Stalinism and Nazism: From friendship to war

Eighty years ago, on August 23 1939, in Moscow, Berlin and the Kremlin contracted a secret pact for splitting Europe, from Scandinavia down to the Black Sea, between the German Empire and the Soviet Union. On September 1 1939, German troops attacked Poland, and on September 17 were joined by the Red Army, after a day earlier it had defeated the Japanese in eastern Mongolia. The two-year German-Soviet alliance ended on June 22 1941, when Berlin attacked its Soviet ally. During the war, Germany (including Austria), alongside its allies, exterminated six million Jews and more than half a million Roma. In central and eastern Europe, not a single Jewish community survived. In German-occupied Europe, Albania was the sole state, which protected its Jewish citizens and readily gave sanctuary to Jews from other countries. Hence, in wartime Albania the number of Jews grew elevenfold, from 200 to 2,400. Three and a half million Soviet prisoners of war (PoWs) and 2.5 million other inmates perished in German captivity. In turn, around 2.7 million German PoWs found themselves in Soviet captivity, where 14% of them perished. The total war cost 55 million civilians and 25 million soldiers their lives. Nazism as a system and a political project ended in 1945, though some Latin American dictatorships adopted its elements, alongside the offer of a safe haven to Nazi war criminals. Stalinism officially ended in 1956, three years after Stalin’s death. Elements of this system and ideology survived until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, and the break up of the SU two years later. However, the Russian president Vladimir Putin praises Stalin as a “great leader.” Meanwhile, Stalinism continues thriving in North Korea, or in China, where Maoism became euphemistically known as the “China model.” Britain and Scotland are the sole areas of 20th Century Europe where no concentration camps sprang up, and no ethnic cleansing occurred. But London, for example, allowed for the Bengal famine to happen in 1943 (3 million dead), presided over the 1947 split of the British Raj into India and Pakistan that ethnically cleansed (“displaced”) up to 14 million and left two million dead. The European Union (EU) was founded in 1958 (then known as the European Communities) for preserving peace and stability in western Europe, and for preventing the re-emergence of Nazism (or extreme nationalism, illiberalism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism) or a Soviet (Stalinist) takeover. In 2009, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism was proclaimed to be celebrated annually on August 23. Seventy years earlier, in 1939, on this very day, Nazism and Stalinism had joined forces and subsequently engulfed most of Europe in totalitarianism. The oft-repeated postwar exhortation was that we need to learn and remember about the horrors of the Second World War and totalitarianism, “Lest we forget.” Because forgetting is sure to pave the way for its return, perhaps, under new noms de plume and in a glitzy package of colourful gizmos and apps, yet equally deadly.