It is hard to understand how, in so many countries, it has been possible to twist and manipulate the Soviet participation in World War II. Given that the essential role of the Red Army in the war can’t be denied, it is admitted but adding as many layers of doubt and distance as possible, using puerile arguments such as that it was the cold that defeated the Nazis in Russian territory, as if German soldiers came from a tropical country. When talking about the arrival of the Red Army to Berlin, press articles often talk of the damage to civilians or the raping of German women by Soviet soldiers. But if we talk about D-Day and the landings in Normandy, no Western journalist would dare to tarnish the glory of the operation by mentioning US and British bombings against French civilians in the previous weeks and afterwards, which left dozens of thousands of civilians dead, much less the French women raped by US troops in the weeks after the landings. (See 05:00-06:20)
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While journalistic articles on WWII never fail to mention the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, always presented as a ‘carte blanche’ given by the Soviet Union to Hitler to start the conflict, the Munich Pact is never mentioned. In 1938, France and the United Kingdom signed an agreement allowing Hitler to annex almost 30 percent of Czechoslovakian territory, opening the expansionist appetite of the Third Reich. Months later, France and Germany signed a non-aggression agreement that cancelled the mutual assistance pact signed by Moscow and Paris three years before to stop Hitler’s expansionist ambitions. In August 1939, France and UK rejected a proposal for a triple alliance offered by the Soviets to contain Hitler. One week later, and only then, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed the agreement that now is presented as the only one. (See 06:40-08:20)