The communists were never allies with the Nazis. A non-aggression pact is not an alliance.
They kind of acted like allies, particularly with regards to Poland, which they split between themselves, and before you cite that it was a preemptive strike—I suppose a sort of “the Nazis-will-invade-Poland-before-us-so-we-might-as-well-have-a-chunk-of-it-right-now-to-fight-there-rather-in-our-beloved-Soviet-Motherland”—there are things like the wp:Katyn massacre. Again, Stalin’s purges hurt the Soviet’s ability to counter the Nazis, and I’ll add maybe scared more Germans into voting for Nazis.
The communists spent the decade prior trying to form an anti-Nazi coalition force, such as the Anglo-French-Soviet Alliance which was pitched by the communists and rejected by the British and French.
It might be due to bad PR: while Hitler was having his Nuremberg rally and the Berlin Olympics, Stalin was having his purges.
The communists hated the Nazis from the beginning, as the Nazi party rose to prominence by killing communists and labor organizers, cemented bourgeois rule, and was violently racist and imperialist, while the communists opposed all of that.
Agreed, but both Communists and Nazis were also anti-liberal—a lot of Germans were liberal—but I suppose the KPD weren’t really into coalition-building with liberals and/or democrats in those days.
When the many talks of alliances with the west all fell short, …, It was a last resort, when the west was content from the beginning with working alongside Hitler.
Yes, but I don’t think the others involved carving up other countries, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, and the idiot British PM who was responsible for that resigned soon after it backfired, while after Molotov-Ribbentrop, Stalin continued to rule until his death in 1953.
Harry Truman, in 1941 in front of the Senate, stated:
If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.
and some Americans believed in continued neutrality for similar reasons.
Not only that, but it was the Soviet Union that was responsible for 4/5ths of total Nazi deaths, and winning the war against the Nazis.
and kudos to the people of the USSR.
The Soviet Union did not agree to invade Poland with the Nazis,
I presume it was implied.
When the USSR went into Poland, it stayed mostly to areas Poland had invaded and annexed a few decades prior.
Presumably they hit the areas defended not by the Nazis but by the Poles—i.e. the eastern part.
Should the Soviets have let Poland get entirely taken over by the Nazis, standing idle?
For the next two decades, Poland was seen by the Soviet Union as an enemy and, along with Germany (under both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich), as a “politically illegitimate” state created by the Allied Powers during World War I at the expense of Germany and Russia.[15][16] During the interwar period Joseph Stalin feared a coordinated Polish-Japanese two-front invasion. Numerous residents of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic also fled across the border to Poland in protest of the First Five-Year Plan’s collectivization policies and the Holodomor.[16] The Soviet Union supported subversive activities of the Communist Party of Poland, the Communist Party of Western Belarus, and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. Poland in turn sent secret agents across the border to encourage rebellion against Soviet rule, which caused Stalin to begin to associate Poles in the Soviet Union with nationalist dissident and terrorist groups. The NKVD murdered 111,091 Poles during the Polish Operation and deported many families to Kazakhstan. Fears of a Polish invasion and external espionage also gave justification to the general internal repression of the Great Purge in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the USSR and Poland concluded a formal Non-Aggression Pact in 1932.[16]
So I guess Moscow and Warsaw weren’t getting along.
The Soviets demanded the right to enter these countries in case of a security threat.[50] Talks on military matters, that had begun in mid-August, quickly stalled over the topic of Soviet troop passage through Poland in the event of a German attack. British and French officials pressured the Polish government to agree to the Soviet terms.[51][52] However, Polish officials bluntly refused to allow Soviet troops to enter Polish territory upon expressing grave concerns that once Red Army troops had set foot on Polish soil, they might decline demands to leave.[53] Thereupon Soviet officials suggested that Poland’s objections be ignored and that the tripartite agreements be concluded.[54] The British refused the proposal, fearing that such a move would encourage Poland to establish stronger bilateral relations with Germany.[55]
So a country that was partially-at-least ruled by the Kremlin, didn’t want soldiers ruled by the Kremlin in their country again.
He served in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I, and in 1918, joined the Red Army and fought with distinction during the Russian Civil War. Rokossovsky rose to hold senior Red Army commands by 1937, when he fell victim to Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge and was branded a traitor, imprisoned and tortured. After Soviet failures in the Winter War, Rokossovsky was released from prison in 1940 and returned to command of an army corps.
What was this Polish commie doing in a commie prison?
more evidence of Stalin’s idiocy.
