Log In
updated 10:20 AM UTC, Dec 13, 2023

Thank Russia For Winning World War II

May 10, 2019. CounterPunch: ‘Thank Russia for Winning World War II’ By Abel Cohen

Russia celebrates victory over the Third Reich on May 9th; the West celebrated it on May 8th. Separate celebrations make sense because the communists had a different fight against the Nazis than the free world did. The USA fought a quarter of the war that our Soviet allies waged – and we opened fire on them at the end. D-Day was timed to halt Russia’s advance west; not to liberate the continent from white supremacists. Western powers waited to open the second front until 11 months before the war ended because our richest racists kept doing business with the Aryans until 1945.

There are many ways to visualize the fraction of the war fought by Western powers: More Uzbeks than Americans died. 14% of the USSR’s prewar population, 2k towns, 70k villages, 40k miles of railroad, and 100k collective farms were wiped out in a race war. In Stalingrad, only one building still stood after the battle. Compared to Western allies, Soviet soldiers fought Nazis at a ratio of 4:1, and over a geographical area several times larger. In January 1945, the Nazis killed almost as many Soviets as Americans died in all theaters of the whole war combined. In the final battle for Berlin, the USSR lost 80k. Everywhere else at that time, the USA lost only 9k.

Of WWII’s total 70m dead, half were on the Eastern Front; where at its height, 15-20m soldiers annihilated much of mankind between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas. This was where the Holocaust happened. For the year the Western Front lasted, less than 5m troops fought there and civilian casualties were incomparable. Russia signed non-aggression pacts with the Aryans and Japanese out of desperation to slow the devastation of Slavic civilization, but that doesn’t diminish the tragedy of nearly 30m dead Soviet peasants.

Similarly in Asia, the atomic bomb was a racist travesty timed to stop our Russian ally’s entry into the Pacific Theater; it was not to save American lives from an invasion of Japan. The Pacific war was a result of Japan’s sneak attack on a distant island our sugar companies had only seized from its natives 50 years prior. We didn’t fight WWII to save Europe’s dying Jews, its godless Slavs, or the Chinese and Ethiopians who first faced militant fascism in 1933-35.

America sent thousands of young men to die on remote islands no one ever heard of or thought about since because the Japanese attacked our Hawaiian naval base; not because Japan had been mass-raping and killing millions of Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Malaysians, Vietnamese, Burmese, Indians, and Micronesians for 10 years.

Our Soviet allies barely held on alone for three years against Hitler, yet conventional wisdom is that we won the war because we equipped Soviets to die for us. This is propaganda – the USSR bore more than 90% of its own wartime industrial burden. The U.S. War Department publicly admitted it in a 1945 pamphlet: “Lend-lease provided only 10% of British war equipment, and certainly a lesser proportion of Soviet materiel.”

Wartime president Roosevelt sought to improve America’s awkward alliance with our communist allies. But days after he died, they crashed into Germany racing for Berlin, and U.S. ambassador to Russia Harriman raced back to Washington hoping to find more anti-communist sympathy in Roosevelt’s successor Truman: “Mr. President, we are faced with a barbarian invasion of Europe.” In stark contrast to his predecessor, Truman agreed.

Instead of thanking the USSR for an indisputable victory, we dropped two atomic bombs in their path days before they planned to invade Japan and open a second Pacific front to lend us a hand. Until that point the Red Army presumably expected a joint, conventional effort with allies – similar to what we’d just accomplished together in Germany. When that didn’t happen, it vindicated the most virulent anti-Westerners among them.

America shouldn’t mythologize a war against the Nazis we didn’t wage until the last minute. Like Truman said: “If Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.” America waited as long as it could to join the war – and ended it by firing the first shots of the next one.

Collaborators

Interwar president Coolidge said in 1925 that the business of America is business. 15 years later, this was certainly still true when Nazi planes that couldn’t fly without a sole-source fuel additive from Rockefeller Standard Oil bombed U.S. boats trans-shipping it through London during the Blitz. Onward delivery to Germany threaded the needle between naval warfare zones in the Mediterranean and North Seas – overland through fascist Portugal and Spain, occupied France, and neutral Switzerland. Rockefeller fuel also powered Nazi tanks during the invasion of Russia.

Standard’s secondary stockholder after Rockefeller himself was IG Farben – the Germans who manufactured Zyklon-B killing gas for the death camps. IBM designed and built basic computers that helped the SS make organize the deaths of millions.DuPont, General Motors, and Ford also profited from the Holocaust. ITT did business with the Nazis until 1945.

Hitler friend Charles Lindbergh and rabid anti-Semite Henry Ford led a million America First fascists. Interwar Weimar German newspapers accused Ford of financing the Nazis. Ford and Hitler kept portraits of each other on their desks. And six months before Japan attacked Hawaii, Lindbergh filled NYC’s arena with Nazi-sympathizer U.S. conservatives eager to hear his Hitler apologia.

