Who defeated the Nazis?
Submitted by gjohnsit on Fri, 06/07/2019 - 11:13am
Who defeated Nazi Germany?
It seems the answer is "Hollywood".
What is striking is how much of the western world believes the pro-America propaganda.
Even Germans believe that the U.S. defeated them in WWII!
If you doubt it's propaganda, look at how opinions in France changed over the years.
Now look at the actual facts of who killed the Nazis.
Six times as many Nazis soldiers and their allies died fighting the Soviets as died fighting the U.K. and U.S. combined.
I think it's worth noting that nearly three times as many Serbians died fighting the Nazis and their allies as Americans.
Comments
Comparing Normandy to Stalingrad
In Stalingrad, the average life expectancy of a Soviet soldier was 24 hours. at an average of 19,000 soldier and civilian deaths a day.
At D-Day, total allied casualties was 4,414 confirmed dead.
Or compare Normandy
to the Soviet Operation Bagration, 2 weeks after D-Day and a massive effort coordinated with the western Allies to assist the Normandy invasion, almost unknown and unmentioned in the West.
2.3 million Soviet troops involved over a 500-mile front in Eastern Europe which went on for 2 months and crushed the heart of the Nazi army. Huge losses on both sides -- 400,000 casualties for the Germans, nearly 600k for the Soviets. And they were going up against the very best trained and equipped German divisions, while in the West most of the G divisions were relatively undertrained and inexperienced and less equipped.
You might even say
that D-Day was a diversion (Diversion-Day?) and Bagration was the real show.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." --Noam Chomsky
Yes
I just finished "Enemy at the Gates" and the scope of the battle was horrific.
In WWI and WWII Combined the US Lost About 700,000 Men.
That is from memory. I'd check somewhere but I don't have books on the road, and last time I checked online I was told that only 1.5M Vietnamese died in the entirety of Viet Nam (wikipedia).
Kind of scary how the memory hole is growing ain't it?
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
Thee single war with the most American deaths was Civil War
The most single deadly enemy America ever had as other Americans. 600,000 was the figure. I think WWII had 400,000.
When Americans made up both sides, of course, American
casualities were heavy.
well ya can't give the evil soviets
the credit; that would amount to Sacrilege!
Well Duh!
That's like saying it's not OK that we rigged Russia's 1996 election, or that according to every indicator people in Crimea wanted to be part of Russia.
?
no comprende, amigo.
Sorry
a bad attempt at sarcasm
A little too distracted to make it funny
oh;
i'd missed it.
Ran across a European chart that explains
...that it has taken more that 70 years of constant propaganda to twist and distort what Europeans saw with their own eyes to match the US narrative that the Americans won the war and Russia failed, failed, failed because communism.
The question is Who Won World Wsr II? The poll was taken in Europe at three different times across history.
holy snickers,
that's great! Soviets were airbrushed out over time. wonder what the percentages would look like by 2019?
more precisely, the question is:
"Which was, in your opinion, the nation that contributed most to the defeat of Germany in 1945?"
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
It was, indeed. Thank you.
Heh.
I do what I can to educate.
It could be said that
the two fronts were
two different wars.
The 'Allies' didn't help Russia
defeat Nazis on the eastern front.
Russia did not help the 'Allies' on the
western front.
It's likely the USA just sat back in England
hoping the Nazis would defeat Russia (as someone
here suggested).
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
The only reason we even entered the war to start with
was so we could rescue the Nazi Party's "best and brightest", after we spent years funding the Nazi war machine along with Fascist Italy. Of course, no western historian or demographer would admit this because they are and have always been pro-capitalist and pro-fascist. It's been that way since William Randolph Hearst lied us into the Spanish-American War.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Uh.
No.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Oh, please.
It's well known the Nazi Party had many backers among 'Murica's bourgeoisie. The Bush Crime Family, Ford, Heinz, Du Pont, and that's just a few. FDR knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened. He also let those who tried to kill him (many of them Nazi backers mentioned above) of easy when he should have publicly executed every last one, but he would have gone against his own class then, and we can't have that.
