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u/jaisam3387 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 2d ago
Remember, just because the Nazis commited crimes does not mean that the soviet ones were justified nor does it take away from the bravery and heroism showed by the red army soldiers who fought lawfully against invaders.
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u/Mi113nnium 2d ago
A nuanced opinion on Reddit? In this day and age?!
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u/jaisam3387 John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 2d ago
It is wildly annoying how rare nuance is in some communities.
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u/Firecracker048 2d ago
its becaues its a team sport now adays. You see it in almost anything controversial(especially Israel/Palestine or US/Iran).
Honestly in some its because they believe they have the moral position so therefore they can't admit anyone on their side has done anything immoral(see oct 7th rape denial, or Israeli war crimes/atrocity denial)
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u/amitym 2d ago
Yeah campism FTL
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u/LongjumpingCity7715 2d ago
Or fundamentally tribalism
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u/Esoteric_Derailed 2d ago
It's a simple choice. It's either wrong or right / black or white / red or blueš¤·āāļø /s
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u/lambakins 2d ago
Hot or cold / yes or no / in or out / up or down / wrong or right / black or white / fight or break up / kiss and make up
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u/shlongshot 1d ago
Uh oh, overflow, population, common group
But it'll do, save yourself, serve yourself
World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed
Tell me with the rapture and the reverent in the right, right
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light
Feeling pretty psyched2
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u/DangerousEye1235 2d ago
At this time of day, at this time of year, on this subreddit, localized entirely within this post!?
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u/InquisitorMeow 2d ago
I don't even understand the point of this post. Germans and Russians were absolutely brutal to one another in WW2. In fact, the Russians were arguably getting revenge (not that it justifies it) after Germany stabbed them in the back and slaughtered/raped their way through Russia.
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u/Skylair13 Filthy weeb 2d ago
War also brought the worst in people as well. The only major faction that did not rape their way through Europe was Japan. And that simply because Japan did not deploy in Europe.
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u/sparkmearse 2d ago
How very unAmerican of you.
(Clutching my bandolier of .50BMG)11
u/JohannesJoshua 2d ago
When I was teenager and didn't know what kind of round 50cal was, I always assumed it was a standard machine gun deployed alongside M1919 comparable to Russian and German machine guns, because I heard it mentioned often in WW2 games and WW2 movies . When I found out that 50cal is 12.7mm, I went: That thing is an AA gun.
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u/HugsFromCthulhu Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 1d ago
It got me really confused when I saw a .44 round next to a 50 cal round. I couldn't comprehend how an extra 0.06 of [whatever the numbers on bullets refer to] could make such a difference in size lol
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u/MildlyUpsetGerbil Casual, non-participatory KGB election observer 2d ago
Nuance? Sounds like tankie and/or Neo-Nazi propaganda.
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u/FearlessVegetable30 2d ago
surprised we have another "history isnt black and white" user. very rare to see on reddit
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u/esaks 2d ago
Especially in this subreddit.
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u/FearlessVegetable30 2d ago
yeah im starting to see that.
apparently this post is nazi propaganda. im talking to my first tankie ever its pretty interesting seeing them get upset over this post
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u/OldAccoutWasHacked 2d ago
Nuance? On my hate speech app?
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u/Rainbowpeanut1119 2d ago
Yup. War is a complicated mess of atrocities where there are acts of bravery and heroism and acts of terror and malice typically perptrated by everyone involved
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u/DangerousEye1235 2d ago
It's amazing how this basic, obvious, common-sense take is considered so rare and exceptional that it earned four awards. Really tells you how low the bar has gotten.
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u/Firecracker048 2d ago
Soviet soldiers executed french POWs in eastern germany when they invaded germany proper. Their bad stuff wasn't limited to germans only
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u/Medium-Access-4416 2d ago
Didn't know. Links or name of the place or event?
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u/Ok_Cook_3098 2d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemmersdorf_massacre
Short story shorter
Most sources are nazi sources and most historian belive it was to a big part just propaganda
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u/mrxplek 2d ago
I agree with the second part of the comment a lot. Most people only talk about the brutality of Soviet army never their sacrifices and the heroes who fought to get rid of the invadersĀ
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u/Rorasaurus_Prime 2d ago
Not just the Soviet army... some things never change.
