V-Stalingrad at 82

In the video above, ExitStrategy.World Eurasia Editor Stanislav Krapivnik and the Expat American Joseph Rose recently visited a late 1980s erected memorial on the outskirts of Moscow. The Komsomol-placed plaque marks the frontline of furthest advance for the Nazi forces in December 1941. As Stas notes in the video, it was not just the Germans and their Japanese Axis allies against the world, as WW2 is commonly oversimplified as in the US, but the combined forces of a Wall Street-aided fascist Europe, which marched on Russia in the largest land invasion of all time, launched on June 22, 1941.

Operation Barbarossa as Stanislav emphasized above, included not only the Romanian and Italian armies, but also General Francisco Franco's Spanish Blue Division volunteers who joined the Finns in the Siege of Leningrad. As Stas repeated above, the invasion and planned subjugation of Russia under Hitler, as under Napoleon before him, was truly a pan-European project. And Moscow as a result of more recent history is changing how it presents World War II or the Great Patriotic War to the Russian people and to the world.

Italian Army POWs captured at Stalingrad, early 1943

This more pro-active promotion of Russia's victory in the Great Patriotic War--including President Xi's China joining Putin in condemnation of Westerners who rewrite WW2 history--is in large part due to well-justified Russian complaints of NATO using charlatans like Timothy D. Snyder to rewrite the story into one of 'dual Nazi-Soviet totalitarianism'; a tale in which Nazi Germany was crushed primarily by the combined Western forces of the Anglo-Americans, rather than the Red Army that inflicted over 80% of the Wehrmacht’s casualties. And in Snyder's historical account of the prelude to war, only the Nazi-Soviet Pact actually matters, rather than years of Anglo-French appeasement of Adolf Hitler and Nazi-sympathizing British elites nudging of the Nazis eastward at the Slavic nations' expense. An ugly history regarding which many nationalists in the western Ukraine and the Baltic states, keen to portray their grandparents and later parents as suffering under Nazi and Soviet boots (even if some of them did quite well under the postwar Soviets) understandably tend to downplay.

But the cult of Sir Winston Churchill so carefully cultivated during and after the war (especially among American conservatives) as well as British claims that Appeasement was solely about buying time for Great Britain to re-arm as opposed to covert sympathy for a Wall Street and City of London-boosted Nazi march on Soviet Russia, is coming under great stress. The past as the great Southern writer William Faulkner observed, "is never dead, it's not even past". The Russian-Ukraine War is seen by millions of Russians as a continuation of the Collective West especially Wall Street's unadmitted support for the Nazi invasion of WW2, and many Ukrainian ultra-nationalists share this view, albeit from the opposite side, in celebrating the Canadian Parliament-hailed Waffen SS Galitzien division and the Nachtgall Battalion as their predecessors.

MAGA populists like Tucker Carlson are giving British blowhards like Piers Morgan a hard time regarding the sanctified Churchill and the painfully slow postwar recovery of an increasingly socialistic Britain. Many of Tucker's arguments made to Piers were quite familiar to us, possibly the result of Tucker reading Peter Hitchens' The Abolition of Britain, a book we first read twenty years ago, which described the UK as a defeated nation that was rescued but occupied by the USA. And these new takes from Tucker and other populist podcast hosts on long-familiar history are coming on while many WW2 archives in both London and Washington remain classified, particularly those related to Rudolph Hess's May 1941 infamous flight to Britain on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Russia. Hess was kept locked up for decades in the postwar Spandau prison to keep his mouth shut about the Fuehrer desperately seeking a separate peace with the British, and most explosively for present British politics, which old friends in London including among the Royal Family the Nazis thought still held sway. The British TV series The Crown, incidentally, engaged in some predictive programming on this very topic, perhaps preparing the British people for this long buried bit of ugly history to finally be brought to light.

As long peaceable Finnish-Russian relations have deteriorated in recent years, with Helsinki citing Russia's Special Military Operation as the reason for it joining NATO (disregarding evidence that the Finns were being pushed by Washington and especially London to join NATO well before 2022), Moscow has declassified Soviet archives, which reveal enthusiastic Finnish participation holding the northern flank of the 872-day-long siege of Leningrad. This was a genocide within the larger General Plan Ost, claiming 1.5 million Soviet citizen lives from hunger, cold and malnutrition-related diseases.

