Leningrad, now known by its old name of St Petersburg, was encircled by the advancing Germans, and in the ensuing siege perhaps one million soldiers and citizens died. These civilians have been killed by German shelling.
The Russians kept Leningrad supplied by running trucks across the frozen Lake Ladoga.
The Russian counterattack of December 1941 used troops trained and equipped to operate in the sub-zero conditions. German commanders were badly shaken, and Hitler assumed personal command of the army, ordering his men to hold on regardless of cost.
A nation at war: members of the Moscow Young Communists digging an anti-tank ditch outside the Russian capital.
German prisoners captured during the Russian winter offensive. It is unlikely that any of the soldiers depicted here survived the war.
A German machine gun post (above) covers a street in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, which was taken by Rundstedt's German Army Group South in October 1941. 
In Russia in 1941 the Germans profited, as they had in Poland in 1939 and France and the Low Countries in 1940, from very effective air support. This shot shows a camouflaged Russian airfield under what the original caption terms “a hail of bombs.”
The reality of the advance through Russia, September 1941. Most German soldiers, like their fathers and grandfathers, went into battle on foot, with horse-drawn transport.
The German armoured thrusts into Russia linked to create vast pockets whose occupant defenders were captured: the Germans claimed over 400,000 prisoners by July 11, 1941.
Despite his 1939 rapprochement with Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler never abandoned plans for an attack on Russia, which he planned to reduce to “a German India.” In December 1940 he issued a directive for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. His army was not ready for a long war: many units had French or Czech equipment and were below strength, and operations in the Balkans delayed the attack. Stalin had some warning of invasion, and the disposition of Russian forces, concentrated on the frontier, induces some historians to suggest that he planned an offensive of his own. The attack, on June 22, proved brilliantly successful, but ran out of steam in December, when the Russians launched serious counteroffensives. German tanks (above) form up for the attack on the open terrain that characterized much of the Eastern Front, July 1941.
The cameraman's location and lack of uniformity amongst the gun detachment suggests that this shot of a German anti-tank gun taking on Soviet armour in July is authentic.
The German army remained two-tier, with its panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions representing the tip of a spear whose shaft comprised units which would not have looked out of place a generation earlier. German cavalry crosses a bridge in Russia, summer 1941.
The best of friends? Russian and German officers chat at Brest-Litovsk on September 18, 1939. The Russians show their rank on collar badges: the traditional epaulettes, hated symbol of the tsarist officer class, were to appear after the German invasion. The black-uniformed German is a panzer officer. In less than two years, these men would be trying to kill each other.
