Did you see how cold and frigid it was there? I'm glad Cheney was smart enough to dress for the cold. Only one there that new how to deal with the cold it apears.

I remember seeing footage of starved and dead bodies being bulldozed into a mass grave.

Probably the best thing I ever saw in my life, as it set me off on never standing for seeing injustice based on race.

VIctor Frankel is a death camp survivor, wrote a book called "mans search for meaning"

I SERIOUSLY recomend reading it.

Its fairly short, easy reading, and a life changer. I have given out at least tweny copies.

Cracks me up those russians proclaiming how brave their soldiers were, the same commies that signed an agreement with Hitler to divvy up Poland,,etc. etc, and only went to war with Nazi Germany cuz Hitler attacked them

The TRUE heros were the Americans,,,they were NOT having their own land invaded/attacked, but I would also have to give my accolades to any soldiers from the west that fought and particularly the underground networks of spies and TRUE resistence fighters.

So, with that in mind, you could say that Hitler has inadvertently done a lot for the elimination of race based discrimination. However, isn't Judaism a religion? I mean, I can be a Jew and so can you, right?

How does what they signed have anything to do with the bravery of the soldiers? If they were brave they were brave, irrespective of what Stalin signs. BTW, Hitler was #2 compared to what Stalin did. His brand of '"problem solving" was not even based on race, religion or creed. It was based on his own paranoia.

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luvrpgrl :

You'd better to a library and borrow a history book about WW II. You cannot
blame what a country's idiot leader (Stalin in this case) did with the Germans on
Russian soldiers. Do you think all our soldiers in Iraq support Bush?

There would be no D-day victory without the courage and sacrifice of millions of
Russian soldiers (yes, they were communists, but so what?)

The WW II victory took place thanks to the collective effort of several countries, including the US and USSR.

There is a bit of irony in that, yes, Hitler did much to reduce racism in the long run. Plus the creation of Israel. But you can excuse his actions.

Who can be a Jew is a highly debated topic. Even in the Old Testament, it had a different term for prosletyzed Jews than "natural" born Jews. In my book, you can be a Jew by birth or religion, and being a Christian, a follower of a Jew, that makes me Jewish )

The point you bring up can be looked at several ways.
You cannot judge each individual by what their country/leaders chose to do, but you can judge a COUNTRY, which is what Im doing.

You could also say, as a group, the American soilders showed more bravery, since they were not even defending their own country. What the Russians did, anyone would have done, what the Americans did, few would have done.

As individual soldiers, you cannot judge them, but you could say that if you were to pluck out any soldier out of a group of Americans or Russians who served, then you are MORE LIKELY to find an American soldier who performed more bravely than a Russian soldier.

The Russians showed what they were made of when they took on the Finns and had their butts basically handed to them. The French also showed their colors when their Minister of Interior had to issue an edict saying any govt official who would FLEE France or Paris when the Germans started bombing it, would be arrested. Compare that to how the Finns responded when the Russains bombed Helsinki. The Finn officials, instead of trying to flee, sent out pictures of the dead from Russian bombers to all the country which rallied the Finns to fight, and fight they did.

THe stories of Russian soldiers fleeing the German onslaught is many and common, much more so than any stories of cowardice by American soldiers. And the Americans werent even defending their own country.

I have read more than my share of books on the big war.

You need to re read my post, I didnt say that the Russian soldiers were to blame for Stalins choices.

A vast majority of soldiers in Iraq support Bush, as high a percentage as is possible, even 14% of the general population SERIOUSLY think Elvis is still alive, and thats about the same percent of soldiers who DONT support Bush.

"YES, they were communists, but so what?" You need to go read about the evils of communism,

Yes, USSR was in on the victory over Germany.

If USSR hadnt been involved, we would still have defeated Hitler.
If the USA hadnt been involved, Russian would have gone down to defeat against Hitler, he was a mere 25 miles from Moscow. The following spring he would have invaded if he hadnt had to worry about the US military coming up the other side.

That is debatable. The soldiers are made up of the population. The population is what overthrew the Czar for communism which was led by Lenin who for a time, led Stalin.

Supporting of Bush has little or nothing to do with it. They have a job to do and they signed up for it so, like it or not, they have to execute it to the best of their abilities.

Don't be too sure. Without the worry of the USSR on the Eastern front, Hitler might have had more resources to devote to the Western front. IOW, there is no way to tell if we would have won it, stalemate or whatever.

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Did American generals station special troops behind front-line soldiers with orders to kill soldiers who didn't advance?

How many American servicemen were executed or jailed for cowardice or disobeying orders?

How many American officers were executed by specially empowered political officers.

Comparing American WWII military to the Soviet military is a stupid comparison--the Soviet leadership treated their soldiers with teh same contempt as the Czarists had done previously. They didn't lead their soldiers, they executed people who failed to obtain objectives.

However, I disagree with the assertion that the Soviet Union would have fallen had the USA not entered the war. Stalin had forced heavy industry to build new cities east of the Urals with the full intention of continuing teh fight from Siberia. The Germans could not maintain supply lines to the Ukraine with any reliability, maintaining lines to Moscow or Stalingrad was a pipedream of Hitlers--the German Army simply didn't have the industrial capacity or the logistical infratsructure to maintain a land war in Russia, even if the Russians had hauled-ass and fought a guerilla war instead of a land war. Zhukov understood the German's complete failure to understand their logistical dilemma and used that to his advantage. It was Soviet tanks and artillery and small arms--not American, that defeated the German Army. Americans love to believe they won the dang war, but it wasn't us, it was the peasant army of the USSR that won the war in Europe. The western allies just helped a bit here and there on Germany's western front while the majority of the German Army faced the USSR. The German people feared the western allies' campaign in Europe because they might lose the war to us. They feared the USSR because of the demonstrable barbarbity of the Soviet foot soldiers. They were entirely justified in their fear, too. Read about the Soviet occupation in the first few months after the fall of Berlin. American soldiers would have been jailed and executed for that kind of behavior.

Finally, the revisionism of Russia's Putin is staggeringly disingenuous. He seems to have skipped the part where, pre-Barbarossa, the USSR and Germany were secret allies dividing the European pie. Putin also failed to mention the slaughter of Polish officers by the Russian Army and the whole dang invasion of western Europe by the USSR crushing Eastern Europe for nearly two generations under the military weight of a brutally led Red Army.

Have you visited the US Holocaust Museum? It's maybe 10 miles from you.

I think for the most part soldiers from all sides were relatively the same type of people, just simply being led by ciorrupted people.

German, Russian, American, Polish, British...all in varying degrees were given a job to do, and they did it. To defend their country, to invade another, to just follow orders. We cannot blame an entire nation of people, especially the Russians who lost over 20 million men stemming the German tide, for evil acts that were thought up by evil people, and perpetrated by those who were given orders.
You didn't follow orders in the Red Army, you were shot.
And the horrid acts perpetrated by the Soviet soldiers in Berlin do not hold a candle to the groups of German Einsatzgruppen who moved behind the front line soldiers and rounded up "Communists, Jews, and general Untermensche" to be shot and throw in graves they have dug themselves.
The Russian slaughter of Polish officers in Katyn forest also not something that was exactly warm and fuzzy either.
However...without the sacrifice, either to further their own "agenda" or simply following orders and defending the motherland, many more American troops would've died.
We fought 25% of the German forces in the Western Front. The other 75%, including most of the Crack Waffen SS units were in the East, getting steamrolled by the Soviets...if we had problems at the Bulge with 25%, I imagine 100% would be much more difficult.

My two cents.

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