The Foundation as now sent seven emails regarding the 80^th anniversary of the ending of World War II.  Our emphasis has been on reporting facts in contrast to the blatant, self-serving propaganda served up by the Kremlin regarding the war and the Allied Victory.

Today we present the final email in this series discussing both the Soviet Union’s secret assistance to Nazi Germany in preparation for the war, the Soviet Union’s incompetence in its own preparation to initiate war, and the decisive role of the United States providing critical aid to the Soviet Union, aid without which contemporary Soviet leaders – including Stalin – said there would have been no Soviet victory.

Victory in Europe Day – 2025

(VE Day)

Eighty years ago, this week on May 8, 1945, the Allied Powers in World War II achieved final victory over the Nazi German Third Reich.  Of the three main Axis Powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan), Italy had been forced to surrender to the Allies in September 1943 and then declared war against Germany in October 1943.  Japan would fight on in the Pacific theater for another three months before surrendering on August 15, 1945. The formal instrument of surrender was signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2^nd, which was thereafter designated Victory in Japan Day. Thus ended the six-year military conflict (1939-1945), the largest in human history.

The worldwide death toll of both combatants and civilians was appalling.  It is estimated that the count was somewhere between 50 and 56 million, caused directly by the war, with probably an additional 19 to 28 million from war-related disease and famine.

Of that number, the Soviet Union recorded the greatest losses.  But one must remember that most people then and even now inaccurately equate the Soviet Union with “the Russians.” This is a major mistake and a clear distortion of the facts.  

The Soviet Union was composed of 15 Union republics, of which the Russian Republic was the largest with a 1940 population of approximately 110 million. It claimed total military and civilian deaths of about 14 million souls – 12.7 % of its population.  However, the Ukrainian republic had a 1940 population of about 41 million people with a composite loss of about 6.8 million souls – 16.3% of its 1940 population. You will not find such candid clarity in statements from the Kremlin whenever that terrible war is remembered and discussed.

In addition to suppressing the contributions of its own non-Russian populations, the Kremlin also minimizes the assistance provided by wartime allies in the most shameless manner.  For example, very recently, Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman for Putin, confidently stated that American wartime assistance to the Soviet Union was helpful but not essential to the defeat of the Nazis in World War II.  

“Can we say that we couldn’t have prevailed with Lend Lease? No, we can’t. We would have prevailed, and we would have emerged victorious regardless. We would have survived on nothing but the earth, but we would have won. That said, they did help us, and we value and remember that.”

This is such preposterous nonsense that a brief summary of the composition of the Lend Lease support that the United States provided to the Soviet Union will enable the reader to make an independent judgement on the matter.

President Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease bill to give aid to Britain and China (March 1941).

From March 11, 1941, the date President Roosevelt signed the Lend Lease Act, to the final victory over Japan in September 1945, the United States provided war material to its allies around the world. The United States provided war material in the aggregate amount of $50.1 billion ($672 billion in 2023 dollars) to its wartime allies. This amounted to 17% of US total war expenditures.  Of that number, the Soviet Union received $11.3 billion ($152 billion in 2023 dollars).

Some of the aid included the following:

• 400,000 trucks and jeeps
• 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks)
• 14,000 aircraft (fighters, bombers, and transports)
• 8,000 tractors
• 2,000 railroad locomotives
• 11,000 railroad cars
• 4.5 million tons of food
• 15 million pairs of military boots
• 2.7 million tons of petroleum products

While current Russian leaders minimize the value of American material aid to the final victory over the Nazis, the testimony of Soviet leaders who lived through those desperate days is perhaps more persuasive.

One example of Russia’s self-serving memory , Nikolai Ryzhkov, the last head of the government of the Soviet Union, wrote in 2015 that "it can be confidently stated that Lend-Lease assistance did not play a decisive role in the Great Victory."

But here is what the wartime Soviet leaders had to say on the matter.

• As early as the 1943 Teheran Conference, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin raised a toast to the Lend-Lease program with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. "I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."
• Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion in his 1964 memoirs. "If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."
• And finally, a 1963 KGB clandestine recording made of Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov reveals the Marshal’s recollection. "People say that the allies didn't help us. But it cannot be denied that the Americans sent us materiel without which we could not have formed our reserves or continued the war. The Americans provided vital explosives and gunpowder. And how much steel! Could we really have set up the production of our tanks without American steel? And now they are saying that we had plenty of everything on our own."

