The war touched each of us. Twenty-seven million human lives were claimed by the war 20 million were claimed by the Second World War

According to well-known statistics, the Great Patriotic War claimed about 27 million lives of citizens Soviet Union. Of these, about 10 million are soldiers, the rest are old people, women, and children. But the statistics are silent about how many children died during the Great Patriotic War. Such data simply does not exist. The war crippled thousands of children's destinies, took away a bright and joyful childhood. The children of the war, as best they could, brought the Victory closer to the best of their, albeit small, albeit weak, forces. They drank a full cup of grief, perhaps too big for a small person, because the beginning of the war coincided with the beginning of life for them ... How many of them were driven away to a foreign land ... How many were killed by the unborn ...

Hundreds of thousands of boys and girls during the Great Patriotic War went to the military registration and enlistment offices, added a year or two to themselves and left to defend their homeland, many died for it. The children of the war often suffered from it no less than the fighters at the front. Childhood trampled down by the war, suffering, hunger, death early made children adults, nurturing in them unchildish strength of mind, courage, ability to self-sacrifice, to a feat in the name of the Motherland, in the name of Victory. Children fought on an equal footing with adults both in the army and in partisan detachments. And these were not isolated cases. There were tens of thousands of such guys, according to Soviet sources, during the Great Patriotic War.

Here are the names of some of them: Volodya Kazmin, Yura Zhdanko, Lenya Golikov, Marat Kazei, Lara Mikheenko, Valya Kotik, Tanya Morozova, Vitya Korobkov, Zina Portnova. Many of them fought so hard that they earned military orders and medals, and four: Marat Kazei, Valya Kotik, Zina Portnova, Lenya Golikov, became Heroes of the Soviet Union. From the first days of the occupation, the boys and girls began to act at their own peril and risk, which was really deadly.

The guys collected rifles, cartridges, machine guns, grenades left over from the battles, and then handed it all over to the partisans, of course, they took a serious risk. Many schoolchildren, again at their own peril and risk, conducted reconnaissance, were liaisons in partisan detachments. They saved the wounded Red Army soldiers, helped organize the escape of our prisoners of war from German concentration camps to the underground. They set fire to German warehouses with food, equipment, uniforms, fodder, blew up railway cars and steam locomotives. Both boys and girls fought on the "children's front". It was especially massive in Belarus.

In units and subunits at the front, along with fighters and commanders, teenagers aged 13-15 often fought. Basically, these were children who had lost their parents, in most cases killed or driven by the Germans to Germany. Children who remained in the destroyed cities and villages became homeless, doomed to starvation. It was terrible and difficult to stay in the territory occupied by the enemy. Children could be sent to a concentration camp, taken to work in Germany, turned into slaves, made donors for German soldiers, etc.

In addition, the Germans in the rear were not at all shy, and dealt with the children with all cruelty. "... Often, because of entertainment, a group of Germans on vacation organized a détente: they threw a piece of bread, the children ran to him, and machine gun fire followed them. How many children died because of such amusements of the Germans throughout the country! Children swollen from hunger could to take something, without understanding, edible from a German, and then there is a line from a machine gun. And the child has eaten forever! (Solokhina N.Ya., Kaluga region, Lyudinovo, from the article “We do not come from childhood”, “World of News”, No. 27, 2010, p. 26).
Therefore, the units of the Red Army passing through these places were sensitive to such guys and often took them with them. The sons of the regiments - children of the war years fought against the German occupiers on an equal basis with adults. Marshal Baghramyan recalled that the courage, courage of teenagers, their ingenuity in completing tasks amazed even old and experienced soldiers.

"Fedya Samodurov. Fedya is 14 years old, he is a graduate of a motorized rifle unit, commanded by the guard captain A. Chernavin. Fedya was picked up in his homeland, in the ruined village of the Voronezh region. Together with the unit he participated in the battles for Ternopil, with a machine gun crew kicked the Germans out of the city When almost the entire crew died, the teenager, together with the surviving soldier, took up a machine gun, firing long and hard, holding the enemy in. Fedya was awarded the medal "For Courage".
Vanya Kozlov. Vanya is 13 years old, he was left without relatives and has been in a motorized rifle unit for the second year. At the front, he delivers food, newspapers and letters to soldiers in the most difficult conditions.
Petya Zub. Petya Zub chose a no less difficult specialty. He had long ago decided to become a scout. His parents were killed, and he knows how to pay off the accursed German. Together with experienced scouts, he gets to the enemy, reports his location on the radio, and artillery fires at their orders, crushing the Nazis. "(Arguments and Facts, No. 25, 2010, p. 42).

