the_dunk_tank

Its pretty interesting that Germany has the highest number of people who believe the USSR did the most to defeat them. I mean they should know that.

I also never saw poll numbers immediately after the war. Really says something about how effective Cold War propaganda was.

The people of capitalist countries learn their history from movies and TV shows. Exhibit A.

"I've watched Band of Brothers twenty-three times and never once heard anyone speak Soviet Unionian. So I think it's pretty clear what the right answer is!"

Ah yes, the country that lost ~180,000 troops in the European theater and didn't actually have any battles on it's home turf did much more to defeat the Nazis than the continent-spanning nation that lost about 9,000,000 troops (not counting ~18,000,000 civilians).

For reference, in all it's wars combined over 200 years, America has lost just over 1,000,000 troops in total.

I need to know how many people in that 1-3% said Italy

During this period of history the British were known mostly for hiding in the subway and worshiping their queen

13% of Americans have read a book in their lives

Germans having the highest percentage still saying it was the Soviets is deeply funny.

its because britain has a whole cottage industry of films and tv shows about how we were the last bastion against fascism in europe and like mythologising the blitz and the d day landings and GCHQ and the SAS and churchill and every brit is fed this nationalist soup from birth. So nowadays our fascist movement's main defining characteristic is how much it celebrates soldiers who died killing fascists and how fascists celebrate the (supposedly single handed) defeat of Nazism at the hands of Britain in between doing nazi salutes and blaming Charles de Gaulle for every single thing that went wrong in ww2

I retract my statements about Germans. 31% of them are redeemable

Not only did the USSR do the most to defeat the Nazis, and not only did they lose the most… Hitler’s real focus was on the USSR. The Nazis opened the western front in part for revenge for Versailles, but mainly just to knock them out so Hitler could focus on the eastern front. Hell, Hess tried to make a bargain with Britain to keep them from getting involved.

Not to mention, “conquering” France and Britain was never the goal. Had the Nazis won the war, those nations would probably have to make significant economic concessions and “bend the knee” to Germany’s dominant position on the continent; but I believe their sovereignty and their borders would largely have been intact.

Not so for the USSR. Lebensraum was all about recreating what the US did to the native population of North America: annexing their land, killing the majority and enslaving the rest or driving them out past the Urals, and German settlers moving in. The war was existential for the USSR in a way it was not for France, Britain, or certainly for the USA.

Britain should still rank before the Americans in Europe, if people have to be delusional enough to erase the contributions of the USSR at least get the western country that did more of the fighting and dying right.

Weird how even with very prominent media still acknowledging reality in the 1960s/70s, Americans still can't understand that the USSR did the most. My dad really liked Hogan's Heroes and I remember the constant recurring "joke" was that the Eastern front was hell on earth with the most intense fighting and being deployed there was effectively the worst punishment a Nazi officer could receive.

UK still contributed more than USA to Germany defeat. Not close to what URSS did tough.

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