Erasing the Eastern Front and the Soviet Defeat of Nazi Germany

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/06/10/sove-j10.html

This WSWS article expresses something my household has noted for some time - the end of World War II in Europe is being subjected to revisionism.

I'm not speaking merely of American narratives in which the primary focus is on the D-Day landings and the Battle of the Bulge, or perhaps the Italian campaign - as if these battles are the sine qua non moments in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Americans have long downplayed and ignored the Eastern Front - the theatre of the largest land battles in history and the battlefield in which Nazi Germany was defeated. This cannot be disputed by any serious historian.

There have always been popular historians in the United States that put all the emphasis on Roosevelt, Churchill, and generals such as Patton. But the more substantial histories and historians have a more comprehensive and honest perspective.

The Anti-Russian stance of the Western Establishment over the past fifteen years or so has signalled a sea change and as such Russia's critical role in defeating Germany is being downplayed, ignored, and increasingly denied.

And this revisionism is even at work within Western Europe where most educated people would know better. But it doesn't matter, as the politics are framing the narrative. It's a lesson related to history and historiography that we should all take note of.

Additionally the article is correct in that the contest over Ukraine closely overlaps with and parallels the strategic reasoning of Hitler and his invasion of the USSR. No one is saying 'Lebensraum', but in reality the goals of Ukrainian support (and political manipulation) are about economics, trade, resources, and an expansion of 'Europe' - or rather Liberal Europe which has taken on an imperialist ethos as seen with NATO's regime change in Libya. This also would include its posture in the Balkans, its attitude toward immigration, and increasing economic interests in Central Asia and the larger Mediterranean. Western Liberalism is being exposed as a mask - a fig leaf for the raw and naked imperialism that is the result of capitalism.

Anti-Russian sentiment is driving not only revisionism but a softened attitude when it comes to the Nazi regime and its crimes. It's reminiscent of the post-war period in which individual Nazi crimes were whitewashed as Western governments were desperate to work with German scientists, doctors, and intelligence agents in order to counter the Russians. The ideologies may be different but the alignments are once again the same and as such any narratives that celebrate Russia and denigrate Germany are not helpful and thus being discarded. The Russians have noticed and all the more as this week marked the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa - the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union launched on 22 June 1941.

This revisionism concerning Nazi Germany is easy enough to find within Far Right circles but it also appears in tempered form in the works of someone like Timothy Snyder as well as other academics who appear on the BBC and elsewhere - always quick to defend World War II Ukrainian fascism (still be celebrated in Kyiv) in the face of criticism from the Poles and others.

The article is faulty in that while it rightly calls out the downplaying of the Soviet role and the millions who died in defeating Nazi Germany, the reality is that feelings are mixed. While I think it's safe to say that life behind the Iron Curtain was (in most cases) not nearly as bad as life under the Nazis, there was bitterness about the course of the post-war political order and additionally the conduct of Russian soldiers as they marched west into Central-Eastern Europe in 1944-1945. There was rape on all sides during the war, but the Russians moving into Central Europe took it to another level. Many Czechs, Poles, and others were pleased enough to be rid of the Germans, but felt betrayed by the Russians and the conduct of their soldiers.

For other historians like Anne Applebaum, the attempt to paint the Russians in the most negative light possible seems to suggest that somehow they were worse than the Nazis - something patently untrue. The communist states which emerged in the aftermath of the war were authoritarian to be sure but not on the order of their subjugation under the Germans.

Please note, I am not including the years of terror under Stalin in Russia (episodically one of the most brutal regimes in history) but rather I refer to the post-Nazi/post-war regimes established in places like Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. People weren't happy with the new regimes, but it wasn't even comparable to life under the Nazis. There were terrible things that took place, but the extent (let alone the intensity) of death and slavery are not analogous. The kind of Double-Genocide models (Nazi and Soviet) promoted (again) by the likes of Timothy Snyder are misleading at best if not simply pernicious revisionism.

The revisionism is also on display with the promotions of Nazi collaborators such as Bandera in Ukraine as well as figures in the Baltic states.

These revisionists are among those in the West who now speak openly of breaking up the Russian Federation - splintering the nation into various states and confederations. This will allow the West to not only position itself geo-strategically vis-à-vis Central Asia and China, but open up Russia's vast resources to Western exploitation. This overall or larger goal must always be kept in mind when it comes to Western policy, military strategy, and even the treatment of history. For Moscow, the message is clear - it's Hitler 2.0. NATO may not be the Third Reich in terms of Blitzkrieg and Generalplan Ost, but the overall effect is the same - the defeat, humiliation, and break-up of Russia.

As such, the revision of history is but one facet of this larger effort - but a critical one in terms of shaping narratives and public thinking.

These issues are further complicated by the fact that to the Russians - Operation Barbarossa was an attempted genocide of the Slavic people and Generalplan Ost was a blueprint for that genocide. More Slavs than Jews were actually killed, but in terms of a percentage of the overall population, the Jewish Holocaust was far worse - with 2/3 of European Jewry being killed and specifically in some places (such as Poland) the numbers ran as high as 90%.

But for the Russians, their geopolitical calculations in terms of Western invasion always take this into account - something that is dismissed and trivialized by the same aforementioned historians.

As Christians we are not engaged in this fight. We don't support these nations, nor will we take up arms to defend their causes and agendas. Those that do should be challenged and called out - but this will not happen given the sacralist heresy, apostasy and compromise of Church leaders.

We may not be in the fight but we are called to tell the truth and thus these issues are of interest to us, all the more as the debates and ideologies are at work within the Church. We need to speak out - our efforts may prevent some young man from enlisting and falling into grievous sin, harming others, or throwing his life away in the cause of oligarchical and bestial powers.

And it's worth stating that truth-telling will almost always be viewed as subversive by modern states with contemporary media culture - let alone if that state is at war. The Christian is always a second-class citizen (refusing the obligations of citizenship as well as many of its privileges) and always counter-cultural.