The Red Army offensive started in Kursk and went on to liberate large parts of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. In December 1943 the Soviet Union launched another offensive along the entire Eastern Front. In January 1944 this led to the liberation of Leningrad, which was under siege since September 1941. It has been estimated that during the siege as many as 1 to 1.5 million civilians died of hunger. The next Red Army offensive began in June 1944 and included the eastern parts of Poland. Soviet armies also entered the territories of former allies of the Third Reich, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland, which, following the example of Italy, successively left the Axis coalition.

The leader of Hungary, Admiral Miklós Horthy, tried to save the Hungarian Jews from deportation. However, when Germany occupied the country in the spring of 1944, transports of Jews set out from Hungary to Auschwitz. Within 56 days 420,000 people were deported, (total number of people – 430,000) the vast majority of whom were murdered in the gas chambers.

The Red Army offensive stopped on the outskirts of Warsaw, where on 1 August 1944 the Uprising broke out. As a result of 63 days of fighting approximately 170,000 civilian inhabitants and insurgents were killed. The city on the left bank of the river was virtually razed to the ground.

During the Warsaw Uprising 13,000 of the city’s inhabitants were transported to Auschwitz.