- 5/5/2025
⚔️ World War II victory through Soviet eyes!
In this in-depth episode of World Affairs In Context, historian Dr. Vladimir Brovkin explores the Soviet Union’s pivotal role in defeating Nazi Germany 🇷🇺💥 and the collapse of Hitler’s empire.
🔍 Key insights:
🌍 The Soviet triumph over the Nazis and their strategic moves
💔 The fall of Hitler’s Third Reich and its impact on the world
🧠 Dr. Brovkin’s perspective on Soviet wartime strategies
⚔️ The role of Eastern Front battles in shaping the outcome
🇩🇪 The demise of Nazi Germany and the aftermath
🎯 Watch as Dr. Vladimir Brovkin uncovers the lesser-known aspects of this monumental victory and its historical consequences.
📢 Don’t forget to like, share, and comment your thoughts on the legacy of World War II.
🔔 Subscribe for more in-depth historical analysis.
#SovietVictory
#WWIITriumph
#HitlersEmpire
#SovietUnion
#WorldWarII
#DrVladimirBrovkin
#WW2History
#EasternFront
#VictoryOverNazis
#NaziGermanyDefeat
#WW2Analysis
#SovietRoleInWWII
#HitlersFall
#WWIIExperts
#NaziCollapse
#WW2Battlefronts
#WarHistory
#SovietUnionVictory
#WorldHistory
#HistoricalInsights
In this in-depth episode of World Affairs In Context, historian Dr. Vladimir Brovkin explores the Soviet Union’s pivotal role in defeating Nazi Germany 🇷🇺💥 and the collapse of Hitler’s empire.
🔍 Key insights:
🌍 The Soviet triumph over the Nazis and their strategic moves
💔 The fall of Hitler’s Third Reich and its impact on the world
🧠 Dr. Brovkin’s perspective on Soviet wartime strategies
⚔️ The role of Eastern Front battles in shaping the outcome
🇩🇪 The demise of Nazi Germany and the aftermath
🎯 Watch as Dr. Vladimir Brovkin uncovers the lesser-known aspects of this monumental victory and its historical consequences.
📢 Don’t forget to like, share, and comment your thoughts on the legacy of World War II.
🔔 Subscribe for more in-depth historical analysis.
#SovietVictory
#WWIITriumph
#HitlersEmpire
#SovietUnion
#WorldWarII
#DrVladimirBrovkin
#WW2History
#EasternFront
#VictoryOverNazis
#NaziGermanyDefeat
#WW2Analysis
#SovietRoleInWWII
#HitlersFall
#WWIIExperts
#NaziCollapse
#WW2Battlefronts
#WarHistory
#SovietUnionVictory
#WorldHistory
#HistoricalInsights
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Now, this is already the time when the Red Army conquered all of East Prussia and Poland and was approaching Berlin.
00:10So, obviously, there's not even any comparison. Hands down, Eastern Front was 10 times, 20 times, 100 times more men, more fighting larger front lines.
00:28It is the Soviet Army, Red Army, that defeated Nazi Germany.
00:33And therefore, the gas for Auschwitz was manufactured in Switzerland by IG Farben with American investors. Here's the fact.
00:49Welcome, everyone. Today, we're joined by Dr. Vladimir Brovkin.
00:53Dr. Brovkin served as a professor of history at Harvard University and a consultant to various U.S. agencies.
01:00His recent book titled From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin, Russia in Search of Its Identity examines how the Russian past influenced and shaped current politics and the East-West divide in particular.
01:13A very insightful read. I will link it in the description below.
01:17I have to say that Dr. Brovkin runs his own YouTube channel focusing on contemporary politics and history.
01:23It is such a great resource. It's become one of my favorite YouTube channels.
01:27I will share the link in the description below. Please go ahead and subscribe. I'm a big fan.
01:32The other day, Dr. Brovkin posted a video on the Battle of Stalingrad.
01:37And I have to say that I watched it as soon as you uploaded it.
01:40So thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Brovkin. It's such a pleasure to have you.
