Don't forget how Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget how Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler

washingtonpost.com

18 pointsilyaeck14 comments

From the article: "Of course, the start of the war had been shaped by a Nazi-Soviet pact to carve up the lands in between their borders. Then Hitler turned against the U.S.S.R." Yes, that has a lot to do with why the Soviet Union's undeniable role in the eventual destruction of the Axis armies doesn't always encourage citizens of other Allied countries. Some of us remember that the Second World War might not have started in Europe (it had already started in Asia, really) if the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact[1] had not been agreed to by Stalin and Hitler.

[1] http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005156

My father was in the RAF in WW2 - any time any film or TV program talked about the US and the US winning the war he would snort and remind us all of how much of the actual fighting was done by the Soviets.

Their leaders may have been monsters, but that doesn't mean we can't be a bit more generous towards the vast numbers of Soviet citizens who fought and died to defeat the Nazis.

Funnily enough, as jingoistic and inadequate as educational tools the most popular FPSs are, I think the first Call of Duty gave me the first glimpse of the importance of the USSR soldiers in defeating the Third Reich - while most of the TV and film media emphasized the UK and USA and the school textbooks were way too "high level", talking more about the meetings than the actual battles.

In the last campaign one plays as Corp. Alexei Voronin and it starts with a vivid exemplification of Order Nº 227 ("Not one step back!") and ends the game with you waving the Victory Banner over the Reichstag.

I've read and heard actual historical works as I got older, and it only increased my respect for IW.

By one calculation, for every single American soldier killed fighting the Germans, 80 Soviet soldiers died doing the same.

http://www.eisenhowerinstitute.org/about/living_history/wwii...

"[T]the Soviet Union did not save "the world."

The point is that every year on the anniversary of VE Day the Western allies congratulate themselves for saving Europe from the Nazis, conveniently downplaying the critical role the Soviet Union, or to be more precise, the Russian people, played in bringing the Third Reich to its knees. Politics aside...the people of Russia, civilians and soldiers alike, fought the Nazis with everything they had and paid a heavy price for it. Compared with the brutality and suffering on the Eastern Front (e.g. Leningrad, Stalingrad) the Western Front was a cakewalk.

Yes, the Soviet Union "saved" Eastern Europe from Hitler. Then the Soviet Union treated Eastern Europe even worse, if anything, than Hitler had. Not until after the Soviet Union fell did any countries in Eastern Europe actually start to recover.

Don't forget how the talibans saved Afghanistan from the soviet union...

The US was never threatened by Hitler, so no, the Soviet Union did not save "the world."

Moreover, had Hitler won, the Third Reich would have come inevitably to the same end as the USSR---probably more quickly. Slavery to the state, with no valid goal, is not a workable system.

To put it politely, the above is shortsighted. The Third Reich was engaged in genocide carried out with conveyor belt efficiency. It murdered tens of millions of people in the name of racial purity. Enslavement was merely means of temporary cheap labor - make no mistake about it, the goal was extermination of those it deemed genetically imperfect. FDR, fortunately, understood exactly what was at stake - humanity as a whole was at stake.

The US /= "the world"

Anybody who considers "the world" to extend beyond the borders of the United States might consider the possibility that a couple of billion non-Americans probably wanted to be saved from the prospect of Hitler having so much control over the whole of Europe he was in a position to start extending the Final Solution to the "untermenschen" of half the former British Empire whilst his allies in the East continued to rape and pillaged their way across the other half. But yeah, the Bay Area would probably have been untouched.

"The US was never threatened by Hitler"

Up to the moment of their demise. V2 could reach the UK, guess what the next step was? (it is what the German scientists did after going to the US and Russia)

The Soviets also got nuclear weapons, and they were never a threat to the US.

Short term, sure. A Europe unified under the Third Reich could eventually have been problematic. If nothing else, we could have a new two-superpowers-vying-for-dominance situation, only with western Europe fighting for the other side side this time around.

If anyone on this forum made that kind of sweeping generalization regarding matters of CS, he would be laughed out of court. Please leave this kind of broad statement to actual historians.

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