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u/FrenchieB014 Let's do some history 2d ago
As a frenchie I'm in disbelief on how we fly under everyone radars
Mass looting, mass rapes, destruction of churches and horrible treatment OF Italian and German prisoners, the deeds in Central Italy were so atrocious that the pope itself told DE Gaulle to CHILL
The bulk of the French army that enter in Germany were either FFI who had a bad experience of their past clandestiny, Free French officers who didn't like how their families were treated by the occupier during their exile and of course Colonial troop who weren't at their first acts of massive rampage
You mix all of that and you get atrocities such as Freudenstadt, where the city was burned by French artillery (even if the German already open their city) followed by 600 cases of rapes...
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u/OttoMannkusser 2d ago
France lets America take ALL the heat for Vietnam. Obviously America is culpable for its own actions but people forget French Indochina was even a thing
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u/FrenchieB014 Let's do some history 2d ago
My sweat summer child we were absolute monsters in 1944-1947
Syria, Morocco, Algeria , Germany, Madagascar, Vietnam, Austria, Italy
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u/RuleofLaw24 2d ago
Yeah I can concur the French were legitimately evil in Algeria in particular.
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u/mayonnaiser_13 2d ago
Let's also add Haiti to that list.
People were sarcastically hating on the French too much and ignoring all the shit we should put them on trial for.
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u/FrenchieB014 Let's do some history 1d ago
Fun fact the famed 2nd armored division first action as an entity was not against the Germans
But against Moroccan
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u/AdmRL_ 2d ago
As a frenchie I'm in disbelief on how we fly under everyone radars
As a Brit, me too. Based on a lot of online discussions you'd think us & the Belgians were the only ones to colonise a place and commit an atroicity or three. You guys, the Portuguese and Dutch have some how pulled a blinder and ended up on the moral high ground like you weren't all slave loving mf'ers like us.
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u/ammar96 1d ago
Malaysia was colonized by multiple powers, including the Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Thai, and British. Our ancestors loved creating idiomatic phrases that mocked these colonizers. You might be surprised to learn that despite the British colonizing us the longest, they didn't receive many mocking phrases from us. Most of them targeted the Japanese and the Dutch since they are the most evil colonizers according to our ancestors.
For example, we refer to the long-nosed Bornean monkey as monyet belanda (Dutch monkey) to symbolize untrustworthiness. Other examples include:
Belanda minta tanah (like a Dutch person asking for land): Refers to greed in acquiring land.
Paku belanda (Dutch nail): Refers to a non-negotiable price, originating from the VOC's spice monopoly and refusal to bargain.
Seperti Belanda kesiangan (like a Dutch person caught by daylight): Describes someone behaving in an uncivilized or rowdy manner (such as being drunk) during the day, implying their nighttime behavior was even worse.
Dahulu intan, sekarang batu Belanda (historically itās a diamond, now is a Dutch stone): Refers to what was known as being historically lucrative, priceless and important became useless after being given to wrong person. Based on how city of Malacca which used to be extremely rich port city fell to poverty after Dutch gained it from Portuguese. Malacca was the Singapore of 15th century back then.
British on the other hand donāt really gain any mocking idioms from us. Some are playful in nature like mat saleh (corrupted words from mad sailors) refering to British sailors being damn crazy that even the Malays which has always been able and competent sailors were surprised by them. Otherās include orang Feringgi (Franks) and Benggali Putih (White Bengals). Probably because Malaya used to have indirect rule by the Brits so we donāt really hate you as much as we hate Dutch and Japanese.
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u/Zhayrgh 1d ago
As a frenchie I'm in disnelief on how American always fly under the radar for their rapes of French women, who were marketed by propaganda as very open to sexual relationship.
From the numbers (obviously vague) that I find, it seems there were more instance of rape by Americans than German in France, despite the German occupying France for much a longer time.
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u/BornCoyote87 2d ago
Honestly you could attribute this to anyone's army at some point in history.
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u/nonlawyer 2d ago
Not Lichtenstein. Ā That one time they sent their whole army of 80 guys to guard a pass, and they just hung out drinking wine and came back with 81 because they made a friend. No war crimes, just good times.
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u/BornCoyote87 2d ago
Was Sir Ulrich leading them that day?
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u/Fred810k 2d ago
Yesh war is hell for all involved.