01:45Thank you so much for inviting me.
01:47So this year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory in World War Two, the deadliest conflict in human history.
01:57The Allied powers comprised of the Soviet Union that was later joined by the United States, the UK, France and China,
02:04and other countries fought against the Axis powers led by the fascist regimes of the Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan.
02:12The scale of the war was absolutely unprecedented in human history.
02:17The Soviet Union mobilized 34 and a half million men and was second to none.
02:23The U.S. mobilized 16 million soldiers.
02:26China had 14 million men and the UK and France mobilized 11 million combined.
02:32The human cost of World War Two stands at 78 million people.
02:37This is not just history. It is legacy that we should never forget.
02:41Before we dive into the details, perhaps we should quickly discuss the main actors.
02:46Dr. Brovkin, could you set the scene by explaining the dynamic behind this quiet, unusual alliance among Stalin, Reagan and Churchill?
02:57There are many, many books written just on the formation of the alliance and on the beginning of the war.
03:04So if we get deep into serious discussion on that, it would take many hours or at least this hour.
03:11So very briefly, the most important thing is that this alliance, nobody knew it would happen.
03:19The short story is that in the 1930s, Stalin thought that he might create an anti-fascist front.
03:28And this was the commentaire policy of the mid 1930s when Litvinov was foreign minister.
03:36But then everything changed very quickly in 1938-39.
03:41I think the 38 is the crucial turning point for Soviet policy because Stalin was not invited to the Munich conference.
03:49And the Munich conference basically didn't do it.
03:52I mean, it's accused of being appeasement and all that.
03:55I don't think that's important.
03:57What's important is that Stalin is not invited and that the Czechoslovakia was, well, it was not really divided or given to Hitler.
04:05That's too much.
04:06The German speaking areas of Czechoslovakia were allowed to self-determine itself.
04:11So in a sense, this is nothing criminal.
04:14I mean, why couldn't the German, Sudeten Germans join Germany?
04:18The problem was that Hitler violated that agreement and in March 1939 walked into the rest of Czechoslovakia.
04:27That is what really is the beginning of the war.
04:30Because after that, Britain and France gave a guarantee to Poland, meaning no more.
04:36This is not going to happen again.
04:37If you move again, then we are at war.
04:40So this is how France and Britain got into war.
04:43So Stalin was still exploring a possibility in the summer of 1939 whether they would be able to form a joint front.
04:51But at the same time, Ribbentrop came to Moscow and gave Stalin an offer he couldn't refuse, which means to stay out of the war.
05:01I mean, people usually focus on that Russia got half of Poland.
05:05In fact, it wasn't half of Poland.
05:07I keep repeating it over and over.
05:09Vilnius, by anybody's judgment, is not part of Poland.
05:13Well, so goes for Lwów.
05:15That is Ukraine.
05:17And the same goes for about half, close to half of today's Belarus.
05:21These were Belarusians because they were Christian Orthodox.
05:26That's the main division.
05:27The dialects are very similar, Belarusian, Polish.
05:30The script is different.
05:32But if you're Catholic, you're Pol.
05:34If you're Orthodox, you're Russian or Belorussian.
05:37So this is the most important thing is that he wanted to stay out of the war, just as the United States.
05:44So nobody can really accuse Stalin of trying to stay out of the war.
05:49The United States stayed out of the war even when Paris was taken over by Hitler.
05:54That's the fact.
05:55The US stayed out of the war until Japan attacked the United States.
06:00And on the 11th of December, when the Germans were really fighting near Moscow, only then the United States entered the war after the Pearl Harbor.
06:13So Stalin wanted to stay out of the war.
06:15He made a deal with Hitler, which moved the border west, which is very nice for his security purposes.
06:22It also reversed the results of the Russian-Polish War of 1920, when Poland actually did get these territories, which were partly Ukrainian, partly Belarusian, partly Lithuanian.
06:36So that's how all of them wound up in a war without really doing.
