Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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70th Anniversary of V-E Day

fp-1945For the past few months, starting in January, we’ve been marking the anniversaries of the liberations of Nazi concentration camps. Those liberations were the harbinger of today: Victory in Europe Day, when on May 8, 1945, Germany formally surrendered.

(Right: The front page of the IJN following V-E Day.)

Because of the time difference, in Russia, the war officially ended on May 9, a date that remains one of the most important in that country. This year, being the 70th anniversary, will be no exception. In Moscow tomorrow, a great parade — and show of military might — will be held.

The loss of life suffered by the Soviet Union was enormous, unfathomable. The numbers aren’t definitive, but the figure for casualties is somewhere around 20 million. Eight million died in the battlefields; we just heard the mind-boggling statistic that more Russians died in the 872-day-long siege of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) than of all of America and Great Britain’s losses combined.

Without the Soviet Union’s disproportionate contribution to the war, it is hard to imagine the Allies could have won. Certainly the war would have continued for far longer and required – and therefore cost – far more American casualties.

It was the Soviets, who in the hell of Stalingrad, caused the reversal of Germany’s unstoppable momentum in conquering Europe. It was the Soviets who liberated Berlin, the seat of Nazi power. And it was the Soviets who liberated the heinous death camps that dotted the Polish landscape, including the most infamous of them all, Auschwitz.

The advent of the Cold War on the heels of Victory in Europe Day meant that the West, including the US, really never gave the Soviet Union its due. And the current tensions with Putin’s regime have caused many world leaders, the US among them, to choose not to attend the victory parade in Moscow tomorrow.

Putin, of course, will use tomorrow’s occasion for Russian military grandstanding, and it’s understandable that Western leadership opposed to his adventurism in Crimea and Ukraine decided to boycott. But is that fair to the millions who sacrificed so that we can live in freedom? So that millions more were not destroyed by the Nazi killing machine?

It’s time for Western leaders to take the high road, put politics aside and to acknowledge, publicly, loudly and repeatedly, the Soviet contribution to winning World War II. It may be an uncomfortable truth, but there is no easy way around it: We are indebted to the Soviet sacrifice.




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