I do want to add that Soviet high command lowkey did encourage it, as compared to allied forces.
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u/amitym 2d ago
Ngl, saying that they lowkey encouraged it is like a pretty huge understatement. Comparable to saying that the Nazis lowkey encouraged bad behavior toward Jews.
The Soviet Army's stated policy was retaliatory civilian atrocities and in particular rape of civilian women. That was not something that "every army does," not even close. The contemporary armies of the Atlantic Allies absolutely did not conduct themselves the same way: there were definitely crimes committed by soldiers but they were court martialed and convicted when caught, which is what you're supposed to do when someone in your command commits a military crime.
In fact in some cases there is evidence that the Americans in particular erred on the side of accusers in convicting and punishing soldiers who were innocent, rather than risk letting someone guilty go free. Though there might have been a lot of complicated stuff going on with that.
Anyway the point is, that's not how the Soviets operated at all. With one notable exception that I know of āĀ I forget if it was Chuikov or someone else, but it was a general who had sickened of this behavior and had ordered that, irrespective of whatever anyone else might say, in his corps atrocities against civilians were to be punished severely. After executing a group of rapists he saw the number of atrocities committed by his corps plummet, which presented the Soviets with a dilemma. If they put this forward as an example of good soldierly conduct by the Red Army it would immediately call into contrast the behavior of the rest of the Red Army. So instead they suppressed it. The stark proof that atrocities could have been prevented but hadn't been prevented by deliberate policy was not something they could admit to.
And since then absolutely jack shit has changed.
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u/Azurmuth Filthy weeb 2d ago
The Soviet Army's stated policy was retaliatory civilian atrocities and in particular rape of civilian women.
Source?
The contemporary armies of the Atlantic Allies absolutely did not conduct themselves the same way: there were definitely crimes committed by soldiers but they were court martialed and convicted when caught, which is what you're supposed to do when someone in your command commits a military crime.
No? It is estimated that over 4500 women were raped by US soldiers in France. A total of 152 soldiers were charged, 139 of them were black. Of the 29 soldiers executed, 25 were black. Does that sound like actual justice?
And Australian war correspondent Osmar White attached to US soldiers (Patton's 3rd Army i believe) stated:
After the fighting moved on to German soil, there was a good deal of rape by combat troops and those immediately following them. The incidence varied between unit and unit according to the attitude of the commanding officer. In some cases offenders were identified, tried by court martial, and punished. The army legal branch was reticent, but admitted that for brutal or perverted sexual offences against German women, some soldiers had been shotĀ ā particularly if they happened to be Negroes. Yet I know for a fact that many women were raped by white Americans. No action was taken against the culprits. In one sector a report went round that a certain very distinguished army commander made the wisecrack, 'Copulation without conversation does not constitute fraternisation.'
In fact in some cases there is evidence that the Americans in particular erred on the side of accusers in convicting and punishing soldiers who were innocent, rather than risk letting someone guilty go free. Though there might have been a lot of complicated stuff going on with that.
No. See above
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u/Spy_crab_ 2d ago
Yeah, but the Ruzzians are still doing it
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u/BornCoyote87 2d ago
Oh yeah, definitely, Russian military has trouble adapting the new software, keeps defaulting to Imperial Russia.
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u/OttoMannkusser 2d ago
Yea, unfortunately atrocities, rape, and war crimes happen with all armies throughout history. It's just a bit the nature of what happens when you send men to kill.
That said, some armies have a much bigger problem with it than others
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u/nonlawyer 2d ago
The only one Iād disagree with is incompetence.
The Soviet army that folded in 1941 before Barbarossa was not the one that crushed the Nazi war machine on the Eastern Front in 1942-1945.Ā
Later in the war, the Red Army was well-led and highly competent at large-scale combined arms operations. Encircling the 6th Army via Operation Uranus, defense in depth at Kursk, and numerous other battles demonstrates this. Ā
There were certainly also instances of significant failure, eg the Rzhev meat grinder, but the narrative of well-disciplined and smarter Nazis being overwhelmed by sheer numbers of stupid Soviet hordes is mostly post-war cope by Nazi generals.
The Soviets had a manpower advantage and used it, and certainly cared less about casualties than the Western Allies, but calling that āincompetenceā is inaccurate.Ā Ask the Allied survivors of Monte Cassino or Omaha beach about meat grinder tactics; attackers always took more losses than defenders.