06:43It's the circumstances around them were attack on Japan, on the Pearl Harbor, the quick defeat of France in 1940.
06:52This is how it all came together that Britain, United States and the Soviet Union wound up together facing Hitler, Germany and Japan.
07:05So the war began in 1939 and in June of 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, which you discussed on your channel, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
07:17Two years later, in 1943, the U.S., U.K. and France opened the Western Front at the Tehran Conference.
07:25I've always been curious, what made Western countries effectively wait until 1943 to help the Soviet Union with its battle against fascism?
07:36This is, again, one of those very controversial topics.
07:41And again, there are many, many books and many different theories as to why they waited for such a long time.
07:46I think the quick answer would be that the United States was the only country which was actually capable of serious fighting on the front line.
07:57Britain was not Britain was beaten.
08:00It had the only thing it could do is bomb German cities.
08:03And this is what they did after the fall of France.
08:06France was out of the game.
08:08France was defeated, occupied, divided.
08:10So it's no longer in the picture.
08:12So the United States was busy with Japan.
08:16This was a very, very serious challenge.
08:19Japan was indeed a very powerful opponent.
08:23So powerful that it's really when we look at the two theaters of war in Japan and the Pacific and in Germany,
08:30Germany comes across as very little, not as powerful as Japan,
08:36because Japan controlled an empire stretching hundreds and thousands of kilometers or miles,
08:42almost the entire Pacific Ocean, almost all the way to Australia and all the way to Burma, meaning all of China and Southeast China.
08:54It was a huge empire with enormous aircraft carriers.
08:58Germany didn't have any aircraft carriers.
09:00Japan had, I think, five or six.
09:03So in other words, the United States was busy with a very, very serious military opponent.
09:08And therefore, the Europe for it was not a priority because what are you going to do?
09:14You can't attack.
09:16You have to have a front somewhere.
09:19And so this is when in Tehran, they discussed where it should be.
09:23Stalin, of course, wanted it in closer to them.
09:27And there were several plans.
09:29There were one, the British wanted to land in Greece and advance to the Balkans.
09:34But again, Stalin said that's not going to get any defeat of Germany if you advance through the Balkans.
09:40Finally, they decided to go through North Africa simply because it was the easiest one.
09:46There was a deal made in Morocco with the generals who opened up Morocco to American landing.
09:53Then they went from Morocco to Libya.
09:56And it's only then that Hitler sent Roman and 200,000.
10:01That's a really minor force compared to 3 million that was fighting in Stalingrad at that time.
10:08So this is in the North Africa and the Normandy landing was being prepared and prepared and postponed and postponed.
10:17And let me just say for your listeners that at the time of the Normandy landing, there was only 145,000.
10:26At that same time, on the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union had 12 million soldiers.
10:3212 million, I checked, in 1944.
10:36At the time, now comparing to this, in June they landed and in August they took Paris.
10:43So they advanced, let's say, 300 kilometers from the landing to take Paris.
10:49I think it's 24th of August.
10:52At that same time, there was a Battle of Bagration raging in northwest Russia next to the Baltic countries.
11:01So at that same time, in the operation of Bagration, this is the name of the general of 1812,
11:08there was an army of 300,000 Germans surrounded in Riga, cut off from access to East Prussia and Germany.
11:19And the total losses of Germans in that summer of 1944 were 450,000, of which 300 was surrounded.
11:30In other words, the proportions, and that's just in three months.
11:34This is the fighting on the Eastern Front through the summer of 1944.
11:39In other words, the scale really shows that most of the serious fighting and heavy casualties induced on the German army were obviously on the Eastern Front.
11:54Speaking about the World War II, I think we need to hopefully dedicate just a couple of minutes to the Red Army itself.
12:02The Red Army came from different republics of the USSR.
12:06But what nationalities made up maybe the biggest portion of such an incredibly large military force?
12:14Well, it was proportionate to the population because there was a general draft.
12:20And then there was, of course, the so-called volunteers, Narodny Front, the People's Front, the people who volunteered basically to defend their own territories.