And now their kids and grandkids run the show. We're fucked.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
"Oh, please," yourself.
You said:
This is so not true it isn't even worth refuting.
Don't get me wrong -- I've been saying for many, many years that big winners of World War II were the Fascists.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I have to concur.
If you won't say it, UR, I will. The problem is this:
I agree with you. I also agree with much that Aspie stated, but not that "only reason" statement. Later, when the outcome was becoming clear, I have no doubt whatsoever that grabbing "...the Nazi Party's 'best and brightest' ..." was a high-level goal. We did that. I also know that there was much favorable sentiment toward the European fascists in the United States prior to us entering the war, and that some of that was at the oligarch level. It just wasn't the reason we joined the war. There were many reasons, but I don't think any "rescue" had entered anyone's frame of thought at that point.
given that we entered the war by declaring war on japan
and then in response Germany declared war on the US, it's safe to say that Germany's best and brightest weren't of a hell of a lot of interest to us in December 1941.
the more relevant truth is that we goaded Japan into attacking us, so that we'd have a reason to reel in their empire and ensure our access to the natural resources of southeast asia and the various islands of the western pacific.
"amusing" trivia question: what was the last country the US declared war on?
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Guessing, wildly. Sort of.
Last country we declared war on? Off the top of my head, and without cheating via duck, I'd say Germany. FDR ask for a declaration of war against Japan in his Day of Infamy speech, but as I recall, Germany didn't declare war on us until we had first declared war on Japan. So, my guess is that Germany got the pronouncement right after that. Just a guess. I'm pretty sure there hasn't been a declaration of war since WWII.
technically, i believe it was romania.
bulgaria, hungary and romania were all in the same day.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Lesson learned
I didn't realize we'd ever declared war on Bulgaria, Hungary, or Romania.
Technically, Japan declared war first,
but they got the timing wrong and didn't deliver the declaration until an hour after the bombing started. (Then, of course, it got buried in all the "sneak attack" news.)
Even if they had got the timing right, it probably wouldn't have improved their public image any.
Most declarations of war wind up being reciprocal, and this one was no exception.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
@UntimelyRippd I have always
I have always thought that the US entered the war against Germany was because Germany declared war against the USA.
IBM was very important
in the Nazi death camp machinery. And company top execs knew what was happening, per author Edwin Black's book IBM and the Holocaust.
Other corporate criminals who shouldn't go unmentioned were Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil), General Motors and Coca-Cola. They not only got off, but were able to successfully hide this important part of their history for many years, until word began to trickle out to public attention or to those few who read books or read the back pages of the paper, only decades later.
and don't forget Bayer
and the IG Farben merger, makers of Zyklon B, who's now merged with Monsanto.
Stalin forced the issue.
The accounts we know about are that Stalin got up while meeting FDR and Churchill and said he had enough as the two other leaders were refusing to open up a Western front. Churchill had to stop Stalin from leaving and promised an invasion in May of 1945. It happened in June.
Some historians have claimed that Chamberlian urged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union, which to the Western elites was the real danger due to communism and those "Judaeo-Bolsheviks.
D day
I've always thought D Day was in 1944.
we sent supplies to russia, including
50 cal machine guns (pretty much the only infantry weapon we had that was in any way superior to what other nations had) and Spam. Khruschev himself remarked on the significance of the food supplies.
we also tied up the luftwaffe, and killed a hell of a lot of their pilots. one military reality hasn't changed much in the last 80 years, which is that air superiority matters more than almost anything else. the successes of D-Day depended as much on our air superiority as on the relative quality of the german troops in the west versus those in the east.
no, not the same as 25,000,000 dead -- just pointing out that the alliance was a real thing, and that we did help the Soviets out in real and material ways. (I doubt they'd have consented to our sending troops, even had we offered. The previous time we'd landed troops in Russia, it was to support the counter-revolutionary "Whites").
