The victory of the Soviet Union

in World War II!

On May 9, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally in Berlin to the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, and France. The victory was celebrated in Moscow with 30 cannon bursts fired by 1,000 cannons. It was a salute for the people's victory over fascism and in honor of the Soviet army, navy, and air forces for their heroic struggle.

The Soviet Union was invaded four years earlier, on June 22, 1941, by the largest invasion army in human history. Nazi Germany had over 8 million men in arms. Of these, 4.6 million were sent to conquer the Soviet Union. Nearly 1 million aid troops from Nazi-allied Italy, Romania, Hungary and Finland and volunteers from other European countries were added.

The invasion army against the Soviet Union consisted of 5.5 million men.

The Soviet Union, which throughout the 1930s worked hard to increase the country's agricultural and industrial production as well as its defense force, managed to build up an army of 5 million soldiers by June 1941. Of these, 2.9 million men were at the western borders. On the Pacific coast, the Soviet Union had an army of over 1 million men on standby for an attack by Japan. Several hundred thousand more soldiers were present at the Turkish border. The strength ratios in the West against the German army were vastly uneven.

The Nazi invasion army was the largest and for its time best equipped army. The hero victory of the Soviet Union over this army was of similar greatness.

More than 27 million dead in the Soviet Union

With the victory of the Soviet Union and Nazism's disappearance as a world power the people of the world were able to exhale. The Nazi darkness had dissipated, and life could go on. But let us not forget that the freedom that we are experiencing today was won by all the people who sacrificed their lives to put an end to Nazism.

This made the people of the Soviet Union incomparably more than any other people on earth. During World War II, the Nazis killed more than 27 million Soviet citizens. By comparison, the U.S. victim was 294,000 troops. It should be a matter of course that, in commemorating the Second World War and the celebration of the end of the war, the Soviet peoples should have a place of honor. But it is not like that.

Build your own perception

Facts about The Second World War and the Heroic Struggle of the Soviet Union to rid the world of Nazi barbarism are today instead lost from the mass media in the capitalist countries and from the history books of schools and universities. Today, falsification of history is pre-emanating when the issue of the Second World War and the defeat of Nazism is raised.

Capitalism and its leaders in the monopolies and financial oligarchy do not want to give way to sympathies for the Soviet Union and the socialist system that proved so superior and could gather forces to defeat capitalist Nazi Germany.

The purpose of the article that follows is to, in short, give the reader facts about The Second World War and the great battles that led to the extermination of Nazism. The reader gets an opportunity to build up his own perception of the events that led to a positive end to the greatest tragedy in human history. The article has a large number of factual data which is necessary to build up a perception based on reality.

Cold War state history forgery

How does imperialism work on the falsification of the historical events associated with the Second World War? The propaganda of civil mass media against the Soviet Union is not only a product of the actions of occasional reactionary politicians or journalists to denigrate socialism.

Politicians and journalists are important links for the spread of the falsification of history. However, the falsification of history is made to order international capitalism and is usually carried out by state bodies, paid with state money or with large contributions from the economic funds of capitalists. Those who stand for the job are usually professors at the universities of the imperialist countries.

So, it was in the United States where the Pentagon published over 100 volumes about World War II. Among these "U.S. Army and World War II" of 80 volumes. So, it was in Britain where the British government published the "Official History of The Second World War" of 80 volumes. In West Germany, the Bundeswehr's historical-military department published 10 volumes under the heading "The German Empire and World War II". In Japan, the Ministry of Defense published the "Official History of the War in East Asia" in 96 volumes.

Pre-ordered "official truth" as propaganda

It is this kind of 'official truths' that form the basis of the anti-Soviet propaganda of The Second World War. Common to these works is the constant will to obliterate or detract from the truth about the Soviet Union's role in the defeat of Nazism. At the same time, they want to denigrate socialism and justify the aggressive policies of imperialism.

Their companions in the mass distribution of books, colorful newspapers, films, and videos, take note of all these qualities but do not swerve to use the open lie to a broad extent. In the struggle for the political will of the people, capitalism is prepared to resort to anything that can lead to anti-communism. It is important to expose the false propaganda of imperialism.

Nazism in power

Let us begin by briefly giving a picture of the political developments in the Nazi homeland of Germany in the 1930s. After taking power in January 1933, the Nazis began to challenge the power of Western democracies in Europe. Hitler had received economical support from the German capitalists to take down the German working class and exterminate the Communist Party.

Furthermore, Nazism in power would recapture the German colonies in Africa that were lost to Britain and France during first world war and conquer new lands in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Nazis' lust for power did not stop there. The whole world was part of their plans for conquest. While Hitler imprisoned and murdered communists and trade unionists, he began to prepare Germany for world war.

Nazis on offensive

In October 1933, Germany left Geneva disarmament conference. The same month, Hitler announced that Germany was leaving the League of Nations. On March 16, 1935, the Nazis introduced universal conscription in Germany, which was a violation of the Versailles Agreement in 1919. The rearmament of the German armed forces then began to take off in earnest.

In March 1936 came the next crime against Versailles. The German army marched in and occupied the demilitarized Rhineland. The Nazi dice was thrown. Would the Western powers now put an end to Hitler?

The violations of the Versailles agreements could be carried out without any significant reaction from the Western powers. Although Germany still had no army that could face the armies of France or Britain, Hitler acted like a world dictator without western powers questioning it, playing with the hate of Communism of the English and French bourgeoisie and making them tacitly accept Nazi politics.

He assumed the role of the last bastion of western powers against communism and promised to move to the east in his country conquests. Germany's military power was constantly increasing and would soon become a threat to the whole world. The Soviet Union's call for an anti-Nazi coalition for collective security was never answered.

In September 1938, Nazi Germany occupied the German-speaking territories of Czechoslovakia, Sudetes,

with the approval of the United Kingdom and France in the Munich Agreement.

Pictures from the Munich Agreement.
The UK's Prime Minister Chamberlain with the Prime Minister of France Édouard Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, and Italy’s Foreign Minister Ciano.
The UK's Prime Minister Chamberlain with Hitler, and the German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop.

The plans of the capitalist countries against Soviet Union shows to be a big mistake.

Europe 1938-1941

In June 1941, the political situation in Europe was such that most capitalist countries in Europe were already under the power of fascism and Nazism.

In March 1938, the Nazis occupied Austria, in September the Czech Sudetes (with the approval of Britain and France in the Munich Agreement September 1938)

Neville Chamberlain returns from Munich in September 1938 with Peace for our time…

and in March 1939 all of Czechoslovakia. In March 1939, the Franco fascists took power in Spain with the help of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland.

The country had received assurances of its security by the United Kingdom and France, but in the event of invasion these countries became completely inactive. Britain's and France's formal declaration of war against Germany on September 3rd were words of no value. Yet during these days they had the opportunity to put an end to Nazism.

So acknowledged, Alfred Jodl the head of the Operational Staff of the German Army during the Post-War Nurnberg Trial: "if we did not suffer defeat back in 1939, it is only because the 100 French and English divisions in the West that during the Polish campaign were against 25 German divisions were kept in inaction". (against Poland, the Nazis used 61 divisions and three brigades).

In 1940, the Nazi invasion wave continued in Europe. Denmark was occupied by the Nazis in April and Norway during April-June. On May 10, 1940, the Nazi armies turned west. Holland surrendered on 14 May, Luxembourg soon after and Belgium on 28 May. A British army of 330,000 men in northern France gave up the battle against the German military supremacy and had to be evacuated in haste to Britain (27 May to 4 June). The British left a large number of weapons including 700 tanks that the Nazis took over. France, a major military power in Europe, became the Nazis' next victim. France was defeated by the Nazis in five weeks and surrendered on June 22, 1940.

Hitler in Paris 23 June 1940

In April 1941, Nazi Germany occupied Yugoslavia and Greece. In addition, in Europe Italy, Finland, Hungary and Romania were allies of Nazi Germany and Bulgaria and Slovakia vassals of the Nazis. In three years, the Nazis took control of almost all of Europe.

"Blitzkrieg"

In the spring of 1941, the German army, the Wehrmacht, appeared in the eyes of the world to be invincible. In its war campaign against the West, Nazi Germany had 135 divisions and a brigade of 2,850 tanks and 3,834 aircraft. They defeated France, Great Britain, Belgium and Holland in five weeks, although the armies of these countries together had 147 divisions. In the war, the German army used a new kind of warfare that they called "blitzkrieg", the lightning war. The lightning war was a rapid warfare using large quantities of mechanized combat vehicles and tanks. The goal was to take out the enemy before it had an opportunity to get its armed forces up and running.

The industrialized country of Germany had, under the Nazi power, built up such a powerful war industry (mostly with American money) that it was able to supply the army, navy and combat aircraft with all kinds of modern weapons necessary to conquer Europe with the mechanized lightning war. By the spring of 1941, Nazi Germany had over 300 million people under its power! The Nazi power had increased significantly over 3 years. The large production capacity of the traditional industrialized countries of Europe had to submit to the Nazi-German war machine and produce what the German army needed for its livelihood.

Europe's industries in Nazi power

The use of Europe's industrial power by the Nazis in the war against the Soviet Union is a little-known chapter in the history of World War II. But even more important. In Poland, for example, the Germans took the metal industry, machine manufacturing, Silesia coal mines and the chemical industry, a total of 294 large companies and about 35,000 medium-size and small businesses. In France, the Nazi plunder made much greater gains. In addition to Lorraine's steel mills and metal industries, immensely larger than Poland's, the Nazis took over all of France's car factories and aircraft factories and the reserves of the strategic metals copper, aluminum, and magnesium. In addition, they took over all the tool and machine factories and their large warehouses. From France, for example, the Nazis took the also 4,000 locomotives and 40,000 rail cars to the German railways. Furthermore, the French Government had to pay all the costs of the German occupying army. In the other occupied countries, the same was the looting.

In total, in the spring of 1941, Nazi Germany had an annual production capacity of 31.8 million tones steel and 439 million tons coal. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union had built up a production of steel and coal with great effort, producing 18.3 million tones steel and 165.9 million tons coal in annual production in the spring of 1941. The difference in production opportunities between industrial Europe and the developing Soviet Union was considerable.
In Czechoslovakia, the Nazis took the country's $48 million gold reserves, in Belgium the country's $228 million gold reserves and in Holland the country's gold reserves of 71.3 million florin (these thefts were made with the help of the Bank for International Settlements with the United States and Britain in the lead, more on that in a later article).

At the same time, many workers and prisoners of war were forced into slave labor in Germany. In the spring of 1941, there were already three million foreign workers in the German factories. Equally important to Nazi power was the war material they took over in victory over Europe's armies. In France, for example, the Nazis took over 5,000 tanks, 3,000 warplanes and the entire French army's other equipment. With the French war material, the Nazis were able to set up 38 infantry divisions, three motorized divisions and an armored division. It was all part of the preparations for the great war against the Soviet Union.

Operation "Barbarossa"

It was with this combined European industrial force that the Nazi armies and their allies attacked the Soviet Union in the early morning of June 22, 1941. According to Hitler, the Soviet Union would be defeated and conquered by blitzkrieg, lightning war, in eight to ten weeks. The war was supposed to be ended by the beginning of September 1941. All according to the lessons of the war against the capitalist countries of Europe. Then the Nazis would crush the socialist state and eradicate communism.

