In the early hours of June 22, 1941, over 3 million troops of the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, launching the bloodiest conflict in the history of humanity. By the end of the war in May 1945, at least 27 million Soviet citizens would be dead, among them 1.5 million Soviet Jews and over 3 million Soviet prisoners of war.
Many of the biggest battles of the Second World War were fought on the Eastern Front and the Nazis committed many of their worst atrocities on Soviet soil, including the systematic starving out of major cities such as Leningrad. The invasion also marked a turning point in the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis: It was in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union that the Nazis began genocidal massacres of the Jewish population. Then, in January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, the Nazi leadership decided on the systematic annihilation of Europe's Jewish population in death camps.
From the beginning of the rise of the Nazi movement in the 1920s, Hitler always stressed that its primary goal was the “complete destruction of Marxism,” inside Germany and across Europe. German imperialism pursued two fundamental aims with the war: First, the annihilation of the workers state that had arisen out of the 1917 October revolution, the Nazis hoped, would deal a major blow to the international working class movement. Second, German imperialism needed the resources of the Soviet Union for its planned war against the US, its main imperialist rival.
Eighty years ago, on June 22, 1941, the German military invaded the Soviet Union. They combined the barbarism of the Middle Ages with the most modern technology of the 20th century.
David North, the chairman of the WSWS international editorial board, delivered the following lecture at San Diego State University on October 5, 2009, marking the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War.
These recollections about the Nazi-Soviet war of 1941–45 were written by Yuri Primakov, who experienced the war as a teenager, and is now 94 years old.
Vitaly Markovich Primakov was a hero of the October Revolution and the Civil War and later an important member of the Left Opposition.
The volume provides insight into the criminal historical antecedents of the current siege of cities in eastern Ukraine by the Western-installed regime in Kiev, spearheaded by Ukrainian fascist forces.
The official ceremony marking the most barbaric event in world history is a celebration of the kind of militarism and right-wing nationalism that accompanied its outbreak.
For all that has been said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure event. The one basic question raised by the Holocaust, “Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most difficult to obtain an answer.
The English translation of Stalingrad will not only finally introduce a broad readership to a masterpiece of world literature, but it will also help new generations, especially young people, to understand the enormous impact of the October Revolution.
Lena’s Diary is an important historical document relating to one of most horrific, although often forgotten, war crimes of German imperialism.
This map depicts the German advances in 1941. Over 3 million troops invaded across the entire 1,800 kilometer long Soviet border in an operation code named “Operation Barbarossa”: By the end of the year, much of the European part of the Soviet Union was under Nazi occupation. Within the first year of the war, the Nazis and their local collaborators had murdered large parts of the Jewish population of what is now Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Major cities, including Leningrad, the city of the revolution of 1917, were under siege and their population was subject to a policy of systematic starvation. Soviet prisoners of war were starved to death in camps and on death marches at a rate of up to 300,000 per month in the fall of 1941 and into the spring of 1942, with 85 to 90 percent of all Soviet POWs killed. These policies were part of the Nazis' “Hunger Plan,” which aimed at the murder of 30 million Slavs, targeting above all the Soviet working class. It was not until late 1942, with the Battle of Stalingrad, that the tide in the war was turned and the Red Army was able to force the Wehrmacht to retreat.
The rise of Stalinism in the USSR left the Soviet and international working class woefully ill prepared for the war. The disastrous policies of the Stalinized Communist International were critical in disarming the German working class in the face of the fascist threat, and enabled Hitler to come to power in 1933. In Spain, the Stalinists strangled the struggle of the proletariat, aiding the victory of Franco in the civil war.
Then, in the Great Terror of 1936—1938, Stalin murdered thousands of revolutionary socialists, including the entire leadership of the Red Army, which had been trained in the Russian Civil War by Leon Trotsky. In August 1939, Stalin, in the vain hope that he could thus guarantee “peace” with Nazi Germany, struck a pact with Hitler. The result was the Nazi invasion of Poland and beginning of World War II in September 1939.
Despite these crimes, the Soviet people rose up to defend the conquests of the October Revolution against the Nazi invaders. As Leon Trotsky had predicted in 1934, “should the Russian Revolution … be forced to direct its stream into the channel of war, it will unleash a terrific and overwhelming force.” In his last major work before his assassination by a Stalinist agent in 1940, In Defense of Marxism, Trotsky stressed that the Soviet Union remained a workers state, albeit a degenerated one, and had to be defended by the international proletariat against imperialism. However, the only way to truly defend the conquests of the October Revolution was through the overthrow of the bureaucracy in a political revolution by the Soviet working class, and the extension of the socialist revolution to the advanced imperialist countries.
The heroic struggle of the Red Army and the Soviet people was the decisive force in the defeat of Nazi Germany and helped inspire a wave of revolutionary struggles across Nazi-occupied Europe from 1943 onwards. It was only their betrayal at the hands of Stalinism that made possible the restabilization of capitalism after the fall of fascism and the end of the war.
