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Monday, June 26, 2023

Russia's and Ukraine's Stand Against Nazis Then and Now

 Nadene Goldfoot                                    

     Cover of Life Magazine of the invasion of Germany into Poland   Near Sochaczew during the German invasion of Poland, 1939.Hugo Jaeger—The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by German President Paul von Hindenburg. Hitler was the leader of the Nazi Party. The full name of the Nazi Party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Its members were often called Nazis. The Nazis were radically right-wing, antisemitic, anticommunist, and antidemocratic. 

Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939  Under the control of Adolf Hitler, they bombard Poland on land and from the air. World War II had begun.

The Soviet Union joined WW2 on September 17, 1939, when it invaded eastern Poland in coordination with Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union officially maintained neutrality during WW2 but cooperated with and assisted Germany.  It would be misleading to say that the Soviet Union (the USSR) switched sides because it was never in a state of war with the US, the UK, or France. Yet, the USSR maintained friendly neutrality with Nazi Germany until the latter attacked it in June 1941. After this aggression, the country allied with the UK, and later on, with the US. 

Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. It took the country four years and a tremendous military and civilian effort to achieve victory. About seventeen million Soviet citizens died in WW2, the largest death toll of any country. The victory was possible due to greater willpower (Soviet citizens defended their own country against an invader with genocidal plans) but also bigger industrial and human reserves.   Then the Soviet Union allied with Britain. After the United States joined the war in December 1941, the USSR also allied with this country against Nazi Germany.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was President of the USA at the time, trying to keep out of the war.  

Prior to the war, Polish Jews suffered from institutionalized discrimination and widespread poverty. In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland while the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. In German-occupied Poland, Jews were killed, subjected to forced labor, and forced to move to ghettos. The Soviet Union deported many Jews to the Soviet interior, where most survived the war. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and began the systematic murder of Jews. 1.8 million Jews were killed in Operation Reinhard, shot in roundups in ghettos, died during the train journey, or killed by poison gas in the extermination camps. 

                                            

                  Warsaw Ghetto burning, May 1943 •

In 1943 and 1944, the remaining labor camps and ghettos were liquidated.                 

 Łódź Ghetto children deported to Chełmno death camp, 1942

 Many Jews tried to escape, but surviving in hiding was very difficult due to factors such as the lack of money to pay helpers and the risk of denunciation. 

      Einsatzgruppe shooting of women from the Mizocz Ghetto, 1942 •

Only 1 to 2 percent of Polish Jews in German-occupied territory survived.

Ukraine:  The surprise German invasion of the U.S.S.R. began on June 22, 1941. Initially, the Germans were greeted as liberators by some of the Ukrainian populace. In Galicia especially, there had long been a widespread belief that Germany, as the avowed enemy of Poland and the U.S.S.R., was the Ukrainians’ natural ally for the attainment of their independence. The illusion was quickly shattered. The Germans were accompanied on their entry into Lviv on June 30 by members of OUN-B, who that same day proclaimed the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and the formation of a provisional state administration; within days the organizers of this action were arrested and interned in concentration camps (as were both Bandera and, later, Melnyk). Far from supporting Ukrainian political aspirations, the Nazis in August attached Galicia administratively to Poland, returned Bukovina to Romania, and gave Romania control over the area between the Dniester and Southern Buh rivers as the province of Transnistria, with its capital at Odessa. The remainder was organized as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.

 In the fall of 1941 began the mass killings of Jews that continued through 1944. An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Baby Yar (Ukrainian: Babyn Yar) in Kyiv, nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre in the city.  The Nazis were aided at times by auxiliary forces recruited from the local population.(Fear of life or anti-Semitism was the motivation.)  

Ukraine’s human and material losses during World War II were enormous. Some 5 to 7 million people perished. Even with the return of evacuees from the east and the repatriation of forced labourers from Germany, Ukraine’s estimated population of 36 million in 1947 was almost 5 million less than before the war. Because more than 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages had been destroyed, 10 million people were left homeless. Only 20 percent of the industrial enterprises and 15 percent of agricultural equipment and machinery remained intact, and the transportation network was severely damaged. The material losses constituted an estimated 40 percent of Ukraine’s national wealth. Was there any reason to think that Ukraine was full of Nazis to later attack?  

Russia now was the invader;   invading Ukraine February 24, 2022 with the pretext that it was full of Nazis and they had to.

                   Volodymyr Zelenskyy b: January 25, 1978  of the hit series, Servant of the People on TV.  

Ukraine, free of Russian rule, has had a Jewish president, a lawyer and TV comedian personality, since 2019, and now is 2023.   Born to a Ukrainian Jewish family, Zelenskyy grew up as a native Russian speaker in Kryvyi Rih, a major city of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in central Ukraine.   I'm even surprised that Jewish people would want to return to Ukraine.  Does it appear that Nazis would put up with a Jewish president?  Where does Putin get his information?  Obviously, no Nazis were secure in Ukraine, of all places.  It was a ridiculous excuse for invasion that Putin used, only working on the demented.  

In the early hours of 24 February, shortly before the start of the Russian invasion, Zelenskyy recorded an address to the citizens of both Ukraine and Russia. He disputed claims of the Russian government about the presence of neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian government and stated that he had no intention of attacking the Donbas region, while highlighting his personal connections to the area. In part of the address, he spoke in Russian to the people of Russia, appealing to them to pressure their leadership to prevent war:

What is Russia doing?

Now:  The private army of Wagner Group's chief accuses Russian army of attacking Wagner forces.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the violent Wagner Group, a private mercenary unit which has been fighting on behalf of Putin, on Friday accused the Russian army of launching attacks on Wagner forces, which are made up of fellow Russians. This has already ended in Russia.  

The rebellious mercenary soldiers who briefly took over a Russian military headquarters on an ominous march toward Moscow were gone Sunday, but the short-lived revolt has weakened President Vladimir Putin just as his forces are facing a fierce counteroffensive in Ukraine.

Under terms of the agreement that ended the crisis, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led his Wagner troops in the failed uprising, will go into exile in Belarus but will not face prosecution.

2:30pm, The latest is that Zelensky is going along with UN with being against Israel (wanting help for Ukraine)  while at the same time they are pleading with Israel to send them arms.  This is an intolerable situation for him, but hurts immensely to add anti-Semitism upon Israel!  This is espeically bad considering their reputation from WWII against the Jews and aiding the Nazis.  

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/FMfcgzGsnLMFMmLlccLvNRgQvmmvqLSG

Resource:

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/hitler-comes-to-power

https://study.com/academy/lesson/ussr-involvement-in-world-war-ii.html#:~:text=Course%2041K%20views-,The%20Soviet%20Union%20in%20World%20War%20II,cooperated%20with%20and%20assisted%20Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volodymyr_Zelenskyy

https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine/The-Nazi-occupation-of-Soviet-Ukraine

CBS:  https://www.cbsnews.com/video/wagner-group-chief-accuses-russian-army-of-attacking-wagner-forces/

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