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Based Soviets (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by jackeroni@lemmy.ml to c/memes@lemmy.ml

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[–] theuniqueone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I think its important to point out that although not to the extent of the west at all the soviets were also far from perfect at purging instead of "strategically using" Nazis.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

As @DefinitelyNotAPhone@hexbear.net said, there's a huge difference between selectively using Nazis for their knowledge on R&D while keeping them on a tight leash, imprisoning, and even executing them, and what the West did, which involved giving them cushy jobs, erasing their crimes, and putting them in the highest seats of leadership of organizations like NATO. The West loved the Nazis (still does), the Soviets hated them.

[–] n7gifmdn@lemmy.ca -1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

IIRC my world history class, the Soviets where perfectly fine letting the nazis destroy western Europe to the point of signing a non-aggression pact with them and only changed their mind once the Germans decided they would be the first to finally capture Russia from the Russians.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 day ago

I'm sure that's how you were taught in (presumably) Canada, but that's not what happened. The Soviets spent the previous decade trying to form an anti-Nazi alliance with Britain, France, etc, who had instead signed non-agression pacts with Nazi Germany. It wasn't until the eve of wartime that the Soviets agreed to a non-agression pact with the Nazis to buy time before the inevitable war.

The Soviets expected it. The Nazis attacked the Soviets just like everyone knew they would, because the Nazis wanted to commit genocide on the Slavs and because Nazism is inerently anti-communist, and communism inherently anti-fascist, as communism is proletarian and fascism is bourgeois.

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.

The West wanted the Nazis to exterminate the communists.

[–] Edie@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

Why then had the Munich men refused all through the Spring and Summer to accept the only terms for an alliance with Russia which could mean anything to Russia? It was, says Schuman, because “all preferred the destruction of Poland to the Soviet defence of Poland. All hoped that the sequence would be a German-Soviet war over the spoils.” Is this a too stern judgment? It fits Ambassador Henderson, who told Hitler, on August 23, that he preferred a German-Soviet agreement to an Anglo-Soviet agreement.

Emphasis mine.

The Cold War & Its Origins, Vol. I, Denna F. Flemming, 1961, Chapter V

[–] DefinitelyNotAPhone@hexbear.net 14 points 3 days ago

The difference being the Soviet-captured Nazis were forced at gunpoint to contribute to their R&D projects, being treated as prisoners before either being imprisoned or executed. NATO made its first supreme commander an SS member, put so many Nazis in the West German government that there were actually a higher percentage of them there than in the actual Third Reich, and let von Braun live a long and comfortable life as a free man.