German invasion of the USSR
The Eastern Front opens as Germany strikes the USSR
On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union, beginning what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. The Brest Fortress garrison held out for weeks. The blitzkrieg was halted near Moscow in December 1941, and the Eastern Front became the main theatre of the war in Europe.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 23 years earlier
- 1939–1945 World War II — 2 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 6 years later
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 7 years later
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 8 years later
Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — 13 years earlier
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — 8 years earlier
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — 5 years earlier
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — same year
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — 12 years later
Middle East
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 25 years earlier
- 1916–1918 The Arab Revolt — 25 years earlier
- 1932 Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed — 9 years earlier
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 7 years later
Africa
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 19 years earlier
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 6 years earlier
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 15 years later
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 17 years later
- 1960 Year of Africa — 19 years later
Asia
- 1934–1935 Long March — 7 years earlier
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 4 years later
- 1945 Indonesia proclaims independence — 4 years later
- 1947 Independence and Partition of India — 6 years later
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 12 years later
Americas
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 12 years earlier
- c. 1930–1936 Dust Bowl — 11 years earlier
- 1945 ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer — 4 years later
- 1947 Invention of the transistor — 6 years later
- 1955 Salk polio vaccine declared safe — 14 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 5 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — same year
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 1 year later
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 13 years later
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 18 years later
Alive at the time
- Nikola Tesla (aged 85)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 72)
- Winston Churchill (aged 67)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 63)
- Albert Einstein (aged 62)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 60)
- Adolf Hitler (aged 52)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 52)
- Mao Zedong (aged 48)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 23)