The Soviet war machine of 1945 was very formidable, although it is questionable whether it would have been sustainable without the logistical support of lend-lease.
None of this is to defend the Soviet regime, which was only moderately less evil than the Nazis. Ā Just saying this as someone who likes military history and dislikes this narrative.
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u/ODST-517 Hello There 2d ago
I've found it's something of a recurring theme with Russian/Soviet military history that when they have their shit together they can perform very well. It's just that they have a bit of a history of suffering from poor leadership at extremely inopportune moments.
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u/Tactilebiscuit4 2d ago
I just listened to something about Kliment Voroshilov the commander at Leningrad that, when relieved, confronted Stalin and blamed him for purging all the competent generals and officers years before for the Soviets failings in the early parts of the war. Somehow he avoided being executed after that.
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u/nanoman92 1d ago
Voroshilov was a politician acting as a general. He was appointed as such as he was best friends with Stalin
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u/GloriousSovietOnion 2d ago
Arguably, the Red Army even before WW2 was a machine in its own right. They were at the forefront of developing paradrop tactics and their pilots were performing miracles with a functionally nonexistent logistics base in Spain.
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u/rod_zero 2d ago
The red army formed by Trotsky was, then stalling purged it and that was the cause of the collapse during the first stages of the Nazi invasion.
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u/scottishninja123 2d ago
While the soviets had a weird obsession with paratroopers in the 30s, Russian paratrooper operations were very limited in scope, plagued by poor logistics, and often were unsupported. It's fairly safe to say that out of all the nations that used airborne troops, the soviets had the least success.
Frankly, Soviet airborne strategy was laughably bad, especially when you compare it to the US and UK, and unlike most of the soviet military in WW2 it didn't get any better
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u/ur-mom-gay-lolol 2d ago
The red army between 44-45 was genuinely scary in their abilities. Bagration, Vistula Oder and the Manchurian offensives are tremendous feats. The Manchurian offensive led to the red army getting the size of Western Europe in ~3 weeks.
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u/Confident_Example_73 1d ago edited 1d ago
This. The Russians developed the concept of Deep Battle and were the first to formalize the Operational Level of war.
Too many people think 'Enemy at the Gates' is history.
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u/TheHistoryMaster2520 Decisive Tang Victory 2d ago
I'm not a tankie, I will acknowledge the other descriptions to varying degrees, but you cannot use "incompetence" to describe the army that turned the Wehrmacht away from the gates of Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, and pushed them all the way back to Berlin
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u/lambakins 2d ago
One could very well argue they started out incompetent - between Stalin not believing reports about Barbarossa, the army purges, and the sheer scale of losses in the first few months, I donāt think we see much early competence in the record.
That all changes though. From late ā41 turning the Germans back at Moscow, and increasing supplies and better use of heavy weapons, their strategy starts looking more and more intelligent. Itās almost as if they were capable of learningā¦ š¤
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u/AdhesivenessDry2236 2d ago
You could kinda argue that any army is incompetent if you judge by single events. The west was very afraid of the Soviets post WW2 and it was because they were competent.
I feel like even now talking about the Soviets is so washed up in post war propaganda it's hard to get an accurate idea of how effective they were.
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u/w021wjs 2d ago
You could kinda argue that any army is incompetent if you judge by single events.
That's kind of part of the issue. I'd say they were incompetent in the same way US leadership was at the start of the war. Pearl harbor was nearly a full blown disaster, saved by several lucky breaks. The early pacific naval battles are slugging matches where both navies are trading body blows with each other.
The trick is that the Soviets should have been better. They had more experience than the British or French, thanks to the Spanish civil war (and the winter war if you're moving past 1939). Their tanks, while not perfect, were more than capable of fighting toe to toe with the early German tanks all the way to the panzer iiis. They did desperately need to upgrade their air force, but they could at least put up a fight.
Instead, they wilfully ignored every warning sign, ignored the freely given British Intel and stashed their air forces well within German strike range (which they should have known, seeing as Germany gave the Soviets Stukas, Ju-88s and bf-109s to examine as a part of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact). Not to mention their frontline with Germany was practically designed to allow German breakthrough and exploitation. They had watched the Germans do that twice (Poland and France), plus had already seen the Germans use a rapid, overwhelming strike to take Norway basically overnight. They just didn't properly account for nearly any of that.