For decades maintaining good Soviet relations with a Finlandized postwar Finland as a largely neutral nominal ally during the Cold War took priority over trumpeting painful Russo-Finnish historic truths. But in recent years, Moscow has re-emphasized the Nazi-inspired maltreatment of Soviet POWs in Finnish hands from 1941-44. It should be noted that Finland was far from a marginal and unwilling Axis ally comparable to say, Bulgaria, which also claims to have saved nearly its entire Jewish population from the Holocaust. By spring 1942, the Nazis maintained some 200,000 German troops on Finnish soil, participating in and advising Finnish operations in the High North against the Kola Peninsula where the Soviet Northern Fleet was based (the Kola Peninsula as a major base for Russia's naval nuclear deterrent is a focus of NATO operations today).

There's also some evidence--despite decades of soft-pedaling the facts by previous generations of Finnish historians, who argued that wartime Finland saved nearly all 2,000 people of its Jews and Jewish refugee population, that the Mannerheim dictatorship played at least an indirect role in the Final Solution in Finland's Nazi-occupied neighbor, Estonia. It should be noted here that the only extant recording of Hitler's private rather than public speaking voice on the Internet comes from a secretly recorded conversation between Adolf Hitler and the Finnish wartime dictator General Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, at a dinner celebrating Mannerheim's 75th birthday.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus, the first German Field Marshal to ever be captured, in Soviet captivity following the surrender of his 6th Army at Stalingrad, just months after Hitler's recorded anxious conversation with Mannerheim.

In the recording, Hitler laments that German intelligence had no idea just how colossal the Soviets' armaments output would prove once the Nazis invaded, and Hitler expressed his astonishment at a single Soviet factory [most likely the one relocated east of the Urals at Chelyabinsk aka Tankograd] cranking out tens of thousands of tanks. Hitler also admitted to Mannerheim that German equipment was 'good weather armament', meaning German trucks, panzers and half-tracks were not designed for the muddy and cold conditions encountered on the Russian front. History does not repeat, but it does rhyme, regarding NATO's vaunted Leopard 2 tanks running over mines and burning on the steppes in 2023 like the German panzers did in 1943.

Knocked-out armor after marching on Russia then and now

In Canada, the 2023 standing ovation for a surviving member of the Waffen SS Galitzien division who swore an oath of obedience to death to Adolf Hitler was perceived by Russians as a 'masks off' moment, a tacit admission that NATO is picking up where the Nazis left off in waging a long-prepared war on Russia. Another 'masks off' controversy broke out this week, when Czech Senator Miroslava Nemcova reportedly made a social media post on the 81st anniversary of the Nazis Leningrad Siege being finally broken by Soviet forces. Nemcova's post was quoted as saying it was lamentable in light of Russia's crimes in Ukraine that Russians could not experience such punishment like the Siege of Leningrad again.

Nemcova's post was deleted and she claimed, that the versions and translations circulating online are Russian misinformation, but the damage to Russian online attitudes towards Czechia has been done. In Czechia, memories of Soviet troops role in suppressing the Prague Spring uprising of 1968 are long, but memories of occupied Bohemia being one of the most industrially productive and least bombed territories of the Nazi war machine are unsurprisingly few and far between. It was the Czechs ugly history and Nemcova reviving memories of it that motivated our ESW Eurasia Editor Stas Krapivnik to post the video above.

A wounded Wehrmacht POW being held at gunpoint by a Red Army soldier, Stalingrad 1943

The Nazi tide first broke on the outskirts of Moscow, just over 84 years ago, followed by a resurgent but overstretched and doomed Wehrmacht advance across southern Russia, as the Red Army learned how to fight a terrible enemy. After Stalingrad the Germans would have one more successful counteroffensive at Kharkov, but their failure at Kursk would ensure a long retreat that ended in Berlin. Europeans would do well to re-read accurate World War II history and work to end the present war with Russia, rather than double down on losing one like their grandparents did.

A brief, non-comprehensive gallery of Nazi German military officers who went on to play prominent roles in the Bundeswehr and NATO