Dulles brothers law firm Sullivan and Cromwell and Prescott Bush’s Union Bank worked with the Nazis until 1944. When the Soviets broke out from Stalingrad in 1943, future CIA director Dulles launched Operation Sunrise to reach a secret peace with the SS, defeat communism, and thus save Western civilization together from the mongoloid barbarians beyond Moscow.

Communist subhumans would soon occupy the ruins of Berlin, maybe Paris and Brussels shortly thereafter. And this fear led America’s first families – Rockefeller, Ford, DuPont, Dulles, Harriman, Bush, Luce, Hearst, Kellogg, Brown and Root – to overlook death camps in the crusade against international communism. Some hatched the 1933 plot to overthrow FDR.

In 1926 DuPont told the American Chemists Society they should create a race of supermen. He subsidized fascist cells too, and led other millionaires in financing the 1m-member American Liberty League. DuPont also established the Black Legion that terrorized striking GM workers in depression-era America, preventing union membership and forcing them to work without pay. In such tycoons’ estimation, nothing was too low in the holy struggle against communism. Postwar, they hired the best consultants available: former SS who had just escaped the war-zone – aided and abetted by the myriad collaborators littering governments everywhere.

After the war, fascist true believers infested Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, South American military juntas, the shah’s Persia, Baathist Levant, Vatican, and even Red Cross. Collaborators built networks called ratlines to get war criminals out of Nuremberg’s jurisdiction. Some didn’t even have to leave though. Our commandos and Wall Street recruited right where they found them in the ruins of Europe and erected West Germany’s postwar intelligence service upon this legacy of unhumbled SS vets, who helped create two iconic U.S. institutions: NASA and CIA.

As the Soviets occupied East Germany, Hitler minion Reinhard Gehlen raced south to the Alps and buried an intel cache before surrendering to the U.S. and leveraging it to negotiate terms of future NATO service. He led West Germany’s secret police for the rest of his life. Other pre-CIA commandos from the OSS launched Operation Paperclip to whisk top Nazi rocket scientists off to Florida, where SS major Wernher von Braun built rockets that took NASA to the moon.

Early 20th-century revolving door plutocrats who made America great again once FDR died were happy to work with Nazis, even after the 1945 Soviet liberation of Germany’s vast concentration camp network exposed the horrors of the Holocaust, including six death camps hidden in the great old-growth forest: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. Allies could have theoretically slowed the genocide by bombing railroads to these camps once they were within range. Western capitals knew about them for at least two years after Polish resistance first told allies of the camps in 1943.

Eugenics and the Holocaust

Context is important to consider the world early 20th century American WASPs inhabited: most were indeed racists, Klan membership and hatred of Jews and Catholics was common, and the military was still segregated until 1948 and the next war in Korea. Future-NATO’s ruling class perhaps collaborated with Nazis out of a sense of Anglo-Saxon supremacy rooted in prewar Euro-Atlantic enthusiasm for eugenics shared by aristocrats on both sides of the ocean.

Until the free world saw Hitler’s death camps, many of its leading lights vigorously defended him. Both at the beginning and end of the war, Nazi leaders sold themselves to foreign industries and markets as the West’s bulwark against the spread of international Jew communism. Days after victory in May 1945, Churchill ordered UK field marshal Montgomery not to destroy captured Nazi materiel: “All must be kept; we might have to fight Russia with German help.”

A key Hitler inspiration was English gentry racist Houston Stuart Chamberlain. Passages of Mein Kampf and Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s Twentieth Century Myth are transcriptions of Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Nazi ideas like primacy of the vital over the moral, hierarchy of races, Aryan world domination, and Jews as the root of all evil came from this book. Hitler called Chamberlain “a savior of the German race” and “messenger of the gods.” Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels called him “father of our spirit” and “a pioneer of Nazism.” Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter glorified Chamberlain’s work as “the bible of the Nazi movement.” Hitler had new SS watch the colonial film Life of a Bengali Lancer as a lesson in how to treat subhumans. And influential public figures like later UK ambassador to the U.S. Lord Lothian shared this worldview; Lothian wrote to foreign minister Eden in 1936 that the UK mustn’t intervene in interwar European territorial disputes until “Germany has time to fully rearm.”

Americans also shared exuberance for mystic Aryanism, eugenics, and social engineering. At the turn of the 20th century, salon society advocated extreme genetic and racial policies; normalizing laws like later Nazi ones for mass sterilization of unwanted demographics. President Wilson headlined pre-war American Eugenics Society junkets, where Nazi racial theorists presented their pseudo-science to the American Public Health Association. Statehouses in Indiana, North Carolina, California, Washington, and Virginia enacted sterilization laws for a generation.

U.S. and UK intel at first disbelieved Auschwitz escapee stories. As late as 1942, America turned ships full of Jewish refugees back to occupied Europe. Allied air forces didn’t bomb concentration camp infrastructure when they got the chance, but napalmed civilians and dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. Defenders say the bomb saved lives as an alternative to a cataclysmic invasion, but this is disingenuous and fails to acknowledge that fire-bombing cities was far more destructive than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

And the only reason those two minor cities are even known to history in the first place is for being the last ones left to nuke because there were no more Tokyos, Osakas, Berlins, or Hamburgs still standing by the end of the war. After napalming Dresden into oblivion, UK aristocrat air marshal Harris said: “Show the Russians when they arrive what bomber command can do!” Hitler got it right in 1935: “Only I, like the British, have enough cruelty to dominate the world.”

