They took on the full brunt of the Wermacht. Their losses are staggering......hard to comprehend losing that many people.


Why aren't they given their due? The cold war?

goddamn commies is why

Because public schools don't teach history.  

Because they dug in and occupied every inch of ground they took, created puppet socialist states, and set about on an ambitious policy of further expansion, making every wester power that helped them in any way feel like a sucker.

Maybe that.

Let's also ignore that fact there probably wouldn't have been a war, or even a Hitler, had it not been for the Soviets and their antics in the 1930s.

Mostly this.

Hitler was incredibly stupid for turning on Russia. Especially at the same time as fighting a war in the West.
Russia was really not equipped to fight that sort of war, maybe he thought it would go faster, but once winter started, it was the end for any ideas of a fast German victory.

Russia could *probably* have negotiated a cease-fire at that point. In not doing so, and continuing with the war, they undoubtedly made a large contribution to the final result.

Russia (more specifically, the Communist ideology installed and run out of the Kremlin) was Hitler's raison d'etre.

Suggesting he leave Russia alone is akin to the threads we have that suggest the CSA could have freed the slaves.

The Zen say the answer to a question is contained within the question.

In the big picture of things, first and probably most important (and Circuits up above hit the nail on the head) the Soviet account of actions and results exist only to support Soviet Propaganda claims. The Truth of Soviet war time conduct was in a lot of ways worse morally that the Nazi conduct. History is a "social" science which means that hypotheses must be tested and confirmed before being accepted, but always subject to revision with better evidence.

We can start with the end of the War first for Soviet historical claims. A few years after the War, the Soviets put up all kinds of monuments and museums in the all of the countries and zones they permanently occupied reminding the people there that they were "liberated" forever by the glorious Red Army. Anyone who would have said different, would've been jailed and beaten until they said the correct words in the correct order. That's counter-intuitive to an actual liberating Army such was the US Army in France and Luxembourg.

Sure, the US has monuments there in the form of Cemeteries. The individual French families, outside of Parisians of course, honor and take care of individual graves. (I'm sure that will end in the Future.) That never happened in the Soviet zones of occupations. The Soviets and all they did were not beloved, honored nor remembered fondly. And when the "Wall" came down, the people they brutalized for decades, couldn't wait to destroy that artifacts that reminded them of their occupation.

Jumping to the beginning of the War, the Soviets were accomplices of the Nazis since the 1920s. In 1939 after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin declared Nazi Germany as "Brothers in Socialism," and then they both invaded Poland. Western Soviet Apologists never mention this, plus it wasn't until 1942 that Soviet propaganda and then the apologists started claiming that the Nazis were actually fascists for like forever, so years previous to 1942 were erased from history along with a huge number of people associated with the partnership. Dead men tell no tales.

The Soviets also murdered the same kinds of people in their concentration camps as the Nazi murdered and for the exact same reasons. The main difference is that the Soviets murdered over twice as many.

The one claim made in the OP needs to be put in perspective. The Wehrmacht fought a three-front war, so the Soviets never faced the full brunt of it. Soviet doctrine, up until 1943 when Soviet factory production and materiel from the US outnumbered what the Germans could replace, was pretty simple. Push ill-trained, ill-equipped people into machine gun and large tube artillery fire with NKVD battalions in the rear to kill anyone they thought weren't putting their best efforts forward. It's way easier to move up on an MG-34 team when they're changing a barrel than when they shooting all your friends.

I could go on. I can wax poetically about Mighty Eighth Air Force history (but that deserves its own place in History and not to be sullied by using the word "soviet" in the same paragraphs.) The main point is that if the Soviets were not involved fighting against the Nazis, it would've taken nuclear weapons to defeat them. (Don't forget the "bomb" was first developed to be dropped on the Germans.) Also, a case can be made to say that if Hitler didn't screw things up so much for the German war effort, the Soviets wouldn't have had the success they did in the later years of the war even with large amounts of US materiel.

But, I'm with Circuits, screw commies. They belong to the dust bin of History.

The German economy post WWI was in absolute shambles and the French occupied the Rurh river valley in the 1920s in order to force reparations. The Soviets were actively trying to destabilize the Weimar government. The German people were essentially forced to choose between communism and right wing nationalism. They picked Hitler and that is what led to all the terrible things that followed... all of which might have happened just as easily had they chosen Stalin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PJkNZ30WV0
this is a good video from a German tanker.
Russia infiltrated the shit out of Germany with communism.
Germany was trying to help Russians from communism.

Attached File

Stalin drowned the Wehrmacht in a sea of Russian bodies and blood.

Fed with American Spam, marching in American boots, supplied by American trucks running on American gasoline.

The ocean of Russian blood would have been useless without American material.

The eastern front: when assholes collide

Because they wouldn’t have done shit without lend lease.

