You said “exactly two sources for this horseshit claim: Nazi propaganda and Vladimir Rezun” then I listed more than TEN respected sources. Sorry, why not just admit you were wrong rather than name calling?
Ah, you somehow forgot to quote the rest of your own cite::dubious:
*When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 during the course of Operation Barbarossa, most of the line was not yet finished, and hence posed a negligible obstacle to the invading forces
*
It was a “line”- a line on a map. Nothing but a few unfinished and useless concrete bunkers.
An area I haven’t seen much on is Soviet activities in support of Hitler prior to the invasion of June 1941. Remember, they were at least associates if not formal allies following the “non-agression” pact of 1939.
Techincal aid was supplied by the Nazis to the Soviets, and a great deal of economic resources passed in the opposite direction. Details would be nice.
I would expect that Communist agents were providing information to Moscow, but how much of it and which specific items was Stalin was turinng over to Hitler, and to what effect?
I have heard there were varous labor strikes and acts of sabotage attributed to Communists in the UK (and France, prior to its occupation) during ths time frame. More details would be enlightening.
While spies and traitors working in Hitler’s interests seem to have been fairly ameturish and easily compromised, the Communist ones aparently were much better at their game; note the rise of the Cambridge spiies and the agents (some in very high positions) within the American government and defense establishment whose activities were not detected until much later. Had the Hitler-Stalin cooperation held, the damage they might have done is almost inconcievable.
We know now about the western allies and Enigma. I would suspect that the Soviets made some effort to either break the codes mathematically or steal the codebooks and/or code machines --it’s only natural that they would at least think of doing this. Additionally, I would expect that at various points, the Soviets also captured code books, code machines, and cypher operators on the extensive battlefields of the eastern front. But if they did (as I tend to believe), we have as yet heard nothing of it or what benefits might were gained.
Because none of your ten “sources” are backing the claim that Stalin was about to attack Germany with any evidence whatsoever or for that matter are foolish enough to directly make that claim. The only two sources who make that horseshit claim, and back it with equally horseshit evidence, are Nazi propaganda and Vladimir Rezun.
Yet again, wow. You seem to have completely forgotten the patently absurd claim by Rezun that you are trying to defend: “Stalin had made no major defensive preparations.” The line was hardly in your words “a few unfinished and useless concrete bunkers”. It was a major defensive line that was going to take to time to compete; it replaced the Stalin Line on the pre-1939 border. That Stalin in fact ordered the construction of such a massive defensive line is hardly evidence of intent to launch an attack on Germany in 1941. For your edification the term “Molotov Line” was actually popularized by none other than Rezun himself in Icebreaker while he, like you, tried to deny or trivialize its existence.
Here’s the scale of your “a few unfinished and useless concrete bunkers”:
[ul]
[li]1. Telšiai fortified region (line from Palanga to Judrėnai, 75 kilometers, 8 centers of resistance, 23 bunkers built and 366 under construction on June 22, 1941).[/li][li]2. Šiauliai fortified region (line from Pajūris to Jurbarkas, 90 kilometers, 6 centers of resistance, 27 bunkers built and 403 under construction).[/li][li]3. Kaunas fortified region (line from Jurbarkas to Kalvarija, 105 kilometers, 10 centers of resistance, 31 bunkers built and 599 under construction).[/li][li]4. Alytus fortified region (line from Kalvarija to border of Lithuanian SSR, 57 kilometers, 5 centers of resistance, 20 bunkers built and 273 under construction).[/li][li]5. Grodno fortified region – 80 km, 9 centers of resistance, 42/98/606 bunkers operational/built/under construction on June 22, 1941 (in Belarus and Poland)[/li][li]6. Osowiec fortified region – 60 km, 8 centers of resistance, 35/59/594 (in Poland)[/li][li]7. Zambrów fortified region – 70 km, 10 centers of resistance, 30/53/550 (in Poland)[/li][li]8. Brest fortified region – 120 km, 10 centers of resistance, 49/128/380 (in Poland and Belarus)[/li][li]9. Kovel fortified region – 80 km, 9 centers of resistance, 138 bunkers under construction (in Ukraine)[/li][li]10. Volodymyr-Volyns’kyi fortified region – 60 km, 7 centers of resistance, 97/97/141 (in Ukraine)[/li][li]11. Kamyanka-Buzka (Kamionka Strumiłowa) fortified region – 45 km, 5 centers of resistance, 84/84/180 (in Ukraine)[/li][li]12. Rawa Ruska fortified region – 90 km, 13 centers of resistance, 95/95/306 (in Poland and Ukraine)[/li][li]13. Przemyśl fortified region – 120 km, 9 centers of resistance, 99/99/186 over 140 bunkers were built (in Poland and Ukraine)[/li][/ul]
So much for “Stalin had made no major defensive preparations.”