You decide!  Whom should we trust in the current conflict?

“The Rest of the Story”

Casualty Counts as a Weapon of Propaganda

The yearly memorialization of Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), May 8, 1945, marking the Allied victory of the Allied Powers over Nazi Germany in World War II invariably includes a comparison of both military and civilian casualties suffered by the warring nations.  As the years and decades go by, there are fewer and fewer people still alive who survived those terrible years.  The once stark details dim in our collective memory, and of late we are beset by a disreputable new phenomenon in which the politically unscrupulous seek to establish the paradigm about which George Orwell warned us in 1948, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

We must not allow Russian propaganda to control the past.

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once cynically noted that a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. It was standard Soviet practice then and remains a Russian one today to treat casualty statistics as some sort of unholy international competition, to wit: the nation that suffers the worst losses must be deemed the most heroic.  

To which, intelligent people should respond “Maybe so, maybe not! Give us some context.” As we call to mind the realities of the Second World War, there are several important facts that are no longer common knowledge.  Let us look at just a few.

Treaty of Rapallo of 1922

The Treaty of Rapallo was concluded between the Weimer Republic, the successor state to the German Empire, and the newly established Soviet Union, the truncated successor state to the Russian Empire. Both Germany and the Soviet Union were considered pariah states at the time and the victorious allies, namely the United Kingdom and France, were very opposed to any agreement that would see those two nations in a mutually beneficial relationship.  

The United Kingdom and France would have been horrified had they known of the top-secret clauses in which the Soviets pledged assistance to Germany in completely evading the Versailles limitations on the size and composition of the German Army (Reichswehr). Germany realized this assistance by establishing clandestine training schools and maneuver facilities (tank, aircraft, and chemical warfare) deep inside the Soviet Union at which the future leaders of the Wehrmacht could design, develop, practice, and perfect the key elements of the “blitzkrieg” which they would eventually debut in the next world war.

The Soviet benefit was to observe and assimilate as much as possible of the techniques and tactics developed by their clandestine guests as well as to send Soviet personnel to Germany for military instruction to those institutions still permitted under the Versailles Treaty restrictions.

But the key fact in this short summary is that the Soviet Union was the unwitting “midwife” of the lethal foreign military entity that wrought such carnage upon the nation and its peoples a decade later.

Collectivization of Agriculture and Engineered Famine

Fast forward to the mid-1930s as the war clouds began to form on the European horizon. Stalin had already destroyed the kulaks – the productive small private farmers principally of Ukraine, long known as the “breadbasket of Europe” – in favor of the enormous collective farms (kolkhoz) that were much less efficient and would make food production in the coming war a desperately unstable operation. To solidify the damage, Stalin then engineered a mass artificial famine in Ukraine – the Holodomor - in which millions of farmers perished.

Purge Trials of 1937-38

The other socio-political debacle of that decade was the disastrous political purge trials, which tore the country apart, eventually penetrating deeply into the Soviet armed forces.

At least 780 officers, including three of the five highest-ranked, were executed, and over half of the 1,844 general-grade officers were purged.  The following examples are instructive:

Red Army

• 3 of 5  Marshals (then = four-star generals)
• 13 of 15 Army commanders (then = three-star generals)
• 50 of 57 Corps commanders
• 154 of 186 Division commanders

Military Maritime Fleet

• 8 of 9 Admirals

Invasion of Finland

The first unimpeachable evidence of the drastic effects of the purge of the armed forces would be seen less than two years later in Finland, which the USSR invaded on the last day of November 1939.

The Winter War, as it was called, lasted only 108 days, ending on March 13, 1940.  A senior party leader during the war and later Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev,wrote in retirement: " … 1.5 million men were sent to Finland, and one million of them were killed, while 1,000 aircraft, 2,300 tanks and armored cars, and an enormous amount of other war materials were lost. Finland's losses were limited to 25,904 dead or missing and 43,557 wounded. … We had an opportunity to choose the time and the place. We outnumbered our enemy, and we had all the time in the world to prepare for our operation.

“Yet even in these most favorable conditions, it was only after great difficulty and enormous losses that we were finally able to win. A victory at such a cost was actually a moral defeat. Our people never knew that we had suffered a moral defeat, of course, because they were never told the truth. All of us—and Stalin first and foremost—sensed in our victory a defeat by the Finns. It was a dangerous defeat because it encouraged our enemies' conviction that the Soviet Union was a colossus with feet of clay."