D-Day itself wasn't delayed out of some spiteful hopes that germany and russia would take each other out, it was delayed because it was one of the most challenging and extraordinary technical and organizational undertakings in human history. Among other things, the western allies needed to:
A. win the Battle of the Atlantic (to ensure transport from the US to the UK of troops, munitions, and other supplies)
B. engineer and manufacturer the special equipment required, both for the initial assault, and for sustaining the beachheads.
C. develop the tactics and train the troops (including the paratroopers)
There was just no effing way we could have launched the campaign in 1943 -- we just weren't ready, only 18 months after Pearl Harbor. Even the small-scale Dieppe raid was a disaster. A winter assault was out of the question, which meant waiting for spring 1944. In the meantime, "we" (US, UK, Canada, etc) did open a second front in Italy, and also drove the Germans out of North Africa. It's not like everyone was just chillin' while the Germans and Russians duked it out.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
don't you think that the Nazis defeated themselves?
that sounds weird, but then the only thing I remember my father and mother saying was that:
1. They wanted to marry in 1941 and did, because at least they wanted to die as a couple.
2. When my father was drafted by the nazis in 1939, they didn't yet fully understand Hitler.
3. When Hitler decided the Germans invade and attack Russia, everbody understood what Hitler was and that that was the beginning of the end.
When my father came back in the end of 1947 there is a photo him being deeply absorbed reading something. I think he only learned then of the horrors in the concentration camps. That is not an excuse because the German civilians were and could be very well aware of all the intentions of the Nazis activites and those were all deeply bad and racist.
I guess, if the US had a land connection to Germany, like Russia had, Hitler would have invaded the US (didn't he try to do that with his fleet of submarines?).
Really, I think all involved to defeat Hitler and the Third Reich, did what had to be done and I am grateful they did. I am very sorry for all the people who lost their lives in those horrific wars. Lunatic believers can move mountains to do bad and to do good, I guess.
I go away from that experience with being watchful of true believers beliefs.
https://www.euronews.com/live
Soviets lost Cold War propaganda
In watching Cold War documentaries about World War II, their major focus was of course on how the Western powers won, and very critically, how the Nazis allowed the Soviet Union to win. A myth has grown over time that the Soviets were incompetent and they only won because of grievous errors by Hitler over and against the military geniuses of the invading Nazi army. There are just bunches of videos on youtube about how Hitler lost the war while having superior forces and generals. This has helped marginalize the Soviet contribution toward winning the war within West.
But there are a view videos at least that say this is all utter nonsense and bullshit. In fact, Hitler pretty much differed to his generals. Great video about why this idea that Hitler was the main cause for literally ALL major defeats of the Nazis in the East. Here is maybe the best. (Of course, the victories in the West were due to superior Allied generals like Patton over brilliant German generals.)
One of major reasons was that Hitler's former Chief of Staff urged all of his generals to write their biographies. And guess what, all of these generals who lost particularly in the East, of course covered their asses and blamed Hitler. Remember the book the best selling book Enemy at the Gates about Stalingrad? Best seller. I read it and for the life of me, I found only one reference to V. Chuikov the Soviet general who was in charge of defending the city, and who came up with brilliant tactics in that defense. The book was through the perspective of the Nazis invaders and those defeated German generals. And a best seller.
In fact, when I watch these videos I get the sense there is crypto-Nazism behind them. Just like the film Stalingrad done by the Germans which was a horrid apologist film.
Not to start anything
but I just finished "Enemy at the Gates" a few weeks ago and found it pretty even handed (but I wasn't there and am definitely not a historian). The index lists at least 42 pages where Chuikov, Gen. Vassili Ivanocivh, is mentioned, at least in my copy.
The question is not only,
Who defeated the Nazis?
The question is also, Who Armed Them?