Furthermore, the Soviet Union would be divided into four German provinces whose inhabitants would be used as slave labor for the Nazis. Large parts of the Soviet Union would then be depopulated by murder and starvation and the major Soviet cities such as Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and many others would be destroyed and totally wiped out. The German Commander-in-Chief Franz Halder wrote in his war diary about Hitler's directive for the war in the East: "This is a war of extermination ... In the East, harshness today means lenience in the future." (29 June 1941), “It is the Fuehrer’s firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad, and make them uninhabitable … The cities will be razed by air force … A national catastrophe which will deprive not only Bolshevism, but also Muscovite nationalism, of their centers” (8 July 1941).

The Nazis were so confident of a rapid victory in the Soviet Union that already in the spring of 1941 they began to elaborate in detail plans to conquer Asia and Africa, invade Britain and prepare an invasion of South and North America. A successful blitzkrieg, lightning war against the Soviet Union was the key to the enslavement of the whole world.

"This is a war of extermination”

Valery Kiselev:
While studying the documents of the 137Th Rifle Division in the Ministry of Defence archive I discovered the following fact...
Captain Kaplan, deputy political officer of one of its rifle battalions, conducted the following poll among the soldiers in January 1945, shortly before the offensive in East Prussia, "the lair of the Fascist beast" as it was named back then.
The personnel of the battalion was asked the following question: "How did your family suffer from the Germans?" Here are the answers: 208 soldiers from one battalion had their relatives (mothers, wives, sisters, children) murdered under the German occupation and, from this number, 10 soldiers had their children hanged.
63 soldiers had their relatives forced to do hard labour in prison camps.
Senior Lieutenant Teplitsky had three of his children murdered by German troops.
173 soldiers of the battalion had their houses destroyed.
The battalion strength was 300 men. The division had 9 rifle battalions, the entire Red Army at the start of 1945 - several thousand.

Now multiply these statistical figures by several thousand...

"Special administration of justice"

The Nazi leadership was preparing for the extermination of the Soviet army and civilian population. They were considered to be carriers of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Hitler had already written about this in his 1925 book "Mein Kampf". It was this attitude, to want to wipe out communism in Germany and the Soviet Union, that had opened for Hitler to receive massive financial support from the German big business. They were the ones who gave Hitler the government in Germany. When the invasion of the Soviet Union began, several legal provisions were prepared along these lines. They went by the name of "Special Justice in the Barbarossa Area", "Special Instructions of the Troops", "Instructions on Attitude to the Soviet Popers" or "Instructions on Attitude to the Political Captains".

The special legal provisions gave the German soldiers a free hand in the treatment of the people of the Soviet Union. The German soldiers and officers were able to oppress and kill the Soviet population in every possible way without having to answer for their actions.

The German soldiers and officers oppressed and killed the Soviet population.

Prisoners of war were used as slaves in industry and agriculture or were stopped in terrible concentration camps to wait for death in famine and disease. The Nazi-German administration of justice in the Soviet Union was organized barbarism to wipe out the Soviet peoples. That this is a fact witnessed by the more than 27 million people that the Nazi armies had time to murder before they were defeated and had to flee the Soviet Union.

Border War
Knowledge of the size of the armies confronted during the border battles of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and the other major battles of World War II is essential for a proper understanding of the outcome of the war. In the invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany set up an army of 153 divisions, of which 33 were tanks and motorized divisions, totaling 4.6 million men. The German troops were equipped with 42,000 guns and mortars, over 4,000 tanks and attack cannons and 4,000 aircraft. The Nazi-German Allied troops consisted of 37 divisions of 900,000 men, 5,200 guns and mortars, 260 tanks and attack cannons and 1,000 aircraft. In total, the Nazi invasion armies consisted of 190 divisions with 5.5 million soldiers. Never had humanity seen such a large army of invasions, which was also so well equipped with all kinds of modern weapons.

On the Soviet side, the border troops consisted of 170 divisions and 2 brigades of 2.9 million soldiers, 37,500 guns and mortars, 1475 tanks of newer models KV and T-34 and 1540 aircraft.

The Nazi invasion army was thus twice the size of the Soviet army at the borders, receiving the first blow of war. In the direction of the main thrusts, the Nazi High Command had built up a force that was between five to six times the size of the Soviet defense forces in these areas.

It is understood that in May 1941, in its preparations for invasion day, the Nazi German army leadership wrote that "We are currently very superior in numbers. Our troops are superior to the Russian in terms of combat experience... We are facing fierce battles for 8 to 14 days, but after that victory will not be delayed and we will prevail." Had the Blitzkrieg succeeded so well against the capitalist countries of Europe, why should it not succeed as well in the Soviet Union?

The possibilities of socialism

The reality of the Soviet Union was quite different from what the Nazis had expected. Firstly, the Soviet Government had made good efforts to neutralize all traitors who, in the service of the Nazis, could have undermined and sabotaged soviet defense preparations. These existed in all countries conquered by Nazi Germany. For the first time, the Nazi armies entered a country where the organized treason had almost been wiped out completely. "There was no "inner work" behind the Russian lines in cooperation with the German military command," said Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to Moscow from 1936 to 1938. Political treason was shot dead at the political trials of 1936-1938.

Ambassador Davies stated in his memoirs:

"There were no Sudeten German Henleinare, no Slovak Tisos, no Belgian de Grelles and no Norwegian Quislingar in the Soviet picture ... They have been shot."

Treason in France, where the ruling upper classes were completely undermined by Nazi sympathizers who gave up without a fight and where the Nazi armies met entire French regiments without officers, was not repeated in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, the whole people rose in defense of the socialist fatherland. The potential of socialism was also evident in this very difficult crisis. The Soviet state mobilized the entire country in a heroic resistance struggle and battle for production to increase the soviet army's clout.

Meeting in the factory Hammer and Sickle in June 1941.

Volunteers sign up for the Red Army in the Leningrad metallic industry July 3, 1941

Weapons are handed out to new soldiers in Moscow July 1941.

March on Red Square.

The first months of the war.

During the first five months of the war, Nazi Germany's army groups advanced north, center and south far into the Soviet Union and managed to encircle Leningrad, get close to and threaten Moscow and approach the oil deposits of the Caucasus. The Nazis' highly superior forces were able to force the Soviet army into retreat and occupy an important part of Soviet territory in the early stages.

During this time, the Soviet Union suffered huge losses in dead, wounded, and captured soldiers. But the Soviet retreat was temporary and organized. In no war episode could the fascist armies disorganize the Soviet armed forces. In very fierce battles, the Soviet army weary out the enemy and forced them to stop all over the front. At the end of the summer of 1941, the fascist high command was forced to admit that their plan to defeat the Soviet Union before October 1941 was under threat.

Heavy losses for Nazi Germany
Examples of the heroic struggle of Soviet soldiers are innumerable but unknown to most of the West. Capitalist forgery rises as an obstacle when wondering people want to get in touch with the truth about the Second World War. During the first month of war, from June 22 to July 18, the fascist armies lost 110,000 soldiers and officers. The tank brigades and motorized divisions lost over 40% of their strength. The German flight lost 1284 aircraft during this time.

Compare this figure with the number of aircraft lost by the Germans in the air war against Britain, the so-called Battle of Britain, after the conquest of France. The air war against Britain has been made a decisive blow to the Allied victory in World War II. The German flight then lost 1100 aircraft in August and September 1940. But in the first month of the invasion of the Soviet Union, for half of the Battle of Britain, the Germans lost 1284 aircraft. During this time, for the first time in their history, the Nazi troops were forced to limp.

Smolensk August 26, 1941

In the Battle of Smolensk, which lasted for two months, July 10 to September 10, the Nazi army group Center was forced to stop, give up the continuing battle against Moscow and move on to defense wars. Soon the Nazi armies, for the first time in their history of violence and conquests in Europe, would be defeated outside Moscow.

From the Red Square to the Front!

The battle of Moscow

The first major battles of World War II, and one of the decisive ones for the end of the war, came to take place outside the soviet capital, Moscow. The task of conquering Moscow had been given to the Nazi Army Group Center, the largest and best equipped of all the Nazi forces. From the Soviet side, since the beginning of the war, the strategic leadership of the headquarters’ command had assumed that the main direction of the fascist forces would be towards Moscow.

This had the greatest impact on the city's defense. In the direction of Moscow, the Soviet leadership placed the largest troop concentration on the Soviet-German front: 30% of all infantry divisions, 54% of artillery regiments, 35% of tank brigades and 40% of aircraft. In total, the two warring armies included, participated in the Battle of Moscow, 3 million men, 2700 tanks, over 2,000 aircraft and 22,000 guns. The efforts of the Soviet civilian population were also crucial in the preparation and victory of the Soviet civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of the residents of Moscow, along with soviet troops, built four lines of defense in a front of 300-400 kilometers.

Hundreds of thousands of the residents of Moscow, built lines of defense.

Blitzkrieg Forever Buried

The Battle of Moscow can be divided into three sections. The defensive battles of October-November 1941, when the Soviet army fought very fiercely, forced the fascists to stop and turn to defense. The Soviet counter-offensive near Moscow in December 1941 that forced the fascists to bake from Moscow's vicinity. Finally, between January and April 1942, the Soviet offensive in the direction of Moscow that defeated 38 Nazi divisions which were forced to flee.

The fighting was terrible with hundreds of thousands dead and wounded on both sides. The Nazis encountered an unbreakable barrier of people and war machines that fought back with such force that it eventually threatened to encircle the attacking forces. It was incomprehensible to the Nazis.

The so-called "sub-humans" were in the way of destroying the elite forces of the German army. All that remained was retreat, sometimes in a panic.

Especially large losses of crew and materials received 15 tanks and motorized divisions that were the very center of the attack on Moscow. The Germans had to quickly withdraw between 100 and 250 kilometers. So ended the Nazis' attempt to conquer Moscow.

For the Nazi Army Group Center, the defeat was devastating. The army group could never restore its former strength again. Between June 22, 1941 and April 1942, according to German statistics, the Center lost 796,000 soldiers and officers. During the same period, the Nazi troops on the Soviet front lost 1.5 million soldiers and officers! This was five times as much as they had lost during all the German wars in Europe over three years.

With the defeat outside Moscow, the idea of the blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union was forever buried. The war would be protracted and Nazi armies, which for first time in all their wars in Europe had been defeated, would be exterminated division after division. The German defeat at Moscow was the first fundamental turn of World War II.

The world paid tribute to the Soviet army
The Soviet victory outside Moscow had a world significance. It showed the world that it was possible to defeat Nazi Germany, the German army was not invincible. The peoples of the Nazi-occupied countries finally had new hope for liberation, which reinforced the resistance and the anti-Nazi coalition in the world. The entire anti-fascist world paid tribute to the Soviet army.

Churchill, the British Prime Minister, sent the following telegram to Stalin on 11 February 1942: "I have no words to express the admiration we all have for the continued brilliant success of your armies against the German invaders, but I cannot help but send you another word of gratitude and congratulations on all that Russia is doing for the common cause."

U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt spoke on American radio on April 27, 1942: "The United States honors the crushing counteroffensive of the great Soviet army against the strong German army. The Russian troops have destroyed and destroyed more of our enemies' armed forces – soldiers, aircraft, tanks and cannons – than all the other allied nations combined."

