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There was moral clarity in West and South Europe. But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism. Everyone else

There was moral clarity in West and South Europe. But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism. Everyone else was trying to find the least bad option, which usually meant choosing a side and switching it at least once.

FridayoLeary 1y ago
I don't know if the eastern european countries besides maybe ussr count. Many many polish, ukrainian and lithuanians enthusiastically helped the germans in carrying out the holocaust.
- oddmiral 1y ago
  Many jews were communists. Communists killed millions in those countries.
  - rrr_oh_man 1y ago
    I think you got your causalities wrong there
    - oddmiral 1y ago
      On 02.04.2008, Russian State Duma confirmed that 7 million (adults and unknown number of children) died because of artificial starvation in 1932-1934 (Holodomor). Majority of them are Ukrainians. However, Russian Federation refuses to confirm the starvation and FSB agents jail or kill everybody who spreads information about Holodomor. If you are from RF - beware.
      - rrr_oh_man 1y ago
        Causalities, not casualties. :)
  - FridayoLeary 1y ago
    Not even close so don't try. There were some powerful positions in the ussr occupied by jews. I'm not sure what role they had in the purges etc. Stalin was definitely not a great lover of jews. On the other hand in the countries i mentioned above many locals participated in a genocide and murdered their neighbors with their bare hands.
rdtsc 1y ago
> There was moral clarity in West and South Europe Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_declaration_of_war_on_Germany_(1939) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_declaration_of_war_on_.... Both Britain and France declared war on Germany because they made guarantees to Poland about it. > ... in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. That is unambiguous and clear. They kept their word. It is tragic in the end that after the war they handed Poland over to Stalin. Poland still had its independence threatened but after having supplied and helped Stalin all that time, it was awkward having to declare war against him as well.
- hackandthink 1y ago
  The political situation in the 1930s was thoroughly messed up. Britain and France may have had mainly good intentions, but their policies did not prevent the disasters. Great Britain should have made a pact with the Soviet Union against Hitler much earlier. Poland was in an extremely difficult situation. But the decision to invade Czechoslovakia with the Germans was certainly not a good idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal
  - rdtsc 1y ago
    > Britain and France may have had mainly good intentions, but their policies did not prevent the disasters. They had an absolute lack of appetite for fighting since the WWI was not long ago. I don't know if the Germans were smart enough to understand that and fully took advantage of it or were just lucky. For the Germans it worked with Czechoslovakia so they figured it would work with Poland as well. Stalin I think is more interesting. He was prepared to "defend" the Czechs as well. He just needed permission to take his armies across Poland and Romania. He quickly switched sides after the agreement and signed the Soviet-German agreement. Not too long ago I also learned about the secret military cooperation between the Soviets and the Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_relations,_1918%E2%80%931941#Treaty_of_Rapallo_1922_and_secret_military_cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_r.... The German air force was training its pilots in the Soviet Union: > In 1925, a flying school was established near Lipetsk (Lipetsk fighter-pilot school) to train the first pilots for the future Luftwaffe Reading that it's like reading some alternative universe fan-fiction. So that makes Stalin's position interesting. He was supposed to be allied with the French and the British officially but non-officially was assisting the Germans.
inkyoto 1y ago
> But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism. WWII in Eastern Europe was a war for the survival of the Slavic peoples whom the Nazis declared to be the Untermensch[0] (Belorussians, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians – all of them) and were determined to fully exterminate them all following the extermination of the Jews and the Roma people. The scale of extermination of the Slavs went far beyond the mass murdering of them in concentration camps, and included rounding up villages and burning them along with the villagers down with the use of flamethrowers, with no remorse because the Nazis considered the Slavs sub-humans[1][2][3][4]. Neither Czechoslovakia, nor Poland, nor the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had communism of any shape or flavour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michni%C3%B3w_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michni%C3%B3w_massacre [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Centre_Lipa_Remembers#The_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Centre_Lipa_Remembers...
- jltsiren 1y ago
  How do Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland fit in that picture? WW2 was a complex war. The big picture for the European part was that the two main powers divided Europe in their spheres of influence, fully intending to fight each other for overall supremacy after a while. Some countries joined their designated side voluntarily, some joined under a threat of invasion, and most of the rest were invaded. The ones I listed were the ones where the USSR was the initial aggressor.
  - inkyoto 1y ago
    Instead of shifting the goalposts, please do yourself a favour and read up on the Untermenschen and the convoluted hierarchy of the sub-humans in the Nazi racial ideology. As an example, since the Nazis harboured particular hatred towards the Poles, the Poles were at the very bottom of the hierarchy, and only complete obliteration of the Polish ethnicity was deemed acceptable. One joins an alliance of convenience, sometimes in very unfavourable circumstances, to avoid the worst – the demise of one's own people and to guarantee their survival. Making a deal with the devil is a well-known adage that aptly describes such an unfortunate event. Nazis considered the Finns (and the Estonians by extension) to be racially pure, with Latvians and Lithuanians being somewhere in between either redeemable or tolerable (frankly, I can't recall the exact details). > WW2 was a complex war. WWII was no more complex than the WWI, and it had a single, overarching objective – the repartitioning of the world. The main difference between the two was that the WWII was infused with a vile racial ideology, used to justify the pursuit of Lebensraum and the total annihilation of peoples whom the Nazi Party targeted with hatred, based on their crackpot so-called racial studies.

