By analyzing some archive photos we can be certain that the real day of the German surrender was not May 9, 1945, as it is celebrated with great military pomp but with little historical accuracy in Russia: the real date is another.
In the photo reproduced here you can see the ceremony of the signing of the German surrender made by Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the German General Staff under the command of Admiral Karl Dönitz, depicted while signing the document of “unconditional surrender,” which obliged all the remaining forces of the German army to lay down their arms. The scene takes place in the War Room of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, in Reims, France. To the left of Major General Jodl is Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg of the German Navy, and to his right Major Wilhelm Oxenius of the German General Staff. Behind Admiral von Friedeburg is Major General Kenneth Strong, Director General of British Intelligence.
Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the German Supreme Command, signed the surrender agreement with the Allied forces on the night, or I should say the morning of May 7, 1945 at 02:41. The surrender was valid because it was countersigned by General Ivan Alekseevič Susloparov (pictured top left) who served as Military Liaison Mission Commander, on behalf of the Soviet High Command, who however later did not recognize it on Mr. Stalin’s orders. The capitulation nevertheless came into effect on May 8, 1945 because a 24-hour grace period was granted to communicate the information to the combat units on the ground.
However, as said, Mr. Stalin did not accept that the German surrender had taken place in France at the Allied headquarters because he wanted Germany to capitulate in a territory under Russian control to underline their contribution and he gave the pretext that the signing of the surrender should take place in Berlin where the decision to unleash the war had been taken. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, always accommodating with the Russians, if not weak, as almost all the representatives of the United States were with the Soviets (only to regret it too late), agreed to repeat the “farce” of the signature with a new text demanded by the Russians that in addition to the surrender imposed, ad abundantiam, the disarmament of the German units that was to be considered implicit. So the ceremony of the capitulation was repeated on May 9 in Berlin. But it was a scene repeated for the internal amusement of the Soviet dictator.
In essence, the Russian claim to impose a specific date of their own for the German capitulation is part of the overall propaganda plan specifically designed to erase and make people forget the Russian-Soviet responsibilities for the previous alliance with Nazi Germany and the start of the Second World War. This plan, in addition to changing the date of the capitulation, includes renaming the conflict as the Great Patriotic War and silencing the great economic and logistical contribution provided to Soviet Russia by the allies. All this in order to induce the Russian people to believe that the only ones who defeated the Germans were the Russians, and only them, following their conquest of the German capital, and that, if anything, the Allied intervention was marginal. Which is what the Russians still believe.
On the contrary, it was the allies, in particular the United States and Canada, who allowed Soviet Russia to resist Germany when on June 22, 1941 Mr. Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded it. With the “Lend-Lease” program, the United States made available to the allies a total of 50.1 billion dollars (equivalent to 672 billion dollars today). Most of it, that is, 31.4 billion dollars, went to Great Britain, but a good 11.3 billion dollars (equivalent to 152 billion dollars today) went to Soviet Russia. The United States not only provided this aid in the form of monetary loans, but also eventually sent weapons systems, tanks, cannons and ammunition to the exhausted and unprepared Russia, unable to react because it lacked everything, especially weapons, which allowed it to react with its own forces and begin military construction beyond the Ural mountains, without which the Germans would have annihilated it. A similar program, of a smaller scale, was also launched by Canada. The result was the Russian counterattack, the opening of the double front and the capitulation of Germany at Reims on May 8, 1945.
Unfortunately, all this is completely unknown to the average Russian citizen. The Federation lives in a large bubble of mystification inherited from the Soviet regime and perpetuated in an even more subtle way by the Putinian dictature.
The Russians are driven by regime propaganda to believe that they are the largest, most powerful, invincible and successful country in the world. And often many of us are led to believe this thanks to their effective systematic falsehood machine, which has always had easy and blind supporters among us, and also to a residue of ideological subordination inherited from the Cold War period. However, if all these people were to put their feet on the ground and analyze the data objectively, they could realize a very different reality.
The Muscovite Russians, although concentrated mainly in the western part of the Russian Federation, through their ethnic dominance undoubtedly control an immense territory, the largest among the countries on earth, belonging to almost two hundred different nationalities and ethnic groups united in a federation. There is no discussion. This objective fact, however, is the only supremacy that Russia holds, which however does not authorize us to believe that, by similarity, it holds other supremacies, of a concrete or abstract nature. As if, faced with the body of a large and fat human being, one would take it for granted that, by force of circumstances, his brain would also be figuratively great like that of a Michelangelo Buonarroti, a Pico della Mirandola or a Niccolò Machiavelli. Each of Russia’s qualities and characteristics, taken individually, can, indeed, must be considered and evaluated to establish whether this country is truly the most powerful, invincible and successful in the world. So let’s analyze them one by one.
Does Russia have the largest population among the countries in the world? No. It has 144 million, that is, less than the United States and less than the European Union. Can we compare it to the combined population of Germany and France put together? Sure, but it would still be inferior, that is, 144 against 151 million.
Does Russia have the largest economy in the world? No. Could its economy before the invasion of Ukraine, when the data were less manipulated, be compared to that of a single EU country, for example Spain? Sure, their economies would be more or less equal, but the Russian one would still be inferior to that of other Western countries taken individually, for example Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Germany. Not to mention the United States.
