I appreciate the fight the individual Soviet Soldiers put up when their backs were up against the wall.
But what set in stone my views on The Soviet Union and WWII was the wrectched and inhumane treatment they visited on their own soldiers after the war.
I understand(but do not condone) the Soviets treatment of German POWs, but the treatment of their own solders who were captured and repatriated was one of the cruelest treatment a governement has visited on its own citizens in modern history.
Those Soviet men had fought in bloody, ungodly conditions against better trained and equipped German soldiers (at least initially) then, after capture, were subjected to worse treatment than the Jews in concentration camps
Astonishingly, there are many instances of Jewish concentration camp prisoners (on edge of starvation and murder themselves) who were able to actually muster real pity for the Soviet POW’s whose paths they often crossed during both of their journeys through Nazi Hell.
The Jews saw that the Soviet POWs breathed air at the even more tenuous whims of German guards than they themselves did, which is a damning statement of German treatment of Soviet POWs.
But even more astonishingly inhumane and cruel than German treatment of Soviet POWs was the Soviet treatment of those same men, their own men who were released after spending years in Nazi Hell. Those men, who probably had all hope die in them of ever seeing their home and loved ones again extinguished at the hands of the Nazis, only to flame up again when they were freed. Then they were rounded up, confused, and shot, disappeared, or sent off to Gulags never to be seen again.
Some few made it all the way back and into the arms of their loved ones, only to have the authorities round them up again and shipped off the Gulag where they were never seen again. And a minicule number made it out of the gulag after 20 years, some even having fivers or tanners slapped on to the top.
It is THAT heinous treatment which makes me despise the Soviet Union and taints any good they were able to impart on anything, even up to (but probably not including) any American lives that may have been lost without the involvement of resources the Germans had to divert to the Western Front.
That action by the Soviets against their own fighting men because they had contact with the West, or simply because it was easier just to destroy any man who had been captured because that included the subset of any who had contact with the West.
In my mind, that is pure, concentrated, sadistic evil, what they did to their own POW’s.
In that light I would say to anyone campaigning for acknowledgement of a greater role played by the Soviet Union for ending the war (when it comes from anyone willing to share that credit with the government) can go pound sand. I can respect the individual Soviet soldier who fought to live, and acknowledge with genuine sadness the loss of so many Soviet lives civilian and military, but anything beyond that is corrupted for me.
Your diatribe is appreciated. Would you have preferred to have the Germans to have succeeded in their conquest of the Soviet Union.
On the day I was born, US Army and Red Army troops met at Torgau in Germany. Those Russian soldiers were subsequently sent to the gulag, simply because they had met and celebrated linking up as well as defeating the German army.
Great post. Most long posts meander, not that one. What the Russians did to the captured nations was equally reprehensible.