Churchill did not take the Nazis as a serious threat, and was horrified when FDR and Stalin made a joke about executing Nazis. Churchill starved millions to death in India in preventable ways, and had this to say about it:
I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.
I’ll have to check that out. Maybe I’ve overestimated him; and yes, he at least seems to have been genocidal, though such would give fuel (might have given fuel) to non-racist isolationists in the US and neutral European countries, such as those in Switzerland and Ireland.
Meanwhile, the soviet famine in the 1930s was the last major famine outside of wartime in the USSR, because collectivized farming achieved food security in a region where famine was common. As a consequence, life expectancy doubled:
anti-Communist ≠ necessarily pro-Tsarist
After Stalin died and Khrushchev took over, things seemed to improve.
Under capitalism—however regulated—Ukraine—IIUC—is a food exporter; though the the Kremlin is still making them suffer.
The soviets knew war was coming, and so bought more time to prepare.
Besides invading Poland and fighting the Poles, I wonder what did the Soviets do in those 22⅓ months to prepare that they didn’t do in the several years previous.
Not sure what including an example of the social fascism of the SPD at the end there is supposed to do for your point.
The KPD under Thälmann’s leadership regarded the Social Democratic Party (SPD) as an adversary and the party adopted the position that the social democrats were “social fascists”. Both the SPD and KPD were already previously split on many key issues, however, this new stance clarified it was impossible for the two parties to form a united front against the Nazi Party.
Thälmann was leader of the paramilitary Roter Frontkämpferbund. After the Nazi regime began, he was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 and held in solitary confinement for eleven years. Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov originally sought Thälmann’s release;[3] after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, efforts to that end were abandoned,[4] while Thälmann’s party rival Walter Ulbricht ignored requests to plead on his behalf. Thälmann was shot dead on Adolf Hitler’s personal order in Buchenwald in 1944.
I hope he died with the consolation that at least maybe many “social fascists” were also executed by the Nazis.
The soviets did not “split Poland” with the Nazis, the soviets only went in weeks after the Nazis did. Most of the area the Soviets took are areas in modern Lithuania and Ukraine. Poland had annexed them in the Polish-Soviet War and the Polish-Lithuanian War earlier. Katyn gets pinned on the Soviets because Goebbels reported on it and it became a useful story, but the execution method was distinctly Nazi, ie killing men, women, and children from behind into mass graves. The ammunition was German-produced in 1941, and the rope used to bind the hands of the victims was German made. It was entirely characteristc of Nazi execution methods and with Nazi equipment.
“Of 225 shells found in this grave, 205 are the German 1941 “Hasag” type, 17 are the German 1941 “Dürlach” type, 2 are of the unmarked 1930s Soviet type; and one is marked “B 1906.” Hence 98.67% of the shells are of 1941 German manufacture.”
The soviets and Poland indeed did not get along, at least not until Poland turned socialist. Poland had been engaging in wars of conquest in the preceding decades, killing Hungarians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, annexing their lands (see the Polish-Lithuanian War. Considering that the soviet union was a multi-national federation of socialist countries, it makes sense that there would be bad blood between them.
As for the purges, the need to investigate the party for traitors was legitimate. After the assassination of Kirov, a conspiracy against the soviet state was found, along with infiltration from fascists. Khrushchev did not improve the soviet union, but rather set the seeds for its dissolution. What improved in the soviet union was the benefit of the decades of industrialization and planting the seeds for the future that existed in the 20s and 30s, fighting off the Nazis and saving the world from fascism, and recovery from that war.
Returning to World War II, the soviets continued their preparatory work for war. It involved dramatic, rapid industrialization, which they needed to continue to close the industrial gap with Germany. Their rate of growth was higher than that of Germany, but in absolute terms were still lagging, so any bit of time they could buy was worth it. See The Soviets Expected It.
Returning to the KPD and SPD, the reason the SPD were so hated by the KPD is because the SPD aided the Nazis in killing communists. The SPD’s anti-communism aligned them with the Nazis, whom they found a common enemy. The SPD’s plan of voting for Hindenburg came true and failed spectacularly as Hitler took power anyways, proving the Communists correct, that the fascists needed to be fought directly. The SPD being killed by the Nazis for being too left wing is a direct result of their assistance with killing the communists first. See how the SPD betrayed the revolution.
As a side note, wikipedia is not a source. It is a compilation of sources at best, and at worst it can be wrong or misleading, lacking key context or mistranslating primary sources.
