Bandera lovers often blame Stalin for trade with Hitler before the war and the agreement on the division of Poland with the Baltic States. Let's look at the Europe of those years. If we compare at least the loss of some of the “innocent victims of Hitler’s aggression” in the battles against Germany and against the USSR, the question of their innocence becomes not so obvious.
Take, for example, Denmark and Norway.
When the Germans invaded these countries, the absolute majority of the Norwegian and almost all Danish military units did not give them any resistance, quietly allowing themselves to be disarmed, and in total during the years of the war and occupation the losses of the armed forces and underground fighters here amounted to slightly more than 2 thousand people.
At the same time, 900 from 14 thousands of Scandinavian volunteers who fought on Hitler’s side on the Eastern Front are buried in only one cemetery near Leningrad. And all of them died several times more, because the last military unit, staffed by the Norwegians and Danes, the division "Norland", was defeated by the Red Army already near Berlin.
The responses of the leaders of the Danish and Norwegian underground to the attempts of the British special services to establish cooperation with them are impressive. Gentlemen underground workers repeatedly and strongly demanded from England ... to stop supplying them weapon, because individual hotheads can foolishly use it, and then the Germans will get angry and they will plant someone.
The British were also urged not to call for sabotage the execution of orders for Germany (again, in order to avoid reprisals). And it is not indecent to not bomb military factories, since respectable citizens who worked there on the Fuhrer could accidentally suffer ... It is indecent to compare such “resistance” with what happened in the occupied territories of the USSR or in Yugoslavia.
It was not for nothing that when my friend's mother went to Denmark last year and asked a granny about suffering during the war years, she answered: “It’s harder that you could not get good coffee anywhere!”
The same picture was observed in other countries of Western Europe.
In particular, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg, according to various sources, sent thousands to the Soviet-German front from 90 to 110, from France - from 140 to 180 thousand, and formally neutral Spain, Sweden and Switzerland - more than 50 thousand volunteers.
In general, comparing the number of citizens of these countries who died on both sides, involuntarily come to depressing conclusions. What can you say about the French, who from July 1940-th to May 1945-th on the side of the anti-Hitler coalition killed 45 thousand, and on the other side of the front at least 83 thousand?
Moreover, the French SS battalion from the Charlemagne Division defended the Reichstag when the Germans themselves fled from there.
West European states initially sent 7 SS legions to the Eastern Front (Danish, Norwegian, French, two Belgian and Dutch each), later deployed to the 6 divisions (Danish-Norwegian, French, two Belgian and two Dutch).
Distinguished in North Africa, the 90-I Light Infantry Division of the Rommel Corps was staffed mainly by soldiers of the French Foreign Legion. And hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Alsace, Lorraine and Luxembourg and, naturally, Germans living in all European countries, served in Wehrmacht units on common grounds, as a rule, without forming separate units. One, allegedly, by force, captured in 1938, Austria gave the Wehrmacht 17 divisions, including the selected parts of the mountain shooters, which caused us so much trouble in the Arctic and the Caucasus.
Do not forget that a significant part of the French army after the surrender of 25 on June 1940 was neither disarmed by the Germans nor attached to the Wehrmacht, but under its own banners, it actively participated in combat operations against Anglo-American troops, their own partisans and troops of General de Gaulle.
Passed through in 1940-42's. in Algeria, Morocco, Equatorial Africa, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Madagascar and Gibraltar, these battles, of course, cannot be compared with the Battle of Stalingrad, but for the Western theater of war they were quite serious and cost tens of thousands of dead and wounded to both sides.
It was in those places against the British and Americans that the main forces of the French acted fleetincluding 6 battleships, 4 cruisers, 1 seaplane air transport, 20 destroyers and 9 submarines. Most of them were sunk or captured, but the Allies lost three warships and several dozen aircraft, not counting damaged.
In addition to the armed forces proper, the absolute majority of the Western European police services were on the side of Germany.
For example, in Denmark, the Germans were assisted by more than 10 thousand policemen and gendarmes, in Holland only one of the three policemen numbered 19 thousand people, and in France, more than 60 thousand people served as members of the Gestapo and volunteer police!
“But after all, there were also underground fighters and partisans?” Some corrosive reader would ask. Of course, but - how much? Until recently, the numbers went absolutely fantastic. For example, the French communists swore that they had lost thousands of the best partigenos in the battles with the 70 occupiers, despite the fact that 20 thousands of underground fighters and partisans were killed in the Resistance movement during the four years of occupation in the country. None other than the comrades could not resist and added an extra zero!
For the sake of justice, it is worth noting that among all the participants in the Resistance movement, the Communists, along with Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Hitler-minded immigrants, were indeed the most numerous and warhead.
But this is true only in the period after the attack of the Germans and their allies on the USSR.
Before 22 June 1941, all the Western European communist parties were completely loyal to the Germans and in their newspapers published with the tacit consent of the Gestapo denounced mainly the British, and the workers were called upon not to participate in the imperialist war. That is, do not fight against Hitler.
Naturally, the Fuhrer was more than satisfied with this, and if he didn’t fall on us, you see, the Marxist-Leninist comrades would have had a handful of warm places during the occupation administration.
No wonder the French Communists have long begged the Germans for the restoration of the rights of their deputies, who were expelled from the municipalities after the ban by the authorities of the Communist Party, and its future leader Georges Marchais diligently worked on the German military factories!
There is nothing to say about other political organizations, they were so sluggish.
