Same reason the Brits wanted Germany to go to war with the Soviets and invade them. Three dudes in a bar wanted to fight each other and two of them wanted the third one to hit the other guy first to make the fight for them easier. Molotov derailed that so hard even if Stalin fucked up because he thought Hitler wouldn't be stupid enough to hit them while the other guy was still capable of fighting.
Yeah, thats bullshit.
Stalin knew about Hitlers plans and had to buy time before the Nazis attack. The sowjet industry wasn't completely adjusted to war fast enough.
No they didn’t. The Soviets made a non-aggression pact with them because they were not prepared for war. They had already asked the west to help, and the west refused. Several Western European countries were ideologically in support of the Nazis, they just weren’t a fan when they came under attack. The Soviets were completely ideologically opposed, and there are extensive historical records proving this. Nazi ideology was anti-communist before anything else, even their persecution of Jews and their antisemitism was related to anti-communism, as they pushed the idea that communism was a Jewish plot. Anti-communism was incredibly popular with Western Europeans and America, the west refused to help the USSR because they wanted the Nazis to defeat them.
A non-aggression pact is not the same thing as helping them expand. They didn’t have the ability to protect everybody from the Nazis, but they protected as many people as they could. They were able to evacuate Jews and other at risk populations out of eastern Poland, and deal with Nazi supporters that lived there. Meanwhile, the US didn’t give a shit about the Nazis until they were attacked by Japan. They spent the time that the pact was in effect building up their armies and preparing for war. To act like the Nazis going back on their agreement was a surprise, is not based in reality, they 100% expected it. They also moved civilian populations away from the borders that would have been easiest for axis powers to invade, and moved military populations to those areas instead. They were vulnerable to both Germany and Japan.
What you’re saying is just anti-Soviet propaganda designed to make them look both evil and stupid.
American businesses other than Ford were making bank with the nazis. IBM got the contract to conduct a census specifically to identify Jews, Roma and others for the nazis, while GM's factories were building vehicles for the Wehrmacht. GM then tried to sue the US for bombing those factories.
Yes, but there was a time the US legitimately wanted to prop up the Weimar Republic, which were anti-nazi. They were openly our allies. And yes, some US businesses profited by helping the nazis leading up to the war.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the story is more complicated than “the US supported the nazis.” Nazis were never our “friends.”
The Weimar Republic wasn’t anti-nazi, the Weimar Republic was just the post WW1 German state. It was dominated by a lot of political strife including tension between German communists and German right wingers (that would become the Nazis). Ultimately the failures of the Weimar Republic are exactly what led to the rise of nazism and the third reich.
There’s quotes from the John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower, the administration noting that Hitler’s Germany was strategically critical vs the Soviets years into his abuses and effective dictatorship. Our actions were unmistakable in that respect.
No, but they weren't exactly enemies earlier on either. The USA never has "friends". It has alliances of convenience which they will drop when the alliance is no longer convenient.
Saying that "the Nazis were never your friends"now is no more meaningful than saying that any other country was never your friend after deciding that they were no longer worth the cost of pretending you were friends up until that point. More important than the labels that come & go as PR requires is the actions of the US and those actions paint the US as OK with Nazi Germany's ethnic values just not their imperial ones.
Ford lost control over Ford-Werke in 1941 when the Nazis de facto nationalized it to build military vehicles. The same German based investigation that led Ford-Werke to pay reparations found that the company made a great deal of profit but that profit was funneled to the Nazi government & and Ford Motor Company received no benefit.
Thank you lol. Revisionism is wild, you can watch polls shift from 1950 to 2010 on 'who did the most to beat the nazis' shift from majority ussr to majority USA. History didnt change, but revisionists got more aggressive.
History did become better understood though. The U.S. supplied massive material aid to the Soviet Union. The influence of Allied navies cannot be understated. Prior to ever landing, the U.S. and British tied up about 100 divisions of soldiers to defend Italy, North Africa, and France against amphibious attacks. The navies stopped virtually all sea-trade that would supply the German military. Defending Strategic bombing and Italy/North Africa tied up over 75% of the German Air Force fighters, and over a million soldiers were assigned to Flak battery duty. The Germany Navy outside of U-boats could never leave port because of U.S. and UK airpower.
All of this became better understood after the war, when a lot of German leaders wrote their memoirs, and the physical records were analyzed. There is a lot more to WW2 than how many soldiers died on one front vs the other.
I mean let's not get crazy and ignore the US was the reason the ussr was able to unduck its logistics and had their tanks in the soviets Guards tank armies. That the allies massive air campaign didn't draw so many dual purpose guns into the heartland to save soviet tanks.