They kind of acted like allies, particularly with regards to Poland, which they split between themselves, and before you cite that it was a preemptive strike—I suppose a sort of “the Nazis-will-invade-Poland-before-us-so-we-might-as-well-have-a-chunk-of-it-right-now-to-fight-there-rather-in-our-beloved-Soviet-Motherland”—there are things like the wp:Katyn massacre. Again, Stalin’s purges hurt the Soviet’s ability to counter the Nazis, and I’ll add maybe scared more Germans into voting for Nazis.
It might be due to bad PR: while Hitler was having his Nuremberg rally and the Berlin Olympics, Stalin was having his purges.
Agreed, but both Communists and Nazis were also anti-liberal—a lot of Germans were liberal—but I suppose the KPD weren’t really into coalition-building with liberals and/or democrats in those days.
Yes, but I don’t think the others involved carving up other countries, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, and the idiot British PM who was responsible for that resigned soon after it backfired, while after Molotov-Ribbentrop, Stalin continued to rule until his death in 1953.
and some Americans believed in continued neutrality for similar reasons.
and kudos to the people of the USSR.
I presume it was implied.
Presumably they hit the areas defended not by the Nazis but by the Poles—i.e. the eastern part.
wp:Poland–Russia relations#Soviet Union
So I guess Moscow and Warsaw weren’t getting along.
wp:Soviet invasion of Poland#Soviet invasion of Poland
So a country that was partially-at-least ruled by the Kremlin, didn’t want soldiers ruled by the Kremlin in their country again.
I just checked this out:
wp:Konstantin Rokossovsky
(my bold)
What was this Polish commie doing in a commie prison?
more evidence of Stalin’s idiocy.
I’ll have to check that out. Maybe I’ve overestimated him; and yes, he at least seems to have been genocidal, though such would give fuel (might have given fuel) to non-racist isolationists in the US and neutral European countries, such as those in Switzerland and Ireland.
anti-Communist ≠ necessarily pro-Tsarist
After Stalin died and Khrushchev took over, things seemed to improve.
Under capitalism—however regulated—Ukraine—IIUC—is a food exporter; though the the Kremlin is still making them suffer.
Besides invading Poland and fighting the Poles, I wonder what did the Soviets do in those 22⅓ months to prepare that they didn’t do in the several years previous.
wp:Ernst Thälmann
(my bold)
I hope he died with the consolation that at least maybe many “social fascists” were also executed by the Nazis.
The soviets did not “split Poland” with the Nazis, the soviets only went in weeks after the Nazis did. Most of the area the Soviets took are areas in modern Lithuania and Ukraine. Poland had annexed them in the Polish-Soviet War and the Polish-Lithuanian War earlier. Katyn gets pinned on the Soviets because Goebbels reported on it and it became a useful story, but the execution method was distinctly Nazi, ie killing men, women, and children from behind into mass graves. The ammunition was German-produced in 1941, and the rope used to bind the hands of the victims was German made. It was entirely characteristc of Nazi execution methods and with Nazi equipment.
The soviets and Poland indeed did not get along, at least not until Poland turned socialist. Poland had been engaging in wars of conquest in the preceding decades, killing Hungarians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, annexing their lands (see the Polish-Lithuanian War. Considering that the soviet union was a multi-national federation of socialist countries, it makes sense that there would be bad blood between them.
As for the purges, the need to investigate the party for traitors was legitimate. After the assassination of Kirov, a conspiracy against the soviet state was found, along with infiltration from fascists. Khrushchev did not improve the soviet union, but rather set the seeds for its dissolution. What improved in the soviet union was the benefit of the decades of industrialization and planting the seeds for the future that existed in the 20s and 30s, fighting off the Nazis and saving the world from fascism, and recovery from that war.
Returning to World War II, the soviets continued their preparatory work for war. It involved dramatic, rapid industrialization, which they needed to continue to close the industrial gap with Germany. Their rate of growth was higher than that of Germany, but in absolute terms were still lagging, so any bit of time they could buy was worth it. See The Soviets Expected It.
Returning to the KPD and SPD, the reason the SPD were so hated by the KPD is because the SPD aided the Nazis in killing communists. The SPD’s anti-communism aligned them with the Nazis, whom they found a common enemy. The SPD’s plan of voting for Hindenburg came true and failed spectacularly as Hitler took power anyways, proving the Communists correct, that the fascists needed to be fought directly. The SPD being killed by the Nazis for being too left wing is a direct result of their assistance with killing the communists first. See how the SPD betrayed the revolution.
As a side note, wikipedia is not a source. It is a compilation of sources at best, and at worst it can be wrong or misleading, lacking key context or mistranslating primary sources.