Anatoly Yakushin, a graduate of the 63rd Guards Tank Brigade, received the Order of the Red Star for saving the life of the brigade commander. There are quite a lot of examples of the heroic behavior of children and adolescents at the front ...

A lot of these guys died and went missing during the war. In the story of Vladimir Bogomolov "Ivan" you can read about the fate of the young intelligence officer. Vanya was from Gomel. His father and sister died during the war. The boy had to go through a lot: he was in the partisans, and in Trostyanets - in the death camp. Mass executions and ill-treatment of the population aroused in children a great desire to take revenge. Getting into the Gestapo, teenagers showed amazing courage and stamina. Here is how the author describes the death of the hero of the story: "... On December 21 of this year, at the location of the 23rd Army Corps, in the restricted area near the railway, the rank of the auxiliary police, Yefim Titkov, was noticed and after two hours of observation, a Russian, a schoolboy of 10 - 12 years old, was detained , lying in the snow and watching the movement of trains in the Kalinkovichi - Klinsk section ... During interrogations he behaved defiantly: he did not hide his hostile attitude towards the German army and German Empire. In accordance with the directive of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces of November 11, 1942, he was shot on December 25, 1943 at 6.55.

Girls also actively participated in the underground and partisan struggle in the occupied territory. Fifteen-year-old Zina Portnova came from Leningrad to her relatives in 1941 for a summer vacation in the village of Zui, Vitebsk region. During the war, she became an active participant in the Obolskaya anti-fascist underground youth organization "Young Avengers". Working in the canteen of retraining courses for German officers, she poisoned food at the direction of the underground. Participated in other acts of sabotage, distributed leaflets among the population, on instructions partisan detachment conducted reconnaissance. In December 1943, returning from a mission, she was arrested in the village of Mostishche and identified as a traitor. At one of the interrogations, grabbing the investigator's pistol from the table, she shot him and two more Nazis, tried to escape, but was captured, brutally tortured and shot on January 13, 1944 in the prison of Polotsk.

And sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Olya Demesh with her younger sister Lida at the Orsha station in Belarus, on the instructions of the commander of the partisan brigade S. Zhulin, blew up fuel tanks with magnetic mines. Of course, the girls attracted much less attention of the German guards and policemen than teenage boys or adult men. But after all, it was just right for the girls to play with dolls, and they fought with Wehrmacht soldiers!

Thirteen-year-old Lida often took a basket or a bag and went to the railway tracks to collect coal, obtaining intelligence about German military trains. If she was stopped by sentries, she explained that she was collecting coal to heat the room in which the Germans lived. The Nazis seized and shot Olya's mother and younger sister Lida, and Olya continued to fearlessly carry out the tasks of the partisans. For the head of the young partisan Olya Demes, the Nazis promised a generous reward - land, a cow and 10 thousand marks. Copies of her photograph were distributed and sent to all patrol services, policemen, elders and secret agents. Capture and deliver her alive - that was the order! But the girl could not be caught. Olga destroyed 20 German soldiers and officers, derailed 7 enemy echelons, conducted reconnaissance, participated in the "rail war", in the destruction of German punitive units.

From the first days of the war, the children had a great desire to help the front in some way. In the rear, children did their best to help adults in all matters: they participated in air defense - they were on duty on the roofs of houses during enemy raids, built defensive fortifications, collected black and non-ferrous scrap metal, medicinal plants, participated in collecting things for the Red Army, worked on Sundays .