12:31They stayed close to the area they were from.
12:34But all the men from 20 to 45 could be mobilized into the army unless they worked in significant capacity on the defense industry somewhere.
12:49So this means that you mentioned correctly on the Ministry of Defense today, one could check that the number of persons who carried who wore the uniform that also included women, by the way, is 33 million.
13:0433 million Soviet citizens, mostly men, but some women, like in the hundreds of thousands, wore the uniform at some point.
13:15Now, again, let's do the numbers.
13:19In 1941, when the war started, the Red Army was 3 million men and it was almost completely defeated.
13:27By the end of the year, most of them were either prisoners of war.
13:31In my video, I mentioned among them was my uncle, the senior, the elder brother of my father, who was 20 at the time.
13:40He was in the war, in the beginning of the war, and he died.
13:44I mean, he was killed, obviously, although no record except that I found it on the Ministry of Defense archives.
13:52Anybody could find their relatives now.
13:55It's very well organized archive.
13:57Anyway, so 3 million.
13:59The next year, in Stalingrad, there were 6 million.
14:03So they were able to create a new army and double it.
14:07That's the amazing capacity of Soviet system to mobilize the masses.
14:12The Bolsheviks were good at one thing better than anybody else in the world, mobilizing the masses.
14:18And now it came quite handy that they were able to recruit and mobilize and draft and train and et cetera, et cetera.
14:28So this is like 6 million.
14:30And as I said, in 1944, during the final assault on Wehrmacht, there were 12 million serving at the same time.
14:40So this is what the Bolsheviks could do.
14:42And I think that's quite a remarkable achievement to not only to recruit them, but draft them, but also to train them, feed them, move the troops, coordinate.
14:53I mean, all this enormous effort that one had to organize and they did it.
15:01Absolutely amazing.
15:02And I think it's a testimony to the Red Army, of course, was comprised of the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians.
15:09Those were sort of the top three, I think, nationalities within the armed forces.
15:14And it's incredible testimony to the ability to unite against an external threat.
15:21Now, I would like to focus on the key turning points of the war that ultimately led to the great victory.
15:28Perhaps we could begin with the Battle of Stalingrad, which was the biggest and the bloodiest battle in human history in terms of casualties and participants.
15:38Could you share how the Battle of Stalingrad unfolded and maybe talk a bit about the significance of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad?
15:47Yes, very briefly.
15:50This is, again, a huge topic and there are many books written on each one of those questions.
15:55But the important thing about the Battle of Stalingrad is, of course, it's the single most, the biggest and the bloodiest battle in world history.
16:04That's it. There was never, even Verdun was one million, 450,000 French and 500,000 Germans, total about one million casualties.
16:15Here we have one million on each side.
16:18So there's a very, very heavy fighting. Basically, in terms of dates, it's from the summer of 1942 to January, February 1943, when the remainder of the German forces surrendered.
16:32So this is six months. And during six months, two million soldiers die in battle.
16:39Now, the whole strategy was that after the Germans suffered a setback near Moscow, they had to decide what to do next.
16:51And so many military historians believe that this was a decision to advance in the south, eastwards towards Stalingrad was a bad decision.
17:03And the reason it was a bad decision is that the longer the Germans, the deeper the Germans moved, the harder it was to supply, because these are huge, huge distances.
17:14So let me just give you this figure from Brest-Litovsk, the Belarusian border to Moscow is exactly 1000 kilometers.
17:23So this is what they advanced in 1941. Now, from Kharkov, this is where they were in the beginning of 42, to Stalingrad is 800 kilometers.
17:35So they had to advance another almost 8000 kilometers in order to reach Stalingrad.
17:42So their plan was to to sweep across the south. These are steps. These are open, open step, which is easy to roll for tanks, no trees, as in the central Russia.
17:54And then to envelope and move north along the Volga, kind of destroying the major population centers of Russia, because beyond the Volga is sparsely populated.