U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded American troops in the Pacific, wrote of the Soviet victory at Moscow in 1942: "I have in my lifetime participated in a number of wars and witnessed others and studied in detail the campaigns of prominent commanders in the past. Never have I observed such effective resistance to hard blows from a hitherto undefeated enemy, followed by a fierce counterattack that pushes the enemy back to his own country. The scale and grandeur of the effort make it the greatest military achievement in history."

Cold War 63 degrees cold!

So spoke the voices of the time of what was unthinkable for most people in the capitalist countries of the West: the armies of Nazi Germany defeated outside Moscow! But times changed. During the Cold War, the Soviet victory at Moscow in the Western media suddenly began to be called a victory without value. The arguments, which historical falsifying professors and dishonest authors argued were of the murkiest kinds. But they were sympathetically received in the capitalist press.

Now it was no longer Soviet heroism that defeated the Nazi armies. Now it was an alleged severe mud season and an extremely cold weather in Moscow this winter that had brought down the Nazis. Several indicated the temperatures in Moscow winter 1941/42 right down to minus 63 degrees Celsius! Utterly false. Even in Siberia, such temperatures are rare. The task of the forgers of history was to turn the victory of Moscow defenders into nothing to explain away as much as possible the decisive role of the Socialist Soviet Union in the defeat of the Nazis.

General Winter was Nazi propaganda

Several international studies by American, English and even German scientists have, since then, revealed the lies of the forgers of history about mud and extremely cold temperatures outside Moscow in the winter of 1941-42. In November 1941, the average temperature in Moscow was 6 degrees below zero Celsius and the lowest 18 minus. In December 1941, the average temperature in Moscow was 14.6 degrees below zero Celsius and the lowest 31 minus.

Such temperatures are not extremely cold, but quite common in Moscow in winter. But of course, people must dress properly to withstand the cold and especially soldiers in war must do so, which should have been a fundamental thought for the German army leadership. The Soviet soldiers had warm winter uniforms; this thought the Soviet high command on far beforehand. Warm clothes for the troops are also a weapon.

But the German army leadership had intended to produce a large amount of equipment in industries in the conquered areas of the Soviet Union. But this was not possible. The Soviet industries of the Western Soviet Union had largely been evacuated far away before the Germans could get there. In 1941, 1,523 industries were evacuated to the east, including 1,360 large factories. The Germans had to freeze. Many stole clothes from the population, which gave a strange touch to the German robbers.

As for the myth of terrible mud before winter, it was shattered by the West German historian K. Reinhardt, who researched this in the German military weather service. He was able to reveal in "The Turnaround in Moscow" that the mud period before the winter of 1941, outside Moscow, was weaker and shorter than usual. His conclusion was that the weather arguments, the so-called "General Winter", were an invention of Nazi propaganda to justify and excuse the German defeat at Moscow. The same Nazi propaganda is again today, in the capitalist mass media.

How German soldiers marched through Moscow.

Army Group Center near total extinction

Another myth that the bourgeois forgers of history still travel, even one drawn from Nazi propaganda, is that of an alleged numerical superiority that the Soviet forces would have had. According to the forgers of history, the Soviet forces were up to 20 times larger than the German ones!

In reality, the Soviet army went on a counteroffensive against Moscow with less troops than the enemy. According to documents from the Days of War, the German Army Group Center at Moscow was larger than the Soviet forces in the counteroffensive, 1.5 times in crew, 1.4 times in artillery and 1.6 times in tanks. Only in terms of aviation were the Soviet forces superior 1.6 times the Nazi flight in the Moscow area.

The truth is that the Soviet counter-offensive at Moscow was a masterful warfare. It threatened the German Army Group Center with encirclement and total destruction. The Nazis were forced into a retreat in panic during which they suffered heavy losses. What saved the German Army Group Center from total annihilation outside Moscow was that the forces of the Soviet High Command were still insufficient for a total restraining order of the Army Group Center.

Germany reinstated slavery

Most of the Nazi atrocities during World War II are today known by the general public of the world. The murders in the Nazi concentration camps of six million Jews and other human groups such as gypsies and homosexuals have been known many times. The murders of political opponents such as communists, socialists and trade unionists are also partly known. A lesser known chapter in the terrible events of World War II is the slave trade and slavery in Nazi Germany.

As early as December 1940, Walther Darre, then Minister of Agriculture of Nazi Germany, had proclaimed in a speech in the English newspaper Life that "We must build a new aristocracy of the lords. This aristocracy must have slaves owned by the lords and not of German descent."

In 1940, this was not really taken seriously. But just two years later in 1942, there were already in Germany 2 million slaves, men and women from the occupied countries of the East and 2 million from France. In 1942, the Nazi government commissioned the government agency for labor use to import half a million healthy girls from eastern countries. The biggest demand in the Nazi slave market was for girls.

Slavery very widespread in Nazi Germany

In 1943, there were 12 million slaves working for the German master people in Nazi Germany. In the first place, the labor force of these people was used in German industries, especially in the war industries, most of them privately owned. Some of these industries used the slaves for human experiments. For example, Bayer bought women for 200 marks each for the experiments in its laboratories.

The slaves who could not fit into the industry were resold on the slave markets that regularly took place throughout Germany. These people were shown by the Nazi prison guards to the prospective buyers, mainly farmers in search of free labor or middle-class people. In the slave markets, the buyers examined these people who were examined cattle, felt their muscles, looked at their teeth, etc.

These people were forced into slavery, treated in the most disgusting way, and died of starvation and disease in the millions. Himmler said: "What happens to the Russians or the Czechs is not something I care about... The fact that they develop or starve to death is only interesting to the extent that we have the use of them as slaves in our culture."

The German offensive in the south

After the failure to conquer Moscow, German troops in the area in April 1942 had to move to defense wars to maintain the previously conquered positions that were up to 250 kilometers away from the Soviet capital. The German Army Group Center was beaten and unable to continue the attack. The German army group Nord had been forced to stop in front of Leningrad. The war's continued offensive was now entirely dependent on the Army Group South. It, in turn, had encountered major difficulties in the southern Soviet Union and had been greatly delayed.

The German High Command then decided to send parts of the Center army group to help the offensive in the south. Among other things, a powerful group of tanks. The goal was to conquer the oil wells of the Caucasus and cross the Volga River at Stalingrad.

The battle of Stalingrad

For the German High Command, the Soviet oil was strategically important. Although Nazi Germany still received large supplies of oil from US oil companies, the German army in general must rely largely on synthetic oil, a precious chemical process. (The economic relations of the United States and England with Nazi Germany before and during World War II, we will address in a later article)

Reinforced with the armies of the Army Group Center, the German Army Group South in June 1942 was able to develop a strong offensive south and east and conquer Kharkov. At the end of June, after terrible battles that went on for many weeks, the Germans captured the Soviet cities of Kerch and Sevastopol in Crimea. The Germans bombed Sevastopol with heavy position artillery from an exceptionally large distance. There was hardly any house left when the last Soviet defenders left the city.

On June 28, the German army continued the offensive against the east and after fierce fighting, the Germans and their allies were able to break the Soviet defenses and advance up to 400 kilometers. The fascists occupied the Donbass territories and territory up to the River Don. The fascist armies were now on the right bank of the Don River, no more than 50 kilometers from the outskirts of Stalingrad.

Fighting for each floor. Stalingrad.

Stalingrad defends himself.

The Battle of Stalingrad began on July 17, 1942 and continued until February 2, 1943. For six and a half months, a terrible war raged without interruption until the fascist armies were completely defeated and wiped out. The war front had a length of between 400 and 850 kilometers by the River Don and Volga. In this great battle participated, both sides included, over 2 million men, 2,000 tanks, 2,000 fighter jets and 26,000 guns and mortars.

The front was constantly added to new combat units to take the place of the dead. The fighting was terrible and the losses of soldiers and materiel greater than ever. The fascist troops managed on some front sections to get all the way to Stalingrad where the defenders fought from house to house. Several times, the situation was critical for the Soviet forces. The Soviet side had to deploy in the fighting units that were under construction.

At the start of the fighting in July 1942, the fascist armies were in numerical superior range with 20% more soldiers, twice as many tanks and 3.6 times more aircraft. When it came to artillery pieces and mortars, the forces were about the same. The fascists invested everything in trying to take Stalingrad before the Soviet forces had time to rally to counter-offensive.

From July to November 1942, the fascists in the battles of the Don, Volga and Stalingrad lost 700,000 men, 1,000 tanks, over 2,000 guns and mortars and 1,400 aircraft. But even though they had occupied large tracts of land, the fascists could not break down the Soviet resistance. The Hitler troops had suffered colossal losses and had to move to defense in November without gaining a decisive victory or preventing the Soviet forces from grouping themselves into counter-offensives.

The forces of the Soviet-German Front in 1942

In 1942, the German army consisted of 267 divisions and five brigades. Of these, the Nazis in the Soviet-German Front had 192 divisions and three brigades (71 percent). In addition, the Nazi-allied countries had 66 divisions and 13 brigades in the Soviet Union. In total, the fascists on the Soviet-German Front had 258 divisions and 16 brigades with 6.2 million men, about 51,700 guns and mortars, 5,080 tanks and gun cars, 3,500 fighter jets and 194 warships. Additional German divisions arrived during the year and in November there were 266 fascist divisions and 16 brigades in the Soviet Union (12.5 divisions in the other fronts).

On the Soviet side, the combat troops included 6.6 million men, 77,800 guns and mortars, 7,350 tanks and 4,544 fighter jets. Although the difference was not great, the power ratios had been reversed in favor of the Soviet Union. During the war, the socialist mode of production could have achieved fantastic results, which was something of a mystery to the Nazis and the leaders of the capitalist world.

The country they had condemned to destruction, without the opportunity to catch up with the war production of capitalist Europe that served fully the Nazi armies, had developed its war production at a rate that it now surpassed production in Nazi Europe.

Soviet production of aircraft and tanks in Ural

Soviet war production surpassed production in Nazi Europe.

Counter offensive in November.

On November 19, 1942, the Soviet counteroffensive began in Stalingrad. The concentration and preparation of the troops had been made without disclosing the purpose. Several new armies equipped with new weapons, new tanks and new aircraft grouped in the area without the fascists noticing what was going on. For the fascists, the Soviet Union was a very weakened country without the possibility of counterattack.

The fascists deployed, in the attack on the southern Soviet Union, 74 divisions of 1.5 million soldiers. The shock group against Stalingrad then existed between the River Don and the Volga. It was Hitler's best armed armies, the German 6th Army and the 4th Tank Army with a total of 22 divisions and about 330,000 men. The Soviet counter-offensive would make a breakthrough of the fascist front line at the north and south of Stalingrad, respectively.

Furthermore, they would attack the left and right flanks and continue the attack to a total encirclement of the fascist armies. The task of the Soviet leadership was enormous. The Soviet troops would defeat and wipe out the Nazis' best armed and proudest armies led by von Paulus, one of Nazi Germany's and Hitler's foremost generals.

