by Vincent Traina

Created on: June 12, 2008   Last Updated: August 07, 2011

There's hardly any topic among twentieth century history that is more misunderstood among the masses than the most devastating, destructive, and genocidal conflict in human history, the Second World War. Many military and diplomatic documents have still not been declassified by the victors who won the war. But more than that, there is a depressingly high degree of ignorance concerning simple, yet no less pertinent, facts in regards to world events surrounding the period before, during, and after the years 1939 through 1945. For now, let's focus on Europe and the United States while trying to be as specific and as clear as possible.

It has been said by many that the first casualty in any war is the truth. Over sixty years after Admiral Donitz of the German Navy signed the official unconditional terms of surrender, there are still atrociously dishonest lies of commission and omission, even among so-called scholars and historians, when writing about or talking about what renowned British historian Norman Davies aptly referred to as Europe in Torment. A very illustrative example of a significant truth often neglected by educators, think-tanks, and the intelligentsia is the Soviet Union's holocaust against the Ukrainian nation from 1933 to 1934. At least seven million Ukrainian and Russian farmers were deliberately being starved to death at a time when the major Western newspapers completely ignored the Soviet crimes against humanity and in many notable cases, (such as Pulitzer Prize winning NY Times reporter Walter Duranty's denial of the Soviet-engineered famine), actually covered up the Soviet Union's extermination of millions of people. It should be remembered that the New York Times is owned by the same family now as it was in the 1930s, the Sulzberger family.

Everyone has heard about the German invasion of Polish territory in September of 1939 in order to get back the historically German city of Danzig and the so-called "Polish Corridor," which connected East Prussia with the rest of Germany. Far fewer, however, are knowledgeable of the Soviet Union's invasion of the other three-fifths of Poland only two and a half weeks after. As Western Europe was exhausting itself in a war against a Germany whose imperial aims lied entirely in the east, Stalin used this extra time not only to step up the production of tanks and planes (all designed for a war of offense as evidenced by their design), but also by annexing the three Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• Next Page >>