18:07Step and then the Euro mountains and Siberia. So they thought they would just surround Moscow.
18:13And then this was the second prong was to advance to the North Caucasus to Baku to seize Baku oil, because Hitler really needed oil for his army.
18:23So they thought this is super ambitious, almost impossible.
18:29The reason is just very difficult, because at a point when they crossed the Don, the two armies diverged.
18:36That's the key to their defeat, because the Eighth Army continued to advance towards Stalingrad.
18:44And it is only 100 kilometers from the Don River to Stalingrad.
18:50And the Fifth Army went to the south to the North Caucasus, which was to reach Baku.
18:57They never they never reached Baku.
18:59They got stuck in North Caucasus and they never made it.
19:03Whereas in the Gap, they had not enough soldiers.
19:06So they had they asked Italians and Romanians and and and Hungarians.
19:12So they were running out of men.
19:14And they should have thought about that in advance.
19:16Whereas the Russians already outnumbered them.
19:19And it would be six million by the by the mid summer.
19:24But in any case, the Germans were so sure of themselves.
19:27This is another kind of big problem that they were so sure of themselves.
19:32And the Russians were so intimidated by their own defeats.
19:36And I found a very interesting fact.
19:38There is a book by Alexander Vert, who was a son of a white emigre.
19:46But he was French citizen and he was very friendly to the Soviet Union.
19:50So he was a correspondent and he was in Stalingrad.
19:53And it is described in his book, Russia at War.
19:56I checked it's available on Amazon.
19:59So that writes that when victory happened and they encircled the Russian, the German armies, even the Russians couldn't believe it.
20:08And that's what he writes in the book that the soldiers around.
20:11No way.
20:12We couldn't have done that.
20:13That's impossible.
20:14In other words, they the people were so conditioned that the Germans are winning.
20:18The Germans are moving.
20:19The Germans are winning, winning that when the Russians won, nobody wanted to believe it at first because it was so incredible.
20:26But they did.
20:27And so the fierce fighting exhausted the Germans that couldn't move any further.
20:33But but the city itself of Stalingrad, house of the house, neighborhood of the neighborhood, they they could not continue even to the south to Astrakhan to join the other army that was going to Baku.
20:47Couldn't do it.
20:48They had to hold on and fight.
20:50And then the prong movement of the north and the south surrounded them.
20:55And this is another very interesting point for Western audience.
21:01General Paulus, who was promoted to be field marshal asked for permission.
21:06Let me break out.
21:08Let me break out.
21:09No.
21:10Fight.
21:11Stay and fight.
21:12Stay put.
21:13So absurd.
21:14Yeah, but because he didn't want to admit that there was a defeat.
21:20To allow retreat means you acknowledge your defeat and he couldn't do it.
21:27So in the end, he lost more.
21:29He lost 250,022 divisions.
21:33And to the owner of the German generals, all 22 generals stayed with their men and surrendered.
21:41And this was January 1943.
21:44After the defeat at Stalingrad in 1940, as you said, in 1943 in January, the German army made one more attempt to advance in Kursk in the summer of 1943.
21:59The Kursk battle lasted several months.
22:02I believe it ended in August.
22:03I'm sure you will confirm that.
22:06And it became the biggest tank battle in history with thousands of tanks engaged in battle.
22:12Could you talk about the Kursk battle and how it changed the course of World War II?
22:18Yes, the Kursk battle is also absolutely fascinating.
22:21Indeed, because this is the largest tank battle in history.
22:27And the story goes pretty much like this.
22:31After the Battle of Stalingrad, which is February 1943, everybody thought what to do next.
22:38The amazing thing is that the Russians offensive was gaining speed and they were moving with the same speed that the Germans did in 1941.
22:47So in two months, they were back in Kharkov.
22:53In other words, the Germans lost 800 kilometers in two months.
22:57Just as they moved fast in 1941, the Russians now with the Soviet army, the Red Army moved really fast and they were in Kharkov.
23:08And then an interesting episode was Khrushchev revealed that he supposedly warned Stalin that they're moving too fast.
