VE Day: When America Cheered Russia

On the bizarre contradictions and confusion of recent history.

Studying the history of international relations is in some respects a study of forgetfulness. One generation is swept into the maelstrom of a great struggle against an evil adversary. After that generation dies, the next generation retains only a dim memory of what the old men of the previous generation were carrying on about. New resentments and antipathies form. The evil adversary of the past turns out to be not so bad after all, and former allies are subsequently regarded with contempt.

A couple of days ago, Germany’s weird new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, announced that Germany would invest hundreds of billions of Euros to rearm Germany. To my (semi) surprise, it seems that other EU countries think this is a swell idea. How quickly we forget the concerns of the recent past.

Observing this irony is especially strange for me, because I have long been of the unorthodox opinion that Roosevelt and Churchill made a huge mistake when they announced the policy of “unconditional surrender” at the Casablanca Conference of 1943.

They did this because they understood that the Russians were doing pretty much all of the fighting against Germany, which resulted in the Russian army and civilian population taking enormous losses—the kind of losses that Americans cannot even begin to fathom.

Stalin was worried the Anglo-Saxons might be tempted to negotiate a separate peace with German officers who didn’t like Hitler, and could be tempted to get rid of him if they were given assurances of being able to surrender on relatively favorable terms.

By announcing their “unconditional surrender” demand, Roosevelt and Churchill were trying to assuage Stalin’s fears. I have long perceived this to be a terrible mistake because it enabled the most fanatical elements of Nazi Germany to insist that there was no choice but to fight bis zur letzten Patrone—until the last cartridge.

It seems to me that the Americans and British should have supported and encouraged the German officers who attempted the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. After all, the war’s most destructive period—and the worst phase of the Jewish Holocaust—occurred between July 1944 and May 8, 1945.

Claus von Stauffenberg was a reasonable man. I knew his first cousin and childhood friend, Alexander von Uexküll, during the last years of his life in Vienna. He was a perfect gentleman, as moderate and sensible as they come.

Likewise, I always thought it strange that—after going to war with Germany because of its invasion of Poland in September 1939, the English (and later the Americans) turned a blind eye to the fact that the Russians also invaded Poland a week later.

Moreover, at the war’s conclusion—precipitated by the Red Army taking Berlin— Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to leave Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe more or less under Russian control.

In 1997, six years after the Russians threw in the towel, I thought it extremely strange that the Americans decided to revive the Cold War by expanding NATO to the east. I completely shared George Kennan’s sentiment that this was “A Fateful Error,” as he put it in the New York Times.

Now—on the eve of VE day—it seems to me that the Europeans have swung to the opposite extreme and completely forgotten that the Russians did most of the fighting against Nazi Germany and suffered tremendously for their effort.

On our side of the Atlantic, we Americans have no idea what it is like to be invaded like Russia was invaded by the German military in June 1941. Though estimates vary, it’s fairly well accepted that 27 million Russians were killed in the fighting that followed.

Most Americans and Englishmen today are unaware of the fact that Hitler had no interest in fighting France and England. He mistakenly believed they would not perceive their interests to be threatened by his military ambitions against Russia, and that they would prefer to make peace with Germany instead of fighting over Poland.

Hitler seems to have mistakenly believed that the English and French shared his passionate hatred of what he called “Bolshevism.” As he put it in Mein Kampf:

Never forget that the rulers of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that they are the scum of humanity which, favoured by circumstances, overran a great state in a tragic hour, slaughtered out thousands of her leading intelligentsia in wild bloodlust, and now for almost ten years have been carrying on the most cruel and tyrannical regime of all time.

Furthermore, do not forget that these rulers belong to a race which combines, in a rare mixture, bestial cruelty and an inconceivable gift for lying, and which today more than ever is conscious of a mission to impose its bloody oppression on the whole world.

I suspect that with with only minor modifications of the above language to make it a little less brutal, it would be perfectly acceptable to express this sentiment in polite liberal American society today—naturally without revealing the author.

This shows how much popular sentiment can change in thirty years. When I was studying political philosophy in the 1990s, I read all of the literature on Bolshevik atrocities, including Stalin’s intentional starving of Ukraine in 1932-1933. I was often surprised to discover that most American liberals were apparently unaware of this history. Back then, they were too obsessed with Hitler’s crimes to learn anything about Stalin’s.

When Alger Hiss died in 1996, I was surprised by the mildness of the New York Times obituary of Stalin’s spy at Yalta, which included paragraphs such as the following:

Others had come to suspect that Mr. Hiss had lied, but were inclined to excuse him on the grounds that the times had changed, that steps taken to help the Soviet Union during the rise of Hitler in the 1930's might have been condoned at that time, but looked quite different in the late 1940's after the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, the start of the Cold War and widespread disclosure of Stalin's crimes.

This struck me as totally disingenuous. Everyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knew about Stalin’s crimes in the 1930s, despite the efforts of Walter Duranty—the New York Times Bureau Chief in Moscow—to conceal them.

Now the same New York Times-reading set who “were inclined to excuse” Hiss have become rabidly anti-Russian and wouldn’t even consider moderate proposals like Austrian-style neutrality for Ukraine.

Again I find myself scratching my head. For years, I’ve gotten the persistent impression that Russia sought a mutually beneficial relationship with the West, and especially with Germany. The Nord Stream pipeline was emblematic of this aspiration.

For years, it seemed to me that the U.S. government was doing everything in its power in Ukraine to provoke an aggressive Russian response. Recently, a Ukrainian friend told me that she’d had the same perception for many years, and marveled at Putin’s restraint.

Tomorrow, May 8, 2025—the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day—I will (as always) think about my grandfather, John Sears, who was wounded multiple times fighting the Germans in Italy, and my great uncle, Bobby Weichsel, who was killed in action in Italy.

I will also solemnly contemplate the 5.7 million Russian soldiers who died fighting Nazi Germany.

If Europe’s leaders had a shred of common sense, they would use the anniversary as an occasion for talking with the Russians about ending the war in Ukraine.

Doing so will require regarding Russia as a country worthy of respect, with legitimate security concerns and legitimate economic interests, such as supplying German industry with natural gas without being terrorized by the United States government representing American liquified natural gas interests.

Doing so will also require recognizing that Vladimir Putin does not resemble Adolf Hitler, who fantasized for years about destroying Russia, leveling Moscow, and covering the ancient city with an artificial lake.

Finally, doing so will require Europe’s leaders to grow up and cease acting like petulant 13-year-olds.