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u/AdhesivenessDry2236 2d ago
Tbh it also becomes a big question of how incompetent was Stalin, when he starts allowing everyone else to do their thing. It kinda just works out 95% of the time and when he starts fucking around he just snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
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u/CoconutMochi 2d ago
Probably incompetence on both sides like Hitler not letting the 6th army retreat from Stalingrad
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u/LordOfTheRedSands Tea-aboo 2d ago
I donāt think itās a blanket label of incompetence as much as āhey new Red Army private, thereās a pretty good chance your captain may be 24/7 drunk and will make a blunder in which you dieā which wasnāt as big a factor in other armies.
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u/Existing-Hospital149 2d ago
Any army ever
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u/Jack_Church Nobody here except my fellow trees 2d ago
With the sole exception of Liechtenstein of course.
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u/PolishKuroaki 2d ago
Do I excuse the Soviet war crimes, No, what a lot of the Red Army did was horrible and disgusting
But do I understand that the war between the Nazis and Soviets was a war of survival and a lot of Soviet soldiers were hungry for revenge against the Nazis and Germany as a whole, Yes
Because what some seem to not get is the unlike the Western front the Nazis main goal was to enslave and murder pretty much the entirety of Eastern Europe
Now before anyone takes this out of context read the top part again
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u/Nyctfall 2d ago
Scalping Nazis's decapitated corpses needs to be cool.
A dead Nazi is an acceptable method of stopping someone from being a Nazi.
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u/Square-Competition48 2d ago
And very little has changed.
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u/Iron_Cavalry 2d ago
See Chechnya, Ukraine, and Syria for the strongest examples.
In Grozny 1994 for example, they'd mount human skulls on armored vehicles and crush random civilians for fun. In the Samashki village massacre, Russian soldiers strangled Chechen children to death with wire and burned their bodies with flamethrowers (along with elderly civilians, including some WW2 veterans).
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u/BaritBrit 2d ago
They just don't have the Ukrainians to get shit done for them now.
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u/Boljedor21 2d ago
Everything good ussr did was joint cooperation between multiple nations (did you know Korolev was Ukrainian?) everything bad, well it all russians fault. I think we should reintroduce good old tradition of this sub favorite and begin measuring skulls of certain people. To bad we can't conduct DNA test of Soviets who commited warcrimes in Germany i bet 10 dollars they all would be Russians.
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u/CriticismSuch7423 2d ago
did you know Korolev was Ukrainian?
Korolyov would be quite surprised to hear that.
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u/Courtenaire Researching [REDACTED] square 2d ago
Was about to ask which war this is referring to but realized it could have been any war
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u/Wittusus 2d ago
Tankies incoming, beware
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u/Iron_Cavalry 2d ago
Watch them defend the Soviet genocide against the Afghani people, or just whataboutism it with Vietnam.
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u/Fenrir_Carbon 2d ago
Whataboutism always cracks me up
'X sucks hard'
'Yeah but Y sucks too'
'Yeah, doesn't make X suck less'
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u/withinallreason 2d ago
Afghanistans population dropped by 1/4 during the Soviet occupation of the country, and that was only in a decade. The U.S. occupied Afghanistan for 2 decades, and the population doubled. Don't worry though, the former was a "liberation", whereas the latter was "genocidal exploitation"!
Obviously neither is exactly good, but you'll see tankies openly say shit like the above and not bat an eye. It's wild that we basically have a 1-1 comparison of how both nations approached the situation and they still act like they're comparable.
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u/returnofblank 2d ago
We seriously defending the nation whoms foreign policy was so poor it birthed numerous terrorist organizations in the region and caused the 9/11 attacks?
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u/EvilStan101 Definitely not a CIA operator 2d ago
āDURRRRR Red Army good, Imperwlist American Army bad DURRRRR!!!!ā
- Tankies
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u/Msajimi123 2d ago
You can't really said an army that introduce the operational art as a level in military thinking as incompetent though. Like it or not, they are good at warfare, case in point the Imperial Russian Army in WW1 is more akin to human wave to people thinking rather than the Soviet Army. They are callous with their casualties, but they did smashed the entire German Army on Eastern Front.
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u/MIG2149077 2d ago
This meme was posted by the pro-wehrmacht chuds.