An impartial observer might pose the question, “Who were more responsible for the monstrous death toll, the heroic Finns or the criminally incompetent Soviet military authorities?

Invasion of Poland Initiates World War II

The Nazi regime is universally held responsible for the start of the Second World War with its invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Less well recalled is that the Soviet Union also invaded Poland on September 17^th, less than three weeks later. In a matter of weeks, both aggressors had torn Poland in half.

In August, weeks before hostilities began, both the Nazis and the Soviets scrambled to avoid the possibility of a major two-front war. In Germany’s case, it anticipated immediate war with France and the United Kingdom in the west and was worried about the Soviet response in the east.  

In the Soviet case, tensions with Japan had been steadily increasing in the Far East, and Stalin finally understood that Hitler’s “lebensraum” dreams were an existential threat to Moscow from the west.  He needed time, several years in fact, to restore the capabilities of the Red Army for the inevitable clash with the Nazis.

In an example of supreme cynicism, the Nazis and the Communists announced on August 24, 1939, the signing of the Non-Aggression Treaty between German and the USSR (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) which included a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence for each country.

The war began exactly seven days later.  In a shameless defense of his actions in light of what he had done with collectivization and engineered famine eight years earlier, Stalin stated that he had become gravely concerned about the wellbeing of Ukrainians who were living in Poland.

1941: Widening of the World War

The success of Soviet espionage operations in 1941 had a tremendous impact on the course of the war.  They also expose in retrospect several important realities not widely understood at the time. One Soviet operative in particular, Richard Sorge, is worthy of mention. He was the grandnephew of Friedrich Sorge, an intimate of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and one of the most successful socialists operating in the late 19^th century in America.

Richard Sorge was born in 1895 in Baku (Azerbaijan) in the Russian Empire where his German father served as a mining engineer. His family returned to Germany in 1898 when Richard was a small child. Sharing his father’s unmistakable nationalist and imperialist views, he joined the German Army in 1914 at age 19. Wounded on the Western Front at Ypres in 1915, he was grievously wounded again and decorated for bravery on the Eastern Front in 1917. However, he became completely disillusioned by the meaninglessness of the conflict and embraced leftist views thereafter. Within a few years, he was a full-blown communist.

In the early 1920s, he became active in German communist activities, and by 1925, he had been groomed and invited to Moscow, where he secretly became a Soviet citizen and a member of the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army.  Instructed to return to Germany and to cease all public participation in left wing activities, he was instead to establish a reputation as a dedicated Nazi and war hero. He soon traveled as a German journalist to the United Kingdom and then to Shanghai in China.  In 1933, his Soviet handlers finally sent him to Japan with instructions to “give very careful study to the question of whether or not Japan was planning to attack the USSR.”

Sorge was incredibly successful in cultivating relationships at the highest level with members of the Nazi diplomatic and military staffs in Tokyo, using them to gain access to their Japanese governmental counterparts.

Tensions between Moscow and Tokyo had been increasing even before the invasion of Poland in 1939 and the fall of France in 1940. Stalin grew increasingly anxious that Nazi success in Western Europe would eventually enable Hitler to turn his attention to the East. Doing as Hitler had done with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, he sought to establish a neutrality agreement between Moscow and Tokyo.

The Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact was a non-aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and the Empire of Japan signed on April 13, 1941, two years after the conclusion of serious Soviet-Japanese border skirmishes. The agreement meant that for most of World War II, “the two nations fought against each other's allies but not against each other.” In 1945, late in the war, the Soviets scrapped the pact and joined the Allied campaign against Japan.

As the spring of that year progressed, Sorge’s dispatches from Tokyo to Moscow became more urgent and definite that the German attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) would begin in late June. [In November 1964, twenty years after his death, the Soviet government awarded Sorge the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.] Stalin received the reports, but he and other top Soviet leaders ultimately ignored Sorge's warnings, as well as those of other sources.

For several weeks comprising the days before and immediately after the attack, Stalin seemed to be on the verge of nervous collapse. He virtually disappeared from the decision-making activities in the Kremlin.  As a result of command collapse, Soviet forces defending the border were virtually overwhelmed, and the situation gave every appearance of quickly becoming an existential crisis for the USSR.  

As the summer progressed, Sorge and his network continued to dig for information on Japanese intentions. In late June, Sorge informed Moscow that he had learned the Japanese cabinet had decided to occupy the southern half of French Indochinaand that invading the Soviet Union was being considered as an option, but for the moment. The Japanese Prime Minister had decided on neutrality.

