Just saw this article…I wonder how many people would have had the courage to voluntarily go to Auschwitz to find out what was happening there…
And just imagine how the guy felt to know that every message he sent out was ignored or dismissed…
And as for war crimes…the US letting Russia just waltz into Germany and taking it over…whose brilliant idea was that? (Yeah, I know Roosevelt was sick, but someone should have pointed out the obvious aftermath…)
how would have that war turned out if U S didnt intervene?
Helluva a story. Thanks for posting it.
Germany and Japan would doubtless have won and then turned on themselves. If you want to start a thread about that alternative history I’d be happy to join in the discussion.
I’m more interested in talking about the alternative history of what would have happened if the US had sped up and got to Berlin before the Russians, instead of slowing down.
But more to the point, did you read the article?
The guy was certainly a hero by any stretch of the imagination, but called a villain by post-WW2 Communist Poles and believed to be so by his children.
Oh…and dang.
I meant to post this Outside the Beltway, not Politics.
Dude was a bad ass.
When it comes to the Russians taking East Germany… well our hands were sort of tied. We could have beat them to Berlin but it would have certainly led to an immediate breakout of war between us and the USSR. Plus they would have certainly forged an alliance with japan who was still not defeated at that point.
The war would have drug on for years longer and caused appalling casualties. We fought an under strength, undersupplied, and near starving Wehrmacht in France and west Germany and they still caused horrendous casualties on our units. The Soviets had steamrolled the best units the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS had to offer and were still becoming even more powerful.
Russia lost twenty million people in that war. They were going in first.
27-30 million. And their population didn’t return to pre war levels until the 1980s.
As much as I detest Stalin he had a point about the Soviet Union deserving Berlin and the honor of the final Nazi defeat.
Yeah I see now that twenty million was the official Soviet line until after the collapse, but I’m kinda old lol. That was what I remembered.
Yeah the soviet government was trying to save face about the catastrophe. Mainly Stalin. He was personally responsible for why it was so bad. Had the USSR been better prepared, even just a few months of real preparation, it wouldn’t have been nearly as disastrous for the Soviet people.
Stalin ignored every warning from both the NKVD and the British intelligence services. And no one in the politburo or the higher levels of Stavka was willing to talk any sense into him out of the fear that they would end up on the wrong side of a gun or in Siberia.
Sentiment.
Why did they lose so many people? (And I’m not downplaying the deaths and agony suffered by the people, I’m talking about Stalin and his government.)
They put civilians in the front lines to be shot down, as the soldiers behind the civilians advanced. They burned their own cities to starve out the Germans.
Let’s not forget that Stalin killed more Jews, and more of his own people, than did Hitler.
We should have gone in first.
The United States should still be thankful that the Soviet Union took the brunt of the casualties.
All told, worldwide, the United States lost 416,800 men in all services during World War II.
Without the Soviets, at a bare minimum, we would have added 2 million to the above total. And likely many more.
A lot of Americans survived due to the massive sacrifices of the Soviet Army.
At least 2 million crosses that are NOT in American military cemeteries.
Berlin wasn’t the “Final Nazi defeat”.
Berlin fell to the Soviets on May 2, 1945.
Nazi defeats and surrenders continued until May 8, when the Channel Islands were surrendered to the British.
There is a lot of back story to the above.
Stalin had gutted his officer corps with his purges of the late 1930s.
Stalin allied himself with Hitler in 1939.
They remained allies until Germany attacked the U.S.S.R. in June of 1941.