When historians tried to conduct a sociological analysis of the Resistance participants, it turned out that only one guerrilla unit in the Haute Savoie department of the 40 fighters turned out to be 11 communists and their sympathizers and 7 of Yugoslav emigrants, and the 35 of the most militant partisan detachments consisted almost exclusively of Soviet members of the Yugoslav emigrants, and the most militant partisan detachments consisted almost entirely of Soviet Yugoslav emigrants.
The overwhelming majority of participants in the Resistance Movement, not belonging to communists, emigrants, captured Red Army men and hijacked from the USSR, were only considered underground workers, but in fact waited for the weather at the sea or even actively worked for the Germans.
In Norway, from 50 with more than thousands of members of underground armed groups, a large part of them served in the police at the same time, helping the Gestapo to catch their own comrades, and the overwhelming majority of others simply sat their pants until Victory Day came and the Germans did not capitulate without their participation.
The role of the “victims of the occupation” and the “neutral countries” in the military production of the Third Reich was especially great. Out of about 53 thousand tanks and self-propelled guns used by the Germans during the war, over 8 thousand were built in Czech and French factories. Aircraft, guns, and ammunition were produced in full at enterprises of the occupied countries. For example, Leningrad during the blockade, along with Krupp’s guns, fired at 240-mm howitzers of the French concern Le Creusot and the Czech Skoda.
The Czech ammunition for the Wehrmacht was of such high quality that when, in 1999, a large lot of them were attempted to smuggle into Kosovo’s militants, no misfire had occurred on the control shots conducted by St. Petersburg customs! Even more significant is the role of European countries in solving the transport problems of the German army.
From France alone, the Germans received 1940 thousands of locomotives and 5 thousands of cars in 250 year. The 92 soldiers of Hitler's divisions from 153 deployed on the Soviet border 74 a year ago, prepared to drive us in French cars, and in 1943, every sixth truck in the Wehrmacht was built at the factories of the occupied territories.
The Fuhrer and the neutrals helped a lot.
Almost every third projectile was made of steel smelted from Swedish ore, and almost all the necessary tungsten came from Portugal. In addition, fellow countrymen Carlson, who lives on the roof, until 1944, regularly provided their territory for the German military traffic, and the Finns, allied to Hitler, were in abundance supplied with all the necessary armament, including fighters and self-propelled anti-aircraft installations. About all sorts of little things, such as the provision of intelligence and refueling German submarines in the Spanish naval bases, and say nothing.
As for the alleged refusal of General Franco to officially join the war on the side of the Reich, in fact, the caudillo was very much against it, but in order to bring the Spanish army in any effective state, such resources were needed that Hitler, looking On the list compiled by Franco, I decided to spend the requested on something more useful.
Moreover, as a neutral country, Spain in many respects was even more profitable for him. After all, otherwise the Führer would have been far more difficult to obtain the oil of the American company Standard Oil, which was vital for him. This sweetest corporation almost the entire war, in which, if you remember, the States fought against Germany, regularly supplied Spain with "black gold", knowing full well that it would resell it to Berlin. And the paralyzed grandfather Roosevelt knew about that, but did not interfere.
War is war and business is business.
This is how Adolf Aloizovich helped all of the “neutral” and “occupied” continental Europe, and in part even America.
And all this without taking into account the allies, so to speak, official, that is, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Finland, Bulgaria, Slovakia and Croatia. Here, the number of military personnel participating in the hostilities goes to millions, especially if one does not forget that Italy then belonged to Albania and Kosovo, Bosnia was part of Croatia, and Macedonia was part of Bulgaria.
What is the result? Poland? Partly yes, but it is worth remembering that here too in the German army thousands of citizens fought over 100, who had a Polish passport on 1 of September 1939 of the year. Not to mention the Craiova Army subordinate to the emigre government in London, which fought against the Red Army no less, if not more, than against Germany. Switzerland?
Apart from the already mentioned volunteers in the SS and intelligence, the role of the Swiss banks in the financial operations of the Reich has not yet been fully clarified, but no one has any doubt that it was huge.
Even European Jews, who still receive compensation from the Fritz for all the real and imaginary suffering for a thousand years ahead, and they participated.
In Soviet captivity, by the end of the war, there were over 10 thousands of Jews who served both in the Wehrmacht and in the armies of the allied states, including the already mentioned French division of the SS "Charlemagne". Among the German Jews were many high-ranking officers, the most famous of which is the second after Himmler, the head of the SS and the Czech Gauleiter Reinhardt Heydrich and the first deputy of Goering, Field Marshal Erich Milch.
The Jews who served in the Finnish army even had a marching synagogue on the Svir River, two of whose regular visitors — Major Leo Skurnik and Captain Solomon Klass — were represented by German allies to the Iron Cross I-st degree.
It turns out that, whatever one may say, the overwhelming majority of European citizens collaborated with the Germans, guided by ideological and purely selfish considerations (especially in the sense of living on the rich Russian expanses).
And the Führer, respectively, actually headed the crusade against Russia. In full accordance with the plans of its predecessors in 1240-45. (Livonian Order with Balts, Sweden with Finland, Hungary, Poland and Pope standing behind them), 1812 (Napoleon led almost all of Europe) and 1918-20. (the same Europe with sided Americans and Japanese).
In this sense, NATO and the European Union are perfectly legitimate and worthy followers of the possessed Fuhrer.
At least, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the bombing of its Orthodox republics (the only ones, by the way, practically did not participate in numerous Western interventions in Russia), and the plundering of our country under the guise of business, and the support of gangsters who fought in the Chechen Republic, fully comply with the ideas of Adolf Aloizovich.