this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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That's why the udssr where allied with Hitler early in the war and signing a NAP, only stopping because Hitler betrayed them and attacked anyway?
Sorry, but this interpretation sounds a bit revisionistic. It was lot of people's fault that Hitler could do what he did, that's not a east vs. West thing. People should focus on the real factors and watch that something like this never happens again.
Claiming the USSR and Nazi Germany were allied is not only Nazi propaganda (aka 'double genocide' theory), but also holocaust denial. And, you know, a basic denial of reality.
It should be noted that Poland invaded the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War and opportunistically killed tens of thousands of Jews. The Soviet Union, by the accounts of many Jewish and Slavic survivors of the holocaust, saved hundreds of thousands of lives and won the war by not only signing that NAP, but also making sure that the Nazis were not occupying vast swathes of territory in western Belarus and Ukraine that had tons of vulnerable groups in them. The price for being an antisemite was death in the Soviet Union.
I say this as someone whose family house was annexed by the Nazis, and our relatives house was torched and their kids were stolen away to the Rhineland, which we only learned of recently through genetic testing. We just assumed they all died.
Not saying allied, but had an agreement that lasted until the nazis betrayed them. But equalling that saying this is the same as holocaust denial plays holocaust denialism down.
To me it seems that the polish wanted independence, but I don't know much about this conflict, so I am not really comfortable to comment on that.
Fighting nazis was a good thing and the appeasement politic from western nations was a bad take, I would never argue against that, but I don't know how the NAP helped, because for me it semms more like it gave the nazis time and space to make atrocitys in Europe and German.
Sorry to hear that this happens to your family. War is hell an leaves it scars. Hope your family can heal.
Poland went to war with basically all their neighbors at this point and were largely supplied by Germany. There are anxieties about this history to this day in Western Ukraine, Belarus, Slovakia, and Czechia, because the Poles massacred a lot of people. Its one thing to want independence, its another to massacre innocent civilians for fun.
It wasn't 'appeasement', it was active collusion.
The Soviet Union had just got out of a Civil War and had almost no industry. They had roughly 10 years to build an industrial base capable of defeating what essentially amounted to all of mainland Europe. They were a feudal society before WW2 and were starting from scratch. And they won, so clearly what they did, communism, worked.