23:17They have to slow down because there's a gap.
23:19And this is what the Germans are so proud of.
23:22General Manstein, he ordered an offensive into the divergence of the two Russian armies and he took Kharkov again.
23:30So there's like a second conquest of Kharkov by Manstein.
23:35And another interesting episode about the Battle of Kursk coming up is that Hitler came to the headquarters.
23:42He was very, very close to Kharkov in an undisclosed location where the German generals and Hitler had a conference.
23:52And General Guderian, he's the legendary general of tank armies, and I read the proceedings.
24:01He urged Hitler to go into deep defense, to abandon any plans of offensive and just, as he put it, defend Europe.
24:11So building fortifications on the existing front line, which was from Kharkov to a big chunk of Russia, sort of about 200 kilometers west of Moscow.
24:23And then through the Belarus to the Baltic.
24:26The German troops were still near Leningrad.
24:29They were still blockading Leningrad in 1943.
24:33So Hitler refused.
24:36This was another one of his, you know, no, advance, advance, advance.
24:40So he ordered to advance.
24:42And Mannheim was happy to do that.
24:45And they assembled a significant force, 5,000 tanks.
24:49And the plan was just make one big blow, break through the front, and then make, try to make what Denikin did in 1919, come very close to Moscow.
25:01So this is a good plan.
25:03But here's another fascinating topic about this.
25:06That Stalin knew about it.
25:08I mean, Soviet intelligence was very, very effective.
25:12Somehow it was through Switzerland, but I, again, I followed all these telegrams and things.
25:18In early spring, Stalin knew about the forthcoming battle of Kursk.
25:24He knew the dates.
25:25I mean, like, the intelligence was fantastic.
25:28It was postponed till May, and then from May to June, and then from June to July.
25:33And it finally started, I believe it was on the 4th or 6th of July, the Battle of Kursk.
25:40Now, by that time, not only the Soviets knew about it, but Stalin did listen to Zhukov.
25:47And Zhukov did the same thing that Guderian advised, except that Stalin took that advice.
25:54They built fortifications in case, and they were, it's called, echelonировane oboroda, several rows and rows of defenses.
26:03Trenches and anti-tank wires and obstacles and all kinds of things, and troops in every wave.
26:12So, it was like several hundred kilometers deep, which means pretty much all the way to Moscow, because there's only 300 kilometers.
26:19And so, this is the defense.
26:21And the Mannheim, they tried, and they took first line and the second line.
26:27But then, after three days of fighting, they realized they were losing enormous number of men and tanks.
26:36And they moved eight kilometers. Eight!
26:39No, they thought, wow, that just cannot go on.
26:42I mean, all this for eight kilometers of step? So, abandon it.
26:47The fascinating, third fascinating fact about the Battle of Kursk, the Germans abandoned it on the 6th day.
26:54Abandoned it, meaning they just couldn't, they just didn't want to advance anymore.
27:00Something broke.
27:01So, they understood that cannot be done.
27:05From this moment on, it's only retreat, retreat, retreat, retreat, all the way to Berlin.
27:12With very interesting, you know, usually people don't pay much attention to this part.
27:17But I looked at it, and it is very interesting, because there were some very impressive, from the purely military point of view, operations, encirclements, advances.
27:31And I also checked, the Soviet army lost, I think it's 700,000 men, liberating Eastern Europe.
27:43So, this was still very, very serious casualties that they had to suffer.
27:48It was very serious fighting.
27:50The Germans were losing more.
27:52In fact, the website that shows German losses in World War II, they were rising.
27:59It was really, the Russians lost more in 41 than in 42.
28:05And the Germans lost a lot.
28:09I mean, like close to a million in 44.
28:12And even more in the beginning of 45.
28:15Because they were encircled, because there was desperate fighting.
28:19So, their casualties were mounting as the war moved westward.
28:25This is absolutely fascinating.
28:28So, the war began in 1939, and then the United States declared itself a neutral state in the same year.