Along the same lines, Stalin’s apparent imperviousness to the massive evidence of the impending Nazi invasion - despite plenty of warnings from spies and the like - has never really been adequately explained, other than by ‘he dismissed it all as disinformation put out by the Allies’. One wonders if there is more to the story than his wooden-headedness.
I’d actually argue that, far from a new revelation, this is instead even an instance where popular culture has overemphasised this aspect in the last 40 years.
For Frederick Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret, the book that essentially broke the secret in 1974, originated the story that Coventry had been sacrificed to the Luftwaffe in order to protect the secret in the cause of the greater good, a claim now comprehensively rejected by historians. But the basic trope has pretty much universally persisted in other forms in fictional accounts of Enigma ever since. The implied paradox is just too attractive for writers to pass up.
It isn’t that the secret didn’t have to be protected at all cost and that this influenced how the information was used. But the typical ploy was to create some “accidental” explanation to the Germans for why the Allies knew what they did: e.g. the reconnaissance aircraft that “happened” to overfly the U-boat and so located it.
I wouldn’t rule out that it never happened that someone took the decision that a specific group of Allied servicemen or civilians had to die in order to preserve the secret, but it wasn’t the norm and was possibly even vanishingly rare.
It was so unbelievable-the German navy had supplied a cruiser to the Russians-it was undergoing repairs in Leningrad (Kronstadt)-all the German engineers and technicians LEFT one day!
From what I read, Stalin thought that the Germans would try to provoke war via an “incident”-but he was blind to all the German military activity in Poland. You cannot assemble 3.2 million soldiers, armor, and trucks without arousing some suspicion.
On a related note, this was how the myth about carrots being so good for your eyesight originated.
During the war, the Germans were sending aircraft to bomb Britain and the British were sending up their aircraft to intercept them. And there were some comments about how the British were doing such a good job at spotting the Germans so quickly.
So the British government released this official scientific report which explained this was an unexpected side-benefit of the wartime food rationing system. Because of rationing, people were eating a lot more carrots and the scientists had found out that carrots improved your eyesight. People were able to spot aircraft at great distances, even at night, because of the beneficial effects of the carrots they had eaten. And ever since people have known that carrots give you superior eyesight.
It was, in fact, complete bullshit. The reason the British were so good at spotting incoming German aircraft had nothing to do with carrots or good eyesight. It was because they had radar stations. The British didn’t want the Germans to figure out how good the British radar was because they would then start bombing the radar stations. So they made up the carrot story to divert attention from the radar network.
I had thought they used the code name “carrots” for RADAR because carrots improved one’s vision, but that would be a pretty stupid code name, wouldn’t it?
Only recently have Americans who were POW’s in Switzerland, actually recognized as that - prisoners of war. LINK
Thing is in WW2 Switzerland was neutral but on occasion allied aircrew would get shot down or crash over Swiss territory and the Swiss would intern them. But since they were not in enemy territory they were not considered POW’s. The men were sometimes kept in good locations, some not. Also their planes were on occasion handed over to the Germans especially if they were in a German-Swiss area.
Another factor. The allies were afraid that many aircrews, to escape and sit out the war in luxury, might on purpose land their planes in Switzerland and indeed, there were some cases where crews landed with planes claiming a mechanical malfunction when their wasnt or were even caught loading suitcases onto the planes.
Though there is the counterargument that Whitehall was just keen on encouraging people to grow carrots (rationing and all that).
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything definitive either way - granted that nobody now thinks that carrots were helping the nightfighters in any direct manner.
I heard a story third-hand (via my grandfather, a European theater USAAF combat vet himself) of a friend of his who had been a Marine during the war, and apparently these guys had the head of some Japanese guy they’d killed, and every morning, they’d get up and piss on the head before taking their place in the line or whatever. He told me the story by way of explaining that what he’d done in the war was more impersonal than that; they got up, flew missions, and shot at other airplanes, but it wasn’t personal, so to speak.
That’s hilarious. Are we really supposed to believe that the British Secret Service was worried about what secrets Hess might reveal - in 1987? What, was he waiting for his 100th birthday to tell all?
There doesn’t seem to be any of it available online, but you might be interested in giving Barton Whaley’s Codeword: Barbarossa a read if you can find it at your local library. Whaley wrote, researched and taught extensively on military-political deception studies and theories. He presents the massive amount of information and warnings of the impending German invasion coming from all sources - his own intelligence services, neutral parties, and the West - as well as disinformation being fed by German intelligence services and his conclusion is that Stalin was convinced that Hitler intended to demand concessions of some sort from the USSR in the summer of 1941 and viewed everything through this prism.
There was a New Yorker cartoon years ago - can’t find it online - in which one professor at a faculty party cheerily says to another, who glares at him, “I hear the revisionists are hot on your tail, Frank!”