FridayoLeary 1y ago

I don't know if the eastern european countries besides maybe ussr count. Many many polish, ukrainian and lithuanians enthusiastically helped the germans in carrying out the holocaust.

oddmiral 1y ago
Many jews were communists. Communists killed millions in those countries.
- rrr_oh_man 1y ago
  I think you got your causalities wrong there
  - oddmiral 1y ago
    On 02.04.2008, Russian State Duma confirmed that 7 million (adults and unknown number of children) died because of artificial starvation in 1932-1934 (Holodomor). Majority of them are Ukrainians. However, Russian Federation refuses to confirm the starvation and FSB agents jail or kill everybody who spreads information about Holodomor. If you are from RF - beware.
    - rrr_oh_man 1y ago
      Causalities, not casualties. :)
- FridayoLeary 1y ago
  Not even close so don't try. There were some powerful positions in the ussr occupied by jews. I'm not sure what role they had in the purges etc. Stalin was definitely not a great lover of jews. On the other hand in the countries i mentioned above many locals participated in a genocide and murdered their neighbors with their bare hands.

rdtsc 1y ago

> There was moral clarity in West and South Europe Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_declaration_of_war_on_Germany_(1939) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_declaration_of_war_on_.... Both Britain and France declared war on Germany because they made guarantees to Poland about it. > ... in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. That is unambiguous and clear. They kept their word. It is tragic in the end that after the war they handed Poland over to Stalin. Poland still had its independence threatened but after having supplied and helped Stalin all that time, it was awkward having to declare war against him as well.

hackandthink 1y ago
The political situation in the 1930s was thoroughly messed up. Britain and France may have had mainly good intentions, but their policies did not prevent the disasters. Great Britain should have made a pact with the Soviet Union against Hitler much earlier. Poland was in an extremely difficult situation. But the decision to invade Czechoslovakia with the Germans was certainly not a good idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal
- rdtsc 1y ago
  > Britain and France may have had mainly good intentions, but their policies did not prevent the disasters. They had an absolute lack of appetite for fighting since the WWI was not long ago. I don't know if the Germans were smart enough to understand that and fully took advantage of it or were just lucky. For the Germans it worked with Czechoslovakia so they figured it would work with Poland as well. Stalin I think is more interesting. He was prepared to "defend" the Czechs as well. He just needed permission to take his armies across Poland and Romania. He quickly switched sides after the agreement and signed the Soviet-German agreement. Not too long ago I also learned about the secret military cooperation between the Soviets and the Germans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_relations,_1918%E2%80%931941#Treaty_of_Rapallo_1922_and_secret_military_cooperation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_r.... The German air force was training its pilots in the Soviet Union: > In 1925, a flying school was established near Lipetsk (Lipetsk fighter-pilot school) to train the first pilots for the future Luftwaffe Reading that it's like reading some alternative universe fan-fiction. So that makes Stalin's position interesting. He was supposed to be allied with the French and the British officially but non-officially was assisting the Germans.

inkyoto 1y ago

> But if you happened to be in East Europe, WW2 was primarily a war between nazism and communism. WWII in Eastern Europe was a war for the survival of the Slavic peoples whom the Nazis declared to be the Untermensch[0] (Belorussians, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians – all of them) and were determined to fully exterminate them all following the extermination of the Jews and the Roma people. The scale of extermination of the Slavs went far beyond the mass murdering of them in concentration camps, and included rounding up villages and burning them along with the villagers down with the use of flamethrowers, with no remorse because the Nazis considered the Slavs sub-humans[1][2][3][4]. Neither Czechoslovakia, nor Poland, nor the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had communism of any shape or flavour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michni%C3%B3w_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michni%C3%B3w_massacre [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Centre_Lipa_Remembers#The_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Centre_Lipa_Remembers...

jltsiren 1y ago
How do Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland fit in that picture? WW2 was a complex war. The big picture for the European part was that the two main powers divided Europe in their spheres of influence, fully intending to fight each other for overall supremacy after a while. Some countries joined their designated side voluntarily, some joined under a threat of invasion, and most of the rest were invaded. The ones I listed were the ones where the USSR was the initial aggressor.
- inkyoto 1y ago
  Instead of shifting the goalposts, please do yourself a favour and read up on the Untermenschen and the convoluted hierarchy of the sub-humans in the Nazi racial ideology. As an example, since the Nazis harboured particular hatred towards the Poles, the Poles were at the very bottom of the hierarchy, and only complete obliteration of the Polish ethnicity was deemed acceptable. One joins an alliance of convenience, sometimes in very unfavourable circumstances, to avoid the worst – the demise of one's own people and to guarantee their survival. Making a deal with the devil is a well-known adage that aptly describes such an unfortunate event. Nazis considered the Finns (and the Estonians by extension) to be racially pure, with Latvians and Lithuanians being somewhere in between either redeemable or tolerable (frankly, I can't recall the exact details). > WW2 was a complex war. WWII was no more complex than the WWI, and it had a single, overarching objective – the repartitioning of the world. The main difference between the two was that the WWII was infused with a vile racial ideology, used to justify the pursuit of Lebensraum and the total annihilation of peoples whom the Nazi Party targeted with hatred, based on their crackpot so-called racial studies.