Nazi propaganda had told Wehrmacht’s soldiers the invasion of the Soviet Union was a war of extermination.

British historian Ian Kershaw concludes that the Wehrmacht’s duty was to ensure that the people who met Hitler’s requirements of being part of the Aryan Herrenvolk (“Aryan master race”) had living space. He wrote that:

The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from central and eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans. … As Bartov (The Eastern Front; Hitler’s Army) shows, it barbarised the German armies on the eastern front. Most of their three million men, from generals to ordinary soldiers, helped exterminate captured Slav soldiers and civilians. This was sometimes cold and deliberate murder of individuals (as with Jews), sometimes generalised brutality and neglect. … German soldiers’ letters and memoirs reveal their terrible reasoning: Slavs were ‘the Asiatic-Bolshevik’ horde, an inferior but threatening race

During the rapid German advances in the early months of the war, nearly reaching the cities of Moscow and Leningrad, the bulk of Soviet industry which could not be evacuated was either destroyed or lost due to German occupation. Agricultural production was interrupted, with grain harvests left standing in the fields that would later cause hunger reminiscent of the early 1930s. In one of the greatest feats of war logistics, factories were evacuated on an enormous scale, with 1523 factories dismantled and shipped eastwards along four principal routes to the Caucasus, Central Asian, Ural, and Siberian regions. In general, the tools, dies and production technology were moved, along with the blueprints and their management, engineering staffs and skilled labor.

The whole of the Soviet Union became dedicated to the war effort. The population of the Soviet Union was probably better prepared than any other nation involved in the fighting of World War II to endure the material hardships of the war. This is primarily because the Soviets were so used to shortages and coping with economic crisis in the past, especially during wartime—World War I brought similar restrictions on food. Still, conditions were severe. World War II was especially devastating to Soviet citizens because it was fought on their territory and caused massive destruction. In Leningrad, under German siege, over one million people died of starvation and disease. Many factory workers were teenagers, women and the elderly. The government implemented rationing in 1941 and first applied it to bread, flour, cereal, pasta, butter, margarine, vegetable oil, meat, fish, sugar, and confectionery all across the country. The rations remained largely stable in other places during the war. Additional rations were often so expensive that they could not add substantially to a citizen’s food supply unless that person was especially well-paid. Peasants received no rations and had to make do with local resources that they farmed themselves. Most rural peasants struggled and lived in unbearable poverty, but others sold any surplus they had at a high price and a few became rouble millionaires, until a currency reform two years after the end of the war wiped out their wealth.

Despite harsh conditions, the war led to a spike in Soviet nationalism and unity. Soviet propaganda toned down extreme Communist rhetoric of the past as the people now rallied by a belief of protecting their Motherland against the evils of German invaders. Ethnic minorities thought to be collaborators were forced into exile. Religion, which was previously shunned, became a part of Communist Party propaganda campaign in the Soviet society in order to mobilize the religious elements.

The social composition of Soviet society changed drastically during the war. There was a burst of marriages in June and July 1941 between people about to be separated by the war and in the next few years the marriage rate dropped off steeply, with the birth rate following shortly thereafter to only about half of what it would have been in peacetime. For this reason mothers with several children during the war received substantial honours and money benefits if they had a sufficient number of children—mothers could earn around 1,300 roubles for having their fourth child and earn up to 5,000 roubles for their 10th.

German soldiers used to brand the bodies of captured partisan women – and other women as well – with the words “Whore for Hitler’s troops” and rape them. Following their capture some German soldiers vividly bragged about committing rape and rape-homicide. Susan Brownmiller argues that rape played a pivotal role in Nazi aim to conquer and destroy people they considered inferior, such as Jews, Russians, and Poles. An extensive list of rapes committed by German soldiers was compiled in the so-called “Molotov Note” in 1942. Brownmiller points out that Nazis used rape as a weapon of terror.

Examples of mass rapes in Soviet Union committed by German soldiers include

Smolensk: German command opened a brothel for officers in which hundreds of women and girls were driven by force, often by arms and hair.

Lviv: 32 women working in a garment factory were raped and murdered by German soldiers, in a public park. A priest trying to stop the atrocity was murdered.

Lviv: Germans soldiers raped Jewish girls, who were murdered after getting pregnant.