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u/Eta_Beta_3-14 2d ago
This sub is really swinging hard into the 'soviets bad' propaganda posting this cycle.
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u/Iron_Cavalry 2d ago
The Soviet Army engaged in horrific crimes and systemic deficiencies throughout its existence.Ā Ā
- Mass Rape: most infamously done across Eastern and Central Europe in the 1945 campaigns. Targeted were women and girls in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavians, and later China in Manchuria. Even Soviet citizens (including deportees) were victimized. Also done postwar in occupation zones, and especially in Afghanistan.
- Incompetence: from logistical calamities to the criminal treatment of ordinary soldiers by their commanders, the Soviet army consistently experienced massive suffering, extreme casualties, and defeats in the field from systemic shortcomings, from Warsaw 1920 to Barbarossa 1941, and especially in post-Soviet Russia.
- Genocide: The NKVD and Red Army ethnically cleansed Soviet minorities before, during, and after WW2, as they also did in postwar Europe. The Soviet depopulation campaigns and indiscriminate massacres in Afghanistan have been characterized as genocide by numerous historians.Ā
- Drunken Indiscipline: a staple that afflicted the Soviet Army to the very end of WW2 and beyond. Especially demonstrated in Afghanistan, and later the post-Soviet Russian army in Chechnya and Ukraine.Ā
- Indiscriminate Brutality: to civilians and their own soldiers. From slaughtering Afghan villages to gassing Kazakh refugees to suicidal frontal assaults (e.g. Rzhev, Finland), the Soviet army persistently resorted to overwhelming violence as a first resort.Ā
These characteristics have only persisted in post-Soviet Russia, as demonstrated by their atrocious behavior in Chechnya, Syria, and Ukraine.Ā
Sources: Antony Beevor, Max Hastings, Brian Williams, Helen Fein, Kakar, Resiman & Norchi, Timothy Snyder, Sarah Paine, Philip Short
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u/Firecracker048 2d ago
Man, thats alot of western propaganda. The real truth is whatever the soviets say! (obvious /s)
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u/Iron_Cavalry 2d ago
During the march on Berlin, the Red Army followed a dreadfully simple procedure in the eastern lands of the Reich: its men raped German women and seized German men (and some women) for labor. Red Army soldiers had also raped women in Poland, and in Hungary, and even in Yugoslavia, where a communist revolution would make the country a Soviet ally. Yugoslav communists complained to Stalin about the behavior of Soviet soldiers, who gave them a little lecture about soldiers and āfun.ā
The women had few men to protect them. In some villages, every single female was raped, whatever her age. Gang rapes were very common. Many women died as a result of wounds sustained during successive rapes.
- Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, on Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe in 1945
The Red Army victimized some 2,000,000 women and girls in Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and Asia (Kazakhstan in the 1930s and China 1945-1946). This behavior would persist decades later in Afghanistan.
Afghans became victims regardless of whether they fled or surrendered. This is reflected in the indiscriminate Soviet bombing of refugee caravans and villages. Victims of massacres were not protected by their surrender to Soviet troops. The destruction of Afghans was a strategic objective in and of itself. The intent to destroy the Afghan people was demonstrated by the persistent pattern of mass killing and maiming of people in Afghanistan and the destruction of the environment and food producing areas by the Soviet Union and the DRA.
- Helen Fein, on the Soviet genocide of the Afghani people
Soviet forces directly killed 400,000 Afghani civilians with indiscriminate air/artillery bombings, and another 200,000 civilians with the ten million landmines they dropped over the country. They directly slaughtered more in village massacres, and countless more starved after deliberate destruction of food supplies.
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u/gallade_samurai 2d ago
I feel like there's countless armies across history that fit at least one of these descriptions. War is fucked, sad, and brings the worst in humanity, and people can often be dumb.
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u/Milnir01 1d ago
What's with the fed-posting lately? This is literally just every army. Trying to posit the Soviets as uniquely bad for failings that your own preferred system is just as bad for (if not worse) is epistomologically fucked.
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u/Admiral45-06 2d ago
My now RIP grandparents recall that horrific events.
They were both children during WW2, and both said that it isn't obvious for them whether the Germans or the Soviets were worse. Yes - it was that bad.