The guys worked for days at factories, factories and industries, standing behind the machines instead of the brothers and fathers who had gone to the front. Children also worked at defense enterprises: they made fuses for mines, fuses for hand grenades, smoke bombs, colored signal flares, and collected gas masks. They worked in agriculture, grew vegetables for hospitals. In the school sewing workshops, the pioneers sewed underwear and tunics for the army. Girls knitted warm clothes for the front: mittens, socks, scarves, sewed pouches for tobacco. The guys helped the wounded in hospitals, wrote letters to their relatives under their dictation, put on performances for the wounded, arranged concerts, evoking a smile from war-torn adult men. There is a touching poem by E. Yevtushenko about one such concert:

"The radio was turned off in the ward...
And someone stroked my tuft.
In the Ziminsky hospital for the wounded
Our children's choir gave a concert ... "

In the meantime, hunger, cold, disease in no time dealt with fragile little lives.
A number of objective reasons: the departure of teachers to the army, the evacuation of the population from the western regions to the eastern regions, the inclusion of students in labor activities in connection with the departure of family breadwinners to the war, the transfer of many schools to hospitals, etc., prevented the deployment in the USSR during the war of a universal seven-year compulsory education started in the 1930s. In the remaining educational institutions training was conducted in two or three, and sometimes four shifts. At the same time, the children themselves were forced to store firewood for boiler houses. There were no textbooks, and because of the lack of paper, they wrote on old newspapers between the lines. Nevertheless, new schools were opened and additional classes were created. Boarding schools were created for evacuated children. For those young people who left school at the beginning of the war and were employed in industry or agriculture, schools for working and rural youth were organized in 1943.

There are still many little-known pages in the annals of the Great Patriotic War, for example, the fate of kindergartens. “It turns out that in December 1941, kindergartens were operating in bomb shelters in besieged Moscow. When the enemy was driven back, they resumed their work faster than many universities. By the fall of 1942, 258 kindergartens had opened in Moscow!

More than five hundred teachers and nannies in the fall of 1941 were digging trenches on the outskirts of the capital. Hundreds worked in logging. The teachers, who only yesterday led a round dance with the children, fought in the Moscow militia. Natasha Yanovskaya, a kindergarten teacher in the Bauman district, heroically died near Mozhaisk. The teachers who remained with the children did not perform feats. They just saved the kids, whose fathers fought, and their mothers stood at the machines. Most of the kindergartens during the war became boarding schools, the children were there day and night. And in order to feed the children in the half-starved time, to protect them from the cold, to give them at least a modicum of comfort, to keep them occupied for the benefit of the mind and soul - such work required great love for children, deep decency and boundless patience. "(D. Shevarov " World of News”, No. 27, 2010, p. 27).

"Play on, children.
Grow at will!
That's what red is for you
Childhood is given", - wrote Nekrasov N.A., but the war deprived the kindergarteners of their “red childhood”. These little kids also matured early, quickly forgetting how to be naughty and capricious. Recovering fighters from hospitals came to kindergartens for children's matinees. The wounded soldiers applauded the little artists for a long time, smiling through their tears... The warmth of the children's holiday warmed the wounded souls of the front-line soldiers, reminded them of home, and helped them to return unharmed from the war. Children from kindergartens and their teachers also wrote letters to the soldiers at the front, sent drawings and gifts.

Children's games have changed, "... a new game has appeared - in the hospital. They used to play in the hospital before, but not like that. Now the wounded are real people for them. But they play war less often, because no one wants to be a fascist. This role is played by they are carried out by trees. Snowballs are fired at them. We learned to help the injured - the fallen, the bruised." From a letter from a boy to a front-line soldier: “We also often played war before, but now much less often - we are tired of the war, it would sooner end so that we could live well again ...” (Ibid.).

In connection with the death of parents, many homeless children appeared in the country. The Soviet state, despite the difficult wartime, still fulfilled its obligations to children left without parents. To combat neglect, a network of children's reception centers and orphanages was organized and opened, and employment for adolescents was organized. Many families of Soviet citizens began to take in orphans to raise, where they found new parents. Unfortunately, not all educators and heads of children's institutions were distinguished by honesty and decency. Here are some examples.

“In the autumn of 1942, in the Pochinkovsky district of the Gorky region, children dressed in rags were caught stealing potatoes and grain from collective farm fields. investigation, local police officers uncovered a criminal group, and, in fact, a gang consisting of employees of this institution. In total, seven people were arrested in the case, including the director of the orphanage Novoseltsev, accountant Sdobnov, storekeeper Mukhina and others. During searches, they were seized 14 children's coats, seven suits, 30 meters of cloth, 350 meters of manufactory and other misappropriated property allocated with great difficulty by the state in this harsh wartime.