Does Russia have a great variety of industries? No. It only has a huge military sector, especially steel, but lacking many components from abroad and a great assortment and abundance of raw materials. Furthermore, in the main cities before the war there was a thriving construction industry belonging to international groups and mainly intended for the upper levels of the urban population, while in the small towns and in the countryside the buildings were and are mainly those from the Soviet era, devoid of many comforts (40% of the population does not have running water and toilets at home. Yes, in the countryside they still have pit latrines today). Finally, there is no industrial fabric of production and transformation, varied and interconnected. For example, does Russia have a national automobile industry of world fame? No: Russian factory workers are limited to assembling vehicle parts of vehicles designed and produced elsewhere. The majority of cars circulating in Russia before the war were produced in the West, today due to a lack of spare parts the existing ones are cannibalized or are Chinese. Is there a Russian Ferrari? No. A Russian Lamborghini, a Maserati, a Lotus, a Rolls Royce, a Mercedes, a BMV? No. Perhaps the oligarchs and the Russian “nomenclature” can afford to buy these models, as users, thanks to the huge profits obtained through the endemic corruption that reigns in that country, but these cars, whatever Putin’s propaganda says, are not produced in Russia.
As for IT, does Russia have a national personal computer industry? No. The ones that circulated in Russia before the invasion were Western, now they are Chinese: and in any case they are not produced in Russia. The same goes for mobile phones: is there a Russian-branded cell phone factory in Russia? No. They are imported from China, perhaps they are assembled in Russia, like computers, appliances, furniture, but they are neither designed nor produced in Russia.
Let’s come to the war industry, the jewel in Russia’s crown, from Stalin to Putin. The common Russian thinks he lives in a great and invincible country because Russia has a large arsenal of nuclear bombs and that Western countries should respect and fear Russia just for this. It is a foolish belief that the Russian ministry of propaganda, like the minculpop(ministery of popular culture) that reminds us of fascism, has instilled in its citizens since childhood, duping them to believe they are superior to all other nations when they are not. Having a large nuclear arsenal does not mean being greatly powerful if you know for sure that you cannot use it. And such an arsenal cannot be used for a simple reason: the undisputed awareness that, if ever it were to be used, it would be the object of such a counter response as to destroy the entire country that we deluded ourselves into preserving and making win, and through a chain reaction triggered by our own attack, also destroy the rest of the planet causing its death. Spokesmen of “democratorships” like the Russian one are accustomed to using the weapon of verbal terrorism like frightened dogs that bark, bark, bark to keep a possible attacker at bay but who, by barking, certify their own weakness, and therefore never attack. Nuclear weapons, while having their validity in a logic of cross-deterrence, have little intimidating power because all the actors are well aware of their unlikely use as an offensive weapon. In fact, if they were sufficient to guarantee the capacity for conquest as well as immunity from attack, why do the Russians – like the others – in parallel maintain such a large conventional army? The answer is that the nuclear arsenal is of little use in a period of conventional opposition, if not to terrorize the unwary of all political colors, especially rainbow ones, mostly belonging to countries that do not have them: what is needed is a conventional army and all the weapons systems of modern defense.
A separate chapter should be written about the conventional weapons systems that we all believed to be highly efficient, before the war in Iraq, where the Abrams and Bradley tanks literally annihilated the Russian T70s (T70 means tank designed in the 70s years). In Ukraine we obtained confirmation, and there were still nothing there but the usual old T70s and a few T90s. A debacle broadcast worldwide: the war that was supposed to be a showcase for the Russian war industry turned out to be a fiasco that brought the 60 customers who bought Russian tanks before the war to 30, and now to 14. We will do a more in-depth study on this topic in the future.
Another Russian obsession is called “Russophobia,” that is, the deep-seated hatred that citizens of Western countries, according to the Russian minculpop, have for Russians and everything related to that nation, and for this reason Russians never miss an opportunity to complain about it in a childish way on their talk shows, having this falsehood corroborated by experts, sociologists, generals, and even some Western “useful idiot”, now obsolete, unheard or failed in his homeland, but well subsidized by that regime. No. Westerners have nothing against Russia, they appreciate its fine arts, culture, writers, classical music, but they do not like the hypocritical sense of superiority and contempt that Russians feel towards the entire Western world, when they simply have no reason to believe they are superior.
All this because the Russian regime has taught them to think in this way, through a systematic demolition and reconstruction of history and current reality but in a distorted way. Russian citizens have done nothing but assume, digest and metabolize false news, throughout their lives and react in two ways: knowing that only falsehoods come from that pulpit, they simply ignore newspapers and TV news, and especially avoid politics by abstaining from elections which they well know are less than a farce. If instead they are completely zombified, taking the news as absolute truths and there is no way to convince them even in the face of evidence.
Historically, Russia has always been a country led by a severe autocracy, used to exercising strong oppression towards its own people and those of neighboring countries. When General Winter defeated the army of Emperor Napoleon, Russia was no less imperialist than France. Mr. Hitler’s Germany that dreamed of world supremacy was defeated by the Western allies and by Mr. Stalin’s Russia, who was no less affected than Mr. Hitler by the disease of world-hegemony. After all, both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were allies in this plan for two years, from mid-1939 to mid-1941, during which time they invaded and divided Poland. When Nazi Germany attacked Russia in 1941, it was thanks to the enormous aid provided by the United States through the “Lend-Lease” program that Russia was able to defend itself. Russia cannot be proud of having been an ally of Nazi Germany against Western countries for a third of the duration of the Second World War and then having contributed to the defeat of Germany during the other two-thirds of the war together with those same Western countries whose enemy it had been.
When the Russian Federation celebrates the Great Patriotic War, which part of that war does it celebrate? The third in which it was an ally of Mr. Hitler or the two-thirds in which the allies pardoned Russia and provided it with the indispensable weapons and military equipment without which Russia could not have defeated Mr. Hitler?
