How The Soviets Saved the World from Hitler
Question: Did you ever think of the Russians as the "good guys?"
"There are not so many nations that could hold out under the blows of a war machine as powerful as the one Hitler unleashed against us. It is an eternal credit to the Russian people that they did not give up and were not destroyed." - Winston Churchill, acknowledging the resilience of the Soviet Union in the face of Nazi aggression.
Reichstag Photo
There is a famous and iconic photo from World War II called "Flag above the Reichstag." The picture is full of symbolism and represents a truly historic moment. Erected in 1894, the Reichstag's architecture was magnificent for its time. The iconic building contributed much to German history, but to the invading Red Army, the Nazi headquarters embodied evil.
Next to Joe Rosenthal's photo of raising the flag on Iwo Jima, Yevgeny Khaldei's photo of Soviet soldiers raising a flag on top of the Reichstag building in Berlin is perhaps the most famous photo of World War II. The Soviets' capture of the Reichstag (the German Parliament Building) on May 2nd, 1945, effectively ended the war in Europe.
But in the Western popular imagination -- particularly the American one -- World War II is a conflict "we" won. We Americans fought on the beaches of Normandy against the Nazis and the Japanese on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Our images of the war consist of young paratroopers from the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers battling through the rubble of recaptured French towns.
The grim determination of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower during Normandy, the moral fiber of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the days of destiny in May 1940, and the incredible power of dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 shaped the Western Allies' victory image. The black and white snapshot of a delighted sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square in the iconic V-J Day photo caps our memories, a scene of joy and victory in New York.
That popular narrative shifts dramatically when you get to Russia, where World War II is called the "Great Patriotic War," and the Allied victory is remembered in a vastly different light: by sacrificing tens of millions of Soviet citizens and soldiers to stop Nazi War Machine.
Of course, the start of the war was shaped by the Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up Poland. Despite the treaty, for Hitler, the key to domination in Europe lay in the invasion of the Soviet Union. When Hitler turned against the USSR on a fateful Sunday in June 1941, he sent a three million-man army rumbling into Russia. German forces attacked in three axes along a 1,800-mile-long front from the Baltic Ocean to the Black Sea.
Hitler took Russia by surprise, but it was not long after that he regretted that decision. Historians today believe that invading Russia was the key mistake Hitler made during the war because he didn't equip his troops for the cold, brutal Russian winter.
But why did Hitler invade Russia?
First, Hitler loathed Communists. Second, the Nazi Leader justified the need for the invasion for "Lebensraum," or living space for Germans in the vast fertile plains of western Russia. Hitler wanted to copy the American idea of expansion like his own personal "Manifest Destiny." Instead of pushing west, he drove east.
Starting that June and for the next four years, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Nazi war machine and played the most crucial role in the Allies' defeat of Hitler.
Disturbing Numbers
Don't think so? Chew on this fact: Over 405,000 Americans gave their lives in the conflict, while it's estimated that the Soviet Union lost 24 to 26 million military and civilians in World War II (approximately 13.7% of the population at the time). By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same. By some accounts, 400 Soviets died each minute for four years.
Epic Battles
Several epic battles rolled back the Nazi advance -- the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, the clash of thousands of armored vehicles at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history) -- had no parallel on the Western Front, where the Nazis committed fewer military men, but the Soviets died in greater numbers. But the fighting in the East was much harsher for the German army than in Western Europe.
By the summer of 1942, the German army commanded vast swaths of the country. So much, in fact, that before the war, 40 percent of Russia's population had lived in the areas the Germans occupied. The Nazis murdered tens of millions of Soviet citizens, and millions had fled east.
By 1943, the Soviet Union had already lost some 5 million soldiers and two-thirds of its industrial capacity to the Nazi advance. By this point in the war, the Soviets and the Nazis fought as if the entire war depended on their victory. Perhaps it did. That it was able to turn back the German invasion is a testament to the courage of the Soviet war effort. But it came at a shocking price. Savagery was on full display on both sides. By 1943, neither side took prisoners.
Kursk
The July 1943 Battle of Kursk- ironically in Ukraine- was the greatest armored clash in the history of the world and the decisive battle of World War II. Vast armies of the Soviets and Nazis engaged each other, and the titanic air battle included the single bloodiest day of aerial warfare of all time. The terrible conflict was so bloody it made even the stoic Hitler confess that it made his "stomach turn over."
The battle was Germany's last chance to regain dominance on the Eastern Front during World War II and would be their final blitzkrieg offensive. The clash was a decisive Soviet victory. Germany never regained momentum on the Eastern Front or recovered their loss of manpower and armor. From then on, the Germans were on the defensive as they spent the next year trying to limp home.
The Trauma of Invasion
For Russia's neighbors, it's hard to separate the country's eventual victory over the Nazis from the five decades under Soviet domination. During World War II, the country's great sacrifice was a big feeder into muscular Russian nationalism during the Cold War. Believe it or not, the USSR was paranoid of another Western invasion. The Soviets were traumatized by what they had endured at the hands of the Nazis during the war. Now, Putin and his Kremlin allies peddle the same rhetoric.
Foreign Policy Based on Fear
This paranoiac fear is why Putin, born just after World War II, invaded Ukraine in February 2022-- to keep the Central European nation as a "buffer" state between him and the encroaching West.
The Russian contribution to World War II cannot be exaggerated. Without the titanic efforts of the Soviet Union, victory in Western Europe would not have happened.
A Great Debt
By the time the Western Allied Armies of the United States, England, and Canada landed in Normandy in June 1944, the best of the German army had already been ground to dust by the Soviets, but at a tragic cost. Although the Allied landings on D-Day in 1944 did play a decisive role in helping to end the war, we should never forget how the Soviets' sacrifice won World War II in Europe for the Allies.