Posted on 09/23/2018 11:56:32 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
An Associated Press correction last week and reactions to it show that the question of whether the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies at the dawn of World War II remains a hot-button issue for many Russians and eastern Europeans.
The correction was issued to an article about a Holocaust commemoration in the Ukrainian city of Lviv that originally called the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “former allies.”
The AP concluded that the pact reached on Aug. 23, 1939 by the German and Soviet foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov didn’t constitute a formal alliance, thus the correction.
The correction followed letters from the Russian Foreign Ministry sent both to the AP and to other media outlets that printed the story, saying that the phrase “former allies” was a “vivid example of attempts to rewrite history” and that the U.S.S.R., had never been the ally of Hitler’s Germany.
This isn’t how history is seen by many people in Poland and the Baltics.
“The Soviet-Nazi alliance began World War II,” tweeted Jerdzej Tomczak, a member of the Polish delegation to NATO.
“An annual reminder of Russian denial at its peak,” former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves posted.
In Poland and the Baltics, the continuity between Soviet and Putinist rationalizations for working with Hitler represents an unbroken line of aggressive, imperialist Russian thinking. Along with Russia’s depredations in its immediate neighborhood, the Moscow version of history is seen as proof that Russia still covets the influence on eastern Europe and the Baltic territories that it was forced to give up when the Soviet Union fell apart.
An unconditional admission of Stalin’s guilt (not a “mistake,” as Putin once termed it) in carving up eastern Europe with Hitler would be a powerful move on the part of a Russian leader...
(Excerpt) Read more at themoscowtimes.com ...
Go to You Tube on anything concerning Soviet Russia and WW2 and the Russkies love to brag about how they alone won the war. I’ve spared with dozens of them and pointed how the Russians didn’t even come close to doing that. But the point I want to make is every time I bring up how chummy Old Joe was with Old Adolph at first, that’s when they all shut up.
Starting another war with an ally and joining the Nazis would have sent a lynch mob to DC.
Americans wanted their boys home.
Put the 'Patton' movie down.
Is that like the FDR Stalin romance??
And they love to point out how many Soviets died during the war.
So many died because that was want Stalin wanted. They could have achieved the same results with much lower casualties. I mean 100,000 were killed just to take Berlin.
The day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the USA should have sat back, prepared lots and lots of popcorn, and watched the two collectivist, socialist devils beat each other brains in.
Instead we went to war to hand Europe to Stalin.
Being a progressive meant FDR was simply a not fully matured Communist.
I agree. I also agree that the Bush dynasty must own up to its family’s romance with Hitler.
“And when Germany was falling we should have joined with anti Hitler forces in the Wehrmacht “
Ahhh the mythical anti-Hitler Wehrmacht. The only reason a few didn’t like him is because they thought he was below them socially and not as tactically brilliant.
Any I cannot imagine a sicker thing than asking an American GI to shift gears in early 45 and agree to fight alongside a nazi army and plunge into the eastern front.
Utterly sick. I suspect you were not a grunt in WWII.
“Which Hitler launched precisely with units withdrawn from der Ostfront . . .”
It was a band of those eastern front types who outright murdered 84 American prisoners. Part of their defense was that this mass murder was normal in the east. Anyone think the US Army could have partnered up with this bunch of low lifes 3 months later has a screw loose. Not to even mention the camps they were soon seeing.
No, a nazi-US alliance was not in the cards. Might as well have asked the US Army in 1976 to ally with the VC/NVA to go after Pol Pot. Or ask our boys in Syria to join up with Al Qeida to go after ISIS.... Sayyyy, wait just a cotton picking minute.
No, they gave away half.
If Stalin was just as evil and proceeded to conquer Eastern Europe and cause all kinds of havoc in his own right, I don’t really see the point.
Did Britain get half of Czechoslovakia out of the deal?
___________________________________________________________
Stalin saw the gutless British and French betray the Czechs to Hitler. I don’t blame him for making a deal with Hitler.
. . . or for murdering the Polish intelligentsia? Couldn’t resist, but that was unfair.
Key Facts not mentioned by this article
Stalin was not Russian.
The Russian people had no say whatsoever in Stalin’s rise to power. What vote?
What happened to Russians who openly disagreed with or worked against Stalin? Dead, disappeared, entire family gone as well.
These omissions of fact are really not funny when they’re holding up this history as an attempt to smear all Russians forever.
The number one victim of the international communists was the Russian people. Many risked their lives to stop them in a civil war.
The reds had a lot of international proxy support in their rise. Did you know that Lenin was sent to Russia with a train car full of foreign money?
Should England face eternal shame for what Chamberlain did to appease Hitler early in the war?
Don’t ask the Moscow Times to explain this double standard, they can’t.
Russia had been looking for revenge on Poland ever since 1920, Stalin knew he’d get it via the Non-Aggression Pact.
It was the Germans who sent Lenin to Russia, because he told them he would end the war if he gained power.
I will expand more on this later but no. Actually: England has the exact opposite problem of Russia. Instead of whitewashing their past to legitimate a terror-based, militaristic, invasive, mafia regime as today’s Kremlin, the Brits OVER-apologize for their ‘imperial past’ to the point of self-deprecation and surrender.
The British Empire, in spite of all its sins, has far more positives to tout than the Soviet one. And it definitely had the moral high ground in WWII and the 20th Century at large. And the endurance of its monarchy and Commonwealth remains as testament to that.
22 SEPT 1939: The joint #Nazi-#Soviet parade at Brest-Litovsk, after the two regimes collaborated to crush and dismember #Poland, igniting the Second World War. [Red Army tanks, German motorcyclists] https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton 
Red Army officers included, salute the Swastika at Brest-Livstok.
I had never seen these photos previously. Again, check Kyle Orton’s twitter, he posted these mainly Sept. 22.
https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton
To be fair, the guys who did Operation Valkyrie definitely were trying to restore the nation of Germany due to viewing Hitler as an antithesis to Germany’s survival, so it’s unlikely they would have viewed National Socialism in a good light. Also, the Wehrmacht technically owed its allegiance to Germany, not necessarily to its leader (that’s even what the guys who used Operation Valkyrie tried to use as their rationalization. Hitler ended up making a specific loyalty oath to him personally largely because of that).
Besides, it’s not like our siding with the USSR was much better, anyway, arguably being even MORE sick due to the USSR under Stalin committing even more mass atrocities than the Nazis did. And I must ask you, were YOU a grunt in WWII?
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