Ask most people to name Germany's greatest military defeat and they will say Stalingrad or D-Day. This episode argues the real answer is Operation Bagration, the Soviet summer offensive in Byelorussia that began on June 22, 1944, exactly three years after the German invasion, and erased Army Group Center in a matter of weeks. We explore how maskirovka, the Soviet doctrine of systematic deception, used dummy tanks, fake radio networks and night-only supply trains to convince German intelligence the blow would fall in Ukraine, prompting them to shift 88 percent of Army Group Center's tanks south and leave the 9th Army with just 143 soldiers per kilometer of front.

From there we follow the offensive's mechanics: Hitler's Fester Platz order chaining garrisons to Vitebsk, Orsha, Bobruisk and Minsk, the partisan rail war that severed German logis ...