Because they were the enemy of our enemy against the Germans & to a much lesser degree the Japanese...

However, the Enemy of Your mutual Enemy is not Automatically "Your Friend"...

Cold War, the battle between "Western" Vs. "Eastern", Capitalism Vs. Communism, ect...   People don't talk nice things about people they are willing to unleash nuclear Armageddon (or who would unleash the same against them) ...

In terms of lives & material, Hitler Lost WWII when he attacked Russia before finishing off England.   He doubled down & Super Sealed his loss when he declared war against the US, (Roosevelt wasn't sure if War should be declared against just Japan (clearly after Pearl Harbor) or Japan, German & Italy.   Hitler solved FDR's quandary by Declaring War against the USA.

The War in the East ceaselessly devoured & bled white the manpower & equipment of the Wehrmacht & Luftwaffe - It was the War of Attrition that the Germans couldn't win.

Like the Japanese trying to knock out the USA with Pearl Harbor & the conquest of the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, Singapore & Malaysia & French Indochina in the first 6 months of the war (that Yamamoto had predicted) if peace could not be dictated - they would lose the long run war of production.  

In the same way - Hitler gambled everything on knocking out the Russians in their surprise attack - and came up short.  After that it was a long slow bleeding grinding away of German manpower & equipment eventually leading to the streets of Berlin in April of 1945...

The Russians were ruthless & used - abused their soldiers & civilians with no room for dissent or hesitation - lest they be shot.

BIGGER_HAMMER

Why?

Everybody roots for the home team.  Americans think of Patton, Ike, MacArthur, Nimitz, Doolittle, LeMay.  British think of Alexander, Montgomery, Slim, Harwood, Bomber Harris.  French think of LeClerc or DeGaulle.

For decades, American appreciation of the Eastern Front was largely seen from a German perspective.  We had a of German PoWs who eagerly wrote of their experience of fighting the Soviets.  Eberhard Raus, von Mellethin, Hoth, Gehlen, etc. These men were happy to denigrate the Soviets and whitewash their own records.  

It didn't help that post-WW II the only "history" allowed was the official Soviet History of the Great Patriotic War.  No general was allowed to pen his memoir and Stalin's death resulted in a reversal of this policy.  A lot of books came out but very few were translated into english.  Zhukov's memoirs was among one that was released.  In the past 20 years our access to sources from the Soviet perspective has increased.  More books by front line combatants have been released as well as online interviews.  I've drawn heavily on Soviet sources to write three chapters of my own book.  It puts a human face on our cold war enemy and we learn that they (the Soviets) made a lot of mistakes too.  For example, the reserve component of a regiment that consisted of some anti-tank men and their pieces, scouts, sappers and snipers were ordered to conduct aa front assault by an officer who did not belong to that regiment.  Obey or die.  Most died trying and the adjutant who participated in it knew it was a waste of the snipers.  How about having snipers play stretcher bearer or ammo carrier instead?

People who are interested in ww2 all know this. Even high school taught this briefly (at least when I was in high school)  

Most people don’t care about history, therefore don’t know anything about it. Those people also don’t know anything about our efforts either (save maybe D-day though even that may be a stretch with most).

Ask 10 random people and I bet most couldnt even tell you which countries were involved in ww2

It's also worth noting that the Russia victimhood-focused "why don't Americans learn about the Eastern Front" whiney shit seems to ignore that we also ignore the Western allies for the most part. I mean, shit, a casual glance at D-Day will get you all sorts of stories about Omaha and Utah Beach, and the 82nd and 101st Airborne. Juno Beach? Sword Beach? What's that?

To Europeans, the war began and ended in Europe. The war in the Pacific might as well have been given a whole different name from World War II." For that matter, the Russians didn't help much there but were quick to move in on the Kuril Islands when they thought they could get away with it.

Everyone has their blinders. Some just whine more than others.

Troof.  Everyone knows about Kursk and Stalingrad.  David Glantz books on the Eastern Front are popular (if not a bit pricey).  For a time, so was German journalist Paul Carrell's books (Hitler Moves East, Stalingrad and Scorched Earth all of which appeared in hardcover, then paperback and finally in hardcover again).  Bohr_Adam is correct in that we Americans concentrate on American units.  Home team bias.

Why isn't Germany given more credit for helping to weaken/limit Russian/communist imperialism?

What would Europe look like if Russia wasn't forced to sacrifice/suicide a generation of men against the Germans?

Kind of a 2 way street on that one.

Because they were Nazis and because of their quest for lebensraum, Russia conquered Eastern Europe and plunged it into the darkness of communism for decades.

One could potentially make the case that Russia was worse than Germany. Communism killed more than fascism and Nazism. They're both evil statist philosophies so why bother.

The real question is why isn't Communist Russia given the same hate as Nazi Germany (they deserve it). The answer is because Germany lost and history is written by the victor.

