Posted on 05/08/2023 5:44:53 AM PDT by george76
The West was freed from Nazi tyranny on V-E Day, but the East faced another half-century of communist slavery under the Soviet boot..
This May 8, we celebrate V-E Day, Victory in Europe Day, marking the Third Reich’s unconditional surrender to Allied forces. Though this day commemorates a triumph over one of the evilest regimes in history, we owe it to the people of Eastern Europe to remember that the end of Hitler’s Germany didn’t bring the end of their sorrows: The West was freed from Nazi tyranny, but the East faced another half-century of communist slavery under the Soviet boot.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin started the war as Adolf Hitler’s willing partner in war crime. Less than two weeks before the first shots of WWII were fired, Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, agreeing not to declare war on each other and to carve up Poland together.
By this pact, the Soviet communists greenlit the most destructive conflict in history, not just by joining Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but by enabling his aggression to the West. Knowing that Soviet troops wouldn’t invade from the east due to the freshly-inked non-aggression treaty gave Hitler a free hand to point his armies to the Western Front, where they rapidly steamrolled Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, countries that were only liberated years later at great cost in brave men’s blood. The only reason Stalin eventually joined the war against Hitler is because he was forced to do so when the fuhrer backstabbed him, invading the Soviet Union in 1941.
During and after the war, the Soviets looted priceless works of art from Poland as the Nazis did, squeezed hundreds of millions of dollars from several Eastern European countries, and started massive campaigns of ethnic cleansing in conquered territories. Soviet “liberating” troops engaged in wide-scale rape and looting of populations who had suffered for years of Nazi war crimes. (When a Yugoslav official, whose country had lost roughly a million lives to Nazi atrocities, told Stalin about Soviet soldiers who had raped Yugoslav women, Stalin responded: “Can’t you understand if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?”)
To further cement Soviet control over what would become known as the Iron Curtain, Stalin imposed on Eastern Europe communist dictators whose brutality makes Attila the Hun look like Mother Theresa. Sadistic madmen whose names are little-known in the Western world, like Romania’s Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Albania’s Enver Hoxha, came to power riding the coattails of Soviet tanks and instituted Stalinist dictatorships.
Think of Enver Hoxha, for example, as an Eastern European Kim Jong-Un. This erratic Albanian communist determined which names parents would be allowed to give their babies, tortured people for saying truths he didn’t want to hear, shut down all churches and mosques, and locked up musicians who played Mozart. His tyranny turned Albania into “the third poorest country in the world, with the GNP of a small town and an average income of 15 USD a month” by the time of his death in 1985.
Such tyrants ruled Eastern Europe until the fall of communism in the ‘80s and ‘90s, subjecting their victim populations to terror and poverty. Growing up in a Romanian family, I heard many horror stories about my family’s life in the Romania of Dej and his successor, Nicolae Ceausescu, including my relatives having to wait in line for hours just to get a loaf of bread or, if they were lucky, some chicken feet. (Which, if you’ve never had the pleasure of “enjoying,” are not particularly filling or savory). A Romanian joke at the time went: “In American butcher shops, the sign outside says the owner’s name, and inside you can find meat. In Romanian butcher shops, the sign outside says ‘meat’ and inside you can find only the manager.”
This was the reality of life for tens of millions of people who lived in Soviet-imposed communism for decades: long waiting in bread lines, poverty, and the fear of being shot or imprisoned for complaining about your horrible life — that is, when you weren’t being shot or imprisoned on the arbitrary whim of a dictator even if you didn’t dare to speak out.
In one of his most famous war speeches, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: “If we can stand up to [Hitler], all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.” The Western Allies freed half of Europe from Nazi domination, and Western Europe enjoyed Churchill’s beautiful vision of postwar freedom. But this freedom was denied to millions of people who were trapped behind the Iron Curtain, who, instead of “broad, sunlit uplands” faced the darkness of prison camps. This V-E Day, we must honor their memories and remember their suffering.
The arctic convoys weren't steady at the time of the Stalingrad battles. Matter of fact they were suspended at that time and only resumed after the Torch invasion of North Africa in Nov 1942. Also a large portion of the aid went through Iran and Vladivostok.
The book YEAR ZERO talks about what happen in Europe just after ww2. Millions died from forced relocation, revenge killings. Starvation, disease.
Not before Old Joe was a good buddy of Hitler.
Russia provided man power.
We supplied them the material, the money and loads of iron ore.
The Russians never paid us a dime for it.
The Threat of International Communism was real (the Cold War proved this 100%) and is what allowed Hitler to seize Power in Germany and justified his march eastward.
The Nazi party was never suppoerted by a majority of Germans, but the majority always opposed Communism.
No Communist Threat, No Fasist crack downs required.
History is wriitne by Communists sympathsizers. When faces with a binary choice, most people chose the lesser of two evils. Jornos always chose Communism.
Sure Russia paid dearly in WWII, but it was their F-d up idealoligy that helped start it.
Letter to the American Church. Eric Metaxas: Silence of American churches today echoes the 1930s Germans..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTzjX6USI6E
They didn’t until 1947 things changed
Now we need to get the U.S. Third Reich (democrats) to unconditional surrender.
Maybe we should vhe listened to Admiral Doenitz.
Looking back at history, it is clear how Russia aided and abetted its partner, Nazi Germany, from 1939 to 1941 - supplying the Nazis with the oil it needed to fuel its holocaust and war in the west.
You Russians were Nazi allies.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you celebrate Waterloo day?
WWII was 78 years ago - most who experienced it are dead. It has entered faded history like the Napoleonic wars.
We should remember it, yes, but we can’t expect everyone to remember them, no more than we expect people to remember the 7 years war or the war of Spanish succession etc.
Poland never recovered from their Nazi embrace. That’s why the world laughs at them.
My late Dad was a seaman on an American Destroyer on the North Atlantic Convoy Run. Didn’t get sunk until he was in the Med.
Remember that the USSR didn’t fight Germany for us…they fought it for themselves, and took full credit for the victory.
Nah, that’s you Russians.
You were pals with the Nazis and now you have a wannabe Nazi dictator Putin who has ruled for 23 years.
Nazi much today?
Nah, I’m not you, Ivan Presto
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