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Putin On World War II
Due to decades of Hollywood propaganda many people in "western" countries believe that the U.S. did the most to defeat the Nazis during World War II.
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Nothing could be further from the truth.
The President of Russia Vladimir Putin has taken the opportunity of the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II to describe the build-up to the war, the diplomatic and military considerations Russia took into account during that time, and the results of the allies' victory.
His essay was published in multiple languages on the Website of the Kremlin:
75th Anniversary of the Great Victory: Shared Responsibility to History and our Future.
The English version is also published in the National Interest magazine:
Vladimir Putin: The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II.
The part with the Russian view of the behavior of various nation in the late 1930s is most interesting. But this passage, related to the graphic above, is also very relevant:
The Soviet Union and the Red Army, no matter what anyone is trying to prove today, made the main and crucial contribution to the defeat of Nazism.
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This is a report of February 1945 on reparation from Germany by the Allied Commission on Reparations headed by Ivan Maisky. The Commission's task was to define a formula according to which defeated Germany would have to pay for the damages sustained by the victor powers. The Commission concluded that “the number of soldier-days spent by Germany on the Soviet front is at least 10 times higher than on all other allied fronts. The Soviet front also had to handle four-fifths of German tanks and about two-thirds of German aircraft.” On the whole, the USSR accounted for about 75 percent of all military efforts undertaken by the Anti-Hitler Coalition. During the war period, the Red Army “ground up” 626 divisions of the Axis states, of which 508 were German.
On April 28, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his address to the American nation: “These Russian forces have destroyed and are destroying more armed power of our enemies – troops, planes, tanks, and guns – than all the other United Nations put together.” Winston Churchill in his message to Joseph Stalin of September 27, 1944, wrote that “it is the Russian army that tore the guts out of the German military machine…”
Such an assessment has resonated throughout the world. Because these words are the great truth, which no one doubted then. Almost 27 million Soviet citizens lost their lives on the fronts, in German prisons, starved to death and were bombed, died in ghettos and furnaces of the Nazi death camps. The USSR lost one in seven of its citizens, the UK lost one in 127, and the USA lost one in 320.
As a German and former officer who has read quite a bit about the war I agree with the Russian view. It was the little acknowledged industrial power of the Soviet Union and the remarkable dedication of the Red Army soldiers that defeated the German Wehrmacht.
At the end of his essay Putin defends the veto power of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. In his view it has prevented another clash on a global scale from happening since World War II ended. Putin rejects attempts to abolish that system.
I have found no major flaw with the historic facts in the essay and recommend to read it in full.
Debunking the Polish trolls here…
What really happened at Katyn? (I)
Historians, political scientists, Western “experts” and anti-communist “liberals” in Russia have always attributed the Katyn massacre to the NKVD, the secret police of the Soviet Union, providing alleged evidence and documents that would prove such authorship. However, all indications suggest that the Katyn massacre is another historical falsification similar to the Ukrainian Holodomor or to the figures given on the “millions of deaths” of Soviet communism. The responsibility for what happened in Katyn, in light of the evidence and testimonies provided, was the work of the Nazis.
80 years after the events of Katyn (supposedly happened in April 1940) near the city of Smolensk (border with Belarus), where more than 20 thousand Polish soldiers were executed in a nearby forest, the propaganda of the cold war returns with force, and the renewed counterfeits of the West against Russia and the former USSR.
Definitely, there is not a single consistent proof of Soviet authorship in the Katyn massacre.
Interestingly, on June 18, 2012, the European Communities Court of Justice for Human Rights, following a claim by Polish relatives of the soldiers executed in Katyn, made a surprising decision: the “documents” provided by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, after the fall of the USSR (which we will talk about in the second part of this entry), indicating that Stalin and the Soviets were guilty of the execution of tens of thousands of Polish officers near Katyn, were false. A historical slap to the propagandists of the “Russian Katyn”.
The alleged documents on the mass execution of Katyn, which appeared in the late 1980s, were gutted by one of the members of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, Alexander Yakovlev (a more than likely US agent who trained in North American Columbia University in the late 1950s), turned out to be false. The European court did not even accept them for consideration.
The European Court was also unable to clearly decide who was responsible for the massacre since the judges did not have enough documentary evidence, although they spent more than a year studying all kinds of historical documents and archival evidence. Until around 1990, everyone was convinced that the Poles had been killed by the Germans. This decision of the EECC Court of Justice has been completely ignored by the propagandists of the Katyn myth.(…)
In the early 19th century, fueling the illusory hope of restoring Greater Poland, the Poles sided with Napoleon in the war of 1812. The Polish army, created with the help of the French, became part of the “Great Army ”Of Bonaparte as the most reliable foreign contingent. This was the third Polish invasion of Russia.