The investigation found that by not giving the due norm of bread and products, these criminals only during 1942 stole seven tons of bread, half a ton of meat, 380 kg of sugar, 180 kg of biscuits, 106 kg of fish, 121 kg of honey, etc. The orphanage workers sold all these scarce products in the market or simply ate them up themselves. Only one comrade Novoseltsev received fifteen portions of breakfasts and lunches daily for himself and his family members. At the expense of the pupils, the rest of the staff also ate well. Children were fed "dishes" made from rot and vegetables, referring to the poor supply. For the whole of 1942, they were only given one candy each for the 25th anniversary October revolution... And what is most surprising, in the same 1942, the director of the orphanage, Novoseltsev, received an honorary diploma from the People's Commissariat of Education for excellent educational work. All these fascists were deservedly sentenced to long terms of imprisonment."

“Similar cases of crimes and non-fulfillment of their duties by pedagogical workers were also detected in other regions. So, in November 1942, a special message was sent to the Saratov City Defense Committee about the difficult material and living situation of children from orphanages ... Boarding schools are heated poorly or are without fuel at all children are not provided with warm clothes and shoes, as a result of non-compliance with elementary social and hygienic rules, infectious diseases are observed. Leningrad. Education, due to the lack of teachers and lack of premises, was abandoned long ago. In the boarding schools of the Rovno region, in the village of Volkovo and others, children also did not receive bread at all for several days. " (Ibid., pp. 391-392).

“Ah, the war, what have you done, vile ...” Over the long four years that the Great Patriotic War continued, children, from toddlers to high school students, fully experienced all its horrors. War every day, every second, every dream, and so on for almost four years. But war is hundreds of times more terrible if you see it with children's eyes ... And no time can heal the wounds of war, especially children's. “These years that were once, the bitterness of childhood does not allow to forget ...”

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"The course of the Great Patriotic War" - Hitler was unable to capture Stalingrad. Gko. Transition to strategic defense. Hitler's autograph: From the memoirs of a combatant. Documents and materials: Left and technical support- the presence of tank and air armies, artillery reserves. I. V. Stalin. District Councils. General Staff of the Red Army. Counteroffensive of the Red Army. Authorized GKO. The beginning of the war. The enemy sought to destroy headquarters, communication centers, railway communications, and bridges.

"Great battles of the great war" - The city is a hero. In the photo, the crowning memorial is the 85-meter sculpture "The Motherland Calls". In the name of the living - Victory! Victory parade. In the name of the future - Victory! Great Patriotic War 1941 - 1945. Defense of the Brest Fortress. Street fighting in Stalingrad. On July 12, the largest oncoming tank battle in history took place in the Prokhorovka area. On June 30, the State Defense Committee (GKO) was created. In the name of the Motherland - Victory!

"Great Patriotic War" - War of Liberation. Summer-spring campaign. Fascist Germany. Summer-autumn campaign. Losses. offensive actions. Soviet troops. The main events of the summer-autumn campaign. The Germans opened churches. Agreement on the formation of an army in the USSR. The biggest battles Winter-spring campaign. Finland. War of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Yalta conference. Counteroffensive near Moscow.

"History of the Second World War" - Preparation for the war with the USSR. Three army groups were created to attack the USSR. South direction. The Great Patriotic War. Commander F.I. Kuznetsov. Was in the blockade of Leningrad. Blitzkrieg. The strategic goals outlined by Germany under the Barbarossa plan could not be achieved. Army Group Center. Central direction. Since mid-June, vacations for personnel have been canceled. As a result of border battles, the Wehrmacht inflicted a heavy defeat on the Red Army.

The Nazis planned to march through Moscow in parade formation. Under water in tanks. Through the streets in disgrace A sea of ​​fire fell from the sky. Nine in one fight. Threats and forecasts. The pilot of the Messer jumped out with a parachute and was taken prisoner. Steel hedgehogs. German fighters attacked Gorovets' car. Molotov cocktail. Not only Hitler believed in the "blitzkrieg" in 1941. Line in history.

"Briefly about the war 1941-1945" - Zina Portnova. There was a holy war against fascism. People. generation of winners. Lenya Golikov. Gavriil Epifanovich Sobyanin. The enemy is broken. Salute of Victory. Defense of Sevastopol. The Great Patriotic War. Chuprov Alexander Emelyanovich. 13 cities were awarded the honorary title of "hero city". Brest Fortress. Leningrad blockade. People of the Earth. How many nameless heroes there were. Sobyanin died a heroic death.