On 2 July, an Imperial Conference attended by the emperor, prime minister and the senior military leaders approved occupying all of French Indochina …” When Sorge’s report of same reached Moscow, the Deputy Head of Soviet Army General Staff Intelligence wrote, "In consideration of the high reliability and accuracy of previous information and the competence of the information sources, this information can be trusted".

In July 1941, Sorge reported that German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had ordered Ott to start pressuring the Japanese to attack the Soviet Union but that the Japanese were resisting. On 25 August, Sorge reported to Moscow: "…. able to learn from circles closest to [the prime minister... that the High Command... discussed whether they should go to war with the USSR. They decided not to launch the war within this year, repeat, not to launch the war this year."

On 6 September, an imperial conference decided against war with the Soviet Union and ordered the start of preparations for a possible war against the United States and the British Empire. At the same time, the German ambassador told Sorge that all of his efforts to get Japan to attack the Soviet Union had failed. On 14 September, Sorge reported to Moscow, "In the careful judgment of all of us here... the possibility of [Japan] launching an attack, which existed until recently, has disappeared...."  He further reported that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union until:

1.    Moscow had been captured.

2.    The Kwantung Army (Japanese Army in North China) had become three times the size of Soviet Far Eastern forces.

3.    A civil war had started in Siberia.

In one of his final messages sent to Germany on October 14^th, Sorge stated, "The Soviet Far East can be considered safe from Japanese attack".  Four days later, on October 18^th

having finally uncovered Sorge’s espionage, Japanese counterintelligence officials arrested him. Sorge was tortured, tried, and eventually hanged on November 7, 1944, at 10:20 Tokyo time in Sugamo Prison.

That ended the incredible exploits of one of the greatest spies in living memory.  But there are two very important consequences of his work that have faded from memory in the annual celebrations of VE Day in the West.  Unlike the skepticism in Moscow that greeted Sorge’s accurate reports in May and June of 1941 of the impending German invasion on June 22, 1941, Stalin …

• … finally believed Sorge’s final messages and, as a consequence, ordered the immediate redeployment of several battle tested and combat ready Siberian divisions of the Red Army from the Soviet Far East that arrived in the Moscow area on December 5^th just as the German thrust to capture the Soviet capital was grinding to a halt.
• …also decided to withhold from the United States any mention that a Japanese surprise attack in the Pacific theater was imminent.

A Final Word on Lend-Lease Support to the Soviet Union

The paragraphs above hopefully provide context to the complicated and, recently, ill-remembered facts about the World War II era.

Even before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, America was sending arms and equipment to the Soviet Union to help it defeat the Nazi invasion.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt convinced Congress that the U.S. should provide military aid to nations “vital to the defense of the United States.”

“We cannot, and we will not, tell [them] that they must surrender, merely because of present inability to pay for the weapons which we know they must have.”

Under the Lend-Lease Act, enacted nine months before the U.S. entered the war, Washington dispatched war supplies to Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union. While the U.S. and the USSR disagreed in other areas, the threat Hitler posed to the world brought them to a common objective.

However, the long lists of material aid provided by the United States to the Soviet Union do not adequately describe the scope and complexity of the effort. One must remember that the United States entered the war from a “standing start.”  

·      Our armed forces were small, and our economy was far from robust after almost a decade of depression.

• We had no war industry in place in the months immediately after Pearl Harbor.
• America itself was now a combatant in a two-front world war.
• Our own forces were short of many of the military materials sent to the Soviets
• The Soviet Union was on “the other side of the world.”
• The simultaneous global maritime effort to deliver aid to disparate locations had no precedent in the history of warfare.
  • Murmansk (25%)
  • The Caucasus (25%), and
  • Vladivostok (50%)* [Delivered in 125 American ships reflagged to the Soviet Union – because, as noted, Japan was not at war with the USSR, so they were safe from Japanese attack.]

In fairness, an argument can be credibly made that no nation in world history other than the United States could have responded with the speed and scale of the aid provided to the Soviet Union. Just think of a single item on the aid list: 2,000 railroad locomotives!

The facts and discussions above provide the essential context that must not be forgotten whenever dealing with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, even those that, through exigent circumstances, must for a time be treated as allies. As the famous American radio personality, Paul Harvey, often said, “Now you know the rest of the story.”

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