28:37The Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, as we just mentioned.
28:42And the United States officially entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.
28:53Would you want, yes?
28:54Yes, thank you.
28:55Thank you for clarifying that.
28:56However, it wasn't until 1943, at the Tehran Conference, that the Western allies opened the Second Front in Normandy, which we will discuss in a minute, against the Axis forces.
29:09In terms of the size and scale of the Western Front and the Eastern Front, how did the Western Front compare to the Eastern Front, where the Red Army continued to press forward toward Berlin?
29:24Well, I already mentioned that.
29:27The first, the first front that was opened was in North Africa.
29:31This is in 1943, 42, 43.
29:36The North African campaign, and the German army was Rommel, General Rommel was 200,000.
29:41That's it.
29:42So, it was not a really big army.
29:44And then there were Italians, but Italians were laughing stock.
29:47The Germans just went there to help them because they couldn't, they couldn't hold the front.
29:54So, this is 43.
29:56And then they advanced to about middle of Italy until, and this was in 1942, 43.
30:05By middle of 43, the Allies advanced north of Naples.
30:10And this is what caused the revolution in Italy, overthrow of Mussolini.
30:15And then he was put back into power and the Germans occupied Italy.
30:20So, from that point on, Italy becomes an allied power where the north, well, Rome included, between Rome and Naples is occupied by the Germans and the Allies in the south.
30:35And they stayed there to the end of the war.
30:38They never moved north until the very end.
30:42But it is in June of 44, where you have the opening of the Normandy Front, the D-Day landing, early June 1944.
30:55And this was very, very miniscule forces, 144,000.
30:59So, this is very minor.
31:02And as I said, they're quite successful in the sense that they move and they liberate Paris on the 24th of August.
31:12And then they move on to Aachen, the only, on the German border.
31:18And they get stuck there until March 45.
31:21In other words, if you want to be cynical, you could say there wasn't no fighting in the, in the Western Front.
31:27There was just one serious battle, the landing and then the Battle of the Bulge, when Hitler tried to push them out again.
31:34And it was very, very bloody.
31:36And I spoke to many Americans who fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
31:41I spoke to veterans in the 80s when they were still alive.
31:44And they, they thought this was, help break loose and they might lose it.
31:50But they held out and it was, and only after that, in March, they, they poured into Germany.
31:59Now, this is already the time when the Red Army was, conquered all of East Prussia and Poland and was approaching Berlin.
32:09So, obviously, the, there's not even any, any, any comparison would be, hands down, would be, Eastern Front was 10 times, 20 times, 100 times, more men, more fighting, larger front lines.
32:28It is the Soviet Army, Red Army that defeated Nazi Germany.
32:33And its allies, let's not forget, officially, Romania, Hungary, Finland were official, Italy, Spain sent troops, which is good enough.
32:45Once you have your soldiers in uniform fighting, you are a party to war by international rule.
32:51So, this, these are all countries officially allies to Germany.
32:57Absolutely.
32:58After the Kursk's victory, the Red Army moved eastward, as you mentioned, to liberate Soviet republics, as well as other European countries.
33:09And what's interesting is that Ukraine was fully liberated in 1944.
33:14So, there were many, many challenges that they had to overcome to move westward and liberate Europe and go all the way to Berlin.
33:27The Nazis established a brutal fascist regime in Austria, in Albania, in Belgium, in Greece, in Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, France.
33:41So, all these countries were occupied by the Nazi Germany and their, the Axis forces.
33:48And, of course, the liberation of Europe came at a great cost.
33:55Could you maybe focus a bit on the liberation of, this is a very, very tragic topic, of course, but I think it is a very important one.
34:08The concentration camps.
34:11Because I know this year, there was a memorial that was held in Poland, and only specific countries were invited.
34:20So, I think to do justice, I think we need to spend some time sort of highlighting the liberation of maybe Auschwitz, for example, and talk about the significance of that in the context of defeating fascism in Europe.
34:40Well, yes, this is also another fascinating topic.
