Erma's comments (member since Sep 01, 2009)

Erma's comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Ed wrote: "Nothing to really disagree with here.

I met a British historian who said that both WWI and WWII were basically Europe's equivalent of the U.S. Civil War. The big difference being that it took an ..."

Ed, I agree -- to an extent.

A huge chapter of WWII was played out on the Eastern Front. The war was won in the West, but in the Eastern bloc, there were only feelings of betrayal. The Big Three at the Yalta Conference -- Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin -- settled everything, where Stalin came out on top. Communism was not defeated.

About the conference at Yalta my father, author Theodore Odrach, wrote in a novel I'm at present translating (not yet available in English): "The hypocrsy of it all is almost too much to bear. Roosevelt and Churchill, the two biggest glorifieres of democracy and self-determination, are only contributing to our suffering under Communist dictatorship. And when all's said and done, the two Western leaders will pat themselves on the back for having won the war, but they won't be the true winners, not by a long shot. That honor will belong to Stalin."

Still today, after the fall of communism, Russia has made very little investigastion of their war crimes. For example, one has to only look at the Katyn forest massacre, where 27,000 Polish (allied) officers were found brutally murdered (it was one of the most brutal murders on human record). And have those responsible and who are still alive today been brought to justice? No, not really.

So did the U.S. really bring an end to WWII? Ask any Pole or any Eastern European.

Count wrote: "If we want to talk about continuing the same war, WWI in Western Europe, was a continuation of the Franco-Prussian War of 1869-70. The Franco-Prussian War was the first conflict to show real cracks..."


Hi Marian and Count,

I also tend to agree that WWII was a continuation of WWI, and it certainly is interesting to go back in time and see how all wars and acts of aggression are historically interrelated. As far as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact goes, it gave both Hitler and Stalin the green light to move in on western and eastern Poland respectively and at the same time.

Hi, I'm new to this group, and I agree, history is not boring.

Today, Sept. 1/09 marks the 70th anniversary of WWII. The question remains: who started WWII? Was it Hitler or was Stalin also responsible? Last July the EU and the OSCE passed a resolution stating that both Stalin and Hitler, with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that carved up Europe, were both equally to blame. As Germany moved in on the Westerplatte fortress in western Poland, just over two weeks later the Red Army launched an attack on eastern Poland. But Putin and Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, argue that Stalin's actions were "necessary", and the two are now going about setting up bodies to challenge, as Medvedev puts it, the "falsification of history".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug...

I have to admit, the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact touches a very special nerve in my system because my father, author Theodore Odrach, lived in Vilnius and later Pinsk (then both a part of eastern Poland) when Bolshevik troops moved in. For anyone interested in this part of the war, my father wrote a novel, Wave of Terror, which details the atrocities committed by the Soviets during this time. His book is set in the Pinsk Marshes in southwestern Belarus, the same location as the movie "Defiance". Though fiction, Wave of Terror is heavily based on eyewitness accounts, and according to my mother (I was a child when my father died and I hardly knew him), almost all the events and people are real. I should also add, I'm my father's translator and we're Publishers Weekly and TLS approved.
http://nitro5.goodreads.com/author/show/...

As for who started the Second World War, the debate continues. But what's indisputable here is the fact that the war gave birth to two monsters both at the same time.