Bethlehem usa produced more steel than the entire axis during the war, it didn't produce the most steel in its state.
Raw total numbers don't matter much. Context is more important. By the time much US aid had reached the Soviets or US strategic bombing was reaching appreciable levels in Germany Operation Uranus was concluded. US aid saved a large number of lives but Axis forces were already in retreat, saying the US unfucked Soviets logistics is revisionist.
Axis forces in retreat or axis forces moving back towards Germany? The US was in Germany so they needed to bring forces back home. USSR was putting up a hell of a fight but it was terrible and the amount of devastation cannot be overstated. The Germans wouldn’t have left if they didn’t need the troops West. The Soviet contribution to defeating the Nazis is debatable as it would have been a much longer and bloodier conflict than it already was without US support in the West. It would have been a different world. Boarders would be different. The Eastern front would have been reinforced and Axis powers could have taken large chunks of USSR and all of Europe would be drawn around the Axis powers. Or Perhaps China and USSR would eventually have beaten them back and incorporated them into their Republics. We will simply never know.
And without the US/Britain/Free french the USSR would have been fucked. The only reason why the USSR didn't collapse was becuese Nazi Germany had to fight on 2 other fronts. Rommel ends up going thru the middle east and the USSR loses it's supply of oil and gas. You don't need to have millions of men on the English channel. In short the USSR gets it's ass handed to it. It was a team effort. And without the Western allies the USSR loses. And without the USSR the western allies lose.
you know that the Soviets also gave huge amounts of material resources to the Nazis to help them build their war machine before the non-aggression pact?
So while Western nations absolutely did business with the Nazis, the Soviets did business and supplied raw resources the Nazis couldn’t get anywhere else, as well as helped the Nazis with war games they were jot supposed to be able to do under the Versaille Treaty.
Basically the Soviets and Stalin did more to help the Nazi war machine conquer all of europe than every other nation combined until finally and against Stalin’s faith in Hitler, the Nazis invaded the Soviets.
However, I think that says more about their strategy and mindset than actual contribution.
Would we have lost the war without them? Maybe.
Did they do more in the war because their strategy was suicide wave attacks where groups of 5 were deployed with 1 gun and the survivor would pick it up every time the person in front of them died? I couldn't say.
However, I can say that the war would definitely have been lost without US wartime production, naval and air force assets.
Because the USSR would have collapsed if not for the allies propping them up. We should've enforced the same restrictions on them that Germany and Japan had after the war.
Russians definitely lost more people for at best they were the shittiest tactician and logistics. But really they would be fine with killing anyone that hurt the name of Stalin.
The pact involved the annexing or partition of various European states to either Russia or Germany. That is why nobody is giving the Soviets credit for 'nonaggression'. This part of the pact was kept secret until Nuremberg.
<USSR joins pact with Nazis. Does joint invasion with them> “that seems pretty bad”
“Yeah but an American newspaper wrote an article. Also, the German subsidiary of an American auto maker who lost control over it was de facto nationalized by the Nazis and used slave labor to build war supplies. So, both sides…”
Now write a thesis to compare and contrast the USA’s response to Germany vs Japan pre/during WWII. If you can throw in some Charles Lindbergh quotes I would appreciate it!
You might want to look into how Soviet intelligence operated in the UK during the war with complete impunity. While the UK AND the USSR were fighting Germany, the USSR continued to backstab and work against the allies at every opportunity. Yeah they suffered horribly. But their anti-allied operations continued at full strength during the war.
Lil whataboutism as a treat, I guess. I don't disagree with what you said, but why not just argue against the point they made instead of "but the US was WORSE"? Just makes it look like you're running tankie defense and not actually trying to have a discussion.
Stalin wanted Poland, and he joined with the Nazis to get it. Then he made a deal to split Europe with the Nazis. It wasn’t 3D chess, Stalin saw it as a good way to expand his empire.
By the time Ford was making trucks for the German military, the Nazis had taken over the company. Ford had no say.
Me thinks you are arguing with a massive tankie. Not to say the USSR didn't play a major role in ending the Nazis but by his view of history it seems he believes they were the only ones truly fighting them.
They did what they had to to survive and protect as many as possible after talks with the Allied powers failed.
Would you allow the Nazis to invade all of Poland in 1939?
Hilter wrote about his intention to take and colonise territories from the Soviet Union in Mein Kampf. It was not a secret, or "backstab." It was Hitler doing what he said he would do.
TIL for you. Poland worked with the Nazis too. Poland attacked and annexed a part of Czechoslovakia together with Germany. Its irony that they received the same fate later on.