It is belatedly acknowledged that U.S. corporations drove German rearmament leading to WWII. But it is essentially purged to this day that Franklin Roosevelt licensed certain U.S. corporations to be exempt from the Trading With the Enemy Act so that they could continue arming, financing and fueling Nazi Germany for the duration of WWII. Charles Higham's Trading With the Enemy documents this treason.
Russia's not having been invited to the commemoration of D-Day is understandable, given the Russians were not at the invasion. But the controversy over which of the Allies sacrificed most and accomplished most in the defeat of Nazi Germany should also acknowledge the involvement of U.S. corporate power in the Nazi war effort!
Great article
Thanks for posting it. The funny thing is that after Roosevelt let those companies work with Hitler they then tried to overthrow him after the war. Every person that did that should have been tried for treason and their company's money taken from them.
Are you sure
about "overthrowing Roosevelt after the war"?
There was the much earlier Banker's Plot against FDR, ca 1934.
Definitely too many major US cos got off real easy for their treason. IBM's CEO, Something Watson, had close ties to Franklin and Eleanor. Perhaps Roosevelt didn't want to unravel the whole thing by pulling on the IBM thread. Or the cos in question were so huge and instrumental to the economy, they were Too Big to Jail.
@Linda Wood Putin is spending the
Putin is spending the week wining and dining Xi Jinping and laughing at the Trump and the US. It's so funny I want to cry.
"Hollywood"
I feel a little guilty posting a laugh line on a thread about such a serious subject, but I'll get over it:
I once took a film course. I don't remember which US World War II film we saw that evening. However, during the after-film discussion, the instructor said something lile, "Hitler thought all he had to do was defeat the military. Had he known he had to defeat Jack Warner,* he may have thought twice before starting World War II."
https://learcenter.org/project/warners-war/
*Jack Warner, of Warner Brothers Film Studios, a fictional counterpart of whom appeared in The Godfather, beside a horse's head that was bleeding profusely. See? Tom Hanks's character in You've Got Mail got it right:
I've long maintained that "Follow the money" was both the smartest and the tersest key to understanding American politics ever uttered or written. (Apparently, the screenwriter of All the President's Men was its source, not the real life Deep Throat.)
IMO, "Leave the gun; take the cannoli" is the best political advice, as well as the second best Italian pastry recommendation (lobster tails--not to be confused with sfogiatelle-- being THE best Italian pastry.)
Being non-violent, I am compelled to say that "Leave the gun; take the cannoli" reflects the indisputably correct priority. Too bad it was said after the gun was used to murder someone. Oh, well. Maybe The Godfather is not the right answer to any question.
Ha! That's a wonderful answer.
Thank you!
Germany crossed Warner Bros. early on
by allowing the mobbing and beating of a Warners movie agent in Germany. Warners retaliated with a propaganda war against the Nazi regime.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Thank you for that! I wonder if my prof knew that. If not, he
would wish he did.
I have a feeling that ticket sales had something to do with it, too, though. What could have been a bigger draw during World War II than a film about World War II and/or an escapist film? "Follow the money." I have a feeling that, for the likes of Jack Warner, an employee may have been more expendable than box office receipts. Just a feeling.
For all we know, the government may even have subsidized World War II films. We are currently supposedly in the age of information and look how long it took us to find out that government is subsidizing "patriotism" at sporting events.
"May have"? They bloody well DID!
More people know about the OSS (which became the CIA) than the OWI (Office of War Information) - to which all scripts having to do with the war were supposed to be submitted for approval. And the OWI from time to time issued "suggestions" as to which topics they wanted to see covered.
Wikipedia has an article (which has a somewhat self-serving smell about it, so take with appropriate amounts of salt): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Office_of_War_Information
The various branches of the Armed Forces also laid a heavy hand on what could or could not be depicted onscreen, in some cases long after the war was over. (If you wanted the cooperation of, say, the US Navy in filming a Naval story, you made sure the script depicted the Navy in a flattering, or at least not unflattering, light).
