Soviet Union ’as guilty as the Nazis for World War II

Daily Mail

Soviet Union 'as guilty as the Nazis for World War II

The Soviet Union under Stalin was as guilty as Nazi Germany for the Second World War, the world’s largest security organisation has declared.

The verdict in a resolution issued by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe has incensed Russia which lost 26 million people in the war.

The organisation based its conclusion on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 which it said was the precursor to the conflagration.

The pact, named after the Soviet and Nazi foreign ministers of the time, carved up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe between Moscow and Berlin.

This made the Soviets equally responsible for the ensuing catastrophe which claimed 50million lives, according to the OSCE.

It said both Stalinism and Nazism ‘brought about crimes against humanity and genocide’ and called for August 23 to be a day of remembrance for the victims.

It was on August 23, 1939, that the two diametrically-opposed regimes signed their infamous pact. After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1 the Soviets moved in from the east, seizing great tracts of territory agreed upon in a secret clause.

Poland was crushed between the vice of Moscow and Berlin. More than three million people perished in Nazi-occupied Poland and an estimated 500,000 in the Sovietoccupied part.

The OSCE has 56 member countries, including the UK. It was created in 1972 during the Cold War with the aim of preventing conflict in Europe, Asia and the Caucasus.

When the resolution on Soviet involvement in the Second World War was passed at its annual assembly held this year in Vilnius, Lithuania, Russia’s delegates walked out.

Russia has accused many Western countries of understating the sacrifices made by the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany.

Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, tearing up existing treaties, in an attempt to conquer Communism.

He told his generals to conduct a ‘war without rules’ in which all cruelties were legitimate.

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