And poland was more then willing to participate in the holocaust and was way happier under nazi rule than communist rule. But I wouldn't claim poland wasn't friendly to the nazis in a way that people are trying to do for the ussr.
yes, at the start soviets had a mutual non-aggression pact with nazis. but it is nazis who broke the pact and attacked soviets unprovoked, forcing soviets to join allies, otherwise they would likely try to stay neutral. soviets have been backstabbed singular and nobody double backstabbed anyone.
Yes, it really is a joke. First of all, it’s dinosaurs, which are funny. Second of all, east does not mean right side, since pictures are not oriented in cardinal directions with north on top, and coming from the east in a general sense does not mean approaching from the east in a particular engagement, since choosing advantageous positioning is important in military tactics.
One of the stats that sticks out to me is the Soviets killed 7 of every 8 dead Germans in the war, and let’s just say they didn’t exactly have a K/D of >1
Massively underrates the contribution of Britain and the Commonwealth standing alone for two years, the United States’ production (which included the Lend-Lease keeping the Soviet Union alive) and Japan, which didn’t get involved in the war against the Soviet Union and therefore wouldn’t feel important at all to the poster, but fought a massive war in the Pacific by itself. Depicting Germany as several times larger than the United States is absurd. Thinking the Soviets won the war almost single-handedly is just another flavor of the same nationalism.
An accurate metaphor image for Reddit would be a bunch of little red tankie dinosaurs fighting a bunch of little stinky incel dinosaurs, while a much smaller group of just regular dinosaurs looks on, shaking their heads.
No joke right? Seriously, while Japan was on shaky ground due to supply chain issues, and they knew a prolonged fight was suicidal, the fighting was definitely a rival of the eastern front. Having Italy be a larger dinosaur that Japan is also amusing, given Italy’s best army was the Wehrmacht.
It really isn’t. If the “success” of the Soviets wasn’t part of the history lesson, anyone who is paying attention would have a lot of trouble understanding anything that came after.
A lot of time is spent on the US part of the war because…it’s part of US History. As taught in the US. Not that weird.
It's like that (you did get taught it you just weren't paying attention) and the myth Americans don't also get taught the metric system in school, we just later in life decide not to use it, that are my two least favorite things on reddit about schools.
Yeah science classes were always in metric. I'm assuming shop and home-ec were imperial, but those were electives not everybody took anyway. Everybody did all their lab work in metric, starting from elementary school.
I don't remember what shop was but I know for a fact those jobs use both and they hate it because they want people to just pick one and they don't care which one as long as it's the only system
The number of “they don’t teach this in school” history facts that I see on the internet that I absolutely learned about in school is astonishingly high.
It’s a weird dichotomy because it suggests both that the education system is definitely better than people suggest but then those same people not knowing what’s taught in schools seem to prove that the system is, in fact, failing. 😂
Theres a lot of variation in the quality of US schooling, both over time and geographically, ao ots possible these people really didnt learn it. Its also quite likely they simply didnt pay any attention to the "boring" bits that weren't about US exceptionalism.
There are a lot of people that need to compensate for some perceived lack of teaching on this issue with massive propaganda in the other direction, stuff thst bares a suspicious resemblance to the official version of a certain large country in far eastern Europe, wonder why that could be?
I went to school in Virginia during the freaking Cold War and we still learned about the massive Soviet contribution during WWII. It sets the stage for Marshall Plan and the Cold War, so it's pretty important
Idk about in your country, but in the US, invading Russia during the winter is basically an idiom to mean doing something foolish, because most of us learn about how Russia wrecked the Nazis, and in my public school we were told Russia's fighting was definitely part of defeating the Nazis.
Now, Japanese war crimes were definitely glossed over in my day, I only heard about shit like Nanking because I took extra history classes in high school.
"invading Russia during the winter is basically an idiom to mean doing something foolish"
And that was already a lesson Napoleon learned. Yet the Nazis still forgot about packing winter clothes as they expected the invasion to be over before winter hits them. They literally went all in with their summer uniforms and lost more soldiers to hypothermia and frostbite then to enemy bullets during the winter of 1941.
Germans on the western front had the typical benefits of defenders. While lower in numbers, they were on land where they had an established occupation, defensive plans, better infrastructure, and were able to maintain organization a bit better. In the east, they got slaughtered on the advance, and they got slaughtered even worse during the hasty and chaotic retreat of a broken army.
The Japanese and USSR fought in WW2 in smaller numbers. They lost against USSR.