Stalingrad Battle Commander Georgy Zhukov

Approaching the buildings and assault, Stalingrad 1942

Von Paulus surrounded

The fighting was exasperated and terrible. The German troops were filled with faith in Nazi propaganda about the victory over the Soviet sub-humans and the riches that were to be conquered. The Soviet troops fought for freedom and the socialist fatherland. The Soviet counter-offensive took the fascists by surprise. After a few days, the fascist armies on the flanks were completely torn up and ceased to exist. After that, von Paulus's 6th and 4th armies were surrounded without having escaped and put themselves to safety.

Furthermore, the Soviet army established an outer ring of very strongly armed armies that made any attempt to help von Paulus out of the encirclement from outside. Quite unexpectedly for the Nazis, the war situation had changed completely. The disaster for the German troops was imminent. Hitler formed the new army group Don to get von Paulus out of the Soviet encirclement. Twenty-seven divisions, of which 5 armored divisions, came in all haste from Germany, France, Belgium and Holland to save von Paulus from complete defeat. But nothing could break the Soviet encirclement.

Victory in February
The ring around von Paul's troops was tightened by the day with heavy German losses. On January 31, 1943, General Field Marshal von Paulus, along with 24 generals, finally surrendered. A few days later, everything was over for the Nazi troops. During the Soviet counteroffensive, between November 1942 and February 1943, the fascists lost 32 divisions and 3 brigades that were destroyed. A further 16 other fascist divisions lost between 50 and 75% of their soldiers (along the entire Soviet-German front, fascists lost a total of 100 divisions and 1.7 million men in the same period).

Throughout the Battle of Stalingrad, the fascists lost over 1 million men, 3,000 tanks and gun cars, 12,000 guns and mortars and over 3,000 fighter jets. This was a quarter of all fascist forces in the Soviet Union. The lost war materials corresponded to half a year of Germany's war production. The defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad was of disastrous measure. Never, ever had a German army of this size been so utterly defeated and destroyed. In Germany, Hitler triggered a three-day mourning.

General Field Marshal von Paulus surrendered along with 24 generals.

The big turnaround after the victory in Stalingrad

The Soviet victory at Stalingrad had great political-military importance for the whole world. The complete defeat of the Nazi troops sharpened the divisions within the Nazi-fascist bloc. Japan withdrew from every act of war against the Soviet Union. Hungary and Romania, which saw their armies lost almost in their entirety at Stalingrad, began secret peace talks with the United States and England. Mussolini suggested Hitler refrain from the war in the East and instead concentrate all forces against the United States and England. Turkey was fortunate not to have gone to war with the Soviet Union and declared itself neutral. The Nazi-fascist bloc began to disrupt. Among the Allies, it was cheered instead greatly.

German prisoners 1943

Roosevelt on Stalingrad

In an honorary diploma to Stalingrad, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt wrote,

"In the name of the people of the United States, I hand over this diploma to the city of Stalingrad to commemorate our admiration for its defenders whose courage, strength of soul and devotion during the siege from September 13th to January 31, 1943 will forever inspire the actions of all free people. Their glorious victory halted the storm surge of the invasion and marked the turnaround in the Allied countries' war against the forces of aggression."

The British King George VI sent a sword with the inscription

"To the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad, the gift of King George VI, In token of the homage of the British people".

“ГРАЖДАНАМ СТАЛИНГРАДА • КРЕПКИМ КАК СТАЛЬ • ОТ КОРОЛЯ ГЕОРГА VI • В ЗНАК ГЛУБОКОГО ВОСХИЩЕНИЯ БРИТАНСКОГО НАРОДА”
“TO THE STEEL-HEARTED CITIZENS OF STALINGRAD • THE GIFT OF KING GEORGE VI • IN TOKEN OF THE HOMAGE OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE”

The bourgeois description of history and the Battle of El Alamein.
But the historians of the West did not hold on to the truth. During the Cold War, a propaganda war began against the Soviet Union in which one of the aims was to thwart the great victory over Nazism in Stalingrad for the people of the West. A large number of books appeared that sealed the Battle of Stalingrad and instead explained the great turn of World War II as a result of the victory of the English and Americans at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt from October 23rd to November 4, 1942. The Nazi general Rommel had invaded North Africa in June 1942 with his armor and threatened the oil fields of the Middle East. He was defeated in El Alamein and his forces of Germans and Italians were finally crushed in Tunisia in May 1943 by the English and American armies. No doubt the victory in El Alamein was to great delight for the freedom-loving humanity. The English who fought there and even gave their lives to end Nazism are forever our heroes, as are all the other anti-fascists in the whole world. But comparing El Alamein to Stalingrad or using El Alamein to make us forget the victory of Stalingrad is just a dirty trick.

In El Alamein 12 fascist divisions of 80 thousand men.
In Stalingrad 74 fascist divisions of 1.5 million men!
In El Alamein, the fascist army consisted of 4 German divisions and 8 Italian divisions totaling 80,000 men. In Stalingrad, the fascists, only in the immediate vicinity of the city, had 22 German divisions. In total, the fascists in the battle area at the Battle of Stalingrad had 74 divisions! In El Alamein, the German and Italian troops lost about 55,000 men and 300 tanks. In the Battle of Stalingrad, the Nazis and their allies lost over 1 million men, 3,500 tanks, 12,000 guns and 3,000 aircraft. This is what broke down the Nazi military force. It is not possible to compare the victory in El Alamein with the total Nazi disaster in Stalingrad. This was acknowledged by The British Prime Minister Churchill in a letter to Stalin in March 1943 in which Churchill described the Anglo-American war operations in North Africa. Churchill wrote to Stalin that "I assumed that you were interested in these details, even if they cannot be compared at all to the immense operations you lead." Only a victory the size of Stalingrad could be a turnaround in the war. Although Nazi Germany was an important military power after Stalingrad, the Germans could never restore the armies, the colossal amount of materiel and the prestige and morale that were forever lost there.

Sweden and the war

(This article was written to the Swedish newspaper Proletären, the part of Sweden in the war must be told to the readers.)

Until 1943, the Swedish bourgeoisie was almost entirely on the German side in the war. Many were open Nazi sympathizers. They were in many important positions in the state administration. At the head of them was King Gustav V and Crown Prince Gustav Adolf, who were happy to visit the Hitler youth's camp. Another Nazi sympathizer was Commander-in-Chief Olof Thörnell who on April 21, 1941, a year after the Nazi occupation of the Norwegian and Danish "brother peoples", proposed to the Swedish government to join Nazi Germany in the impending war against the Soviet Union. "A German victory would bring the discouraging of communism and inestimable benefit to the internal health of our country," said Supreme Commander Thörnell. Thörnell had, with very few exceptions, the entire Swedish officers' corps with him.

Commander-in-Chief Olof Thörnell and the Service Cross of the German Eagle given to Thörnel by Hitler.

It was a time when the Swedish security police registered over 60,000 Swedish communists and the fascist organizations in Sweden 20,000 Swedish Jews. One does not need to ask to whom these long lists were supposed to be left if the Soviet Union had lost the war. Trade with Germany, and especially the iron ore so necessary for war, grew out and completely dominated Swedish foreign trade. Trade with Germany previous war was around SEK 800 million a year. By 1941 it had grown to SEK 1800 million. Colossal wealth was made among the Swedish capitalists, the Wallenberg family for example became great at the war.

At the same time, the baiting against the Soviet Union and the Swedish communists became general in the capitalist press. The Swedish state imposed a transport ban on the communist press. Communists and other leftists were imprisoned in labor camps and threatened by the officers for life when the Soviet Union was defeated by the Nazis. Yet Sweden had every reason to be deeply grateful to the Soviet Union.

Prison camp in Sveg

Soviet Union saved Sweden

When the German Nazis invaded and occupied Denmark and Norway in April 1940, an invasion and occupation of Sweden was also prepared. But Sweden was never invaded. This despite the fact that the country was without defense in the south. The Swedish army was then mostly located at the borders in the north to the east. Sweden's generals were expecting a Soviet attack...

It has been speculated that the absence of Nazi occupation was due to the German friendliness and Nazi sympathies of the Swedish bourgeoisie. The Germans got everything they asked of Sweden, why occupy? No doubt something is in the argument, but it was not that simple. The Nazis invaded and occupied other countries whose bourgeoisie was pro-German, almost like their allies. Poland was happy to receive part of Czechoslovakia's territory when the Nazis ended this country. The capitalists of Holland and Belgium stood on the balcony of Amsterdam's and Brussels' best hotels and toasted in champagne as the Nazi troops paraded in these capitals during the invasion. In France, before the Nazi invasion, the nonsocialist government declared the Communist Party illegal and the bourgeois spoke openly of "Rather Hitler than the Popular Front" (Plutôt Hitler que le Front Populaire!) in fear that a new left-wing government would come to power. But all these countries were occupied and plundered by the Nazis. Sweden was left at peace by the Nazis for other reasons.

At the time of the invasion of Denmark and Norway, the Soviet Government informed the Germans that it was in the Soviet Union's interest that Sweden would remain neutral and was left out of the Germans' war plans. The Soviet Union easily the Germans understand that in the event of a German invasion of Sweden, the Soviet Union would take an active role on Sweden's side. At the time, the Nazis were not ready to start a war against the Soviet Union. Sweden was left out of the war. On the occasion of the Soviet Union's support to Sweden, the Swedish Ambassador to Moscow, Per Vilhelm Gustaf Assarsson, was advised by Foreign Minister Günther, to seek the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov and thank him for this support.

Sovjets president Kalinin med Sveriges Moskva ambassadör Vilhelm Assarsson

Ambassador Assarsson did so in Moscow on April 20, 1940, eleven days after the invasion of Denmark and Norway. In his report on the meeting with Molotov, Assarsson writes to Foreign Minister Günther – "Today I have had the opportunity, equally obtained, to thank the Foreign Commissioner for... some communication, which he had previously given to this German ambassador regarding the Soviet desire for Sweden to remain neutral during the ongoing campaign in Norway – something he expressed as being in Russian interest – even as count Schulenburg's statement (German ambassador to Moscow, my note. MS), that the German government found this Soviet attitude understandable and correct and intended to respect our country's neutrality...".

Sweden after Stalingrad

After the Soviet victory in Stalingrad, the so-called neutral Sweden began to look after its house. The Swedish bourgeoisie's support for Nazi Germany began to wane and the Swedish coalition government's pro-German policy disappeared more and more. At the end of 1943, Sweden regained diplomatic relations with some of the Nazi-occupied countries through the governments in exile. Trade with Germany decreased markedly and in October 1943 Swedish trade with the Soviet Union resumed. Later in 1943, the Swedish supply of war materials to the Finnish fascists ceased and in 1944 the Swedish trade with Germany ceased. With the victory in Stalingrad, the political wind had definitely turned for the Swedish bourgeoisie. Among the Swedish people, the Swedish Communist Party received great sympathy. In the 1944 elections, the Swedish Communists won 15 seats.

The armored battle in Kursk

After the defeat in Stalingrad, the German armies tried to recapture the initiative in the war. That was what Hitler demanded. Through "total mobilization”, the Germans increased their army by 2 million men. The armies that had come to free von Paulus received additional reinforcements and launched an offensive at the end of February 1943. They managed to retake Kharkov from the Soviet front troops who had captured the city. But they did not get any further than that. The offensive was soon stopped by the Soviet troops and the Germans had to turn to defense.