While the article claims that Paramount Pictures was exempt from most of the red tape, there are indications that they cooperated voluntarily and enthusiastically. It was Paramount that scored the publicity coup of producing the first, and for a long time the only, film ever to mention the OSS by name - in fact, that was the title, O.S.S.. Other studios, e.g. Warner Brothers, had to use workarounds, allusions, and aliases - even when, as with Warner's 13 Rue Madeleine, the story was unquestionably about the OSS.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Thank you.
Good info.
It goes more to controlling content than to subsidies, but it's very good to know.
Nazis night at the Garden
Night at the Garden
I had no idea that happened here, but I guess I might get the chance to see it again.
Heil, Washington!
Seven minute film at the above link, in case anyone is interested.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
Doh! Yes watch the video of the Nazis at the Garden
This is just stunning to see how people were involved with this.
Thanks for mentioning it.
I have photos of that in my files.
That's when I first confronted the demographics.
Germans were by far the largest ethnic group in the United States at that time. Indeed, they still are.
But we chose to lock the Japanese in internment camps during that war.
It was obviously a racial issue. They had alien facial features. That's why it was so easy to drop atomic bombs on civilian targets in Japan and watch the people vaporize. They weren't fully human, so it wasn't really a war crime.
When I first learned about Pearl Harbor, I had only one question — and it was the same question I had after 9/11.
"What did we do to piss those people off so bad?"
In "Day of Infamy" Walter Lord quotes a sailor
(or a maybe a soldier?), bewildered by the destruction all around him: "I didn't even know they were mad at us."
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
On possible
foreknowledge by FDR re the Pearl Harbor attack, the best book is Richard Sennett's Day of Deceit from about 20 yrs ago, a very interesting, dogged look at the available gov't and military documents tucked away in all sorts of obvious and not obvious places, and consideration of the implication of those documents missing which should be there.
I came away leaning in the direction of foreknowledge, with Roosevelt probably not anticipating the extent of American deaths at PH. But he knew it would take a substantial event in order to rouse the American public, which hadn't budged in its anti-European war attitude after numerous attacks/mini-events by the Germans on our boats in the Atlantic.
The MIC/WS duo have long been in control
https://www.mintpressnews.com/76-years-of-pearl-harbor-lies/235375/
I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley
We also interned Germans and Italians, but in much
smaller numbers.
Xenophobes Я Us!
Whew!
What's so disheartening is no matter what time in history, and the casts of heroes and villains changes, the speeches are always the same.
Wow. Guess Woodrow Wilson's propaganda people may not
have done such a bang up job selling Americans on World War I as we thought.
Of course, many believe that the harshness of the World War I peace treaty paved the way for the rise of Hitler. If so, talk about "unintended consequences!"
That's a load of shit.
Man. 26 million dead and they get no credit at all.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
here's an interesting take from historian Peter Kuznick
It was the Soviet army that broke Hitler's back at Stalingrad, but the myth that the American army liberated Europe, serves aggressive U.S. policy, including Trump targeting Iran -
https://therealnews.com/stories/d-day-mythology-of-america-as-liberator-... (video or text)
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
BTW, if you're interested in a soviet cultural take,
and if you're willing/able to subscribe to Amazon Prime, there are two subtitled adaptations available of a mid-1960s Russian novella called, The Dawns here are Quiet.
The first was filmed in the early 70s, the second in 2015 -- but both are quite well done, notwithstanding the limited production values of the USSR in 1972.
Yes, they are movies set during war, so there are combat scenes, but this isn't Platoon or Full Metal Jacket -- it's very different from those, and very, human, focusing on the stories of several women who are assigned to a small anti-aircraft battery out in the boonies, far, far away from the front lines.
Indeed, one of the things that struck me most was how easily, notwithstanding the explicit propaganda element, the movie could translate to a different country, or even a different war.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Just what I was hoping to find.
I was scouring this essay hoping to find just the right kind of history. I didn't expect film, but I am pleased to find these. Thank you.