Answering a question about the role of Stalin, Vladimir Putin said during the last, in December, “straight line” (the article was written in April 2010 - ed.): “Even if we return to losses, you know, no one can now throw a stone at those who organized and led this Victory, because if we had lost this war, the consequences for our country would have been much more catastrophic. It's hard to even imagine."

It doesn't look like an impromptu. Evaluation thoughtful, about the most important thing. Such a statement does credit to the head of the Government. Only the reservation is doubtful - "no one can now throw a stone." Throw, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Also how they throw it. And in those "who organized and stood at the head of the Victory." And in Victory itself. And in victorious veterans who have survived to this day. Remember at least the vile and insulting attack of a certain Podrabinek against veterans of the Great Patriotic War. What have we not heard in the last 25 years! And the fact that they overwhelmed the enemy with their corpses. And the fact that in the Kremlin they did not lift a finger to provide their prisoners of war with legal protection, and the Nazis needed only that. They themselves are to blame. And the fact that other countries fought “wrong”, they have neither mistakes nor blunders. Is it possible, they ask, to compare our losses with American or British ones.

On the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the Victory, a unique, unparalleled in modern military history literature, newest reference publication “The Great Patriotic War without the stamp of secrecy” was published. The Book of Losses” (hereinafter, for brevity, “The Book of Losses”). This is the result of many years of colossal work by the group of authors of the General Staff and the Military Memorial Center of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation under the leadership of Colonel General, Professor of the Academy of Military Sciences G. F. Krivosheev. The authors used archival documents of the General Staff and the main headquarters of the branches of the Armed Forces, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Federal Security Service, the border troops and other archival institutions that were previously closed for publication. We studied the books of district (city) military registration and enlistment offices to record notifications (for dead, dead and missing servicemen) received from military units, hospitals and other military departments. Compared with previous editions, the total losses of people and military equipment have been significantly clarified by periods and campaigns of the war, by fronts and fleets, individual armies and flotillas. For the first time, updated information was provided on the composition of enemy troops and their losses.

The book is not for easy reading. Tables, figures, comparisons. Dispassionate evidence of the heroic and tragic events of the Great Patriotic War.

The war claimed 26 million 600 thousand lives of Soviet people. Here is how the number of casualties is calculated from June 22, 1941 to December 31, 1945:

Calculation order ( in million people)

The population of the USSR on 06/22/1941 - 196,7
The population of the USSR as of December 31, 1945 - 170,5
Incl. born before 06/22/1941 - 159,5
The total decline in the population of those who lived on 06/22/1941 (196.7 million - 159.5 million = 37.2 million people ) - 37,2
The number of children who died due to increased mortality (out of those born during the war years) - 1,3
The population would have died in peacetime, based on the 1940 mortality rate. - 11,9
General human losses of the USSR as a result of the war (37.2 million + 1.3 million - 1 1.9 million = 26.6 million people ) - 26,6

“We didn’t retreat before fools”
Get acquainted with the 94th table from the “Book of Losses”, which shows, on the one hand, the irretrievable losses of the Germans and their allies, on the other hand, the losses of the Red Army with allies on the Soviet-German front from June 22, 1941 to May 9, 1945 ( thousand people).

Some explanations for the table. Germany's allies are the troops of Romania, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia and Finland. The allies of the USSR are Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Romania and Bulgaria managed to fight for both sides. Bucharest fielded 30 divisions and brigades against the USSR, for which Hitler promised the Romanian dictator Antonescu part of the Soviet territory “up to the Dnieper”. But they did not find glory: two Romanian armies found their end at Stalingrad, others - in the Crimea. As soon as the Soviet front approached the border, Antonescu was overthrown in Bucharest and the army turned against the Germans. Bulgaria did exactly the same: it did not declare war on the USSR, moreover, the Soviet ambassador remained in Sofia all these years, but fought on the side of Germany against Greece and Yugoslavia, which made it possible for the Wehrmacht to transfer part of its divisions from the Balkans against us.

As can be seen from the table, the loss ratio is comparable - 1:1.1. No, they did not fill up the enemy with corpses. It is a myth.

In fact, both sides suffered huge losses. For us, the first one and a half years of the war out of four were the most difficult, especially 1941. This period accounts for 56.7 percent of irretrievable losses throughout the war and 86 percent of prisoners and missing persons. A nightmare for the Germans - the last two or two and a half years, starting with the disaster at Stalingrad and then on the rise. Not to mention the complete defeat and surrender. After May 9, 1945, almost 1.6 million Wehrmacht soldiers and officers laid down their arms in front of the Red Army alone.

