We think it’s safe to say that the Soviets gave the Wehrmacht a pretty hard time during WW2 and there are few, if any real instances of the German’s achieving victory against the Soviets without either catastrophic loss of life or at least one instance of a Soviet soldier dicking them over. One of the best examples of this happened in the middle of the war when the Wehrmacht took over a Russian fortress and the soldiers inside, rather than giving up, hid in the basement and spent several weeks harassing the shit out the Germans.
This inspiring act of defiance occurred in June of 1941 when the German war machine set its sights on the awesomely named city of Brest, a tactical foothold on the edge of Soviet territory, during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa. The only thing stopping the Germans from rolling over the entire city was a large fortress located within it that contained about 9,000 soldiers. The Germans who had twice as many soldiers and the element of surprise, weren’t expecting that much of a resistance from the fortress and initially allotted just 12 hours to take over the entire area. The Soviet forces inside eventually ended up holding out for 8 days.
To put into perspective how balls out insane this was, the Wehrmacht began the siege by shelling the ever-loving shit out of the fortress without warning and then sending 10,000 men to bumrush it. Despite having the majority of their forces crushed in the opening 18 seconds of combat, the Soviets were able to mount an impressive defence and even managed to kill a few hundred German soldiers.
After 8 days of fighting and thousands of casualties, the Brest Fortress was finally captured, though not before the Germans had to resort to deploying soldiers armed with rocket launchers and flamethrowers. Even then, this wasn’t the end of the battle because several dozen Soviet soldiers had managed to hide in the sprawling basements of the fortress just before the Germans managed to take it over. Over the course of the next few weeks these soldiers continued to harass the fuck out of the German soldiers using a combination of guerilla tactics and insulting graffiti they scrawled onto the walls at night when the everyone was asleep. Every morning the Germans would wake up to find poorly spelled insults carved into the fortress walls by pissed off Soviets and messages saying that they’d never win. Which must have been pretty fucking demoralising to see weeks after they supposedly “won”.
The Soviet resistance managed to hold out of so long and were such a pain in the ass for the Germans, that they were sill fucking around in the fortress catacombs over a month later when Hitler himself turned up to gloat about taking it over. According to legend, Hitler actually had to bring extra security with him because there was a genuine worry that one of the remaining Soviet soldiers might kill him as he was walking around bragging about how easily he’d taken over the fortress that was still filled with enemy soldiers.
The defence of Brest Fortress was so inspiring that the Soviet Government formally recognised the heroism and inability to give a fuck of everyone who was there during the siege by awarding the entire fortress a medal. Oh and when we say “they awarded the fortress a medal” We don’t mean they awarded everyone stationed their a medal or something like that, we mean they literally gave the fortress itself a medal for heroism and then carved a great big fucking scowling face into a nearby rock so that a physical manifestation Soviet rage is watching over the area forever, just waiting for a chance to explode from the ground and punch Nazis into paste with his giant, granite fists.
–
To read more about Russian’s doing cool shit during WW2, why not check out our article about the time Russian’s used heavy tanks to literally run over German anti-air guns.
