I always found it strange how anticommunists are allowed to blame their military failures on the weather, but blaming said weather for a famine in a people’s republic is worse than Shoah denial.
Anyway, while the Axis invasion of the U.S.S.R. is admittedly a subject that can take nearly dozens of hours of study, you’ll be hard pressed to find a historian who claims that the Red Army’s contribution to repelling the invaders was insignificant. Environmental factors (like field mice) contributed, yes, but it would be exaggerative to claim that they were decisive. The Axis devastated the U.S.S.R. so much that the Soviets had no choice but to fight for their very survival.
A telling detail of this remarkable saga is that on January 31, 1943, at Stalingrad, General von Paulus, Commander of the German 6th Army, surrendered to Lt. Colonel Leonid Vinoukur, a Jew.20 […] A rich accounting of specific individuals appears in a detailed work by Reuben Ainsztein,22 where we learn, among others, that Matrosov’s legendary feat of blocking [an Axis] machine gun with his body to allow his comrades to advance was repeated by Yosif Bumagin in Breslau, Poland, and in the Battle of Moscow by Yakov Paderin, both Jews.23
It’s a shame that most anticommunists would prefer to either ignore or trivialise this beautiful history. Oh well.
I always found it strange how anticommunists are allowed to blame their military failures on the weather, but blaming said weather for a famine in a people’s republic is worse than Shoah denial.
Anyway, while the Axis invasion of the U.S.S.R. is admittedly a subject that can take nearly dozens of hours of study, you’ll be hard pressed to find a historian who claims that the Red Army’s contribution to repelling the invaders was insignificant. Environmental factors (like field mice) contributed, yes, but it would be exaggerative to claim that they were decisive. The Axis devastated the U.S.S.R. so much that the Soviets had no choice but to fight for their very survival.
One aspect of the resistance that I love reading about are the Jews who directly fought against their oppressors:
It’s a shame that most anticommunists would prefer to either ignore or trivialise this beautiful history. Oh well.