True.
That a significant number of those men fighting Hitler did so at the point of their own comrade’s guns doesn’t change that fact. Or the fact that hundreds of thousands of Russians exposed to direct contact to the West during the war spent the rest of their lives in the Gulags, worked and starved to death.
It was indeed at great cost to themselves, but a significant portion of that cost (and a morally far more disturbing cost than those Soviets actually killed or wounded in the war) was at the hands of their own countrymen who treated them as cannon-fodder, if not worse (as outright traitors) as they found out when they were both repatriated from German POW camps or simply returned home as veterans when the war ended.
We (the allies, specifically us and the British) share a blame in some of that repugnancy (the repatriations who were imprisoned upon their return) but that was the way the world was then.
Am currently reading Nicholas Stargardt's "The German War" (which I can wholeheartedly recommend).
Interestingly, there were more Soviet "Fremdarbeiter" working together with and for the Nazis than there were Soviet P.O.W.s. - sometimes quite willingly.
There were also entire brigades - called "Legionen" - of Ukrainian, Baltic, Muslim, and Tatar nationalists who had believed that it would be to their benefit to fight for the Nazis.
Regards,
That always blew me away: Russian POWs freed by advancing Soviet army is sent back into battle and at the end of the war the survivors are sent to the gulag.
The figure I read many years ago was well over 1 million sent to the camps back home.