Throughout the war, the Wehrmacht kept a rather crafty record of losses - it limited it to German citizens within the borders of 1937, that is, it belittled it. Austrians, Sudeten Germans, various Volksdeutsches were not taken into account in losses. And until now, in German sources, losses, as a rule, are presented in this way. According to the principle - "the rest are not ours." But these “not ours” fought and died. In the war against the USSR, the Nazi leadership involved the population of the occupied countries with both a stick and a carrot. We went to the Wehrmacht, the SS troops and volunteers, especially at first, when it seemed that the USSR would be easy prey: only 1 million 800 thousand Europeans. Of these, during the war years, the Germans formed 59 divisions and 23 brigades. Impressive strength. The names themselves speak of their nationality - “Wallonia”, “Galicia”, “Bohemia and Moravia”, “Viking”, “Netherlands”, “Flanders”, “Charlemont”, etc. The Germans did not take into account the losses the so-called “hivi” (“volunteer helpers”). These are auxiliary workers (in fact, soldiers) in workshops, in kitchens, etc. In infantry divisions, there were up to 10 percent of them, in transport columns up to half of the composition. Slovaks, Croats, Romanians, etc. were recruited into the “Khivi”. Among them were our prisoners of war, who thus escaped starvation. Paulus near Stalingrad had, for example, 52,000 Khivas. The Germans did not consider all these losses their own. Did they take it into account at all? There is no answer to this question in German documents. Losses “not ours” were treated like disposable tableware: used, thrown away, forgotten.

A similar record was kept by Germany's allies. The classic example is Romania. In 1941-1944 Moldovans were drafted into the Romanian army. But the losses of the Moldovans in the war against the USSR are not shown in the reports of the Romanian army. Do you think you have dropped the account on the Almighty? No, these losses were included in the demographic losses of the USSR. As well as the loss of Latvians from the Waffen-SS, Bandera's "Galicia", Vlasov, "Khivi", etc. On the one hand - absurd. With another…?

The fate of Soviet prisoners of war turned out to be tragic. Of the 4 million 559 thousand people who were captured, 1 million 836 thousand (40 percent) returned to their homeland. About 2.5 million people died and died in captivity (55 percent). More than 180,000 emigrated to other countries or returned home, bypassing collection points. They returned years later after the war.

Compare this with the fate of enemy prisoners of war: Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Romanians, etc. returned home 85.2 percent. Feel the difference? If the same percentage fell on the lot of our prisoners of war, then more than 2 million people would return and our total losses in the war would decrease by the same figure. How many children would they have! But they didn't return.

The topic of prisoners of war is a special one that requires separate consideration. The topic is not simple, about the fate of millions of people. And different destinies.

Here, in the words of A. Tvardovsky, Stalin

... showed features

His cool, his cruel

Wrong.

And right.

Today, far away, many circumstances, considered outside the titanic tension of those years, look different, not like the participants in the event. One example. September 1942. Chuikov's army is pinned down in Stalingrad against a narrow coastal strip. To the north, the enemy broke through the corridor and went to the Volga. To help the besieged, the Stavka is planning an offensive from the north to cut this corridor. The Red Army did not have enough forces at that time. “The success of the operation depended on the secret concentration of troops” - this was the first item in G. Zhukov's memo sent by the General Staff to the commanders who were preparing the operation. But on the eve of the offensive, a group of Red Army soldiers from the 173rd Infantry Division ran over to the Germans. They preferred captivity. And how do you want to deal with them? The topic, I repeat, requires a separate discussion.

In this article - briefly about the little-known facts: about what steps our state took on the foreign policy front for the sake of the lives of prisoners of war.

In the very first days of the war, the country's leadership turned to the Swedish government with a request to represent the interests of the USSR in Germany (our diplomats, correspondents, etc. remained there) and, most importantly, to bring to the attention of Berlin that the USSR recognizes the 1907 Hague Convention on the maintenance of prisoners of war ( and it was a fundamental document) and is ready to implement it on the basis of reciprocity. Germany did not answer. On July 17, the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs officially reminded the Swedes of the request. Berlin was silent. On August 8, foreign embassies in Moscow received a circular note from the Soviet government with a similar content. Finally, on November 26, 1941, Pravda and Izvestiya published a note from the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, handed over to all diplomatic missions the day before. “The camp regime established for Soviet prisoners of war,” the note said, “is a gross and outrageous violation of the most elementary requirements for the maintenance of prisoners of war by international law, and in particular Hague Convention 1907, recognized by both the Soviet Union and Germany.”