34:45You touched most of them.
34:47Auschwitz, what did people know about it at that time?
34:53Now, you know, there is a museum and children are coming there and it's a death camp and there were hundreds of thousands of people who were burned alive and killed there.
35:04There were Jews and there were others, but what did they know about it at that time?
35:10And there were historians, some of them were my colleagues, wrote books about it, trying to see what is the history of Auschwitz.
35:19And one should admit that the President Roosevelt and Churchill knew about it as early as 1942.
35:30They knew about it and there were some people who said, well, why don't you stop it?
35:34Why don't you, at least this is, Walter Laqueur wrote a fantastic book about this.
35:40And he asked the question, why didn't they bomb the rail tracks?
35:44Why didn't they try to stop it?
35:46And the answer is they didn't.
35:48And it was not a priority.
35:51I spoke to many Germans.
35:53Did you know about it?
35:54Well, I studied in Germany.
35:55I lived in Germany.
35:56I have many German friends and they told me that during the war, they didn't know anything about it.
36:01The only thing they knew that people were moving, that there were Russian workers brought in, Ukrainian women worked in the fields.
36:11The Jews were moved somewhere here.
36:14Those people moved there.
36:15Everybody was moving places and they did not know.
36:18They knew that people were moved, but they didn't know they were being systematically killed.
36:22And I believe them, at least publicly, this was not disclosed.
36:27But the leaders did know.
36:29Roosevelt did know.
36:30Churchill did know.
36:31And they didn't know anything.
36:32I want to tell you one other thing, which is important.
36:36And when I have an occasion, I do say it, which is that I did research in the National Archives in Washington.
36:46And the files that I was working on were on Switzerland.
36:50And in Switzerland, there is this, we all know, this is a center of chemical industry.
36:57And there was a company that was disbanded after the war.
37:01It's called IG Farben.
37:03And this is a German chemical company.
37:06And they were the ones who were producing gas for Auschwitz, poison gas.
37:11And I looked at the documents of IG Farben in American archives in the files of Switzerland.
37:20And to what I found was absolutely extraordinary.
37:23I, yeah, well, we all see why.
37:28There was a list of owners and stockholders of that company.
37:34And there were many Americans in it.
37:36And they were blacked out.
37:38You couldn't see the names.
37:39Some censor just crossed it out by black ink.
37:44But they were there.
37:46They were the owners.
37:47And they could not not know what they were producing.
37:51And there's another book that's called Switzerland, a secret ally of Germany.
37:57Meaning that the allies didn't bomb Switzerland.
38:00It was a very convenient place to produce military material, which they did.
38:06And they supplied it to Germany.
38:08And they were not even bombed.
38:10And therefore, the gas for Auschwitz was manufactured in Switzerland by IG Farben with American investors.
38:18Here's the fact.
38:20The Red Army liberated it.
38:22And they couldn't believe what they saw.
38:24It was earth shattering.
38:26And the same thing happened to Belgium.
38:28And I saw, again, the existing videos.
38:31One could look at them.
38:32American army moving into Belgium.
38:35And these exhausted, barely alive bodies of people moving in striped uniforms.
38:44It's very moving.
38:46It's really hard to watch without tears.
38:50Absolutely.
38:51And I think it is so tragic that even though it's a terrible part in history, it's still worth emphasizing that it happened and how these concentration camps were liberated.
39:09And it's a truly tragic part of history that shouldn't be forgotten and should never be repeated, of course.
39:16But I think for that memory to remain, I think it is important to help people learn more about this and help educate as many people as possible to allow them to know what actually happened.
39:31And I think this is a truly fascinating topic and it is so difficult to cover the main points in an hour.
39:38So I will be absolutely looking forward to connecting with you again and learning from you.
39:45Dr. Brovkin, thank you so much for joining today.
39:48This was such an incredibly interesting and important conversation.
39:52Thank you so much.
39:53Dr. Brovkin, thank you so much for joining today.
40:20Thank you for your time.
40:21Thank you very much.
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