Picking sides

In 1943, the Red Army consolidated control over the Eastern Front and inflicted two devastating defeats on Hitler: Stalingrad and history’s biggest tank battle, Kursk. Allies invaded Italy too, but German, Italian, and Croatian fascists held the Alps until the end of the war; these SS were never defeated. They sat there until the war ended and then strolled home through alpine meadows to join CIA ops against Russia. Before the war was even over, NATO formed, and OSS renamed CIA, Euro-Atlantic intelligence services began recruiting Europe’s worst war criminals from the ranks of retreating SS.

The operation was codenamed Gladio and consisted of stay-behind, anti-communist armies in 18 countries: Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Albania, and the former Yugoslavia all had enough SS volunteers to man the ramparts of a planned postwar guerrilla conflict against the USSR. Gladio was destined to become one of the most egregious in Moscow’s long litany of Western grievances and betrayals. Red Army vets of the Brody cauldron say the RAF even bombed their Soviet allies to cover retreating Nazis and Ukrainian SS collaborators. Postwar KGB say CIA later re-infiltrated them back into the USSR.

One month before D-Day in 1944, Final Solution architect Himmler announced that “the Jewish question has in general been solved in Germany and its occupied countries.” Hitler told the SS: “Future generations will thank me for solving the Jewish problem.” That winter, 250,000 civilians died in Warsaw. Himmler tells the SS: “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.” The Nazis conceived of building a beautiful, artificial lake to cover up the evidence of what they did; just like they planned for Moscow too. SS death squads moved from house to house with explosives, flamethrowers and heavy equipment, demolishing as much of the ancient Jewish city as possible.

The Third Reich began to crumble between two collapsing fronts and imminent, simultaneous invasions from both sides of the German homeland. After ignominious defeat at the Battle of the Bulge, future-NATO broke through all along the porous, weakly manned Western Front – drained of resources to support Hitler’s war of annihilation in the East – and the race for Berlin was on.

Roosevelt sensed it was important for postwar relations to de-escalate, let Russia get there first, and hand them a decisive victory. Churchill was furious yet impotent because the UK had nothing left. But Roosevelt died before the German surrender, so Truman got the good news that our first atomic bomb was ready. In subsequent negotiations with Soviet leaders outside Berlin, assistant secretary of war McCloy said Truman and Churchill acted “like little boys with a big red apple secreted on their persons.” Their arrogance stunned the Soviets. Stalin never forgot this point of no return in an already abysmal relationship. Soviet foreign minister Molotov later reacted to Hiroshima by saying, “That bomb was not aimed at Japan, but the Soviet Union.”

Mixed messages

Three months after VE Day, the Red Army met its treaty obligations and invaded occupied China. But by this point the U.S. was uninterested in any assistance. A year earlier, Roosevelt had dropped peacenik, anti-nuclear VP Wallace for Missouri racist Truman, whose secretary of state Byrnes made a new policy: “We must end the Japanese affair before the Russians get there. Once they’re in, it won’t be easy to get them out.”

Two days before the Soviets liberated China from the longest occupation of the war, America dropped the first atomic bomb on one of the last Japanese cities still standing: Hiroshima. Russia invaded anyway, so the next day the U.S. dropped a second bomb on another city: Nagasaki. Stalin then called off the Soviet invasion of Japan, and the American victors allowed the emperor to retain his title despite four years demanding unconditional surrender.

As soon as the bombs dropped, FDR successors Truman and Byrnes began taunting Soviet partners. They threatened to flatten Moscow or Kyiv next, but Stalin was skeptical because his spies said American occupying forces in Germany only found enough fissile material for two to three bombs. Notwithstanding the likelihood that a huge nuclear enterprise like the Manhattan Project was long since infiltrated by KGB, generals Patton, Lemay, and Macarthur argued allies shouldn’t stop in Tokyo and Berlin, but keep on going to Moscow. Resignations of the last reasonable voices like deposed VP Wallace, secretary of war Stimson and generals Marshall, Clark and Eisenhower ended constructive dialogue.

Russia was confused by this treatment. They fought 200 Nazi divisions over four years along 2k kilometers of ethnic cleansing we now call the bloodlands; Western allies faced 80 Nazi divisions over a year and eight months in today’s leading tourist destinations. Churchill even admitted it at Yalta: “Russians have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army.”

25-30m Soviet citizens died fighting WWII. Thanklessness for Slavs bearing the brunt of that epic struggle is a colossal wrong the West has never righted. Pride in this is understandable; it was the pinnacle of Russian civilization and self-esteem. They beat the Nazis, were first to Berlin, and stopped the Holocaust. It wasn’t all noble, but it was better than the alternative. So on May 9, let them have their day; they earned it.

Tagged under

Leave a Reply