The Polish uprising of 1830 began with the widespread extermination of the Russians. In all the churches they called for the indiscriminate murder of the Russians. In Warsaw, on Easter night, an entire battalion of the Russian army was taken by surprise in a church. 2,265 Russian soldiers and officers died.
The Polish state, born in November 1918, immediately showed its hostility towards Soviet Russia. With the help of the Entente, Poland begins preparations for a war against Russia. Polish politicians had the possibility that a forceful blow from the Polish army would be dealt to the Russian army.
Poland accompanied its aggressive intentions with a set of propaganda stereotypes about the aggressiveness of the Bolsheviks. Numerous proposals from the young Soviet state to conclude a peace treaty and establish diplomatic relations were rejected. Polish military operations against Russia in the spring of 1920 were undertaken by Poland, not Soviet Russia.
After tripling numerical superiority, Polish troops, along with the army of the Ukrainian nationalist military man Simon Petliura, launched a full-scale offensive along the entire Western Front from Pripyat to Dniester. This was the fourth Polish invasion of Russian lands. In early May 1920, Polish and Petliura fighters captured Kiev. The invasion of the allied forces of Poland and Petlyura was accompanied by brutal and inhuman retaliation against the civilian civilian population.
In the occupied regions of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, Polish invaders established bloody local governments, insulted and robbed civilians, or burned innocent people. Orthodox churches became Polish Christian churches, national schools closed.(…)
The total number of prisoners of war who died in those concentration camps is not known with certainty. However, there are various estimates based on the number of Soviet prisoners of war who returned from Polish captivity – there were 75,699 people. Russian historian Mikhail Meltiukhov estimates the number of prisoners killed at 60,000 people. Mortality among prisoners of war reached 50 people per day and as of mid-November 1920 it was 70 people per day. In the Tukholsky concentration camp alone, during the entire time of its existence, 22 thousand Red Army prisoners of war died.
In other words, the Poles established in their concentration camps a systematic policy of extermination with the Russians that reached the character of genocide, something that has been systematically silenced or hidden by the West in favor of Polish propaganda. For these crimes, the Poles today neither feel guilty nor have any remorse and disparagingly call it “Russian propaganda”.
In the period between the two world wars, Poland repeatedly threatened to destroy Bolshevism and Russia as a state. Instead, as General Vladyslaw Anders, an active participant in Pan-Poland’s intervention against Soviet Russia in 1919-1920, admitted, “There was never a real threat from the USSR to Poland.”
Poland was never reluctant to attack Russia to hold, alongside Nazi Germany and Japan, a parade of victorious Polish-German troops on Moscow’s Red Square. Marshal and national hero of Poland, the dictator Jozéf Pilsudsky, responsible for the mass extermination of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews, dreamed of coming to Moscow and writing “It is forbidden to speak Russian on the Kremlin wall!”
In January 1934, Poland was the first, five years before the USSR, to conclude a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany. In late 1936, the Anti-Komintern Pact was concluded with the signing of Germany and Japan, which were later joined by Italy, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Denmark, Finland, Croatia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and the Republic of China (a state puppet formed by the Japanese empire in occupied territory).
The Poles, at that time, flatly refused to sign any agreement with the USSR, a country that despite having been throughout the history of countless Polish aggressions reached out to Poland. As early as mid-August 1939, the Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck, in whose office there was a portrait of Hitler, declared that “we have no military agreement with the USSR, nor do we want to have one.”
In developing the plan of attack against Poland in early 1939, Hitler did not take into account the overtly anti-Soviet policies of the Polish government before the war. He and his entire circle despised and hated the Poles as a nation (even though they had been his allies in the 1930s), which was natural since his supremacist ideology did not take into account other nations than the German one.
In August 1939, before the attack on Poland, Hitler ordered that all Polish women, men, and children be ruthlessly exterminated. During the years of occupation, the Nazis murdered more than 6 million Poles, representing 22 percent of the Polish population. 95% of genetically defective Poles were planned to be evicted from their homeland.
Soviet troops, by contrast, did not allow the Nazis to wipe Poland off the face of the earth. No other force in the world could do this. “Poles must be very stupid, Winston Churchill wrote in January 1944, if they don’t understand who saved them and who for the second time in the first half of the 20th century gives them the possibility of true freedom and independence.” These surprising statements by Churchill, a confessed anti-communist, had nothing to do with the Cold War preparations that the British premier against the USSR and the socialist countries subsequently devised and that was reflected in his famous speech by Fulton (USA).