Germany ignored all appeals. She was in the "euphoria of victory": the plan "Barbarossa" set aside 5 months for the defeat of the USSR. Everything began, Hitler and his generals believed, as successfully as possible. Already on July 3, Chief of the General Staff Halder wrote in his diary: "... the campaign against Russia was won within 14 days." Further, he believed, a quick and easy seizure of the industrial regions of the USSR would follow. What kind of prisoners of war are there?! Who will ask for them from the winners? Who will care about their fate?

My late father-in-law, V. G. Yegorov, was taken prisoner in 1941, shell-shocked. Miraculously survived. In 1943, together with a friend, he fled, fought again. Never, even decades later, even after he took the front norm on his chest and repeated it, he never told about captivity. Could not. It was too painful and painful for him to stir his soul with the hell he had experienced.

The Nazis deliberately destroyed Soviet prisoners of war: by starvation, executions, poison gas. The Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek death camps were originally built for them. “The fundamentally important orders of the military command and propaganda about the “subhuman” have long created the general impression that the life of Soviet citizens is of no value. A significant part of the Wehrmacht, both officers and privates, fell under the influence of Nazi ideology and was ready to treat “subhumans” accordingly ... The leadership of many camps was of the opinion that “the more these prisoners die, the better for us” - such is the verdict historian Christian Schreit.

At the Nuremberg trials, the accusation was reduced to one word - genocide.

The authors of the "Book of Losses" speak briefly about the causes of our losses in the war, primarily during its first period. They single out two of them: the factor of the surprise attack by Germany and the miscalculations of the Soviet military-political leadership on the eve and at the beginning of the war. Army General Makhmut Gareev, himself a participant in the Great Patriotic War, analyzed this in detail in No. 2 of “RF Today” and the historian Svyatoslav Rybas in No. 24 for 2009. I refer readers to their articles so as not to repeat.

In Soviet times, for some reason, it was obscured that the most powerful army in the world at that time invaded the USSR. A year before, she easily and with lightning speed defeated the French armed forces, which, as experts then believed, had no equal. I remember how the reflections of Marshal G. Zhukov sounded literally like a revelation in the 60s in a conversation with K. Simonov. “We must appreciate the German army, which we had to face from the first days of the war,” he said. - We did not retreat before the fools for a thousand kilometers, but before the strongest army in the world. It must be clearly stated that by the beginning of the war the German army was better prepared, trained, armed, psychologically more prepared for war, drawn into it. She had the experience of war, and, moreover, a victorious war. This plays a huge role. It must also be admitted that the German General Staff and the German staffs in general, the German commanders, thought better and deeper than our commanders. We learned during the war…”

After Battle of Poltava Peter I raised a toast to the Swedish generals - his teachers. Perhaps he talked about teachers more in joy. Peter I learned from his own mistakes, from his own defeats.

In the Great Patriotic War, too, had to learn from their own defeats. The war carried out a “natural selection” of commanders already in the first months of the war, and in the end they became marshals of Victory. The well-known English historian and military theorist Liddell Hart immediately after the war got the opportunity to communicate with captured German generals and ask about past battles. Their statements about Soviet military leaders and the Soviet army are indicative. Field Marshal Rundstedt: "Zhukov was very good." Field Marshal Kleist: "Their commanders instantly learned the lessons of the first defeats and in a short time began to act surprisingly effectively." General Dietmar: "Zhukov was considered (in the German generals) an outstanding personality." General Blumentritt: “The very first battles in June 1941 showed us the new Soviet army. Our losses sometimes reached 50 percent.”

