country 19th waffen grenadier division of the ss 
The 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS ( 2nd Latvian ) was an Infantry Division of the Waffen SS during ___MASK64___ War II . It was the second Latvian division formed in January 1944 , after its sister unit , the 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS ( 1st Latvian ) with which it formed the Latvian Legion . It was surrounded in the Courland Pocket at the end of the war when it surrendered to the Red Army . ___MASK64___ War II ( often abbreviated to WWII or WW2 ), also known as the Second ___MASK64___ War , was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945 , although related conflicts began earlier . It involved the vast majority of the ___MASK64___ ' s nations  including all of the great powers  eventually forming two opposing military alliances : the Allies and the Axis . It was the most widespread war in history , and directly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries . In a state of " total war ", the major participants threw their entire economic , industrial , and scientific capabilities behind the war effort , erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources . Marked by mass deaths of civilians , including the Holocaust ( in which approximately 11 million people were killed ) and the strategic bombing of industrial and population centres ( in which approximately one million were killed , and which included the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ), it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 million fatalities . These made ___MASK64___ War II the deadliest conflict in human history . The Latvian Legion was a formation of the Waffen - SS during ___MASK64___ War II created in 1943 , consisting primarily of ethnic Latvian soldiers . The 15th Division was administratively subordinated to the VI SS Volunteer Corps , but operationally it was in reserve or at the disposal of the XXXXIII Army Corps , 16th Army , Army Group North . The 19th Division held out in the Courland Pocket until May 1945 , the close of ___MASK64___ War II , when it was among the last of ___MASK93___ ' s forces to surrender . During ___MASK64___ War II , the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made Nagasaki the second and , to date , last city in the ___MASK64___ to experience a nuclear attack . The Courland Pocket refers to the Red Army ' s blockade or isolation of Axis forces on the Courland Peninsula from July 1944 through May 1945 . The Soviet commander was General Ivan Bagramyan ( later Marshal ). The Russian Civil War was a multi - party war in the former ___MASK9___ immediately after the Russian Revolutions of 1917 , as many factions vied to determine Russia ' s political future . The two largest combatant groups were the Red Army , fighting for the Bolshevik form of socialism , and the loosely allied forces known as the White Army , which included diverse interests favoring monarchism , capitalism and alternative forms of socialism , each with democratic and antidemocratic variants . In addition , rival militant socialists and nonideological Green armies fought against both the Bolsheviks and the Whites . Eight foreign nations intervened against the Red Army , notably the Allied Forces and the pro - German armies . The Red Army defeated the White Armed Forces of South Russia in Ukraine and the army led by Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in Siberia in 1919 . The remains of the White forces commanded by Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel were beaten in Crimea and evacuated in late 1920 . Lesser battles of the war continued on the periphery for two more years , and minor skirmishes with the remnants of the White forces in the Far East continued well into 1923 . Armed national resistance in Central Asia was not completely crushed until 1934 . There were an estimated 7 , 000 , 000 - 12 , 000 , 000 casualties during the war , mostly civilians . The Russian Civil War has been described by some as the greatest national catastrophe that Europe had yet seen . The Soviet Armed Forces , also called the Armed Forces of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Armed Forces of the ___MASK16___ ( Russian :       " Vooruzhonnyye Sily Soyuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik ",     ) refers to the armed forces of the Russian SFSR ( 1917  1922 ), and ___MASK16___ ( 1922  1991 ) from their beginnings in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War to its dissolution in December 1991 . The Holocaust ( from the Greek ': " hólos ", " whole " and " kaustós ", " burnt "), also referred to as the Shoah "' ( Hebrew : , " HaShoah ", " the catastrophe "), was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler ' s ___MASK93___ and its collaborators killed about six million Jews . The victims included 1 . 5 million children and represented about two - thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe . Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non - Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders , bringing the total to about 11 million . Killings took place throughout ___MASK93___ , German - occupied territories , and territories held by allies of ___MASK93___ . ___MASK100___ ( Russian SFSR or RSFSR ; ), commonly known as , was a sovereign state in 1917  22 and 1991 - 93 , the largest , most populous , and most economically developed republic of the ___MASK16___ in 1922  91 and a sovereign part of the ___MASK16___ with its own legislation in 1990  91 . The Republic comprised sixteen autonomous republics , five autonomous oblasts , ten autonomous okrugs , six krais , and forty oblasts . Russians formed the largest ethnic group . The capital of the Russian SFSR was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad , Novosibirsk , Yekaterinburg , Nizhny Novgorod and Samara . Courland or Kurzeme ( in Latvian German and ; / ) is one of the historical and cultural regions of ___MASK86___ . The regions of Semigallia and Selonia are sometimes considered as part of Courland as they were formerly held by the same duke . The Workers ' and Peasants ' Red Army (: RKKA , frequently shortened in Russian to ; KA , in English : Red Army also in critical literature and folklore of that epoch - Red Horde , Army of Work ) was the army and the air force of the ___MASK100___ , and after 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution ( Red October or Bolshevik Revolution ). The Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations ( especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army ) of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War . Beginning in February 1946 , the Red Army , along with the Soviet Navy , embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces ; taking the official name of " Soviet Army ", until its dissolution in December 1991 . The Soviet Navy ( literally " Military Maritime Fleet of the USSR ") was the naval arm of the Soviet Armed Forces . Often referred to as the Red Fleet , the Soviet Navy was a large part of the ___MASK16___ ' s strategic plan in the event of a conflict with the ___MASK63___ , the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ( NATO ), or another conflict related to the Warsaw Pact . The influence of the Soviet Navy played a large role in the Cold War , as the majority of conflicts centered on naval forces . The ___MASK63___ dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9 , 1945 , respectively , during the final stage of ___MASK64___ War II . The ___MASK63___ had dropped the bombs with the consent of the United Kingdom as outlined in the ___MASK36___ Agreement . The two bombings , which killed at least 129 , 000 people , remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in history . The Bolsheviks , originally also Bolshevists or Bolsheviki ( derived from  " bol ' shinstvo ", " majority ", literally meaning " one of the majority ") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party ( RSDLP ) which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903 . The RSDLP was a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898 in Minsk ( ___MASK38___ ) to unite the various revolutionary organisations of the ___MASK9___ into one party . The Waffen - SS ( Armed SS ) was the armed wing of the Nazi Party ' s SS organisation . Its formations included men from ___MASK93___ , along with volunteers and conscripts from both occupied and un - occupied lands . ___MASK93___ is the common English name for the period in German history from 1933 to 1945 , when ___MASK53___ was governed by a dictatorship under the control of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party ( NSDAP ). Under Hitler ' s rule , ___MASK53___ was transformed into a fascist state in which the Nazi Party took totalitarian control over nearly all aspects of life . The official name of the state was " Deutsches Reich " from 1933 to 1943 and " Großdeutsches Reich " (" Greater German Reich ") from 1943 to 1945 . The period is also known under the names the ___MASK80___ and the National Socialist Period ( abbreviated as " NS - Zeit "). The Nazi regime came to an end after the Allied Powers defeated ___MASK53___ in May 1945 , ending ___MASK64___ War II in Europe . Ivan Khristoforovich Bagramyan , also known as Hovhannes Khachaturi Baghramyan ( 21 September 1982 ), was a Soviet military commander and Marshal of the ___MASK16___ of Armenian origin . During ___MASK64___ War II , Bagramyan was the first non - Slavic military officer to become a commander of a Front . He was among several Armenians in the Soviet Army who held the highest proportion of high - ranking officers in the Soviet military during the war . The 15th " Waffen " Grenadier Division of the SS ( 1st Latvian ) was an Infantry Division of the Waffen SS during ___MASK64___ War II . It was formed in February 1943 , and together with its sister unit , the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS ( 2nd Latvian ) formed the Latvian Legion . Hiroshima is perhaps best known as the first city in history to be targeted by a nuclear weapon when the ___MASK63___ Army Air Forces ( USAAF ) dropped an atomic bomb on the city ( and later on Nagasaki ) at 8 : 15 a . m . on August 6 , 1945 , near the end of ___MASK64___ War II . Army Group North was a German strategic echelon formation , commanding a grouping of field armies during ___MASK64___ War II . The army group was subordinated to the " Oberkommando des Heeres " ( OKH ), the German army high command , and coordinated the operations of attached separate army corps , reserve formations , rear services and logistics .