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The Red Army offensive before Moscow was the first Allied offensive to regain territory lost to the NAZIs. Reports had been received of NAZI atrocities in occupied cpuntries, especially in the East. These had been impossible to confirm. There was some skepticism among the American public because World War I reports of German attroicities had been widely overstated. And the Russians had been invaded by the Germans in World war I and the Germans had behaved sternly, but not barbarically. As the Red Army advanced, however, the hideous, auful truth emerged. They found burned villages and butchered populations.
In some cases the Germans killed civilians as reprisals to guerilla actiins. The Soviets, however, found whole villages destroyed ahnd the inhbitants shot for no apparent reason. The Wafen SS was not yetr a major factor. Many of these attrocities appear to have been committed by Wehrmacht units. We do not yet know just who was responsible or why the Whrmacht begaved so barbarically. I do not yet know if any historian had addressed this. The subject of killing Jews has been addressed in details, but the Red Army duscovered wide-spread attrocities aimed at non-Jewish civilians.
Much of this seems to have done by retreating Germans, but we can not yet confirm this.
As the war swung back and forth on the Eastern Front, Hitler and the NAZIs had what they wanted, a war of anialation. Neither side would give the other any quarter and German soldiers feared more than anything falling into Russian hands. While the Red Army was used to supress the occupied countries and there was widespread rape and looting, the Soviets never committed the attrocities rourinely committed by the Germans.
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