Elbe Day 2023 and the Lessons of History

Instead, Russia was demonized with a degree of hatred and racism that was never applied to Nazi Germany in the United States through World War II. In those days at least there was no attempt to ban or suppress the playing of music by Bach, Handel, Beethoven or Brahms in the United States because they were just “dirty Germans.” Yet such rhetoric has been thrown like dog execretia at even Pyotr Tchaikovsky and other great Russian composers.

America is an amnesiac culture that has cultivated infantile delusions among its population for at least three quarters of a century now. But even in such humanistically arid soil, the arrogance and ignorance of the hard-won lessons of modern history defies belief.

Not one American or British citizen in 100,000 today realizes or remembers that at least 90 percent of all Nazi soldiers killed in World War II were killed by the Red Army. Instead, as Tim Kirby and others have pointed out, in Latvia today the wearing of SS uniforms is freely permitted by the government while the wearing of Red Army uniforms is heavily fined. Yet 330 million Americans live in heightened danger of needless nuclear war to defend such Nazi-lovers and Holocaust-deniers eager to exploit and pervert the protections of their NATO shield throughout Eastern Europe.

One would never guess from the relentless barrage of sneering and contempt towards Russia today that throughout World War II, Russians and the Soviet Union were vastly more popular in embattled Britain than the United States and the American people were.

Indeed, opinion polls from the beginning of 1942 through the war showed far more Briton admiring the victories and sacrifices of the Russian people and resenting the prosperity, ease, confidence and – to their eyes – arrogance of the US soldiers flooding into their country.

For the year of war from D-Day to victory, millions of US soldiers fought bravely and well across Continental Europe, but strategically even their greatest victories were no more than a sideshow compared to the titanic struggles in the East.

Ironically, today British historians remain far more balanced than US ones. Such excellent scholarly and popular historians as Michael K. Jones, Richard Overy, Andrew Roberts and Max Hastings freely and repeatedly stress that the colossal struggle on the Eastern Front was the strategic pivot of the entire war and that everything else pales by comparison.

However, in the United States, even supposedly acclaimed popular historians continue to have myopic vision and childishly reject the most self-evident of facts. Specialist scholars write first class studies, but among popular historians and on television documentaries, the ignorance is embarrassing.

This is shameful and it has the gravest implications for world peace. Communism is long gone and the Russian people continue to work hard and impressively to rebuild their society. Yet every year, when Elbe Day comes round, the leaders, scholars and opinion shapers in the West continue to steadfastly ignore it.

By doing so, they are not only dishonoring the memories of the millions of Red Army soldiers who died in the fight against the Nazis. They are also rejecting an opportunity to ease East/West tensions.

Yet, the Red Army stood virtually alone in the European fight against the Nazis from June 22, 1941 until the Normandy invasion, and the Soviet role in D-Day itself was enormous. The success of D-Day was only made possible by the extraordinary drive of the Red Army from Stalingrad to the Elbe River in the two years following victory at Stalingrad on February 2, 1943.

Only 11 Wehrmacht divisions fought the Allied armies in Normandy, yet at the same time 228 Nazi divisions were fighting the Red Army in the east. Simultaneous with the Battle of Normandy, the Red Army won the far greater victory of Operation Bagration, when Hitler’s last great concentration of armies Army Group Center was annihilated in what is now Belarus.

It was also the Red Army that liberated the greatest and worst of the Nazi extermination camps, including Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Sobibor. But Western leaders and NATO allies now remain unanimously silent about this crucial fact.

When I casually asked my three now-adult children, products of supposedly some of the finest educational systems in America including two Ivy League colleges and the New School for Social Research in New York City what force stopped the operation of the gas chambers and physically ended the diabolical Nazi genocide program, the concensus answer was “the US Army, of course.” But with due respect to the bravery, service and sacrifice of millions of US, British, Canadian and other Allied soldiers in the European Theater of Operations, the answer was “No!” It was the Soviets.

Remembering that momentous meeting on the Elbe River between the brave heroic soldiers of the 58th Guards Rifle Division of the First Ukrainian Front of the Red Army and the 69th Infantry Division of the US First Army is no mere exercise in ridiculous or contemptible nostalgia: It is a solemn tribute to millions of brave and decent men and women from east and west alike who gave everything to exterminate the most evil and contemptible ideology and military force in history.

Today, the stakes are even greater: The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists now puts the time to Armageddon – total destructive thermonuclear world war – at only 90 seconds to midnight. At this dark hour, the Spirit of the Elbe is more desperately needed than ever. By standing together to commemorate it, we stand for the survival and rescue of civilization and the entire human race.

Martin Sieff is a Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and former Managing Editor, International Affairs for United Press International and Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Washington Times. He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for International Reporting.