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For most of my life, I believed that British resistance, D-Day, and the Western front were the primary reasons for German defeat. That's certainly how it appear
by whack 7y ago
For most of my life, I believed that British resistance, D-Day, and the Western front were the primary reasons for German defeat. That's certainly how it appeared to a lay person. It was only recently that I realised the vital role the Eastern front played in Nazi defeat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War_II https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_W...
The Nazis lost over two million soldiers in the Eastern front, whereas all the other fronts combined produced a loss of ~800k soldiers. The turning point of the war came in Stalingrad, an entire year before D-Day even started.
The Soviet Union has been a brutal regime and I'm glad they lost the cold war. But the Russian people deserve more credit than they are being given for turning back the Nazi tide.
- 6d6b73 7y agoThey were on Nazi side at the beginning of the war, so really they were trying to stop the Nazi tide that they helped to create.
- flohofwoe 7y agoEverybody downvoting this should read up on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac..., especially the secret protocol to divide Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union.
- futureastronaut 7y agoIsn't this common historical knowledge? Sad if not.
- whuaminot 7y agoIt's not. And that's reflected by the fact that amazon sells tshirts with soviet symbols (though swastikas are absent from their selection). Soviets did not just conspire with the Nazis. Nazi tank crews trained in the soviet union up until 1938. If it were a just world, the Soviet union would have been as decimated after the war as Germany was. But it is not. We just satisfice our way to survival.
- whack 7y agoI'm certainly no Soviet admirer or apologist as my last paragraph made clear. However, it seems a stretch to say that they helped create the Nazi tide. The Germans had such little respect for Soviet resistance, that they expected it to collapse like a house of cards within a few months. Hitler would have started the war, with or without the non-aggression pact.