Their goal was instead to assemble a very powerful army group of large forces of tanks to, in the summer of 1943, force the Soviet army to back down and abandon the city of Kursk and adjacent area in a protrusion of the front, the so-called Kursk salient. According to the Nazis, this would open the way to breaking the Soviet front. The Nazis drew the same 50 elite divisions with about 900,000 men, hence 16 armored and motorized divisions and 11 armored and gun-wagon battalions with 2,700 tanks and gun cars, 10,000 guns and over 2,000 aircraft.

To Kursk, the Nazis drew 70% of the tank divisions located on the Soviet-German front with almost all new tanks "Tiger" and "Panther", the pride of German military technology in the field. Even in the case of aircraft were sent to the offensive in Kursk the best fighter jets such as fighter aircraft Fokke-Wulf-190, attack aircraft Henschel-129 and bomber Heinkel-111, all with the most modern weapons systems. Several more aircraft were added during the fighting from other areas of the Soviet-German Front.

The Kursk Front 1943

The Red Army prepares for strategic victory in Kursk

The Soviet High Command was well informed of the intentions of the Nazis and was preparing for the coming great battle. The Soviet industry now had a production capacity that exceeded the German and German-occupied and allied countries in quantity and quality. In addition, the Red Army had been reinforced with millions of party members and Komsomol members. At the end of 1943, there were 2.7 million communists and nearly as many Komsomol members in the Red Army.

The Soviet High Command decided to wait out the enemy's attack. It was decided, in Kursk, to build up powerful defense tens of kilometers deep against which the Germans would lose a large part of their forces. Then the Soviet troops would go to counter-offensive and crush the enemy. The German offensive began on July 5, 1943.

On the night of July 5th, the German elite troops heard a personal call from Hitler. "Every commander, every private, is obliged to realize with his consciousness the crucial importance of this offensive. The victory at Kursk must seem like a torch to the whole world." Now it was the time for the Germans!

The Germans lost 30 elite divisions.

The fighting was terrible with heavy losses in human lives and supplies. The German shock troops that attacked from the north advanced about 10 kilometers into the Soviet defense but after four days were without the power to continue the offensive. The German troops who attacked from the south managed to advance 35 kilometers into the Soviet defense where they were stopped without reaching the target. In some battles there were hundreds of tanks from both sides involved at the same time. The Soviet victory in Prokhorovka, known as the largest tank battle in history, was one of the decisive for the Soviet victory at Kursk.

A week after the start of the fighting, on July 12, 1943, the planned Soviet counteroffensive began. For over a month, until August 23, it went on. The fighting was terrible and the use of tanks the largest ever. In the end, the Germans could not resist the soviet superior warfare and strength. Once again, the German army was defeated and forced to flee. The Nazis wanted to conquer the protrusion of about 14,400 km2. They were properly defeated and instead lost an occupied area of about 25,000 km2, almost twice the size of the Kursk protrusion.

The Soviet army won the Battle of Kursk and the Nazis were forced to reverse 150 kilometers from the original lines. They left behind thousands of burnt-out tanks and planes. The Soviet army liberated the cities of Orel, Belgorod, Kharkov and many others.

After Kursk, we knew that we would lose the war".

The Defeat of the Germans was devastating. In the Battle of Kursk (for about a month and a half!) the Germans lost about 30 elite divisions, hence 7 tank divisions, a total of 500,000 men, 1,500 tanks, over 3,700 aircraft and 3,000 guns. After the Battle of Kursk, although still strong, the German army could never restore its former strength again. It also lost forever the strategic initiative in the war and the ability to launch major offensives. By the end of 1943, the German High Command had to move another 75 divisions and large quantities of weapons and supplies from the West to the Eastern Front. Another 40 new German divisions were sent to the Eastern Front in the first half of 1944. But it did not help, in the future it was the Soviet forces that dictated the terms of war. This view was also prevailing among the German generals. "After Stalingrad, we knew that we would not win the war and after Kursk we knew that we would lose it," they said.

“After Kursk we knew that we would lose the war”

The falsification of history and the Anglo-American conquest of Sicily

Soon after the German troops began their attack on Kursk on July 5, 1943, the Anglo-American conquest of Sicily began. On July 10, 1943, the Anglo-American troops disembarked in Sicily. Against them there were 2 German divisions and 10 Italian divisions. The Italian troops in Sicily had no fighting spirit left, did not want to fight for the fascist regime and surrendered without a fight. (according to Hitler, "the Italians did not fight, they will be happy when they can lay down arms and even happier if they can sell them") The German divisions retreated during battle and on August 17th the island was secured for the Allies. It was happy news for the whole anti-fascist world. The Anglo-American victory in Sicily was also celebrated in Moscow. Every step and every meter of earth, won from the fascists, was, of course, a joy for the whole world.

In Sicily 2 fascist divisions, in Kursk 50!

But some Cold War writers have tried to turn the conquest of Sicily into something it was not, trying to compare the conquest of Sicily with the Battle of Kursk and its military-political significance. A ridiculous comparison. In Sicily there were 2 German divisions and in Kursk 50! In addition, there were never any major battles in Sicily, the Italians gave in and the Germans struck retreat. In Kursk, the Germans lost 30 elite divisions, in Sicily no divisions at all! But the falsification of history does not end here. Some Western writers claim that it was the attack on Sicily and the threat of conquest of Italy that prevented the Germans from gathering enough force to attack Kursk. According to these forgers of history, some of the German divisions located at Kursk were relocated to Italy, making it easier for the Soviets to win the Battle of Kursk. This claim is a lie.

The Anglo-American conquest of Italy

Let us see what happened in Italy. The two German divisions in Sicily, one of which was an armored guard division, made a successful retreat to the Italian mainland with very few losses. These two German divisions were part of the German 10th Army, located in southern Italy under the command of General Kesselring. In northern Italy there was another German army, Army Group B under general Rommel's command. (he who was defeated in North Africa by the Anglo-American forces). In all, in Italy in early 1943, there were 21 German divisions (consider that at this time the Nazis at the Soviet-German Front had 205 German divisions and 45 divisions from German-allied countries). No German divisions were sent to Italy before or at the time of the Battle of Kursk. It was not necessary. The Anglo-American invasion forces, the British 8th Army and the U.S. 5th Army, in a total of 23 divisions, could not threaten the Germans with defeat and surrender in Italy.

It took almost a year to get to Rome!

The Anglo-American conquest of Italy began on September 9, 1943, and it was not until June 4, 1944 (almost a year later!) that they managed to reach central Italy and take Rome. They then reached the east-west fortification line that crossed the Apennines mountains north of the city of Florence, between Pesaro and Carrara, which was called the Gothic Line by Hitler. Germans entrenched themselves at the Gothic Line and the Anglo-American armies were unable to defeat them. On November 13, 1944, the commander of the Allied forces in Italy, the English general Alexander, announced that the attack had failed and ordered the transition to defense.

Families of the Italian partisans

General Alexander treason against the partisans.

German troops in Italy surrendered only in the spring of 1945 after Nazi Germany had lost the war on the Eastern Front. The German troops in Italy surrendered on May 2, 1945, the day before the fall of Berlin to the Soviet army on May 3, 1945. It may be interesting to know that General Alexander's orders for the transition to defense and the prohibition of offensive missions were given to the Italian partisans behind the German front, in a broadcast that was also received by the Germans. The Germans were thus given the go-ahead to pull some of their forces off the front to persecute the Italian partisans who were murdered in large numbers, including the families, during the winter-spring of 1944-1945. The partisans accused General Alexander of treason. The general's broadcasting was intended to give the Germans a free hand to persecute and assassinate the Italian partisans, who were mostly communists. It was a way of preparing the political situation for the new regime that was to be built up in Italy after the end of the war.

Soviet Union’s offensive after Kursk

After the victory at Kursk, the Soviet High Command set a goal not to give the Germans a minute's peace and quickly conquer all land until the Dnieper river. The Soviet soldiers were exhausted after sustained fighting at Kursk, but no one hesitated before the headquarters directive. Everyone knew what the German troops were doing when they were forced to retreat. On their escape, the Nazis set fire to villages and towns, blew up factories, burned schools and hospitals and murdered all living things. Millions of human bodies filled the mass graves in the escape route of the Germans and their allies. The Nazis avenged the defeat on the defenseless civilian population. The Soviet army continued to take out the Germans' attempts at defense along the entire Dnieper. After exasperated battles, the Soviet army was able to force the Dnieper 700 kilometers in late September 1943 and advance along a 1,200-kilometre front.

Crossing the Dnepr!

Crossing the Dnepr. On the other side!

Ukraine’s capital Kiev!

Just over a month after, on November 6, 1943, the Red Army captured Ukraine's capital Kiev. Stalin declared on this day in a public speech:

"The war has entered a stage when it is a question of completely expelling the invaders from Soviet soil and eliminating the fascist 'new order in Europe'. The time is not long, when we shall complete the cleansing of Ukraine and Belarus, as well as the Leningrad and Kalinin districts from enemies, and when we shall liberate the peoples of Crimea and in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldau and the Karelian-Finnish Republic from the German invaders".

After the soviet counter-offensive in Stalingrad had begun, in November 1942, until the end of 1943, the Soviet army had destroyed 56 German divisions and defeated another 162 divisions in battle, which were forced to flee with very heavy losses. Many of the best Generals and officers of the Germans were killed during these battles. During this time, the Germans lost about 7,000 tanks, over 14,000 aircraft and nearly 50,000 guns and mortars. Towards the end of 1943, important victories were also achieved in other combat areas. The Soviet troops had liberated the Kalinin and Smolensk areas and part of eastern Belarus.

Germany's production of munitions and the Anglo-American aerial bombardment

From the beginning of the war in the late 1930s until mid-1944, the German war industry increased its production all the time. The Anglo-American bombing spree over Germany had little impact on Germany's production capacity and transport system. Compared to 1942, German production of aircraft had grown in 1944, grown 2.7 times and tanks 4.4 times. Only after the Soviet great offensive in the summer of 1944, which deprived the Germans of important sources of raw materials, the German war production began to decline. The Anglo-American bombing spree over Germany was primarily directed to civilian targets, the major German cities.

A special commission appointed by the US government in 1947 to investigate the impact of the North American and English aerial bombardments over Germany came to the conclusion that the German economy had lost 9% of its production in 1943 and 17% in 1944 due to the bombings. The Commission concluded that the bombing of Germany 'had not had a decisive impact on the ability of German industry to produce war materials'.

1,1% of all bombs fell on petrol plants and refineries!

Only 18% of the bombs fell over the war industry, the rest were released to kill civilians. More than one million German civilians were killed in this way and over 7.5 million were left without housing. In the summer of 1944, during the great Soviet offensive, the German refineries and synthetic gasoline plants were fully working. They were located geographically in places that could only be reached by the Western Allies' warplanes. From the beginning of the war to May 1944, these industries suffered only 1.1% of all bombs that fell on Germany! Although the Anglo-American war leadership knew that the fascists took no account of the people and that the bombing of German cities had no influence on the Nazi leadership, the bombings increased in the final years of the war. Mainly, the bombs were dropped over eastern Germany, which was later occupied by the Soviet Union.

Barbarism in Dresden.