More than 600,000 Soviet soldiers gave their lives, saving the cities and towns of Poland in battles with the Nazis. On the contrary, during the three weeks of the Polish-German war of 1939, there were attacks by Polish troops against units of the Red Army. As a consequence of these attacks, the Soviet army lost more than a thousand of its men.
The Polish troops, who were in the midst of the Second World War in the territory of the Soviet Union, refused to fight together with the Red Army against which it should be a common Nazi enemy and left for Iran in the summer of 1942 While in the USSR, Polish troops engaged in robbery in cities and towns and committed atrocities in them.
During World War II, up to half a million Polish volunteers fought on the eastern front against the USSR, as part of the Nazi Wehrmacht (the regular army). In fact, the Germans did not carry out a forced mobilization of Polish fighters to fight alongside Nazi Germany. In the SS, the Poles acted voluntarily and in the Wehrmacht, they posed as “Germans” or “semi-Germans”.
During the four years of the war, the Red Army captured 4 million Wehrmacht soldiers and volunteers from 24 European nationalities. The Poles on that list were in seventh place (over 60,000 mercenaries), ahead of the Italians (about 49,000).
It should be noted that the mortality of German refugees in Polish camps in 1945-1946. reached 50%. In the Potulice camp in 1947-1949 half of the prisoners died of starvation, cold and harassment by the Polish guards. At the end of the war, four million Germans lived in Poland. According to estimates by the Union of German Exiles, the loss of the German population during the expulsion from Poland amounted to some 3 million people.
After the unmitigated defeat of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, it became clear that if nothing extraordinary happened in favor of the Hitler regime, nothing would change the course of events and the Third Reich would eventually implode in the very near future.
So the Nazis “discovered” in 1943, in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, a mass grave with Polish officers. The Germans immediately declared that, as a result of the opening of the graves, all those buried there had been executed by members of the Soviet Union’s secret police, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), in the spring of 1940. .
The official statement on the Katyn massacre was made by the Nazi government and released by its Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, on April 13, 1943, in a statement speaking about the “terrible discovery of the crimes of the Jewish commissioners of the NKVD ”in the Katyn Forest. With this propaganda device, Nazi Germany sought to divide the anti-Hitler coalition and win the war.
The significance of such a declaration by the Goebbels Department had a cunning undercurrent: the Polish government-in-exile would strongly oppose Moscow and thereby pressure the British who sheltered them in London to stop supporting the Kremlin. According to Berlin’s calculations, the Poles would push the British and Americans to fight Stalin, which could imply a completely different development from the events in World War II.
But Goebbels’ calculation was not justified: Britain at the time did not consider it profitable to believe in the “crime of the Bolsheviks”. At the same time, the head of London’s “Polish government”, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, took a relentless position and began to truly become an obstacle to the great international policy of alliances between the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.
The Vladislav Sikorsky government in London supported Goebbels’s version and began to distribute it diligently, hoping that this would help regain power in Warsaw and spark a war between the USSR and its anti-Hitler coalition allies. Sikorsky supported the Germans’ proposal to send to the Katyn region an “International Medical Commission” created by them under the auspices of the International Red Cross (IRC) with doctors selected by Germany, as well as experts from 13 allied countries and the German-occupied countries.
When his CRI commission reached Katyn, Goebbels demanded that his subordinates prepare everything, including a medical report tailored to the Nazis. Under pressure from the Nazis and so that events such as the terrible fate of Polish officers would not be repeated in the future, the agreement was signed by the majority of the members of the international commission.
Members of the commission, such as the doctor from the Department of Forensic Medicine at Sofia University, Marko Markov, and the Czech professor of forensic medicine, Frantisek Gajek, did not support Goebbels’s version. The representatives of Vichy, France, Professor Castedo, and Spain, Professor Antonio Piga and Pascual, did not put their signature on the final document. After the war, all members of the international commission of forensic experts abandoned their conclusions in the spring of 1943.
The Polish Red Cross Technical Commission, which worked in Katyn in specially “prepared” places and under the control of the Germans, was unable to reach unequivocal conclusions about the causes of death of the Polish officers, although they discovered German cartridges used in the shooting of victims in the Katyn forest. Joseph Goebbels demanded to keep this a secret so that the Katyn case would not collapse.
A few weeks later, on July 4, 1943, General Sikorsky, his daughter Zofya, and the head of his cabinet, Brigadier General Tadeusz Klimecki, were killed in a plane crash near Gibraltar. Only the Czech pilot, Eduard Prchal, survived, who was unable to clearly explain why he put on a life jacket during this flight, when he generally did not.
