With all the Russian rhetoric about Ukrainians being Nazi collaborators in a propaganda smear job, I don’t know why there is no rebuttal using the example of Russia’s alliance with the Nazis during 1939-41. This was far more than collaboration. This was a formal treaty, as historian Norman Davies points out in his lecture titled “Auschwitz and the Second World War in Poland: A Lecture given at the Representations of Auschwitz international conference at the Jagiellonian University”, July 1995. Stalin and Hitler were official partners when Auschwitz began in 1940.
Stefan Lemieszewski
-------------------------------
http://books.google.ca/books/about/Auschwitz_and_the_Second_World_War_in_Po.html?id=_6CEAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y
(pp 14-15)
[ . . .]
Yet any familiarity with the war as a whole will remind
us that the structure of events was not so simple. For
one thing, for the first two of the six years which the war
lasted, the largest of all the combatant powers, the Soviet
Union, was bound to Hitler's Reich by a Treaty of Friend-
ship and Co-operation signed on 28 September 1939, in
the terminal phase of their common campaign against
Poland. For another, it is extremely misleading to equate
the conduct of the war on the Western Front with that
on the Eastern Front. The titanic struggles in the East
were far more extensive than anything that occurred in
the West, accounting for 75% of all German casualties.
Moreover, they were pursued by both sides in the midst
of mass terror, mass murder and civilian genocide which
can only be considered evil. As a result, this major
section of the history of the Second World War must
necessarily be classed as a contest between two great
evil forces, not as a just war between good and evil. It
was a contest in which the third power grouping of the
Second World War - the democratic western powers -
had a very little part to play except at the diplomatic
conference table.
The history of “Auschwitz" was launched in 1940 at
a time when Stalin was Hitler's partner, when there was
a formal agreement for the co-operation of the SS with
the NKVD, and when Soviet repressions of Poles, Jews
and Ukrainians had started on a much grander scale
than anything yet attempted by the Nazis. lt moved into
its most intense phase in the period 1941 to 1944, after
Hitler had attacked his erstwhile partner and Nazi su-
premacy in occupied Poland was complete. It came to an
end in January 1945 when the last great Soviet offensive
drove the Germans out of Poland for good, replacing one
brand of totalitarian oppression with another. From start
to finish, it took place in Europe’s eastern “Zone of Two
evils”, not in the western zone where conditions were
markedly different.
[ . . ]
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