The aim of obstructing the reconstruction of society in the East was obvious. Most famous is the bombings on the 13th to 15th of February 1945, three months before the end of the war (!), of the German city of Dresden with its cultural treasures. In three days, everything was turned into ash and over 40,000 civilians were killed. A barbaric attack.

Barbaric attack on Dresden.

The Soviet Union never bombed civilian targets. The Soviet Air Force was used to fight the German army and support the Soviet ground troops. The Soviet Air Force had a large part in the defeat of fascist aviation. A survey of German historians shows that of the approximately 100,000 aircraft that Germany lost in the war, 62,000 lost at the Soviet-German Front, 8,000 in Western Europe, 9,000 in the Mediterranean region, 7,000 over the Balkans and about 13,000 in Germany's defense.

Magnitogorsk’s victory over the Ruhr

Although German industries were barely attacked and despite their high production performance in the first half of 1944, German industries were unable to win the battle for war production against Soviet industries. In the first half of 1944, the Soviet Union produced 61,600 guns, 13,800 tanks and powered guns and 19,600 aircraft. Germany produced 53,200 guns, 8,300 tanks and powered guns and 16,000 aircraft. It was Magnitogorsk's victory over the Ruhr!

The great Soviet offensive of 1944

After the great successes on the front lines in Ukraine, the Soviet headquarters decided to conduct an offensive across the front from Leningrad in the north to Crimea in the south in the winter of 1944. At the beginning of 1944, Germany and its allies on the Soviet-German Front had 245 divisions with about 5 million men, 54,500 guns and mortars, 5,400 tanks and gun cars and over 3,000 aircraft. The Soviet army was superior to the German with 30% in crew, 70% in artillery and 230% in aircraft. Soviet superiority also extended to a qualitative superiority in all weapons battles, be it handguns, tanks, cannons and fighter and bomb flights.

During the war, the Soviet Union had developed weapons systems that were technically by far superior on all fronts, including technologically superior to the Anglo-American weapons. This was, for example, the T-34 and KV-1 tanks, Il-2, Il-10 aircraft, Tu-2 bombers, Jak-3, Jak-9 and La-5 fighter jets, artillery guns 76 mm and many others.

The socialist social system frees the creativity of man and gives it an opportunity to realize technological innovation. During the war, this was an important factor in creating the conditions for victory. Another especially important factor in the victory, perhaps the most important, was the always high morale of soviet soldiers, prepared for any sacrifice to fight the fascists and liberate the Soviet motherland.

Finally, Leningrad

Between January and February 1944, Leningrad was finally completely liberated from the Nazi encirclement. After 900 days of great suffering, the people of Leningrad were finally able to breathe out. They had written one of the bravest sides of the war against the Nazi invader with their efforts. The fighting around Leningrad was terrible at a time when the German war machine was still in full swing. Along with the lack of food and the lack of emergency units of all kinds, it meant the death of 600,000 Leningrad residents. It was a heroic battle of the greatest importance to the entire anti-fascist world. The Nazis had plans to destroy Leningrad, not leave stone on stone and put the area under water. The same destruction plans existed against Moscow, Kursk, Stalingrad, and other major cities of the Soviet Union.

Leningrad 19 January 1944

Symbol of the brave people of the Soviet Union

Leningrad's struggle for survival is today forged by right-wing historians, who want to make the achievement of the people of Leningrad an insignificance. But they cannot silence those who lived then and what they conveyed in perpetuity. Leningrad's liberation became a world first of great importance, greatly strengthening many occupied countries and peoples in their hope of liberation from Nazism and fascism. The English newspaper Star commented on Leningrad's liberation in an editorial: "All free peoples and all peoples oppressed by the Hitler horde understand the importance of the defeat of the Germans in Leningrad to the weakening of fascist power. Leningrad has long since conquered a place among the hero cities of this war. The Battle of Leningrad has sown alarm among the Germans. It reminds them that for some time alone they are masters of Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Oslo". The North American President Roosevelt sent a diploma of admiration to the people of Leningrad in which he wrote that the city's defenders stood as a symbol of "the brave people of the Soviet Union".

Leningrad January 1944

The battle for Ukraine

During the winter of 1943 and the spring of 1944, the Soviet army in southern Ukraine continued its successful offensive against the German troops and their allies. The aim was to throw out the fascists and reach the border with Romania and Poland. The German troops defended themselves fiercely and the losses were remarkably high on both sides. In early February 1944, the German 42nd and 11th Army Corps were surrounded. They refused to surrender and tried to break through but failed. Only a group of generals, officers and SS men managed to escape on tanks under cover of darkness and snowfall. A few days later, 18,000 German soldiers were captured.

At the beginning of March, a new offensive was launched with the aim of completely liberating Ukraine and the front continued to move further west. At the end of the same month, a large group of German troops, 23 divisions of which 10 tanks were surrounded at the town of Ternopol, about 200 kilometers from the Polish border. The 1st German Armor Army then lost much of the crew, artillery, tanks and cannons. In mid-April, the German group was destroyed, and Ternopol was liberated by the Soviet forces.

The Red Army liberated Ternopol on April 15, 1944.

Of the invasion armies in the south of the Soviet Union, there was now only a strong fascist troop concentration in five German divisions and seven Romanian divisions surrounded in Crimea with no chance of getting out. It was destroyed by the Soviet troops in early May 1944 when Sevastopol was finally liberated. During the winter, the Soviet army had destroyed 30 fascist divisions and 6 brigades and defeated 142 fascist divisions that had been hunted on the run with very heavy losses. The German High Command had to move another 40 divisions from Germany and the occupied countries to the Soviet-German front to cover the losses.

The Soviet summer offensive 1944

At the end of April 1944, the Soviet headquarters in Moscow began preparing the planning of this summer and autumn military campaigns. The first and most important mission was to liberate Belarus from the Nazis. During the three-year Nazi occupation, Belarus, like Ukraine, had been plundered and destroyed on a mass scale. 1.2 million buildings and 7,000 schools had been burned down and over several million people murdered. But the people of Belarus never gave up.

The partisan army, all over the war.

Partisans preparing to take back their land.

Group portrait of Soviet partisans who are members of the third unit of the Shish partisan detachment in the Molotov brigade, operating in the Leninsky district in the Pinsk region.

Behind the German lines was a partisan army of 143,000 men fighting the Nazis and now waiting to launch major battles for the liberation of their country. As in the rest of the Soviet Union, large parts of the partisan army were transformed into units of the Red Army when the Soviet front came to their areas. Partisan armies as a military power factor were always part of soviet headquarters planning. This time they would be part of the offensive to defeat the Nazis and throw them way back behind the border. The Soviet offensive started as planned on June 23, 1944, which had been agreed with the Anglo-American command.

Ambassador Davies on the Second Front in Europe

The issue of a second front against Nazi Germany in Europe had been the subject of discussion between the Soviet Union and the Western allies since 1942. In June 1942, for the first time, the British and North American leaders publicly declared that an agreement had been reached with the Soviet Union “to open a second front in Europe without delay". The domestic opinion in these countries demanded it.

In the United States, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1936-38, Joseph E. Davies, had participated in a campaign to get the government to open a second front in Europe. In radio speeches and writing, Davies fought hard to influence home opinion. In the paper "Our Debt to Our Soviet Ally", in June 1942, Davies presented his arguments in support of the Soviet Union. He was a great connoisseur of the Soviet Union who "went to the Soviet Union as a capitalist" and "came back as a capitalist", was the most dedicated advocate for help for the Soviet Union. Davies writes,

"If the Red Army had been defeated... Hitler and his Japanese partner would today hold Europe, Asia and Africa under total subjection... Australia and South America would probably have already fallen to the Axis." "The Red Army stands in the breach defending our civilization, offering us the hope of victory ... If Russia falls, Hitler will be in a position from which he expects to dominate the world." "Our civilization owes it to the Soviet Union that must never be forgotten." "Therefore, above all else, I believe that what is necessary is the opening of a second front in Europe...".

Soviet victories force a second front in Europe.

But Davies' campaigns did not make it all the way. The English and American governments were not interested in providing effective assistance to the people of the Soviet Union. Their promise of a second front in Europe was also shamed in 1943. At the Tehran Conference between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the end of November 1943, it was once again decided on the opening of a second front in Europe, this time until May 1, 1944.

Two long years had passed since the first promise. Stalin commented on this on his return: "Roosevelt gave me his word of honor to launch extensive actions in France in 1944. I think he will keep his word, but even if he would not, our own forces are sufficient to completely take out Nazi Germany." The promised Allied invasion on May 1, 1944, never took place. Churchill tried to stop the Western Allies' invasion of Normandy until the end. But in June, the Soviet Union's Western allies were in a hurry. The Soviet army won everywhere and moved quickly forward. June 6th, 1944, it was finally time!

The German Eastern Front near collapse

The Soviet summer offensive in 1944 was one of the largest war operations of World War II. The Nazis tried to postpone defeat until the last. Nazi Germany mobilized a large number of soldiers, many of them older men and young boys, and brought together the largest number of fascist divisions during World War II. In June 1944, Nazi Germany and their allies had 324 divisions on the front. At the Soviet-German Front, the fascists had 4.3 million men in 179 German divisions and 5 brigades as well as 49 divisions from German-allied states and 18 brigades.

In total, there were 228 fascist divisions and 23 brigades on the Soviet-German Front, which is equivalent to about 239 divisions. (other front: 61 divisions in France, 24 in Italy total, about one million German soldiers). They were equipped with 59,000 guns and mortars, 7,800 tanks and cannon cars and about 3,200 aircraft. But now the Soviet army had superior forces. On the Soviet side there were 6.6 million soldiers equipped with 98,100 guns and mortars, 7,100 tanks and gun cars and about 12,900 aircraft. In early August 1944, the Soviet army won a mighty victory over the German Army Group Center, where in a matter of weeks the Germans lost over 400,000 men. The Soviet army broke through the German front, threatening to collapse. The Germans had to move a further 46 divisions and several brigades from Germany and the rest of Western Europe to the Eastern Front in haste. This was a very great help to the Anglo-American offensive in France.

Two fronts against Nazi Germany

Bourgeois writers have often tried to portray the Western Front as the most important theatre of war of the Second World War. Let us therefore recall that in June 1944, on the Soviet-German front, there were 4.3 million German soldiers and one million on the Western Front. In the second half of 1944, Germany lost more than 200,000 men every month on the Eastern Front, twice as much as Germany lost on the Western Front. The Eastern and Western Front developed its offensives against Germany with different successes.

On the Eastern Front, in the summer and autumn of 1944, the Soviet army continued to successfully defeat the fascists and force them to flee between 600 and 900 kilometers. During this time, the Soviet army came to the German border in East Prussia, liberated all of Belarus, almost the entire Baltic states, liberated the eastern areas of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia as well as the whole of Romania and Bulgaria.

On July 28, 1944, the Red Army liberated Brest, the first town attacked by the Nazis on June 22, 1941.

The Nazis have been thrown back across soviet borders

In July 1944, the Soviet Red Army freed the prisoners in the Majdanek extermination camp and in January 27, 1945 the prisoners in extermination camps at Auschwitz. Soon the whole world would have evidence of the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, homosexuals, several million Soviet prisoners of war, political opposition figures and many others. Since 1942, the Soviet government tried to expose the ongoing genocide, but revelations were dismissed by Western powers as Soviet propaganda. In Sweden there was a complete knowledge of the Nazi murders, in the Swedish church and the Swedish Foreign Ministry since 1942. But it was kept quiet until the end of 1944.

