One of the Great Photos of the 20th Century

The Red Army hoisting the flag atop the Reichstag, the seat of Nazi power, amidst the apocalyptic horror of the Battle of Berlin. The Battle of Berlin was one of the greatest battles of the 20th Century. In only two weeks on 1945, an incredible 181,000 were killed, 8

This must rank up there with the Iwo Jima hoisting the flag photo with one of the great photos of WW2. Actually, along with the Iwo Jima photo, it’s not only that, but it’s also one of the great photos of the last century.

The Soviet contribution to the defeat of the Axis in WW2 is completely underestimated. We didn’t even seem to be against the Nazis much before the end of 1941. I saw an article from Time Magazine in 1940 about the takeover of Poland by the USSR and Nazi Germany. There was nothing about the Nazis. It was all about the cruelty and evil of the Soviets. One would think that the piece was Nazi propaganda.

Even before 1940, there was a battle against fascism going on in Spain. A Leftwing government had been elected in 1936. There was a military coup soon afterwards, as there always is (which is why a lot of Communists say that the peaceful road to socialism is doomed), and Franco’s forces declared war on the state. I think the Army split, but I’m not sure. Hitler and Mussolini supported Franco.

The US and the rest of the rest refused to support the Republican government despite their desperate pleas for help. But the US did not stop US corporations from supplying the Francoists with military gear. These supplies along with the refusal of the West to support the Republic, led to the fall of the Republic in 1939.

Thousands of Americans went off to fight with the Republicans. They were excoriated at home, and in the 1950’s, they were purged from their jobs by the McArthyites as “premature anti-Fascists.” Amazing, huh? It was only ok to be anti-fascist after, what? 1940? 1941?

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The Nazis were essentially defeated by the USSR.

Nevertheless, revisionist history holds sway. Going to school in the Cold War, we never learned about the Soviet role in the defeat of the Nazis. Most popular US WW2 books have reams about Roosevelt and especially Churchill, oh, and don’t forget D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, but little to nothing about the crucial Eastern Front, where the war was won.

New books and articles in Time excoriate Stalin’s role in the war. The Nazi invasion caught him off-guard, since he was a fool.

Not really so. Stalin knew Hitler was going to attack, he just did not know when. There had been endless false claims of a Nazi attack, almost one a day, for the previous year. Most of these were coming out of Western intelligence, especially “war hero” Churchill’s MI-5.

While under brutal attack by the Nazis, amidst Soviet cries for alliance, Churchill the die-hard anti-Communist could not be bothered to help the “evil” USSR. Instead, his intelligence service was busy serving up Stalin a fake Nazi invasion about every day. The reason?

To set off a war between Germany and USSR in which the two enemies, one as bad as the other to Churchill, would destroy each other, meanwhile laying off the Brits. So these reports developed a boy who cried wolf quality, but Stalin knew of the invasion as soon as it started. Yes, there were tactical retreats at the beginning, now recoded as defeats by the Western media.

The same books and articles even, appallingly, try to lay responsibility for the 27 million Soviet deaths on Stalin himself! I have seen analyses of “Stalin’s Death Toll” that apportion say 10 million of those deaths to the Nazis, and the other 17 million to Stalin! Why? For being a shitty commander in chief, apparently. What a disgrace to the memory of the fallen.

The West regularly republishes the tragedy at Katyn. Yes, 40,000 Polish officers, possibly fascists, were executed. So much about this, but is there one word of the fireboming of Dresden (28,000 Germans killed in one night) or the firebombing of Tokyo (100,000 Japanese killed in a night).

We often hear reports of atrocities committed in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by Stalin. Yes, there were some killings. Keep in mind these states had elected fascist governments when the Soviets took over. Supposedly, a few of those taken away to Siberia by the NKVD were even Jews. So Stalin was an anti-Semite?

Let’s look at the facts. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Baltics when the Nazis overran them and the Red Army retreated. That was only a few less than when the Soviets took over. In a year or so, there were basically zero Jews left in the Baltics. Those who had not escaped were gassed at concentration camps. Huge numbers of locals had gleefully joined in with the Jew-killing, even forming large Nazi auxiliary armies to help the process along. Now who’s the anti-Semite anyway? Not a word of any of this in the Western media.

Yet we do hear of the Red Army reportedly waiting outside Warsaw, supposedly to let the Nazis finish off the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, though I have yet to corroborate this.

With all the sacrifices the Soviet people made in defeating the Nazi Orcs, it’s sad that we have to trash and ignore them like this.

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12 thoughts on “One of the Great Photos of the 20th Century”

  1. Hey Robert, as much as I respect and recognize the huge Soviet losses and hardship in being the main power to defeat Germany, you do have to admit that Hitler’s Germany did have some good qualities.
    He was the only 20th century Western leader to explicitly outline the Jewish problem and he called out the Jews by name, while America is today a disgusting, rotten Jewish colony that has Holohoax museums every square mile.

