By ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN
Toronto SunPRESIDENT GEORGE W. Bush is due to attend ceremonies in Moscow tomorrow commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over Germany in 1945. It is both right and wrong that he be there.
Right, because many North Americans and British mistakenly believe their nations alone defeated National Socialist Germany. In fact, Stalin's Soviet Union, not the western democracies, played the decisive role in defeating Adolf Hitler and his European allies. While rightly honouring our own heroic veterans, it's time we also recognize and pay homage to Russia's dauntless courage, endurance and suffering.
- The Soviet Union inflicted 75% of all World War II German casualties in titanic battles involving millions of men. Soviet forces killed 3 million German troops, and lost 11.3 million, with 18.3 million wounded. Twenty million Russian civilians died.
Britain lost 340,000 men, Canada 43,000, and the U.S. about 150,000 in the European Theater. The $11 billion of U.S. military aid to the U.S.S.R. helped Stalin, but was not decisive.
- When Allied forces landed at Normandy, the Wehrmacht's "guts had been ripped out by the Soviets," said Winston Churchill. Had the Allies met 1940's strength and quality German troops, with an intact Luftwaffe, they would have been driven into the English Channel. However battered, the Wehrmacht fought ferociously from 1944 to '45, recalling Churchill's dictum, "You will never know war until you fight Germans."
- The Soviet defeat of Japan's forces in Manchuria has been ignored. In a brilliant, blitzkrieg campaign along a 3,000-km front on Aug. 9, 1945, Soviet Far Eastern armies crushed Japan's weakened 710,000-man Kwantung Army, killing 80,000 and capturing 594,000.
So it's right to honour Russia's valiant soldiers. But it's also wrong to keep on ignoring the Soviet Union's monstrous crimes or the Allies' alliance with the tyrant who committed them.
Nazi concentration camps like Buchenwald and Auschwitz are household names. But who recalls even more murderously prolific Soviet death camps like Kolyma, Vorkuta and Magadan?
Stalin told Churchill he had killed 10 million farmers in the early 1930s, and hailed the butcher of 6 million Ukrainians, Commissar Lazar Kaganovich, as "our Himmler." The best current estimate of Stalin's victims is 20 million murdered before WWII, and 10 million from 1941 to '53, a total "democide" of 30 million. Hitler's toll was around 12 million after 1941.
Nor did German aggression alone begin the war in Europe.
German-Soviet aggression did. We forget Hitler and Stalin jointly invaded, then partitioned Poland under the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that Moscow has never renounced. Seven million Poles died, half of them were Jews. The U.S.S.R. then went on to invade Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
In 1939, Hitler, whose major crimes still lay ahead of him, was seen by many Europeans as a hero who had pulled Germany out of economic collapse, restored national dignity and provided the main bulwark against the very real threat of communist mass murder engulfing western Europe. Yet Britain and the U.S. chose to become war partners with Stalin, by then history's worst mass killer. Churchill and particularly Franklin Roosevelt must share indirect guilt for Stalin's crimes, just as they would had they joined Hitler.
This aspect of the war remains taboo. At Yalta, the left-leaning Roosevelt, besotted by "Uncle Joe" Stalin's power, delivered half of Europe to communist rule, replacing a greater tyranny for a lesser one.
What should the Allies have done? In 1939, the 20th-century's leading military thinker, Maj.-Gen. J.F.C Fuller, urged Britain not to go to war over Poland, but await the inevitable war between Germany and the U.S.S.R. that would destroy them both, then liberate Europe. Otherwise, he warned, Stalin would emerge the victor. Hitler was declared "the supreme evil" and ideological war declared. Fuller was pilloried and ignored.
It's time Canada, the U.S. and Britain face their culpability in abetting Stalin. They should demand Russia come clean over Stalin's crimes and prosecute Soviet officials and police who are still alive. Bush at least took a first step by rebuking the Kremlin for its invasion of the Baltic states. Continuing to beat the drums about Nazi crimes, however horrible, while ignoring egregious communist crimes is profoundly dishonest.
Too much lingering wartime propaganda still clouds our historical memory. Some other forgotten points:
- Germany's September 1939 invasion of Poland did not begin WWII. It began five months earlier when Fascist Italy invaded little Albania. Or arguably in 1936 when Japan invaded China.
- In the 1920s, Churchill authorized using poison gas against rebellious Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq and on India's northwest frontier. In the '30s, Italy used poison gas and concentration camps to break resistance in Libya.
- As German generals Rommel and Guderian were smashing across the Meuse on May 12-15, 1940, in the epic Battle of France, Hitler remarked that his generals were more eager to march on Berlin than Paris. The failure by Britain and the U.S. to support anti-Nazi Germans in the late 1930s and again in 1944 proved a tragic mistake.
- WWII was not a simple conflict between democracy and tyranny, as we are misinformed, but a clash between imperial powers, ideology and economic systems. Italy's fascism, and Germany's National Socialism, threatened not only Europe but Britain's and America's capitalist system and money-lending financial elites. In 1939, the British Empire still ruled swathes of Asia and Africa. Germany, Italy and Japan went to war against the British, French, Dutch, Belgian colonial empires and the U.S. Pacific Imperium.
- No sooner were the Netherlands liberated from German occupation by Canada in 1945 than Dutch troops were sent to re-occupy the former Dutch colony, Indonesia, which had proclaimed independence. Dutch and British colonial forces massacred tens of thousands of Indonesians from 1945 to '49, acting with far more brutality than German troops did in Holland.
- At war's end, 15 million ethnic Germans were driven from ancestral homes across Eastern Europe. Two to 3 million Germans were killed. Two million German women were raped by the Red Army.