In his last major work, Leon Trotsky provided a brilliant exposition of the Marxist method and perspective. Responding to the petty-bourgeois opposition of Max Shachtman and James Burnham, who claimed that the Hitler-Stalin Pact meant that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers state, Trotsky explained that the USSR continued to remain a degenerated workers state that had to be defended in the case of imperialist assault through the means of the international class struggle. This work proved critical for the political orientation of the Fourth International in the decades to come.
This Manifesto was published by the Socialist Workers Party, then the American party of the Fourth International, one day after the invasion of the Soviet Union. The SWP insisted that the international working class had to defend the Soviet Union through the means of the class struggle. It first appeared in the Fourth International journal.
In this brilliant essay, written eight weeks into the Nazi war against the Soviet Union, John G. Wright, a close collaborator of Leon Trotsky, outlined the basic dynamics of the war and its impact on Soviet society. He stressed, “It is not Stalin’s Red Army that has successfully resisted the first two Nazi offensives. It is the Red Army of the October revolution. It is Trotsky’s Red Army, which was built in the fire of the Civil War, built not from the wreckage of the old Czarist armies but completely anew — unlike any other army in history.” The essay first appeared in the Fourth International journal.
In this preface, which accompanied the publication of an anniversary edition of The Heritage We Defend, David North deals with several tendencies that arose within the Fourth International during the Second World War: The Shachtman-Burnham tendency, as well as the IKD and the Morrow-Goldman faction, were all deeply pessimistic about the revolutionary role of the working class. The IKD and the Morrow-Goldman faction considered the final victory of fascism in the war to be inevitable and the prospect for socialist revolution to be hopeless. On this basis, they rejected the struggle for the building of the Fourth International.
As part of the state-led promotion of far-right forces, recent years have seen systematic attempts to whitewash the crimes of fascism and rehabilitate Hitler. In Germany, professor Jörg Baberowski declared in 2014 that “Hitler wasn’t vicious”. He has also published books seeking to whitewash the crimes of the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union. Since then, the neo-fascist Alternative für Deutschland has become part of parliament and far-right networks in the police, military and intelligence services have been discovered.
Since the far-right, imperialist-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014, US and German imperialism have openly worked with far-right forces that stand in the tradition of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. In the US, former President Donald Trump is seeking to build a fascist movement. The temporary culmination of these efforts was the fascist coup attempt in Washington of January 6, 2021.
For many years, the International Committee of the Fourth International has waged a systematic struggle against these historical falsifications and the rise of fascist forces in Europe and internationally.
Historians like Humboldt University's Jörg Baberowski are labouring to rewrite and falsify history in order to justify new wars and discredit opposition to them.
Last week’s decision by the Christian Democratic Union in the federal state of Thuringia to elect a state premier together with the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany exposes the filthy state of German politics.
As in the 1930s, the great challenge is to provide the mass of the working population with a clear program and perspective.
Princeton University has never explained the reasons for and nature of its collaboration with Jörg Baberowski, who has exploited his position at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany to rationalize Nazi crimes and legitimatize extreme right-wing politics.
Service’s public lecture was canceled and moved to a secret location from which all critics were barred.
This is the first part of a two-part article on the debate in Germany surrounding an exhibit on the crimes of the German army (Wehrmacht ) under the Nazis. The second part will be posted Thursday, September 20.
This is the second and concluding part of a two-part article on the debate in Germany surrounding an exhibit on the crimes of Hitler’s army (the Wehrmacht). Part one was posted Wednesday, September 19.
In an interview with Der Spiegel, Neitzel insists that Germany’s Armed Forces must stand in the tradition of Hitler’s Wehrmacht because they must be an “instrument of battle.”
In spring 2019, the deputy chairman of the SGP, Christoph Vandreier, gave a series of lectures in the US on the rise of the far-right in Germany and the role of historical falsification. This is the video of the lecture he gave at Wayne State University, Detroit.
This book documents the intersection of the fight by the International Committee against historical falsification at Humboldt University and the rise of the neo-fascist Alternative für Deutschland.
This essay is based on the transcript of the remarks made by David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and national chairman of the Socialist Equality Party (US), in opening an online discussion held January 17 on the significance of the fascist assault on the Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021.
The German Verfassungsschutz has produced a 56-page response to the lawsuit filed by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party—SGP) challenging its official designation as a “left-wing extremist” organisation subject to state surveillance. The government’s response is an angry diatribe against Marxism and every form of socialist and progressive thought.
In these essays Trotsky examines the political and social origins of fascism and elaborates the strategical and tactical methods for the defense of the working class against this deadly menace.
In this volume, David North argues that none of the problems of the twentieth century—devastating wars, economic crises, social inequality, and the threat of fascism and dictatorship—have been solved. In fact, they are posed even more sharply today.
