Eighty years ago, in May 1945, the European phase of World War II, the bloodiest and most decisive military conflict in history, came to an end. In the Pacific, Japan would still hold out for just over three months.
The exact date depends on the celebrant. For the USA and Western European countries, it is the 8th; for Russia, the following day. The “official” surrender took place in Berlin late on the evening of May 8, while it was already the 9th in Moscow. However, the Netherlands celebrates the Liberation Day on May 5, which marks the surrender of German troops in the country to the British-Canadian forces of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. And there was a separate German surrender in Northern Italy on April 29, which occurred as part of negotiations between high-ranking Nazi officials and US intelligence officials, led by the sybilline Allen Dulles, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland (who would later become the longest-serving director of the CIA, the OSS’s successor, and one of the most influential figures of the post-war period).
These negotiations were part of the grand bargain that allowed Germany to expatriate assets from the major German companies that had built the Nazi war machine, so that they would not be seized by the Allies, and a large part of the valuables looted by the Nazis in the occupied countries, along with the escape of thousands of regime figures, including numerous war criminals, who took refuge in Italy, Spain, Egypt, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Brazil, Canada, the US and other countries. A considerable amount of those funds would later return to West Germany, contributing greatly to the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s.
In exchange, the US received key German technological secrets (including long-range missiles and even components of atomic weapons), many of the scientists and technicians who developed them and, no less important, the core of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front, including key personnel and archives, already aiming at the projected Cold War with the Soviet Union, in operations that would be coordinated by the CIA, from its inception in 1947.
The bargain, which paved the way for the peculiar exchange of allies and enemies in the East-West confrontation, with repercussions that continue to this day, is one of the secrets of the war still poorly explored by researchers, being practically ignored by the “official history”.
The decisive contributions of big American and British companies and banks to the rise and consolidation of Hitler’s regime, relations that in many cases were maintained even during the war, are also conveniently ignored.
Instead, in recent years, there has been a great effort by the Western powers to rewrite the history of the conflict for strictly political and propaganda purposes, in order to belittle the role played by the USSR in it or to hold it jointly responsible for it, along with Nazifascism, with the aim of transferring such attributes to its putative “political heir”, the Russian Federation.
In 2019, the European Parliament approved a revisionist resolution proposed by Poland, highlighting “that the World War II, the most devastating war in Europe’s history, was started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, whereby two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest (sic) divided Europe into two zones of influence (sic)”.
The persistent Soviet efforts, up until the eve of the war, to form a defensive front against the notorious expansionist pretensions of the Führer Adolf Hitler, duly rejected by the United Kingdom, France and Poland (which paid dearly for its anti-Bolshevik obsession), were swept under the historical rug.
A recent example was the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau prison camp in Poland on January 27 this year, which was attended by dignitaries such as King Charles III of the United Kingdom, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, but no representative from Russia, whose troops liberated the camp. Numerous reports in the international media and even on official websites, such as the US Embassy in Warsaw and UNESCO, did not mention the liberators at all, although there was no shortage of expressions of friendship towards Israel, a country that did not even exist at the time.
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Soviet soldiers liberating Auschwitz concentration camp (Public Domain)
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On May 1, US President Donald Trump joined the revisionist concert with a preposterous post on the TruthSocial network, in which he stated:
“(…) We did more than any other country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II. I am hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I. We won both wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything. (…)”
Any serious historian knows that the USSR was, by far, the main responsible for the defeat of Nazifascism, for which it paid a very high price in human lives, no less than 27 million people, including military personnel and civilians. Although the pre-war population level was restored by the end of the 1950s, the war caused a severe imbalance between the female and male populations that persisted until the 1980s.
Moreover, about 80% of the casualties inflicted on the Nazi forces during the war occurred on the Eastern Front by the weapons of the Red Army.
By mid-1944, the Wehrmacht had 228 divisions in the East, compared with 58 on the entire Western Front between the Balkans/Northern Italy and Norway, with only 11 in France. When the Western Allies landed 175,000 men in Normandy on 6 June, the celebrated and highly overrated D-Day, they initially encountered only about 80,000 German fighters. With reinforcements on both sides, by mid-July, when the attackers finally managed to break through into France, these numbers had risen to 1.3 million versus 380,000 men. In Operation Bagration, which began on June 22 in Belarus, Soviet forces fielded 2.4 million men against the still-powerful German Army Group Center, which was virtually annihilated in nearly two months of fierce fighting that resulted in 450,000 German and 770,000 Soviet casualties.
In the battles of Stalingrad (1942–43) and Kursk (1943) and in Operation Bagration alone, Soviet casualties exceeded the combined total of Anglo-American military and civilian deaths in the entire war.
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Clockwise from top-left (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
76.2 mm ZiS-3 field gun, operated by the Soviet Red Army
Soviet troops fighting in a destroyed workshop
Axis prisoners of war (Germans, Italians, Romanians, Hungarians)
Soviet soldiers fighting on the roof of a house
Ju 87 of the German Luftwaffe after a dive bombing
Sturmgeschütz III, operated by the German Wehrmacht
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Estimates of the number of deaths in World War II range from 70-85 million, of which 50–56 million were caused by military operations and another 19–28 million by the famine and disease caused by the devastation (21–25 million military personnel and 50–55 million civilians). The USSR, with its 27 million, and China, with 17 million, suffered more losses separately than all the other belligerents combined but each other. Namely: Germany – 7.3 million; Japan – 3.1 million; USA – 420,000; United Kingdom – 451,000 (but India lost 87,000 soldiers and up to 3 million civilians, mainly due to hunger and disease, largely due to the priorities of supply for the military).
Strictly speaking, the real history of World War II has only begun to be properly scrutinized and evaluated in recent decades, with the access to previously inaccessible archives and documents, both in the former USSR and in Western countries (where there are still archives that will be opened only in 2045), and thanks to new generations of researchers with a vision less influenced by the Manichean and simplistic version of a war of civilization against barbarism.
The recent attempts by the leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union to reinforce this obsolete and anti-historical view run counter to the necessary effort.
Although the war officially ended eight decades ago, the reconfiguration of the global power order that emerged from it continues to this day. Therefore, an adequate knowledge of the relevant facts is of great value in guiding one’s position in the face of the rapid change of contemporary times.
Possibly, the best summary of the responsibilities for the war is that of the respected English historian A.J.P. Taylor, in his celebrated 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War:
“In retrospect, though many were guilty, none was innocent. The purpose of political activity is to provide peace and prosperity; and in this every statesman failed, for whatever reason.”
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Geraldo Luís Lino is a founder and director of the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIa) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. E-mail: geraldoluislino@gmail.com.
Featured image: Iconic photo of a Soviet officer (thought to be Ukrainian Alexei Yeryomenko) leading his soldiers into battle against the invading German army, 12 July 1942, in Soviet Ukraine (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)
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