningrad (today, again with its original name, St. Petersburg).

In 1942, at the extremities of that long front, the Russians started to resist to the German besiege of LENINGRAD (about 1000 days, between the Finland Gulf and the great Ladoga Lake and of STALINGRAD (today, Volgograd) along the low course of Volga river, that was reached on September 1942.

The war and the living conditions of Russian citizens in these towns soon become a real nightmare, for the continuous bombings, the starvation that killed many hundreds persons every day, the diseases and the extreme cold.
But Russians were absolutely determined to resist, because it was clear that the Nazis hadn't pity of the prisoners and wanted to destroy Russia as a nation.

The hell become deep also for the German troops that in Stalingrad, from besiegers were turned in besieged, inside part of the town, already in ruin, during the whole winter 1942-43, thanks to a Russian counter-attack that broke through the side lines of the Italian and German front.
So, the residual German troops, led by the General Von Paulus, surrendered among the ruins of Stalingrad (February 2nd, 1943).

Only this battle cost 1 millions of deads and was fought house after house, or better, ruin after ruin, in a ferocious freeze.
This was the first great battle lost by the Axes forces in Russia and marked the beginning of the end for the Nazi regime in Europe.

The victims of cold had become more than those of fights, in winter, especially among the Italians, badly equipped for the extreme winter when their withdrawal started, after the Stalingrad defeat (September 1942-February 1943).

Their withdrawal become a never-ending nightmare, until the autumn of 1943, always by feet (the trucks and vehicles were all taken by the German troops), fighting everyday for not being surrounded by the Russians.
Most of them died frozen, in an infinite landscape always white for snow, ice and fog, difficult to be distinguished.
The others were captured and taken as prisoners in the terrible Russian "gulags" (1943, after the Italian armistice).

Of the 100,000 Alpines sent by their irresponsible "duce" Benito Mussolini in Russia, only 1500 came back alive in Italy at the end of the war.
Some of them were missing (mainly, dead) or prisoners and they came back even years after the war, after that the German arrogant army had been attacked and pushed back until Berlin (April 1945), loosing millions of lives, winter after winter.

Learn more about this author, Aldo Bonincontro.
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