WW2 The Eastern Front@ShoahUkraine
The Grave and the Glory
Part One:
Some history you learn from books, and some history changes the way you stand at a grave. This is my attempt to explain to a Western audience what the Eastern Front actually was: who broke the back of Nazism, what it cost, and what was done with the credit afterward. Parts of it I wrote with tears in my eyes. Share it with someone who thinks they already know how the war was won.
I. The Lie of the Single War
There is a story the West tells about the Second World War, and it has a shape as clean as a cinema reel. In that story the war turns upon a beach in Normandy; a tide of American and British boys wades ashore under fire; and from that morning the liberation of Europe rolls inexorably toward Berlin and the fall of the Reich. It is a stirring story. It is also, in its essentials, a falsehood, and a convenient one. For the war that decided the fate of Nazism was not fought on that beach, nor in the hedgerows beyond it, nor in any theater the West most loves to remember. It was fought a thousand miles to the east, on a front beside which Normandy was a skirmish, by a people the Western story has laboured for eighty years to forget.
The plain truth, familiar to every serious historian and withheld from every cinema audience, is that there were not one war against Hitler but two, and that they were not remotely equal. There was the war in the West, a real war and a hard one, but a latecomer's war, a smaller war, and, measured by what was done to the conquered, a comparatively merciful war. And there was the war in the East, which began in earnest in June of 1941 and did not end until the red flag flew over the ruins of Berlin: a war of a scale and a savagery without precedent in the history of the species, in which the German war machine was not merely defeated but ground to powder. The first war the West fought. The second war destroyed Nazism. They were not the same war, and those who pretend otherwise do so because the truth is intolerable to them.
This review concerns that difference, and what the West made of it. It will show that the Soviet Union was the power that actually broke the Reich, paying a price in blood that dwarfs every Western sacrifice combined; that the Western powers, Britain and the United States foremost, came late to the fight, hedged while their ally bled, and contrived a strategy that spared their own and spent the Soviet dead; and that, the war once won by other hands, they stole the credit, rewrote the memory, and turned with indecent haste upon the very ally who had won it for them. The tale of the two fronts is not a story of gallant allies in a common cause. It is the story of one nation that fought Nazism to the death and several others that watched, waited, and then claimed the laurels.
II. The War of Annihilation
To grasp why the Eastern Front stands apart from every other theater of the war, one must grasp that Hitler did not regard it as a theater of the war at all. He regarded it as the war: the real war, the racial war, the war of extermination for which all else had been mere prelude. The campaign in the West was, to the Nazi mind, a quarrel among Europeans, to be settled and forgotten; Hitler hoped to the very end for an accommodation with Britain, and the war in the West was waged, with grim exceptions, within recognisable bounds. The war in the East was waged within no bounds whatever, because it was conceived from the first as a war to depopulate a continent.
The documents leave no room for doubt, for the planners of the Reich wrote their intentions down. Under the design known as Generalplan Ost, the lands of the Soviet Union were to be emptied of their peoples to make room for German settlement, and tens of millions of Slavs were marked for expulsion, enslavement, or death.
