Posted on 01/24/2020 8:16:41 AM PST by NorseViking
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin unveiled a monument dedicated to the victims of the Siege of Leningrad, in Jerusalem on Thursday.
Netanyahu said that the Soviet sacrifice and contribution during WWII should not be forgotten in the eradication of the Nazi monster.
In his speech, President Putin hoped that the monument "will remain for a long time, I hope, for centuries. And you can unveil it in different ways. But the way you did it today... Thank you."
The event is part of the 5th World Holocaust Forum taking place in Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance centre on Thursday.
(Excerpt) Read more at m.youtube.com ...
russian collusion is evident.
Whatever we think of Stalin, and I don’t think much that’s good, if not for the Soviets we never would have defeated the Nazis.
Russia, Israel, and the entire West all have a common - and deadly - enemy: radical Islam. So its good to see Russia and Israel shaking hands at this event.
Side note to Putin: Dont forget that the Nazis and the Islamists were allies. Todays Islamists want to destroy Israel. But Russia is on their list too.
This monument is a good thing. But it should include the entire mass murder period from 1919 through the nazi period. Stalin had already murdered about a fourth of the population during the great terror and and the great purge.
I guess your death only counts if you were murdered by a nazi.
True, but that credit goes to the Russian people, not to Stalin. Another of his endless crimes was glomming onto the WWII suffering of the Russian people and taking credit. He probably doubled the suffering that would have been needed.
And when he thankfully died, he was about to unleash another terror.
> Whatever we think of Stalin, and I dont think much thats good, if not for the Soviets we never would have defeated the Nazis. <
Stalin was a mass murderer on the same level as Hitler and Mao. But when the German army neared Moscow in the fall of 1941, Stalin refused to leave the city and flee eastward. If he had left, that might have set off a panic.
But he stayed. And the city held. So Ill give Stalin some credit. He made many monstrous decisions. But he did the right thing in the fall of 1941.
By all accounts his Generals found him catatonic at that moment. In a complete panic not knowing what to do. But even had he fled it wouldn’t have changed a thing. The nazis would have entered Moscow, and been defeated in roughly the same manner.
Napoleon took Moscow and it did zero good for him. Russians do not have a mentality that taking Moscow means you have lost.
BS. US aid to the Soviets and the weather, along with the Nazi’s mismanagement of supplies was the reason of the defeat.
I hope they also acknowledge the Heroes of Leningrad that were murdered by Stalin after the war.
Stalin was not a fan of Leningrad, he never trusted the Leadership there, because he thought they were too “independent”.
If the Nazis had razed the city to the ground, Stalin wouldn’t have shed a tear.
The Soviet army was quite brutal while they were streaming across eastern Europe towards Germany, because of the horrific atrocities committed by the Nazis against the civilian population of the USSR.
Of course, Hitler and Stalin were both monsters, and while Hitler is still denounced as the example of evil, Stalin was every bit as bad, and he was in power far longer.
Mark
Hell, Stalin murdered Leningrad people before the war, wholesale. Then he continued AFTER the war.
> By all accounts his Generals found him catatonic at that moment. In a complete panic not knowing what to do. <
I believe that was true for the first weeks after the German invasion in June of 1941. I even read somewhere that when the Soviet generals first informed Stalin of the invasion, Stalin thought the generals were going to arrest him.
But by the fall of 1941 Stalin had pulled himself together.
> Napoleon took Moscow and it did zero good for him. <
That is an interesting observation. And it probably lead Hitler to delay his assault on Moscow until it was too late. The Moscow of 1941 was a key rail hub. If the Germans had taken it, Stalin would have had great difficulty moving troops between the northern and southern fronts.
So would Hitler have won had he taken Moscow? Maybe. But Hitler was so strategically stupid that he probably would have thrown that advantage away.
Now I know what you read on the subject. You forgot crazy Hitler spoiling everything for the ‘competent’ generals. Post-Nazi German propaganda is as far from truth as Goebbels’s one.
It was more than that. The Russian soldiers fought damned hard. No less than Heinz Guderian wrote in his journal that “the offensive on Moscow failed ... “We underestimated the enemy’s strength, as well as his size and climate”.
Good for Netanyahu...
“it’s quite probable that England would fallen, and the war in Europe would have gone on far longer than it did, with a distinct possibility that the Axis would have won.”
Very doubtful. One, the Brits had already denied the Germans air superiority. And the Germans had zero chance of a sea crossing of the English Channel. We always hear about “the Few”. But “the many” was the home fleet sitting at Scappa Flo.
It would have come down like a freight train and destroyed everything German in the channel. The Germans had almost nothing comparable to stop them. The German fleet was pitiful compared to the RN lying in wait. And the German air force did not dominate the Channel to the point the RN couldn’t have operated.
And the Axis wasn’t going to win. They would have simply delayed the inevitable. And even if they hadn’t invaded, massive amounts of men and material were demanded on the eastern border lest the Soviets decide to make a move.
The Germans were doomed the day they started the war. A nuclear weapon was their only chance. But they decided it would be smarter to chase every Jew out of Europe and stifle intellect.
Stalin had the Party Leader of Leningrad, Sergei Kirov, assassinated in 1934.
And then used that as a justification to arrest a quarter of the city.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.