Considering what would happen 2 years later, legit feels like a deleted scene. Always fascinated me a bit how everyone says officially WW2 started when Germany invaded Poland. That other country always seems to be left out, and we’re not declared war on.
by daikatanaman00
5 Comments
“Scum of the universe, I presume? Good to meet you.”
Just gonna add this since there seems to be a big part of history being ignored. The Soviets made a non aggression pact with the Nazis as a last resort. They already approached Great Britain with concerns on containing Nazi aggression and expansion and they were more or less told to fuck off.
Russia historically has been invaded THROUGH Poland numerous times and their country sacked. They had good reason to want to establish a buffer zone from their ideological enemies, but people pretend this was some shameless land grab with their best buddies.
It’s horseshit and historical revisionism. I’m not a communist or socialist just a lover of history and won’t standby to see life be turned into black and white propaganda by people that have no desire to truly investigate the thoughts of people at the time.
I wouldn’t speak of a ‘deleted scene’. While Ribbentrop-Molotov can be objectively analyzed as tacit collaboration, both sides were extremely wary of each other. It was by no means an alliance. One of the core tenets of National Socialism was the denounce of bolshevism as fundamental enemy. Hitler wrote on Mein Kampf (long before becoming dictator) about the concept of ‘living space’, which could only be achieved through eastward expansion. Soviet leadership knew that war was coming, 1939 just wasn’t the right moment to fight said war. Industrialization plans were still ongoing and the Red Army was still recovering from the purges of the Stalinist terror. The Soviet Union was in no position to take on Europe’s largest army all by itself. I’m not justifying the Soviet invasion of Poland, but from their perspective, it was a way of buying time. Even with more time, it still costed them 26 million lives.
The Second World War didn’t just happen because of the invasion of Poland, that was merely the trigger. A multitude of factors built upon each other to reach that outcome. While I believe that historical determinism should be avoided, I also think that by 1939 the war was inevitable.
Look up the [Lipetsk School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipetsk_fighter-pilot_school)
To circumvent the Treaty, the Nazis sent aviators to learn to fly planes in the Soviet Union **BEFORE** Molotov-Ribbentrop!
“In addition to the school at Lipetsk, Germany operated a tank school, the Panzerschule Kama (1926–33) and a gas warfare facility, Gas-Testgelände Tomka (1928–31) in the Soviet Union.”
This would never have happened if Great Britain had agreed to the triple alliance (GB, France, USSR) that Stalin had initially proposed.
This wasn’t an “alliance” it was a non-aggression agreement that the USSR entered as a last resort because they could not fight the Nazis alone at that time.