JVLV: THE 1945 VICTORY OVER FASCISM WAS A JOINT ENDEAVOR WITH RUSSIA! By Jiri Valenta with Leni Friedman Valenta, 5-8-15

 Why hide it?  I was disappointed.  Sadly the Washington celebration of the 70^th anniversary  victory in Europe, much less dignified  than the one  in London the same day, displayed old weaponry and battles involving not only the European theater but  the Pacific one.  Then the  Moscow one a day later  showed new weapons and elite troops, designed to strengthen the false narrative  of Russia as a fortress under the West´s siege.

 Putin was also shown in the company of such defenders of freedom as Raul Castro, Nicholas Maduro and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. But in all three capitals, the  wisdom of Winston Churchill, who understood the desperate need for a strategic alliance of the West with Russia to defeat Hitler, and who said he would make a pact with the devil to do so, was all but forgotten. 

I also recalled my aunt, Irma Stein-Suprun in occupied Bohemia where I was born.  A  petite brunette with Khazar features, she described how she and her fellow prisoners in Terezin concentration camp became alarmed at the noise of  gunfire and  tanks on May 8, 1945.   Hungry and dirty, they anticipated the worst.  Were the Nazi guards going to do what they promised so many times?  Shoot all the Jewish women ? 

Then a door opened and a big man who,  for a change smelled of vodka, not schnapps,  ran into the room followed by soldiers with helmets that bore  red stars.  Irma was, terrified – until  one reached out and  tore  the yellow Star of David off her uniform.   “This is the Red Army,” he said in Russian.  “ You will never wear this again in your life!  Hitler is dead!  Fascism is dead!” But was it?

Russia´s Double Liberation of Prague

 Surely, had Liberation not come when it did, the fanatic Nazis, who continued killing not only Jews but Mischlinges [mixed race Jews] would have eventually killed my Jewish mother, and me.   I still have a hard time comprehending Hitler’s ´s Wagnerian summer of 1944 insanity,   when he utilized some of his remaining  Aryan manpower to organize new camps rather than deploying it against the approaching allied armies.

VE day celebrates a great victory, yet within that lies a tale of self-betrayal by both America and the Soviet Union.  The city  of Prague holds a record for having been liberated twice by different Russian armies. It all began with the May 5 uprising of young people in Prague. By then the U.S. forces of general George Patton´s third army were 60 miles away in the industrial city of Pilzen; yet stalled by stand down orders not to come to the rescue of Prague.  The allied understanding was that Red Army  would liberate the Czech capital.

But on May 6 came not the Red Army but General Andrei Vlasov´s  Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia.  To my tall, handsome, Russian uncle Ivan,  this brave landsman  was the real hero of Moscow’s defense in 1941 and not Marshal Georgi Zhukov.  However, Vlasov was captured a few months thereafter by the Germans. To Stalin, capture was a crime punishable by death.  So  in a brilliant move, Vlasov persuaded Hitler, to let him raise and lead an army of Russian POW´s against the other dictator. 

 Not surprisingly Vlasov has been largely erased from Russian history, though there are reports that  Putin’s father served in his army. Nowhere in Russia will you learn that Prague was liberated and saved from the Nazis  by  his Russian POW´s  wearing German uniforms  but with an arm band containing a  St. George’s cross. In his 1943 Prague Liberation Manifesto, he also resisted the Nazi´s efforts to incorporate anti-Semitic objectives. Nor will you hear that Vlasov´s manifesto  declared the objective of  building a democratic Russia.  

On the morning of May 9^th, came the second Russian liberation, the  Red one, with liberated Terezin  inmates,  showing the way to the Russian tanks.  On their way to Prague and thereafter,  the Red Army slew not only Nazis, but many of Vlasov´s men on the spot, shipping others to Moscow   for trial.    

They also arrested uncle Ivan, who still, after 25 years, was listed in KGB files as a former White Guard who had escaped with General Pyotr Wrangel’s forces to Turkey after the lost 1920 Civil War Over some vodka, however, Ivan, still emaciated from starvation,  explained he had just been freed from long incarceration as a “White Jew” for refusing to divorce his Jewish wife. Irma showed them the  yellow star, she had kept, and  the soldiers let him live on his farm.   

Vlasov and his generals were not as lucky as Ivan.  Having escaped to the US Army in Bavaria their plea for sanctuary was rejected.  In a disgraceful act of political correctness, the American leaders returned Vlasov and his surviving men to Stalin.  Likewise were thousands of Cossacks returned from the British zone handed over to the Russians to be hanged or shot. Vlasov himself was publicly hanged on Red Square.

America and Great Britain Could Not Have Won Without Russia

No, America, like Russia,  is not perfect.  But Churchill´s wisdom surely was, as he  explained the reason for his strategic alliance with Stalinist Russia.  “If we can stand up to him (Hitler), all Europe may be freed and life of the world may move forward into broad sunlit uplands.  But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties.”