The USSR was allied with Nazi Germany and started WW2 with Nazi germany attacking on September 17 1939 Poland and partitioned the country between the two.
The US and UK made important contributions. And my grandfathers fought hard against fascism, and I am proud as hell of that.
But the Soviets still hard carried the Allies in real combat. 34 million soviets served in the war, and 1/3 of those died. More soviets fought and died in Stalingrad, a single five month battle, than the total participation of US soldiers in the entirety of the war. No one contributed more in WW2 than the Soviets, by a mile.
You forget to mention that the Soviets tried to form an alliance against Germany, but England and France were busy handing over the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement). Since the USSR knew that alone they were woefully unprepared for a war that was surely coming (after all, the 'Jewish Bolsheviks' were the sworn enemy of the Nazis), they had no choice but to buy time that way.
Yea, the Soviets postured so hard that they ended up killing 4 out of the 5 million German soldiers during the war and lost themselves 27 million people in the process. Damn, that's definitely a strong commitment to just "posturing". /s
Let's also not forget that a number of the allied forces invaded Russia to aid the Zar and Whites to win the revolution against the Bolsheviks. You know, the same Whites that were at the time genociding Ukrainian Jews that only ended because the Bolsheviks won the revolution?
This proposed anti-german "Alliance" was right after the Molotov Ribbentrop. Way before Germany and USSR were at war. They started WW2 together, they just wanted Allies to be complacent that "we not siding up with Germans, please do not atta k us as we invade Finland"
They did the same posturing to Czechoslovaks, blaming Poles for the lack of support against Germany after Munich. Because Poland surely will let truckloads of Soviet soldiers through their land...
Soviet diplomacy was always playing all sides, and then cherry pick what to beat their chests about. Molotov Ribbentrop, a treaty that started WW2? Oh, that one we won't bother mentioning. Theoretical support of Czechoslovaks or trying to ally myself with the west a.k.a. "Anglosaxons" (iykyk)? Oh we gonna be talking all about it. How we, the Soviets, were trying to save the world from the war we started. Now let's do a quick invasion of Finland.
And invading to hel Tzar and Whites? You mean volunteers and legions? That were invited on behest if Tzar/Whites who could have won? You do realise that Reds also had a shitton of volunteers and legionnaires on their side too right? The same reds that genocided Ukrainians later on (see Holodomor), the same reds that persecuted Jews and basically anyone they wanted?
The USSR when seeing England and France ready to commit to warfare vs Germany in defense of Poland
Decided it was finally the opportune time to commit to a pact of nonaggression, raw material exchange, and acknowledgment of conquest of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia.
And this choice to become an aggressor who enabled the start of WW2 in Europe is them being a VICTIM in your world view?
The USSR when seeing England and France ready to commit to warfare vs Germany in defense of Poland
That is not how it went.
England and France explicitly didn't commit to war. France did a small incursion, but then just backed away and retreated. Nobody was doing anything.
Soviets waited two weeks, but Poland was being wrecked, while Allies were sitting on their asses. And on September 15th Germany had declared that its going to annex Poland in its entirety.
That is when Soviets had started to move. Initially, Moscow had tried to get in contact with Polish government so to make one final attempt to make it accept Soviet military aid, however Polish ambassador had just brushed it off and didn't even arrange direct contact with his government.
After one final attempt to get in contact with Polish government (early morning Sep 17th), Soviets had said "fuck you all", and sent tanks in without asking permission. Predictably enough, Reich chickened out, and made a new treaty with USSR (as existing pact was null and void by that point).
I can forgive making a deal to stall for time. I can't forgive invading Poland, raping and looting their way to the center to shake hands with the Nazis, as planned in the secret protocols, and later invading more of Eastern Europe and Finland, and then ruthlessly exploiting a bunch of countries for fifty years after deporting a bunch of their citizens to Siberia.
Nobody is asking you to forgive anything. Just don't misrepresent history by "forgetting" to include some crucial details. Nobody is defending any of the war crimes committed by any of the involved parties.
I've seen many people try to excuse the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact by saying that "Well, they had to ally themselves with some country, and England didn't want to", conveniently omitting that entering a non-aggression pact does not require you to add secret protocols about dividing up Europe, and then proceed to invade "your" half.
So the only reason I commented was that you seemed to misrepresent history by "forgetting" to include some crucial details.
Yea, Stalin wanted a buffer zone, because he suspected that England and France were trying to direct Hitler's aggression eastward against the USSR. Again, the entire thing could have been avoided if England and France had chosen to ally with the Soviets. They objectively forced the Soviet's hands.
