Saturday, May 8, 2021

Sean MacMeekin. Stalin's War.

 


There were times in 1950-1970s when the majority of the SS and Wehrmacht veterans were still young and sprightly, and threw lavish parties in which they boasted about their "victories". (The subject of the US-French 1967 movie "Night of the Generals"). To an occasional sympathetic British journalist they told that they were defending Europe and European culture from the plague of Bolshevism. And yet, they were provoked by the Russians. Holocaust? Ya, Jews were an obsession of a single deranged man whose supposedly incompetent meddling in the military decisions had cost them that wonderful war. [1] But its victims were much fewer than it is told by the "Jewish propaganda" machine and many were communist fellow travelers and partisans, anyway. Serial ascription of the victims of Nazi terror to the Russians and Stalin had to come much later

Meekin laments that turncoat Romania--it switched the sides when its defeat was imminent--was punished "for defending its territory", i.e. the territory grabbed from the decaying Russian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War. Forgotten are about 200 thousand Jews and many others exterminated by the Romanian Army in the Odessa Oblast' alone, not counting the Crimea and other territories, which were "blessed" by the Romanian occupation. 

But the Western allies are treated as shabbily by von Meekin. In his book, Roosevelt and, especially, Churchill were naïve dupes that were enchanted by Stalin to help USSR/Russia instead of accepting "reasonable" German piece overtures, of which little evidence except the neo-Nazi propaganda can be found. First, Churchill already had a taste of Hitler's sincerity and trustworthiness. Second, Churchill obviously, and cynically, preferred a million Germans fighting over Kharkov, or Stalingrad rather than El Alamein where slightly more than 100,000 British troops, many little more than colonial militias, were facing slightly less that number of troops of the Afrika Corps with uncertain results [2]. 

Books following this narrative periodically appeared but they were usually limited to provincial publishing houses in the countries--Canada, Australia--where the post-war British Empire shoveled war criminals too obvious to keep home. Now it penetrated the most prestigious American editorial empires--Basic Books--and the university campuses. Bard College hired a Nazi! 

[1] What about Soviet POWs (the second largest group subjected to mass extermination), Roma/Cinti, homosexual, communists, mentally ill and other human beings Nazi considered subhuman?  Meekin even has a nerve to present a piece of Nazi War propaganda describing a POW admiring food, by which his captors fed him and regretting his wife cannot share it with him. About 2/3 of the Soviet POWs perished in German (Finnish, Hungarian, etc.) captivity and the rest--mostly from the borderline areas--either switched allegiance to the Germans, or were liberated quickly after their captivity because of the shifting front lines. Almost nobody survived the war in the Stalag.  

[2] In the key battle of Alam Halfa, about 12 brigades of the German Army faced two British divisions. 

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