January 27, 1945, the Red Army liberated the prisoners in extermination camps at Auschwitz.

Freedom at last!

The Nazis lose 500,000 men in Belarus

In the second half of 1944, the Soviet army destroyed or captured 96 fascist divisions and 24 brigades and defeated and forced on the run of 219 fascist divisions and 22 brigades. The battle for Belarus, from 23 June to 29 August 1944, must be mentioned. It was greater than all the western allies' operations on land. Here, the Soviet army destroyed the German army group Centrum, the largest Nazi army group, which carried out the failed offensive against Moscow in the autumn of 1941. The Nazis then lost over 17 divisions and over half of the soldiers in the other divisions, over 500,000 men! This disaster forced the Nazis to send to the Eastern Front the last reserves intended to be used against the Allies who had landed in France. With the offensive in Belarus, the German soldiers lost "forever the last faint hope of ever stopping the Russian tsunami".

The struggle on the Western Front

On the Western Front, the war took a different course. Here, the troops of the United States, Great Britain and France met a much smaller force of the German army than the one in the East. About a quarter. In addition, many of the German divisions in the West were those that had been taken out of the war on the Eastern Front for rest and reconstruction after suffering heavy losses. But the success of the three Western allies was not the size of the Soviets on the Eastern Front.

This is despite the fact that the Western Allied army was at 2 million men, twice the size of the German army in France. Despite some violent battles in Northern France where the U.S. army met the German, the Western allies could not come to a decisive and defeat the Germans. In September 1944, nearly four months after Normandy, the German High Command decided to leave France and retreat to Germany's border with the fortified Siegfried line. That is where they defended themselves. In the autumn of 1944, the Western Allies were unable to break the German armed forces. The Western Allies chief commander, General Eisenhower, then decided to hold off on the offensive operations until the spring of 1945. Due to the heavy German defeats on the Eastern Front, Eisenhower later reversed his decision to move to the offensive until February 1945.

Battle of the Ardennes

The bourgeois forgers of history are trying in all their descriptions of the Western Front to glorify the warfare of the Western allies. At the same time, they are trying to make the war on the Eastern Front insignificant. Sometimes you turn the whole historical process around to make it fit into its purposes. The Battle of the Ardennes is a good example of this. As we showed above, the situation of the German troops in the east was disastrous in the autumn of 1944. The Soviet offensive forced the German elite divisions to flee, sometimes in sheer panic, without the German leadership being able to get a breather to uproot the troops' morale of combat and bring out new soldiers and new weapons.
At this point, the German leadership tried to achieve a situation where a separate peace with the West could be a possibility. An offensive against the Western allies of the Belgian Ardennes was prepared. The German leadership thought that a successful offensive and the victory over western allies' troops in this important area of Belgium could lead to the Western allies accepting a separate peace in the West. It was with an offensive over the Ardennes that the Germans in 1940 had started the invasion of France. From the Ardennes you can quickly reach major important cities such as Brussels, Antwerp and beyond Rotterdam and Amsterdam. In its desperation over Germany's defeat in the East and the impossibility of reversing the end of the war there, the German leadership decided to, on the Western Front, bet everything on a card.
Some bourgeois historians write that the Germans believed that the most difficult war situation was in the West, not in the East, and that Hitler had therefore decided on an offensive in the West. Let us recall that in the latter part of the autumn of 1944, the Western allies in France had not carried out any major offensive operations. Eisenhower had decided to hold these until the spring of 1945. The calm state of war on the Western Front, in the autumn of 1944, could in no way be compared to the disaster of the German troops on the Eastern Front.

The German divisions in the Ardennes came from the West
On November 10, 1944, Hitler signed the order of war for the Battle of the Ardennes. Under the order, a shock group of 38 divisions, of which 15 tank and motorized divisions, would strike western Allied troops in the area. But by the start of the operation, the shock group had only had time to gather 21 divisions and 2 brigades, seven of which were tank divisions. The situation on the Eastern Front required all available troops. According to what German generals testified after the end of the war, most of the German divisions in the shock group at the Ardennes (all tank divisions) came from different places on the Western Front where no major war operations were carried out. The remaining were formed divisions with the remains of divisions that had previously been brought home from the Eastern Front after huge losses there. The story that the German divisions at the Ardennes came from the Eastern Front because it would have been quiet in the East, is a bourgeois myth.

The Germans broke the Allied front line in the Ardennes

The next bourgeois myth is the description of the battle in the Ardennes. It wants to glorify the western allies' warfare and state that this is what caused the German offensive to fail. The reality is completely different. The German troops attacked the Ardennes in the early morning of December 16, 1944. The Western allies were completely unaware of the Intentions of the Germans and were taken by surprise. The Germans broke the western allies' front line and began to advance through Belgium towards Antwerp and Brussels. By December 25th, the Germans had come through a width of 80 kilometers and a depth of 100 kilometers. The fighting was very fierce and the losses on both sides very high. After new German attacks on the American troops and after the Germans deployed over 1,000 aircraft in the fighting, the situation became critical for the Western allies. This forced the Western allies to ask the Soviet Union for help.

Churchill asks Stalin for help

On January 6, 1945, British Prime Minister Churchill turned to Stalin with the desire for Soviet troops to go on an offensive in the east to force the Germans to send divisions from the Western Front and force them to suspend the offensive in the West. Churchill wrote:

“The battle in the West is very heavy and, at any time, large decisions may be called for from the Supreme Command. You know yourself from your own experience how very anxious the position is when a very broad front has to be defended after temporary loss of the initiative. It is General Eisenhower's great desire and need to know in outline what you plan to do, as this obviously affects all his and our major decisions… I shall be grateful if you can tell me whether we can count on a major Russian offensive on the Vistula front, or elsewhere, during January... I shall not pass this most secret information to anyone except Field Marshal Brooke and General Eisenhower, and only under conditions of the utmost secrecy. I regard the matter as urgent.”

Eisenhower, for his part, then informed the headquarters of the United States that the lack of Soviet help would put the American troops in "the most difficult situation".

The Soviet Union did not leave its allies in the lurch. Stalin replied to Churchill:

“We are mounting an offensive, but at the moment the weather is unfavorable. Still, in view of our Allies' position on the Western Front, GHQ of the Supreme Command have decided to complete preparations at a rapid rate and, regardless of weather, to launch large-scale offensive operations along the entire Central Front not later than the second half of January. Rest assured we shall do all in our power to support the valiant forces of our Allies.”

Churchill had every reason to thank:

“I am most grateful to you for your thrilling message. I have sent it over to General Eisenhower for his eye only. May all good fortune rest upon your noble venture… The news you give me will be a great encouragement to General Eisenhower because it gives him the assurance that German reinforcements will have to be split between both our flaming fronts.”

The great Soviet winter offensive across the Soviet-German front started 8 days before the scheduled date. On January 12, 1945, the Soviet army launched its war machine in an offensive that would end 4 months later with victory over Berlin. In the run-up to the Soviet offensive, the German High Command had no way of continuing the offensive on the Western Front and was forced to order the retreat from the Ardennes.

On January 15, 1945 Stalin wrote to Churchill:

“Despite unfavorable weather the Soviet offensive is developing according to plan. The troops are in action all along the Central Front, from the Carpathians to the Baltic Sea. Although offering desperate resistance, the Germans have been forced to retreat. I hope this circumstance will facilitate and expedite General Eisenhower's planned offensive on the Western Front.”

The German High Command wrote in his Journal, "In the face of the threatening situation in the East, der Fuhrer has ordered a transition to defense in the West." Another 16 divisions and 800 tanks were then moved to the Eastern Front. The Western allies were able to retake their former positions in the Ardennes and later move on to offensive.

Eisenhower's order of war of February 1, 1945 states,

"The Russian offensive is very successful, and the enemy is increasing troop movement from the Western Front. It is therefore of the utmost importance to reach the River Rhine north of Dusseldorf at the greatest speed."

USA aid to the Soviet Union: Lend-lease agreement

One of the most widespread lies of bourgeois history forgers is that it was "the disinterested assistance of the United States to the Soviet Union", in the Lend-lease agreement, in the form of weapons and other munitions, that formed the basis for the Soviet army's success in the war.

The capitalist countries use every little opportunity to make it likely that they were the ones who won the war against Nazi Germany. Of course, the forgers of history never present facts or figures, or for that matter the statements made by the politicians responsible in the United States during and shortly after the war.

Then let us show it. During the war, the Soviet Union received by the Allies 14,700 aircraft, 7,000 tanks, 427,000 cars, a certain amount of liaison equipment, food and other goods. But the Soviet Union's production of munitions during the war amounted to 108,028 aircraft, 95,099 tanks, 97,768 guns, 350,000 mortars and nearly a million machine guns. The Allied broadcasts of war materials to the Soviet Union represent only 4% of Soviet production! Where is the great flow?

The victory was won with their own forces!

The Soviet Union received from allied munitions worth 10 billion dollars which is 3.5% of all US war costs, a small investment in the Eastern Front where Nazi power was actually broken down.

Moreover, the western allies’ war deliveries were not reliable. In the midst of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Western allies suspended all deliveries to the Soviet Union to which they had committed themselves in the Lend-lease agreement. The same occurred in almost all of 1943. As a result, the US and UK met only half of their commitments under the Lend-lease agreement.

In addition, many aircraft and other weapons at the time of delivery were in damaged condition or incomplete and therefore unusable. Stalin wrote to Churchill on November 8, 1941:

“… tanks, guns and aircraft are badly packed, some parts of the guns come in different ships and the aircraft are so badly crated that we get them in a damaged state.”

Even among the aircraft that arrived in good condition were many outdated models that could not be used in combat, only in work far behind the front. These are facts that must be known when discussing the Lend-lease agreement. The Western allies' munitions to the Soviet Union were welcome but not something that gave the Soviet Union victory. The victory over Nazi Germany was won by the Soviet people own forces.

Was the Lend lease agreement "disinterested"?

Another of the lies that the bourgeoisie spread about the Lend-lease agreement was that through it, the United States had acted "disinterestedly" and "nobly" and gave the Soviet Union free help in the war. This is false!

The United States has never done anything disinterested. The country's actions are determined by big business, which wants maximum profit on invested capital. This alone determines the actions of the United States. When the United States and Britain were prepared to send munitions to the Soviet Union, they were well aware that this would help them in the long run, that Soviet troops would use these weapons to fight Nazism and that thus many American lives (and property) could be saved.

This was explicitly declared by US President Truman:

"The money spent on lend-lease undoubtedly means that many American lives were saved. Every Russian, English and Australian soldier who had been equipped under lend-lease to fight in the war reduced by just as much the dangers our young men faced when it came to winning the war."

In addition, the United States made a profit! In fact, the Soviet Union paid for the goods they received under the Lend lease agreement. The Soviet Union sent to the United States 300,000 tons of chromium ore, 32,000 tons of manganese ore, a large quantity of platinum, fur, and other raw materials and products.