That is a ridiculous and utterly detestable opinion. No country has the right to invade and occupy other countries (including decades after the war!) because they want to feel more secure. I'm going to assume that you wouldn't be ok with the Nazis taking over Russia if they just added the pretext that they needed a buffer zone in case China started getting aggressive. Or if they said that taking over Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands was necessary as a buffer zone to protect them from Britain and France. Also, England and France didn't control Germany's actions – you may as well say that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was an attempt to direct Hitler's aggression westward.
Important to mention: this contradicts the American narrative that "we came in and won WW2 for Europe." By the time America got to Europe, the Soviets had sent enough of their people into a meat grinder that there wasn't enough of the Nazi war effort to stop the Allied forces in the west. America came in fresh during the second half while the Nazis were already committed to someone who had been playing the whole game (and would continue until the end).
important to mention: this is true for all the Western allies. Russia eventually could have solo’d Germany (albeit at a higher cost of man and materials), Operation Barbarossa was the beginning of the end of the war as Russia always wins.
also important to mention, the US was the only ally that could stand up to Stalin, as only the US could match Russian industrial output. Without the US presence, Western Europe would be speaking Russian right now because there is no way Stalin would stop at Berlin.
Getting this bullshit from tankys is always..interesting. China lost almost the same as the USSR, and a lot of the Soviets weren't Communists fighting for their beloved Joseph Stalin but random Jewish people killed for being Jewish.
People siding against Ukraine because Soviet Union cool. Hasan Piker is a Tankie. Or was. A lot of the media types have stopped going "Ukraine should just give up because they're Russia's bitch anyways" so the Kremlin checks apparently stopped.
At least one of the factions of the Democratic Socialists of America are also tankies. The media is smart enough to figure out that they should ask some DSA members about this when they run for Senate, but not smart enough to heck which DSA members are actually tankies, so if you're associated with US politics you'llprobably hear a lot about them in the next few months.
That were as careless with their citizens and soldiers lives that it looked like they did the most, whereas instead they predominantly died the most and used everyone else’s material goods and support to turn it into a German quagmire.
Effectively Ukraine/Russia now, in a smaller window.
The soviet's are far from heroes in WWII. They started out as Hitler's ally, then were sustained by the industrial might of the USA after their alliance broke. Yes, they lost a lot of people due to Stalin's foolishness.
Riding in American trucks, moving supplies on American-built railways, flying American planes burning American fuel, and using American explosives, aluminum, and copper.
The Soviets did the bulk of the fighting and dying. They did not do the bulk of the winning. It was a team effort. Without US and British strategic bombing, the various continental resistance forces, the British keeping the Germans away from the oil of the Middle East, US resupply, and the US and Britain keeping Japan occupied, Germany would have had something like 25 more divisions and 2,000 more aircraft and artillery to use on the eastern front, and the Soviets would have had far less of both.
Painting the USSR as the heroes of WW2 is such laughable revisionism. The Soviets were good at exactly three things: Carving up Poland with Nazi Germany, getting backstabbed by Hitler, and winning through attribution by dying by the tens of millions.
Down-vote me all you want. Also the USSR is dead, they lost, and are never coming back. Ever.
I did not know this until I was 20-something years old and befriended a russian immigrant who explained it to me. I honestly was skeptical and researched it. I thought the US just went in and did everything lol. Thats how school here made it seem growing up.
Yeah but it should be millions of dead Soviets doing basically nothing while America ended the war. On both fronts I might add. Because we used units like 101st and 82nd Airborne in the European theater and we used the hell out of the Marines and the Pacific Theater and it was us that got to the Eagles Nest it was us that gave Japan it's too hottest days on record and it was to us that both Nations surrendered. We ended the war not the idiot communist pigs.
Which is hilarious because depending on what period of the war 1/2 to 1/5 of frontline soviet tanks were lend lease from allied countries. All the Russians had was bodies. Without support they wouldnt have folded but they wouldnt have pushed to Berlin.
They all should be holding tiny American T-Rex because the US supplied the Societs, okay so like 1 in 3 Soviets so maybe don't give all of them tiny T-Rex.
It's still not accurate because it almost ignores the pacific theater. Which the US was more prominent in, and ignores the Chinese fighting the Japanese invasion completely.
Also lend lease. The Soviets were getting a lot of logistical support from the US.
If I didn't know better I'd say this was Russian Agitprop.
Yea.... but it would be better if it just showed an ice age and the nazi t-rex frozen to death since it was the Russian winter that really did the Nazis in.
8.5k
u/Express_Character253 9d ago
The little dinosaurs are the Soviets