Without the Red Army, which took on the major burden of WWII  military land operations and experienced the deaths of nine million men and women in uniform  and 26 million civilians,  there is no way we would have won WWII.  The German army was simply the  best WWII fighting force. Towards the end of the war,  German engineering, much advanced, was already beginning to produce  jets, rockets and was only stopped from developing nuclear weapons by British Special Forces.  

 We were actually lucky according to some historians.   If Hitler had followed the course his  generals recommended and attacked Russia from the south instead of the west, the Nazis could have turned the Mediterranean Sea, into an Axis lake,  occupied the strategic oil fields in the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus, and won the war.  But the fuehrer  foolishly chose to over extend   logistic supply  lines from Germany through the enormous Russian  steppes  to the Caucasus.  Srategic madness!

What Vladimir Putin does not readily admit, however, is that without our support and war operations in Northern Africa, Italy and finally Normandy,  the Red Army would never have won  by itself.  Equally important, was our aid to Russia via U.S.  and British navy convoys to Murmansk.  We became not only the arsenal for democratic England, but also  totalitarian, communist Russia. Also decisive was  Bletchley Park’s deciphering the codes of the German Enigma machine.  

Islamofascist Present Danger Threatens both America and Russia

So Nazi fascism was defeated, but  now, 70 years later I am wondering is fascism really dead? Are we not facing the same danger again, as usual unwilling to see the whirlwind heading for us as Churchill did when for so long he cried in the wilderness?

Ironically, almost on  the anniversary of V-day, an aborted Jihadist attack in Texas taught us more about the threat we are facing with the new brand of Islamic fascism  now slowly metastasizing  in our homeland.  Not an army or WWII’s Nazi saboteurs sent to our shores, but  thousands of Islamists recruited via social media, now present a clear and present danger.   As we write, our country is on “Bravo” alert.   Whereas Russia is still endangered through the Jihadist threat emanating from the Caucasus, we now face the possibility of terrorists seeking to  enter America through our exposed  southern borders.

 What both the U.S. and Russia  are slowly awakening to is already known to  our allies in Europe.    Meanwhile our president does not understand that without going to the source and in Syria and Iraq, and destroying – not downgrading or containing ISIS, there can be no victory as in WWII.

Does  Putin  understand that Russia too faces the same threat? Is he yet aware  that he sooner or later, he himself will have to make a choice;  either to push for victory in the Ukraine and continue the Cold War with NATO, or prepare his country for yet another alliance with us against the Islamo-fascist threat with their growing cells in the Northern Caucasus? Does he comprehend that a Europe demoralized and finally defeated by ISIS  would eventually lead to the metastasizing of  Islamo-fascism from the Northern Caucasus to the Muslim regions of Central Russia?. 

Like the Nazis who believed themselves the master race, the Islamofascists view themselves as the master religion.  Worse yet is their apocalyptic ideology, one that  provides for their own national martyrdom while obliterating  infidels in Israel,  America, Europe,  and eventually in Russia  in pursuance of a promised paradise with virgins. 

We must not give up on Putin!

Brilliant and clever as he is, Putin is making some fundamental mistakes.  It began with his repeated unwise support for corrupted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2004. Obsessed with the notion of one large Orthodox Slavic nation originating in Kiev Rus, the Christian autocrat and follower of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is making an enemy of a former fraternal World War II ally, the Ukraine.  Unleashing ultra-nationalism his propaganda depicts the democratically elected regime in Kyiv as fascists. Cozying with Iran, he fails to recognize that the mullah´s Islamofascist theology may yet present the same threat to Russia in Central Asia, as ISIS does in the North Caucasus.

Thus,  our policies, as during the times of FDR and Churchill, should be for our countries to seek and find an understanding with each other.  Looking into the future, it is essential we recall the past.  There must never be a war between the U.S. and Russia. It would avail no one but our mutual enemies.

We must arm the Ukraine with defensive weapons until Putin finally realizes the folly of changing the  European order by invading a sovereign country that desires to choose its own destiny.  Yet  our statecraft must never give up hope for a democratic   Russia, following  the spirit for liberty of Andrei Vlasov,  Andrei Sakharov and now the late martyr, Boris Nemtsov.  Russia may yet cycle into democratic transformation as she has twice bravely attempted in recent decades.  But that is for the future.

For the present, a good beginning is for both countries   to stop minimizing  each other´s role in the WW II victory we just celebrated.  The better course of action for Obama would have been to attend the Russian celebration, reminding the Russian people directly or in some other way,  of our joint struggle and of  America as an  indispensable actor in  world politics. The President of Czech Republic and my former classmate, Milos Zeman, did so by paying his respects to  General Vlasov´s grave for his contribution to saving Prague on May 6^th from the SS Units’ onslaught.  Even more significant  was German Chancellor Angela Merkel´s rebuke of Putin´s intervention in the Ukaine, while paying homage to Russia´s WWII sacrifices.

                On June 22, 1941, when Churchill, learned Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union, he remarked, “.… The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for hearth and house is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.”  

Sooner than late, let our leaders see the light.

Copyright 2015, excerpted from memoirs  “Are You Starting a Revolution Here,” by Jiri Valenta

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