    1. The only good thing I will say about the Nazis is that they produced some great economic growth and they built Germany form a devastated nation into a great military and economic power. By 1936, Germany had surpassed the UK as the world’s biggest military power. England had held that position since the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

      Also, the Nazi military was one awesome, kickass military machines, one of the greatest and deadliest the world had ever seen. Hitler was also one of the world’s greatest conquerors. It is incredible the amount of territory that he conquered in such a short of period of time.

      I think he was all wrong on the Jewish Question, sorry. There are other ways to deal with such matters.

      1. What other ways? Stalin tried to assimilate them but the Jews backstabbed the USSR in the Cold War era.

        1. The Jews were no problem at all in the USSR. They were 3% of the population, but they were not allowed to have tremendous control over the economy, huge ownership of wealth, or anything like that. They had to be loyal to the state and not to a foreign power like Israel. Most Jews were very patriotic and were not traitors. Crimeans and Chechens were much worse of a problem.

          There were a few Jewish traitors after 1947, but not too many. There were traitors against the state from all of the nationalities. The USSR was generally good to the Jews and the Jews were good to the USSR.

    1. There were some of them in power at the beginning. But the Jewish period ended by 1927.They mostly did good things, if anything they went too far with radical experiments. Stalin came in and made everything backwards with his turn towards conservatism and to the Right. There were as many Latvians in the NKVD as Jews, and after 1936, there were few Jews. Jews got hit pretty bad by the purges too. The JewSSR thing that MacDonald is pushing does not really make sense.

  2. Hi Robert

    You asked me to comment. I liked the photo very much and I think you have set the record straight re the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was massive. Trouble is, no-one will take you seriously unless you write in more scholarly language and cite references for your assertions. But hey! this is a blog and you write colloquially. Your argument is valuable as it stands, especially in Amerika. It is a shame however that this comes over as an occasional piece. I was a little disturbed to see this: “By 1936, Germany had surpassed the UK as the world’s biggest power.” By 1936? In three years? Do you mean military power? That is possible, in which case German investment in Rearmament 1933-36 must have been huge. I am a little sceptical about this. The US had surpassed the UK as the world’s foremost economic power by 1913, and certainly Germany was not about to catch up with the US in the 1930s.

    Re your statement on the Jews in Nazi Germany: “There are other ways to deal with such matters.”
    You are either being sloppy or you are insinuating that the anti-semite agenda was valid in some way, which I do not believe. What do you mean? That Jewish dominance of the German commercial and financial sector was a problem? And if so why? If you follow that insinuation you’ll end up agreeing with Gilad Atzmon, that the Nazis had a point about the Jews, but they just adopted the wrong solution, and ethnic cleansing a la Palestine would have done the job. When I had the same discussion with Gilad he would not engage!

    1. Germany was the world’s largest military power in 1936, mostly due to aircraft. Prior, the UK had led the world since the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

      Yes, Jewish domination of the German economy was a problem, that’s for damn sure. Considering it led to the Holocaust, yeah I’d say it was a problem!

      I believe that in 1932, Jews, 1% of the population, controlled ~32% of the wealth in Germany. Fact is that hardly any people are going to put up with that shit for very long. It would be nice if people would, but they just don’t.

      I don’t agree with Atzmon. The Holocaust and repression was not ok, nor would have been ethnic cleansing. The other ways I was thinking included how Eastern Europe and the USSR dealt with the Jewish Question. Clearly, Jewish minorities in Eastern Europe and the USSR, at 1-10% of the population, were not allowed to monopolize vast quantities of those nations’ wealth under Communism. That’s surely one way to deal with the Jewish Question, no?

  3. 1% of wealthy Jews controlled 32% of Germany’s wealth in 1932. Let’s assume these figures are accurate. They don’t leave a great deal over for the rest of the German bourgeoisie. Now given that it had won the class struggle with the German working class in 1917-23, a period when Germany came closer than any European state to socialist revolution it is understandable (but not excusable) that the German bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie
    – traumatised by the economic crash of 1929-33 – should turn on the ethnic minority cornering some of the country’s wealth. The Holocaust (shitty term which Zionists love – it sacralizes the Nazi genocides, removing them from history and hints at the Eternal Jew, persecuted throughout history, whose only salvation is an arid fascist stetl surrounded by a 25 ft concrete wall on the edge of Asia) is not simply the result of ethnic hatred; it must have something to do the defeat of German social democracy, something the KPD had part responsibility for – following Cominternm thinking at the time – when they decided, crazily, that the German social democrats were “social fascists” and failed to unite with them to defeat the main enemy.

  4. How could you generalize by stating that Polish executed officers in Katyn were fascists? Where do you have such a belief from? These people in majority weren’t even professional soldiers. During peacetime they were doctors, lawyers, administrative officials etc. They were mobilized because of the World War 2 outbreak. Therefore even knowledge of political affiliations and beliefs of Polish Army is not the ground to classify or describe Katyn victims as fascists, even though possibly. There are no reasons to suggest that they were fascists in general or that the Soviets murdered them because they were fascists. Unless the only criteria who a fascist is are Soviets’ assurance, of course.

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