Belarus lost roughly a third of its entire population during the German occupation of 1941–1944 — proportionally among the highest death tolls of any territory in the Second World War. The partisan movement operating from the Pripyat marshes was extensive enough that German command repeatedly diverted frontline resources to suppress it, and entire villages were burned in reprisal. Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944, which finally expelled German forces, remains one of the largest and most tactically decisive Soviet offensives of the war, yet it receives far less Western attention than the concurrent Normandy campaign.
Belarus lost roughly a third of its entire population during the German occupation of 1941–1944 — proportionally among the highest death tolls of any territory in the Second World War. The partisan movement operating from the Pripyat marshes was extensive enough that German command repeatedly diverted frontline resources to suppress it, and entire villages were burned in reprisal. Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944, which finally expelled German forces, remains one of the largest and most tactically decisive Soviet offensives of the war, yet it receives far less Western attention than the concurrent Normandy campaign.