80% of German casualties were on the eastern front.  The western front was almost an afterthought.   Germany lost the war on the eastern front.  

By the time of the Normandy invasion the Russians were well on their way to Berlin and not going to be stopped

What do you want a national thank Russia day. They get plenty of credit. Way more then they should. Germany suffered so many casualties in the east because 90 percent chance surrender to USSR they were going to kill them anyway. If America had done the same there could have been around me serious bragging about Germans killed on this side to. We are talking about a country that wanted free weapons and for the Brits and American to die from German subs and warships delivering them. The USSR had a respectable sized navy and wouldnt use it to pick up free weapons. Look up the death toll on those convoys. A lot of people died on those convoys. It was a massacre. The Soviets could of tried and helped part way but no. Stalin even kept on threatening to make a deal with Hitler if he didn't get more weapons. That didn't even make sense. He was in this mess he was in because his deal with Hitler. Still he kept repeating that nonsense. I will give the Russian people credit though. Trapped with a Georgian who hated Russians rulling them and a crazy Austrian that wanted them all dead they had a terrible fight to make it so the Russian people survived.

Their own commie .gov slaughtered their own men.  My grandfather told me that if the Krauts would have treated the Russians a little better, the probably would have fought for the Germans.

ETA, US and Brit Generals were more than happy to let the Russians invade Berlin while we kept on the outskirts.  A lot of Russians died taking the city.

1. The US needed an enemy after WWII (Communism, Soviet expansionism).

2. The MSM felt overreporting Soviet assistance would take away from the true Allies.

3. The US war effort lasted well past Germany's surrender. Washington was satisfied with splitting Germany and increasing its footprint in the Pacific. Hiroshima and Nagasaki became the headlines until the Space Race.

Look at how well their equipment is doing now. The news reels of WW2 was full of inflated nonsense to make the Soviets look good. The USSR didn't want peace after the war. They just kept on having massacres in Eastern Europe when the war has been over for years. They sent out weapons and trainers to cause trouble in just about every country. Just scroll through old news papers in Western Europe. War was over, should be peace and for decades there were a continuous stream of communist USSR alligned groups carrying out assassinations in Europe. Plenty of those assignations were on American troops. At the end of WW2 the USSR captured the stockpile of records on where the nazis had all their spies. Then suddenly pronazi hotspots around the world turned procommie. Suddenly the USSR was highly against hunting down Nazi war criminals. By all same logic they should of wanted every Nazi everywhere dead. Most Russians wanted Nazis dead but it didn't matter one bit. What counted was Communist greed prevailed and they became the inheritor of international nazism.

The last chapter of Paul Brickhill's, The Great Escape, discusses the British effort on tracking down the Gestapo agents involved with murdering the British Commonwealth escapees.  It'll give you some insights into Post-WW II cooperation (or lack thereof).  That stuff didn't make it into the movie.

Maybe because they were allied with germany until they were attacked by germany?

Something the Russians try desperately to sweep under the rugs of history.

It would have been very difficult for the Wehrmacht & Luftwaffe to rebuild in the late 1930's without the cooperation & testing they did in secrecy with the Soviet Union.

And of Course poor Poland got stabbed in the Back by the Russians who wanted to regain "lost" land.

It's Odd because to Hitler, Stalin & Communism were the greatest threat.  and to Stalin, Hitler & Fascist Germany were the greatest threat.

But being two ruthless Dictators who could kill hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands with merely a simple order spoken - they saw the Power in each other & I think they secretly admired the other while knowing each others systems (Communism vs. Fascism) were Cobra & Mongoose and only one could survive in the end.

BIGGER_HAMMER

First of all, we supplied 2/3rds of all Soviet wheeled vehicles. Without those, the Soviet war machine grinds to a halt out of fuel and food, and gets cut to pieces. We supplied huge numbers of tanks, boots, food, fuel, steel and machine tools. And that is just what got through, forget how much went to the bottom at the hands of u-boats. Their casualty count was as much their own fault as it was Wehrmacht effectiveness. Their tactics, training, and equipment not supplied by us was awful. Check out the survival rate for T-34 crews when hit sometime - something like 15%. The much-maligned Sherman crew survival rate was something like 70+% for tanks that were hit, on both fronts (Soviets had a LOT of Shermans).

It's fascinating at the moment to watch a tentative, sporadic narrative developing on the Russian side which credits Western logistical support to Ukraine for Russia's setbacks there

I've only seen it surface a few times, and there seems to be real reluctance to emphasize this particular "excuse" too much, lest it undermine decades of dismissing the above-mentioned role of American support against the actual, first generation, OG Nazis.

By who?
If you ask them, they won The Great Patriotic War single handedly.

Yup.

Fuggem, that's why.

I think here is where us students of History apply our own bias/prejudice about the first half of the 20th Century.

