On May 9th, 1945, the Soviet Red Army marched on Nazi Berlin, liberating the European peoples from the yoke of fascism. The army of proletarians and peasants marched through the fortifications of the Nazis and their collaborators, liberating prisoners from Monowitz, Birkenau, and Auschwitz, until they reached Berlin. At that focal point of militarised industrial capital, over the Reichstag, the crimson banner of communism was iconically hoisted.

When it waged war on the Soviet Union, the German economy was geared towards militarisation. All of the highly developed industries in Germany were organised to cater to the needs of war. Pooled together with the German economy were the economies of the rest of the European fascist regimes — Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Finland —as well as the economies of European countries under fascist occupation: France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The collective industrial might of continental Europe was militarised and directed primarily at the Soviet Union.

According to historian of the Second World War Vilnis Sīpols¹, by June 1941, the fascist European regimes led by Nazi Germany had at their disposal more than 10 million troops, 90,000 guns and mortars, 6,600 tanks and armed vehicles, and 13,600 war planes. At that time, the Soviet military had a strength of 5 million troops and far less weaponry and equipment.

The fascist invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) mobilised 153 German and 37 other divisions. Roughly 6 million troops at a time when Soviet deployment to its western borderland was around 2 million.

While fascism wrought death and destruction on the USSR, Europe, East Asia, and the world at large, the United States and the United Kingdom dismissed the humanitarian urgency and repeatedly denied Soviet requests to reopen a Western front in Europe. The UK and US understood that the Soviet Union was indispensable in the battle to defeat Nazi Germany, but due to their political hostility to Communism, limited their support to supplying the USSR with military hardware, especially from the US, and a formal alliance.

According to Sīpols, Churchill (among others) was dubious of the USSR’s ability to defeat the Nazi regime, but he nevertheless thought that granting it some assistance would be in British interests; “to have the agony of the USSR kept up and its funeral put off.”

Not until the Red Army turned the tide and started marching towards Berlin did the UK and US frantically intervene, belatedly establishing a second front after a three-year interlude. The imperialists were not merely jumping onto the winning side. Once the tide had turned in the East, the prospect of the Red Flag flying in Berlin filled them with an urgency to act.

1. Vilnis Sīpols, The Road to Great Victory: Soviet Diplomacy 1941 – 1945, Progress Publishers, (1985). ↩︎