The position of the “Western Allies” of the USSR in World War II on the Katyn issue began to change along with the deterioration of relations between Washington-London and Moscow, once the “cold war” began by the United States and its allies. The accusations against the USSR were continued by the American Madden commission in 1951-1952.
Posted by: H.Schmatz | Jun 21 2020 0:03 utc | 47
A lot of people here are falling into the anachronism of judging the 1930s-1940s through the lenses of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is from December 10th 1948. There wasn’t any concept of human rights before and during WWII, people didn’t judge each other by this concept.
Poland wanted to wage a war of conquest to rebuild their empire. They lost. If you’re a POW, you must be prepared to suffer any kind of consequences. There are no rules in wars of annihilation.
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@ Posted by: Kay Fabe | Jun 21 2020 1:13 utc | 50
The icebreaker theory is already debunked. Even the American historians don’t buy it anymore.
Everybody was building up in the 1930s. The 1930s was an era of rapid military reform and revolution. New equipment and technology was being introduced, and officers were being replaced by the new generation.
The reason Hitler preserved his WWI generals was very simple: the Versailles Treaty forbade Germany from graduating new high officers. As a result, there was a 12 year gap in the German high office of the armed forces. In fact, Hitler seemed to hate the Prussian aristocracy that made a large chunk of his generals. He had to make the reform of the high office during the war: by the end of the Battle of France, seven officers were promoted to Generalfeldmarschall (funnily, Rommel wasn’t one of them) – by far the largest amount in German history. By 1943, he had the high command office he wanted – ironically, too late, as that was the year that marked Nazi decline in the war.
Glantz is even more assertive against this icebreaker theory: if anything, the quick fall of France and the UK made things much worse for Stalin’s plan. The ideal scenario for the USSR was for Germany to self-destruct with France-UK, so the Red Army could have the most time possible to finish its reforms.
As for Stalin’s reforms during the 1930s.
All the evidence (and there’s plenty) points that his first five-year plan was a monumental success among the Soviet people. The results took a little to show, but you have to keep in mind that the USSR went on completely unaffected by the 1929 crisis. That fact boosted the morale of the Soviet people immensely, as it was evidence the USSR was really transitioning to a socialist system.
We know Stalin’s early five-year plans were to be a huge success. What Western historians like to tell us is that they were a huge success at the cost of the Soviet people. This is a complete myth: the Soviet people were very aware of the short-term consequences of the five-year plans, and they were supportive of them even knowing them. The problem here is one of anachronism: people living in the comfort of their post-war imperial countries tend to see the peasant life as cruel and difficult. Well, the problem is this was the country the Czar left to the Bolsheviks, and that was the world the Soviet people knew at the time. You cannot judge the lifestyle of the old peoples with modern lens.
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@ Posted by: m | Jun 21 2020 6:11 utc | 62
That wasn’t the Bolshevik’s theory, and, either way, any hope for a world revolution were already dead by the 1930s.
Lenin’s analysis was very concrete: capitalism would exhaust its possibilities and lead to total war, which would – within capitalism’s own contradictions (and not by external invasion and conquest) – lead to the historical stage of socialism. Russia, therefore, was just the first piece of domino, not the country with manifest destiny.
His hope would be that Germany would become socialist with the disaster of WWI. However, the 1918 German Revolution was crushed and he had to abandon his analysis. He then initiated the NEP, in a phase he called “State Capitalism”. So, he changed his mind, he didn’t initiated any imperialistic reform.
The Trotskyists – already mainly exiled in the Western countries – released a manifesto during WWII calling for the USSR to not stop in Berlin, going all the way to the whole European Peninsula. But they already were a nullity within the USSR by then, so their opinion really didn’t matter.
There was a plan commissioned to Zhukov for an eventual conquest of the whole European Peninsula, in case the Western allies did a volte face after Germany’s fall. However, this is just protocol for any Marshall of any armed forces: it is his job to cover all the possibilities, not matter how unlikely they are to come. The USA, for example, had a post-war plan for a war against Canada and the UK; Hitler had commissioned a plan for a war against Switzerland; Churchill commissioned a plan for a war against the USSR right after WWII was over (Operation Unthinkable). Those plans are part of the job of a Marshall – their existence don’t mean a nation seriously thinks about world domination.
The failure of the German Revolution was so shocking that, when he received a copy of the SPD journal announcing they had betrayed the revolution, Lenin thought it was a fake news piece planted by the Kaiser intelligence.
Posted by: vk | Jun 21 2020 15:04 utc | 79
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