Before Operation Barbarossa, Germany and the USSR invaded Poland together. Before that Germany and the USSR were nominally against each other in Finland. Before that, Germany and the USSR were nominally against each other in Spain. Before all of that, as several of us have written, they were cooperating in both air power development and amour development in the hinterlands of the Soviet Union.

To be sure, as Hitler described Bolshevism, it was a Jewish/Communist Plot. As for Stalin, his Cult of Personality accolades described his mastery of Marxist Theory and the use of the Marxist Dialectic. (I don't think either of those were true.) Where Hitler and Stalin saw things the same was in "National Socialism."

Just like many of their temporaries, they were socialists but not International Socialists. Hitler as an Austrian believed in the concept of Gross Deutschland, or to put it another way for us english speakers, pan-Germanism. Stalin got rid of Trotsky because Stalin believed in "Socialism in one Country" which was against the the doctrine of violent international revolution in order to achieve a Communist World like Lenin and Trotsky believed in. They (ETA Hitler and Stalin) were in a number of respects similar people.

I'm pretty sure that either Hitler was going to invade the USSR, or the USSR was going to invade the Nazi-sphere. Hitler made the first move even though Stalin was warned about it by his spy in Tokyo (whose name I can't remember right now.) By all accounts Stalin went into a funk over it. We can speculate why, but on the other hand it was Hitler who lost the Eastern Front by continually changing objectives. We can't forget about that part. Nor should we forget the part about the Stand and Die orders that Hitler started issuing because if Germany was going to lose the War, he (Hitler) was going to make sure there would be no Germany or "Germans" left in the World.

Because history is hard.

Inferno is a great one volume history of WWII. Pretty accurately discusses the full scope of each country's contributions. The fact that we knew in advance almost every Japanese and German military strategy sure didn't hurt the Allied outlook.

Bumping this thread. Burt Lancaster hosted a series called The Unknown War in the late 70s that portrayed the Russian view of WW2:

Probably because they did it with the piles of stuff we gave them. They went from two men, one rifle, to using American Thompson SMGs…..

1) They could not have pulled it off without insane amounts of American material aid.

2) The Soviets killed more Soviets than the Germans did.

3) Decades of Cold War kind of erased any good feelings.

Because we don't like them.  But they absolutely defeated the Germans.  80% of the German war effort was on the Eastern Front.

Soviet, yes.

80% of the forces... in Europe.

"War effort" would require more defining.

But...  speaking broadly here, and taking a slightly different angle from above... why does today's Russian state seek to take the credit when Ukrainians did a lion's share of the fighting and dying? Seems especially pertinent in the context of ramped up rhetoric from Russian nationalists against Ukraine.

And, my earlier points still apply.

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Because of two truths.

The Victor write the History.

Everybody is the Hero in "their" story.

To imagine that the Western Allies (Britain, Canada & The USA tried "Operation Overlord" (Invasion of France) without the massive losses in manpower & weaponry the Germans suffered on the Eastern Front - would certainly be an entirely different & massively more bloody matter.

Bigger_Hammer

Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; began as member of the Axis Powers; participated in the invasion of Poland; enabled Germany & WW2

Germany's "turning point" losses to Russia had more to do with Germany having over-extended itself on too many fronts and running out of resources

either way, Russia doesn't deserve credit for their hand in creating the problem to begin with

You want to talk stupid? Japan was stupid for going to war with 2 superpowers at once. Especially when you consider that Japan wasn't wanting war with the US at all, they had a rivalry with the USSR... they were trying to build an empire to match them, and they needed their co-prosperity sphere in order to rival the USSR, but they didn't want to go to war unless they had an economic parity... and as a result, they ended up attacking the US, who had a 44-1 economic advantage. If they had stabbed Russia in the back... or hey, I don't know, attacked Indonesia without bringing the UK or US into the war, they could have gotten a lot further. But they saw 10 battleships and they just really, really wanted to take those out...

Could you imagine Japan attacking siberia just as those siberian reinforcements were needed during the Battle of Moscow? Ouch.

Apart from that... USSR doesn't get as much credit for the high body count because Stalin didn't care about body counts. He was prepared to sacrifice millions more, as well as all the tanks and planes, gas and food we could offer him. He was every bit as bad as Hitler.

It’s a bingo

Stalin loved it when his material was being used to bomb Britain and wreck France.

It depends on who is teaching the history class says some of our posters from former commie bloc countries.

Because they wouldn't have done what they did without lend lease. Wouldn't have been close

For what it's worth, neither do private schools.
Nearly every history book, whether used in a public school or private was US centric until the last thirty years.
In my US military history class (taught by a Lt Col) the only references in our textbooks to Russia was the siege of Stalingrad and US Lend Lease to Russia.

You took a U.S. Military history class.

You don't think it included the Civil War? It sure as hell did. C.S.A. isn't U.S.