How the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler

In the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict we won. It was fought on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima, through the rubble of recaptured French towns and capped by sepia-toned scenes of joy and young love in New York. It was a victory shaped by the steeliness of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the awesome power of an atomic bomb.

Unfairly or not, the current tensions obscure the scale of what's being commemorated: Starting in 1941, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played perhaps the most important role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler. By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.

Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R.

The Red Army was "the main engine of Nazism’s destruction," writes British historian and journalist Max Hastings in "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945." The Soviet Union paid the harshest price: though the numbers are not exact, an estimated 26 million Soviet citizens died during World War II, including as many as 11 million soldiers. At the same time, the Germans suffered three-quarters of their wartime losses fighting the Red Army.

"It was the Western Allies’ extreme good fortune that the Russians, and not themselves, paid almost the entire ‘butcher’s bill’ for [defeating Nazi Germany], accepting 95 per cent of the military casualties of the three major powers of the Grand Alliance," writes Hastings.

In his memoirs, Eisenhower was appalled by the extent of the carnage:

When we flew into Russia, in 1945, I did not see a house standing between the western borders of the country and the area around Moscow. Through this overrun region, Marshal Zhukov told me, so many numbers of women, children and old men had been killed that the Russian Government would never be able to estimate the total.

Hellsangel wrote:Trying to glorify the rapists now, Comrade?

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32529679

Hellsangel wrote:So what the Japanese or the Nazis did excuses what the Soviets did? 

Think very  carefully, Comrade. This is what you whine about the BJP all the time.

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:So what the Japanese or the Nazis did excuses what the Soviets did? 

Think very  carefully, Comrade. This is what you whine about the BJP all the time.

I'm afraid it is you that need to be careful. I did not bring the rapes into discussion. Looks, to you, those 10s of millions of Soviet lives lost has no value or meaning.

Hellsangel wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:So what the Japanese or the Nazis did excuses what the Soviets did? 

Think very  carefully, Comrade. This is what you whine about the BJP all the time.

I'm afraid it is you that need to be careful. I did not bring the rapes into discussion. Looks, to you, those 10s of millions of Soviet lives lost has no value or meaning.

Stalin and Hitler tried to carve up East Europe between the two of them. They went to war when they couldn't agree. The Soviets were no great champions of freedom. After the war they subjugated the whole of East Europe.

The irony is that the Soviet Union is now broken up while Germany reunited.

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:

confuzzled dude wrote:

Hellsangel wrote:So what the Japanese or the Nazis did excuses what the Soviets did? 

Think very  carefully, Comrade. This is what you whine about the BJP all the time.

I'm afraid it is you that need to be careful. I did not bring the rapes into discussion. Looks, to you, those 10s of millions of Soviet lives lost has no value or meaning.

Stalin and Hitler tried to carve up East Europe between the two of them. They went to war when they couldn't agree. The Soviets were no great champions of freedom. After the war they subjugated the whole of East Europe.

The irony is that the Soviet Union is now broken up while Germany reunited.

Nobody was/is innocent when it comes WW II, including the UK.