Victory Day 1945: The Fall of Berlin and the Defeat of Nazi Germany in Second World War
Prabir Purkayastha
THE fall of Berlin on May 8th/9th in the Second World War is widely celebrated as the Victory Day as it heralded the defeat of Nazi Germany. Though the World War in the Pacific, East Asia and South East Asia continued for another four months, it was only an attempt by Japan to secure better terms of surrender, particularly for its “God” Emperor. As various historians have shown, the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not the end of Second World War, but the start of the Cold War against Soviet Union. However, the west has rewritten this history, and most people today are unaware of even the basic facts of that war. The people have forgotten that the Second World War was primarily a land war between the Soviet Union and Germany. The number of people killed on both sides – the Soviet Union and Germany – the tanks and aircraft deployed and destroyed was overwhelmingly on the Eastern Front, and it was fought primarily within the Soviet Union.
Unlike any other war, this war was also a “war of factories”: the production of tanks, aircraft, artillery, arms, and ammunition, along with the number of soldiers, decided the fate of this War. It was in this war that the Soviet Union, which transformed itself from a largely peasant society to an industrial one, outperformed Germany, as it was able to raise its levels of production well beyond Germany with the progression of the war.
THE PROPAGANDA WAR
AND HISTORICAL MEMORY
While the generation that saw the war knew who had contributed most and paid an enormous price in Second World War, slowly, this has been erased from public memory. It is this erasure that allows Germany today to ban all Russian symbols and bars any Russian representation in the celebration of Victory Day in Berlin. Even in France, which was occupied by Germany virtually till the end of the war, the view on which country contributed the most to the defeat of Germany has flipped from the Soviet Union to the USA, a victory of propaganda over memory. The graphic that shows the result of a poll taken in 1945 and then again in 1994, 2004 and 2015 shows how the memory of the Second World War has been reworked in the new post-truth world, where Hollywood (and now social media) rewrites history!
To conclude this part, I quote below the historian Richard Overy, who, in his book Why the Allies Won, writes:
If the defeat of the German army was the central strategic task, the main theatre for it was the conflict on the eastern front. The German army was first weakened there and then driven back before the main weight of Allied ground and air forces was brought to bear in 1944. Over four hundred German and Soviet divisions fought along a front of more than 1,000 miles. Soviet forces destroyed or disabled an estimated 607 Axis divisions between 1941 and 1945. The scale and geographical extent of the eastern front dwarfed all earlier warfare. Losses on both sides far exceeded losses anywhere else in the military contest. The war in the east was fought with a ferocity almost unknown on the western fronts.
GEOGRAPHY OF
SECOND WORLD WAR
While the war in Europe was largely between Germany and the Soviet Union, the war in the east was again largely a war between Japan and China. It started with Japan attacking China in 1933 before the war between Germany and the Allies started. It merged into the Second World War with Japan’s attack on French Indochina in September 1940, when Japan joined the Axis powers. Operation Barbarossa was launched by Germany against the Soviet Union in June 1941, drawing the Soviet Union into the war. Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, the US naval base in the Pacific in December 1941, brought the USA into the war, in which it had stayed neutral till then.
If we take casualties in the Second World War, it was overwhelmingly the Soviet Union and China which bore the brunt of the war. USSR suffered the biggest losses in Europe and China in Asia. The Soviet Union lost about 27 million, with 8-9 million dying due to famine caused by the German occupation of its western provinces and the Nazi racist ideology that the Slavic population, like the Jewish population, also needed to be “cleansed”. China lost about 20 million, including about 4 million soldiers (counting from 1933 when the Sino-Japanese War started). Germany lost over 5 million, and Japan lost about 3 million, including civilians. In Asia – China, Southeast Asia and India – famines caused by the colonial powers hoarding food and Japan’s brutal occupation took a toll of 7-10 million, with 3 million in Bengal alone – what Madhushree Mukherjee termed as Churchill’s famine. Compared to these numbers, the casualties of the UK, the USA and France were all well below half a million.
Here, I will focus mainly, on the European theatre of the War and leave out Asia, Japan and the Pacific islands from this account. Germany’s fall effectively sealed the victory of the Allied powers over Axis powers, and Japan’s surrender was only a matter of time. The US use of the two atom bombs on Japan and its surrender is another story, but by then it was clear to everyone including the Japanese that they had lost the war.
WAR OF FACTORIES
Unlike the First World War, the Second World War was not about just armies. It was also about who could produce how much equipment: arms, ammunition, guns, tanks and aircraft. It was about the productive forces of a society harnessed to the war. In 1917, when the October Revolution took place, the Soviet Union was overwhelmingly an agrarian society. It had started industrialising by 1927 and the launching of its First Five-Year Plan. The Soviet leadership knew the western powers’ – particularly the UK and France’s – hostility towards the October Revolution. They had sent armed support for the White Russian forces, attacking the fledgling Soviet state. Winston Churchill was the First Lord of Admiralty and was also instrumental in the use of poison gas against the Red Army. They were fully aware that in the case of war, they would have to face the brunt of the war virtually on their own.
At the beginning of the war and Germany’s attack on Russia in 1941, it was still behind the Germans in the production of tanks, artillery, transport, and aircraft, which were the key elements of the war. But as the war progressed, the Soviet Union consistently outproduced Germany in all of these areas, in spite of having to shift its factories from the west – currently Ukraine and Moscow region – to the east of Urals and beyond to Kazakhstan and Siberia, a distance of more than 1,000 kilometres. Nearly sixteen million Soviet civilians and over 1,500 large factories were moved to areas in the middle or eastern part of the country by the end of 1941. If we consider smaller factories and workshops, the numbers would be closer to 50,000. Not only the scale but also the speed with which it was done was astonishing. Zaporozhstal’s steel plant equipment was dismantled in a scant 20 days, and its skilled workers began production in a matter of months. The plants were reassembled almost as fast as they had been dismantled and began production shortly after. Though it took some time for their production to reach the level that they had before their relocation, by the second half of 1942 and 1943, the Soviet Union consistently outproduced Germany in the number of tanks, aircraft and artillery, the key elements in the war.
The US, being outside the immediate land war, supported both the British and Soviet Union’s war efforts. Without this support, Germany might have lasted the war for even longer than it did. However, there is no question that the Soviet Union played the most decisive role in the war. This is clear from the record of casualties, the size of the Soviet Army, and the production of arms and equipment during the war.
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS AND
THE US COMPLICITY
While prominent Nazi figures faced the Nuremberg trials, a whole host of others, including Reinhard Gehlen, the head of Germany’s spy operations against the Soviet Union during the Second World War, were instead recruited by the United States. Gehlen and his entire intelligence network in Eastern Europe were incorporated into the US efforts during the emerging Cold War against the Soviet Union. While both the USA and the USSR benefited from the rocketry and missile development knowledge that Germany had developed after the fall of Germany, what is less known is the US protection of the Japanese Unit 731, which developed and used biological weapons against the Chinese soldiers and population. The US not only protected these war crimes but also transferred the key “actors” with their entire records of their experiments to the US. There is enough evidence that the US used these weapons against the Koreans and the Chinese soldiers in the Korean War. The Second World War had now morphed into the new Cold War against the Soviet Union.
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