This May 8, we celebrate V-E Day, Victory in Europe Day, marking the Third Reich’s unconditional surrender to Allied forces. Though this day commemorates a triumph over one of the evilest regimes in history, we owe it to the people of Eastern Europe to remember that the end of Hitler’s Germany didn’t bring the end of their sorrows: The West was freed from Nazi tyranny, but the East faced another half-century of communist slavery under the Soviet boot.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin started the war as Adolf Hitler’s willing partner in war crime. Less than two weeks before the first shots of WWII were fired, Hitler and Stalin signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, agreeing not to declare war on each other and to carve up Poland together.
By this pact, the Soviet communists greenlit the most destructive conflict in history, not just by joining Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but by enabling his aggression to the West. Knowing that Soviet troops wouldn’t invade from the east due to the freshly-inked non-aggression treaty gave Hitler a free hand to point his armies to the Western Front, where they rapidly steamrolled Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, countries that were only liberated years later at great cost in brave men’s blood. The only reason Stalin eventually joined the war against Hitler is because he was forced to do so when the fuhrer backstabbed him, invading the Soviet Union in 1941.
During and after the war, the Soviets looted priceless works of art from Poland