J. Jones, then Us Secretary of Commerce, said of the Soviet deliveries:

"With deliveries from the Soviet Union, we have not only received our money back, but we also got a profit, which does not happen often in trade relations regulated by our governmental organizations."

Internationalism with life committed

The Soviet offensive for the liberation of the European countries of the East developed in 1944 and 1945 with great force and great speed. 7 million Soviet soldiers were everywhere embroiled in very fierce battles spanning 13 countries in Europe and Asia. The Soviet soldiers saw it as their internationalist duty to fight to rid these countries and peoples of fascist oppression. They did that with their lives committed. The war always requires great sacrifice. Over a million Soviet soldiers gave their lives to defeat fascism in foreign countries in Europe. In the battles for Poland's liberation, 600,000 Soviet soldiers died, for Czechoslovakia's 140,000, for Hungary's 140,000, for Romania's 96,000, for Germany's 102,000, for Austria's 26,000.

Finally, Berlin!

After months of heavy fighting in the winter of 1945, the Soviet army finally arrived at the Nazis' last stronghold, Berlin. In the city's defense, the German High Command had gathered 85 divisions and a large number of other combat units with over a million soldiers. In Berlin alone there were 10,400 guns and mortars, 1,500 tanks and gun cars and 3,300 aircraft. Inside the city there were over 200,000 soldiers. The Battle of Berlin is often described in Western literature as an insignificant battle, in which the Germans did not offer any more serious resistance. There is not an ounce of truth in such claims. This kind of history description is only to make insignificant the Soviet Union's decisive contribution to the extermination of Nazism.

One of the greatest battles of World War II

The Nazis put all their last forces into Berlin's defenses. Villages and towns near Berlin and Berlin's suburbs were made into fortresses and streets, squares and rivers to defense lines. In berlin's defense construction worked 400,000 people. They set up three lines of defense and divided the city into nine defensive areas with antitank barriers and concrete defense scaffolding. The remaining air defenses and ss divisions were brought to Berlin.

In his letter to the Berlin defenders on April 14, 1945, Hitler wrote

"We have foreseen this attack and have put up a strong defense against it... Berlin will remain German."

The Battle of Berlin was one of the greatest battles of World War II. The Soviet preparatory work was unprecedented in scale and intensity. The battle for Berlin was masterfully planned and conducted by the Soviet army. It began on April 16, 1945 in a front of 700 kilometers. The Soviet headquarters regrouped for the Battle of Berlin 2.5 million soldiers from the fronts of Belarus and Ukraine.

Goebbels propaganda on Russian atrocities

The fighting was terrible with heavy losses. The German soldiers, although they understood the hopelessness of the situation, could not surrender. Goebbels' propaganda in the Nazi press and radio had repeatedly established what atrocities were expected if the Soviet army took Berlin. It was more terrible "to fall into the hands of the Russians than to die," Goebbels stated. The German soldiers believed that they would be sent as slaves to Siberia if they were captured by the Soviet army. So was Nazi propaganda.

On the other hand, the German soldiers were well aware of what they had done in the Soviet Union, how mercilessly they had exterminated millions of people, children, women and elderly people, burned down villages and towns, killed livestock and set fire to corn fields.

The list of atrocities, looting and destruction by the Nazis and its allies is terrible. 1,700 looted and burned-out villages and towns and 6 million buildings destroyed. 40,000 hospitals, 84,000 schools, 43,000 libraries, 427 museums, 2,800 churches and 31,850 industrial companies looted and destroyed. 65,000 kilometers of torn-up and looted railway tracks, 4,100 destroyed railway stations, 36,000 mail, telegraph, and telephone stations. 89,000 kilometers of highways destroyed, and 90,000 bridges blown up. 10,000 power stations, 1,135 coal mines and 3,000 oil wells destroyed. 14,000 boilers, 1,400 turbines, 11,300 generators sacked. 7 million horses, 17 million cattle, 20 million pigs, 27 million sheep and goats and 110 million poultry slaughtered or abducted.

However, contrary to Goebbels' propaganda and despite the Nazi murder orgies of more than 27 million people in the Soviet Union, Stalin, on 19 January 1945, had talk on the impending invasion of Germany and demanded the Soviet soldiers to not allow raw treatment of the German population.

Berlin fell on May 3, 1945

On May 3, 1945, all battles were completed in Berlin. As early as April 30, Hitler had committed suicide and by May 2, the German General Weidling, who had been appointed by Hitler as commander-in-chief of Berlin's defense, had surrendered. Until the complete conclusion of the military operations in the Berlin area, the Soviet army had defeated 70 infantry divisions, 12 tank divisions and 11 motorized divisions, with a total of 480,000 men. The Soviet army then seized 1,500 tanks, 11,000 guns and mortars and 4,500 aircraft.

Germany’s unconditional surrender

After Berlin, it was the end for the Nazis. Finally, the words of Stalin in the radio speech on 3 July 1941 were reality.

"The war against fascist Germany must not be seen as a normal war. It is not just a war between two armies. It is also the great war of the entire Soviet people against the German fascist troops. The aim of this whole people's patriotic war against the fascist oppressors is not only to eliminate the danger that lies over our country, but also to help all the peoples of Europe who are suffering under the yoke of German fascism."

May 9, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally

The victory was celebrated in Moscow with 30 cannon bursts fired by 1,000 cannons.

On May 9, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally before allied representatives in Berlin. The victorious powers were represented by the Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgiy Zhukov, the British Air Marshal Arthur W Tedder, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Strategic Air Forces General Karl Spaatz and the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny. Germany was represented by Hitler's closest man in the army, General Field Marshal Keitel along with navy admiral von Friedeburg and Air General Colonel Stumpff. Germany lost 13 million soldiers during World War II. On the Eastern Front, Germany lost 10 million soldiers.

War in Asia

At the Allied conference in Crimea in February 1945, the United States and Britain asked for the Soviet Union's help in the war in Asia. The Soviet Government then promised to go to war with Japan three months after the victory against Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union had a nonaggression agreement with Japan since 1941 but must have an army of 40 divisions at its eastern borders throughout the war in Europe because of Japan's aggressive policies. Japan had annexed Korea in 1910, occupied Manchuria in 1931, Beijing and parts of China in 1937 and tried to conquer Mongolia in 1939.

Japan never attacked the Soviet Union during World War II. Memories of the war in Mongolia in 1939 when the Soviet and Mongolian armies destroyed the Japanese army meant that the Japanese government did not want a confrontation with the Soviet Union. In addition, the Japanese government saw how the Soviet Union ended the German army, "the world's strongest army" according to the Japanese. Japan had a secret agreement with Nazi Germany to go to war with the Soviet Union in October 1941, but at that time Japan terminated the agreement.

Soviet Union at war with Japan

A large part of the Japanese army was located in Manchuria. Of the 5 million troops that Japan had in the spring of 1945, 1.2 million were placed on the Asian continent. In addition, Japan's Kwantung army in Manchuria had large parts of the Japanese army's tanks and artillery. Ending Japanese imperialism in Asia was a necessity for the Soviet Union to bring about peace on the continent.

On April 5, 1945, the Soviet Union terminated the nonaggression agreement with Japan. On the promise of the Crimean Conference, three months after the surrender of Nazi Germany, on August 8, 1941, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The Soviet Union struck Japan’s powerful armies in Manchuria, Korea, southern Sakhalin and the Kurils. The Soviet Union's declaration of war was devastating for Japan.

Soviet Union entry into war forces Japan to surrender

The United States had detonated the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later. Despite the American atomic bombs, the Japanese upper classes were not going to give up. The great distress of the population did not bother them, and in addition, the atomic bombs had little effect on the Japanese army. But a ground war against the Soviet Union was another matter.

At the first cabinet meeting after the US atomic bomb attack, Japanese Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki declared that "the Soviet Union's entry into the war this morning finally puts us in a hopeless position and makes it impossible to continue the war."

Japan total surrender, August 14, 1945

On August 14, 1945, the Japanese government decided on total surrender. On September 2, 1945, it signed the surrender documents. Had the United States waited a few days to drop the atomic bombs, these would have been politically impossible to use and never put to use.

That is exactly why the first atomic bomb dropped on August 6th. For US imperialism, the atomic bomb blackmail against the Soviet Union was far more important than hundreds of thousands of human lives and terrible sufferings and deaths for decades.

On September 2, 1945, World War II was over on all fronts with victory for the anti-fascists. But soon the capitalist countries would start the Cold War against the Soviet Union. The atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the first Cold War provocation against socialism.

Conclusion

The Soviet Union's victory over Nazism and fascism in World War II is an event by world-historical standards. The Soviet Union was a country transformed by the working people from extreme poverty and retardation into a socialist world power so strong that it defeated the strongest imperialist country of the time and all its allies. Socialism, with the industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, had created the necessary material conditions for victory. And in the struggle for the realization of socialism grew an enthusiasm, a unity among the peoples and nations of the Soviet Union and a high awareness and morale that led people to endure the terrible war until victory day. This was really needed.

The destruction and barbarity of the Nazis in the Soviet Union is beyond comprehension. But despite the mass murder of over 27 million people, despite the thousands of plundered and burnt-out villages and towns, despite the tens of thousands of looted and burnt-out factories and collective farms, despite slavery and humiliation, despite all this, the Nazis could never subdue the people of the motherland of socialism and never crush its unity around the Soviet government.

Stalin and the Generals.

The Soviet Union was the key to Nazi world domination, but that key the Nazis never got.

The Soviet Union saved human civilization from the barbarity of Nazism.

Mario Sousa

mario.sousa@telia.com

Distribution of Germany's and its allied land armies along the fronts 1941-1945 in number of divisions.

22 June April November April January June January

1941 1942 1942 1943 1944 1944 1945

Soviet-German

Front 190 219 266 231 245 239.5 195.5

Other Front 9 11 12.5 14.5 21 85 107

The Literature List

Stalin – Churchill – Roosevelt. Correspondence 1941-1945. Progress/Fam 1988.

Memories and reflections. Georgiy Zhukov. Progress/Fram 1988.

Bol'shaia Soveskaia Entsiklopediia Moscow 1970- Great Soviet Encyclopedia - Macmillan New York

History of World War II – Myths and Reality. Oleg Rzjeshevsky. Progress/Fram 1984.

A verdade e a mentira sobre a segunda guerra mundial. E. Kulikov, O. Rjechvski, I Tchelichev. Avante! 1985.

Dossier. Segunda Guerra Mundial. Avante! 1985.

Mission to Moscow. Ambassador Joseph Davies. Bonniers 1942.

Our Debt to Our Soviet Ally. Ambassador Joseph Davies in 1942.

Stalin Speaks. During World War II. Nature and Culture 1944.

The Gothic Line. Douglas Orgill. London 1956

Goal of Life. The Soviet aircraft industry. A. Yakovlev. Rabén and Sjögren 1969.

Molotov Remembers. Chicago 1993.

El Estado Mayor General Durante La Guerra. S. Shtemenko. Progreso, Moscú 1977.

The hidden fates of the Swedish people. Gustav Johansson. Bo Cavefors Bokförlag 1968.

Red Book on Black Time. Hilding Hagberg. Bo Cavefors Bokförlag 1966.

From the darkness we rise to the light. Kristensson/Nyström. Proletarian culture 1985.