Politicians and pundits in the West often misleadingly conflate the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. This is a sign of extreme historical illiteracy. They were polar opposites, and fought each other ferociously in one of the most brutal wars in human history.
In fact, while the USSR played by far the biggest role in destroying Nazism, the Third Reich received support from major US corporations, such as Chase Bank, Standard Oil, IBM, Ford, GM, Coca-Cola, and Kodak, which helped Adolf Hitler carry out the Holocaust (along with companies for which US Senator Prescott Bush, father of former President George H W Bush, was a director and key shareholder).
In World War Two, 419,000 Americans and 451,000 Britons were killed. On the other hand, between 26 and 27 million Soviets lost their lives, including soldiers and civilians.
In other words, 62 Soviets died for every American.
It is not just the overwhelming death toll that demonstrates that the USSR did by far the majority of the fighting and sacrificed the most to destroy the genocidal Nazi regime.
It was the Red Army that liberated Berlin. Moreover, International Holocaust Remembrance Day is held every year on January 27, marking the day in 1945 when the Soviet Union freed the prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Prominent historian Richard Vinen, a professor at King’s College, London, explained in his book A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century:
“The invasion of the Soviet Union marked a break with the European war that had been fought over the previous two years. The forces of Germany and the Soviet Union dwarfed anything that had been put into action before, and for the next three years the eastern front was the scene of almost all the serious fighting. In 1942, Hitler had 178 divisions in the east; Rommel’s confrontation with British forces in northern Africa, which came to feature so much in British mythology, involved only 4 German divisions. Between the evacuation of Crete in 1941 and the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Russian troops were the only ones to fight German forces on European soil. Of the 13.6 million German soldiers who were killed, wounded or captured during the Second War War, 10 million ended their military careers on the eastern front”.
Peter Kuznick, associate professor of history at American University, similarly noted, “Throughout most of World War II, the United States and the British were fighting 10 German divisions combined. The Soviets were fighting 200”.
That is to say, the Soviets fought 20 times more Nazis than the Americans and British combined.
Kuznick described how, following WWII, the “destruction of the Soviet Union was the equivalent of the entire United States east of Chicago being wiped out and destroyed”.
The historical reality of World War II is that the USSR overwhelmingly defeated the Nazis. Even Winston Churchill, a virulent colonialist, racist, and anti-communist (who had praised Hitler in his early days), was eventually forced to admit this fact.
In a speech in the House of Commons on August 2, 1944, Churchill stated:
“I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies”.
In October 1944, Churchill reiterated:
“I have always believed and I still believe that it is the Red Army that has torn the guts out of the filthy Nazis“.
Despite this, many Western anti-communist intellectuals have tried to rewrite history to erase the enormous contribution made by the Soviets. And they have been remarkably successful.
Polling from France shows that, in 1945, 57% of people agreed that the USSR was “the nation that contributed the most to the defeat of Germany” in the war. By 2004, that number had fallen to just 20%, while 58% of people in France believed the US did the most.
This narrative turns history on its head.
This is not to say that the Western allies did not help the Soviet Union. US material support for the USSR in its Lend-Lease program was important. But pointing to the relatively small losses on the Western Front is disingenuous. As even the New York Times acknowledged:
“A plucky Britain refusing to bow to the Luftwaffe’s blitz, Patton and Rommel dueling in the North African desert, the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge — these tend to dominate American’s conception of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany.
But as important as the episodes were, military historians have always known that the main scene of the Nazis’ downfall was the Eastern Front, which claimed 80 percent of all German military casualties in the war.
The four-year conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army remains the largest and possibly the most ferocious ever fought.
…
In short, the war fought on the Eastern Front is arguably the single most important chapter in modern military history—but it is a chapter that in many essential ways is only now being written”.
Despite this, anti-communist historians later whitewashed the basic facts of WWII, as part of the Cold War disinformation campaign.
They outlandishly depicted the USSR and Nazi Germany as allies, citing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, while conveniently erasing from history the Munich Agreement that Great Britain and France signed with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in September 1938, or the Quadripartite Agreement that the same powers signed in July 1933.
Mainstream Western historians nearly always fail to mention the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, the German-Polish non-aggression pact of 1934, or the German-Estonian Non-Aggression Pact and German-Latvian Non-Aggression Pact of June 1939, among others.
In fact, it was the Western capitalist powers that sought to appease Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. They had hoped that the fascist regimes would focus their attention on waging war against the communist government in Moscow.
After all, in 1936, the far-right Axis Powers signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was officially called the “Agreement against the Communist International”. Their mutual enemy was communism, not the capitalist West.
The Telegraph newspaper reported that the Soviet Union had asked Great Britain and France on August 15, 1939 to join it in an anti-Nazi alliance to invade Germany and destroy Hitler’s regime. But London and Paris were not interested, which meant that Moscow felt it had no other choice but to sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a week later. (And immediately after signing this, the USSR began producing enormous quantities of tanks, guns, and ammunition, as it prepared for war with the Third Reich.)
The Telegraph wrote:
“The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.
The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin’s generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.
But the British and French side – briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals – did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 – just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin’s offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.
“This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement,” said Gen Sotskov, 75.
The Soviet offer – made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov – would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany’s borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.
But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorised only to talk, not to make deals.
“Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany – double the number Hitler had at the time,” said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. “This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks.”
When asked what forces Britain itself could deploy in the west against possible Nazi aggression, Admiral Drax said there were just 16 combat ready divisions, leaving the Soviets bewildered by Britain’s lack of preparation for the looming conflict“.
The fact that this history is barely known in the West demonstrates the shocking degree to which US anti-communist propaganda has whitewashed the basic facts of WWII, in a desperate attempt to demonize the Soviets: the destroyers of Nazism.
A version of this article was originally published at BenNorton.com on February 9, 2014.