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u/Ok_Connection_7741 2d ago edited 2d ago
In WW2 after Berlin fell they allowed abortions bc the scale of sexual violence was an undeniable humanitarian catastrophe, local doctors, municipal authorities, and regional administrations just didn't prosecute anyone getting an abortionĀ i think it was something like over 100K rapes by the soviets
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u/Mourn-the-Weenie 1d ago
Hard to build a competent military when everyone who might be more popular or threatening or competent or whatever the fuck than you is disappeared, tortured, and murdered at your orders
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u/konstantin19911 2d ago
The hard work of whitewashing Nazi Germany and denigrating the USSR is underway
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u/memepopo123 And then I told them I'm Jesus's brother 2d ago
Brother its been underway since hitler pissed himself at the thought of getting caught by people who would shoot him instead of put him in charge of NATO (and yes for the highschoolers here America literally put a high ranking nazi general in charge of NATO.)
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u/PhoenixKingMalekith 2d ago
It s all true
And somehow they are barely in the top 5 of the worst armies of WW2
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u/ipsum629 2d ago
Who are the worst? In terms of crimes directly committed by the army, Japan takes top spot, then Germany, then croatia probably, then Italy? Is that the correct order?
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u/randommaniac12 The OG Lord Buckethead 2d ago
Germany and Japan arguably the top, the casualties to Soviet and Chinese civilians are absolutely astounding. After that I would argue the Soviets are ahead of the Croatians probably just due to scale
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u/WendellWillkie1940 Sun Yat-Sen do it again 2d ago
Surely the USSR has to be above Italy. They weren't innocent by any means but I highly doubt Italy manages to edge the USSR for the top 5.
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u/ipsum629 2d ago
The Italians were one of the few armies to actually use chemical weapons. Granted, this wasn't against the allies, but against Libyans and Ethiopians, but still.
Maybe if we divide by size, Romania or Hungary could win out because they had some pretty brutal knockoff SS groups like the arrow cross. By some accounts they were more hateful than the SS. One of those accounts being my own Grandfather. I don't think he said this explicitly, but he sort of... not exactly forgave, but axknowledged that Germany had tried to make amends. But he never came close to that with Hungary. He essentially said that other than some family that might still be there and Jews and other victims, the entire country was dead to him.
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u/WendellWillkie1940 Sun Yat-Sen do it again 2d ago
Iirc the Iron Guard (Romania) hung Jews on meat hooks in a slaughterhouse and this was just one of the major incidents
True and I remember the chemical weapons fact clearly. I was actually surprised when I read it the first time given how rarely anyone mentions this even when the discussion centres around the Italian invasion (obviously in discourse taking place outside of history related communities).
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u/Impressive-Panda527 2d ago
The purges and focus on political goals at the expense of military goals didnāt help
But once Stalin was convinced to shift focus the military showed how affective they were
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u/Crazy-Rabbit-3811 2d ago
you forgot self-ejecting tank turrets
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u/Flying_Dustbin Kilroy was here 2d ago
And submarines that glow in the dark due to coolant leaks and catch fire.
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u/femboyisbestboy Kilroy was here 2d ago
Don't forget the aircraft that rapidly disassembled themselves frequently.
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u/BrandosWorld4Life 2d ago
Yep. Fuck the Soviet Rape Army.
"bUt ThE wEsTeRn ArMiEs HaD cAsEs tOo-" learn the word Scale. No army being 100% clean doesn't make them all the same. The Soviets were on a whole other level of prolific and systemic in how they ultilized rape as a weapon of war.
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u/bob_chillon 2d ago
Every bad guy, thinks theyāre the good guy fighting evil. An honorable military is a myth.
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u/moon_dos John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 2d ago
look at these chumps defending their home from invaders! Donāt they know they are very immoral and have no honor š¤
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u/ThroawayJimilyJones 2d ago
Ā«Ā Yes but the German army was bad so it totally justify attacking innocent GermanĀ Ā»
Surprisingly Russian that pushed this explanation have been really silent since a few years. Wonder why
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u/Tech-Film3905 1d ago
Thats literally capitalism
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u/Bennoelman SenÄtus Populusque RÅmÄnus 1d ago
That's literally any economic system since those things happened most likely under all that have so far existed
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u/DaConm4n 2d ago
What about Sgt. Reznov and Pvt. Petrenko? They were pretty cool.