The second factor that determined the scale of our losses: for three years the USSR fought one on one with Germany and all of continental Europe. Moreover, after 1941, the USSR fought for two years in a “truncated” composition. More than 70 million people were under occupation. A total of 120 million against 300 million. But there was no second front. Churchill showed all his remarkable abilities to pull him to the limit. Did he save the lives of his soldiers in this way, did he bleed Germany and the USSR, in which he was very interested, was he simply afraid, as Ambassador I. Maisky believed, or did Hess nevertheless reach an agreement with the British on the second edition of the “strange war” ( latest version expressed by Western researchers; all doubts could be dispelled by the documents, but the Hess case is kept under seven seals, and this is not hidden without a serious reason) - the fact remains: Hitler was provided with a quiet life in the European West. In March 1943, the Chiefs of Staff asked Churchill to contact Stalin to find out about the plans of the Soviet command for the coming summer. “Our military involvement is too small to ask such questions,” replied Churchill. “Against 6 divisions of the Germans standing against us, Stalin is fighting with 185 divisions.”

Hence the different losses - for us and for the allies. They landed in France when, according to the same Churchill, the Red Army broke the back of the Wehrmacht.

Stalin, tired of empty promises, had to resort to a "strong reception" in Tehran, at a meeting of the "Big Three". In the capital study “Second Front”, the well-known diplomat and historian Valentin Falin writes: On November 30, 1943, in a one-on-one conversation, Stalin warned Churchill: if there was no landing in Northern France in May 1944, the Red Army would refrain from any operations for a year. “The weather will be bad, there will be difficulties with transport,” said the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, according to the English entry. - Frustration can cause ill will. Unless there are major changes in the European war in 1944, it will be very difficult for the Russians to continue the war.” Churchill must have instantly imagined what would happen if Hitler transferred 15-20 divisions from the Eastern Front to southern Italy, where the Allies were stuck.

Two hours after this, as they would say now, “cool” reception, Stalin was announced that the second front would be opened in May 1944.

London and Washington wanted an “easy” war for themselves. To blame them for this is an empty case. They proceeded from their national interests. The United States and Great Britain could afford it: the ocean and the English Channel reliably sheltered them from the Wehrmacht's tank divisions. The well-known British historian A. Taylor wrote: “Throughout the war, Stalin had no freedom of action. Everything he did was foreordained by the German invasion. He was forced to wage a mass war in which millions of soldiers opposed each other (no one in the entire Second World War took part in such a battle), and wage it on the European territory of Russia. Even victories did not give him freedom of action: he could not avoid such a war to the very end, the only difference was that after Stalingrad he won, and did not suffer defeat” (“History of the Second World War”, London, v. 4 , p. 1604).

Foreigners sometimes understand the Great Patriotic War deeper, deeper, more objective.

"Kill every Russian"

Civilian losses were even greater. Second World War differed from the First in an unprecedented number of troops, a manifold increase in the lethal force of weapons and military equipment, which inevitably multiplied losses among the civilian population.

But this was not the main reason for the huge losses.

Hitler unleashed not just a war against the USSR, but a war to exterminate entire peoples, primarily Slavic, Russian. War without rules. Plan "Ost" was developed - a monstrous program of genocide in the occupied territory of the USSR. The purpose of this program is the creation of Greater Germany to the Urals. “For us Germans,” one of the justifications for the Ost plan said, “it is important to weaken the Russian people to such an extent that they will not be able to prevent us from establishing German domination in Europe.” They expected to destroy 30-40 million people on the move, primarily the intelligentsia. They started with prisoners of war, Jews and Gypsies.

The German historian Wolfram Wette describes the purpose and meaning of the war for “living space” against the USSR: “After the conquest of the country in the East is over, the number of Slavs should be reduced, and the survivors should have become slaves of the “German masters”. Lest they grumble under this new domination, their cultural level must henceforth be kept at a low level.” Wette cites the prescription of M. Bormann, the permanent interpreter of the Fuhrer's will. “A year after the start of the war against the Soviet Union,” the historian writes, “(Bormann) clarified the anti-Slavic policy of the Nazi regime in this way: “Slavs must work for us. When we no longer need them, they can die ... We are the masters, and they will make way for us.

“Memo to a German soldier,” which was given to everyone in the Wehrmacht, demanded: “You have no heart and nerves, they are not needed in the war. Destroy pity and compassion in yourself, kill every Russian, do not stop if there is an old man or a woman, a girl or a boy in front of you. Kill, in this way you will save yourself from death, secure the future of your family and become famous forever.

Let me remind those who are trying to put Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the same level: Soviet soldiers entered German soil with the exact opposite reminder: "Hitlers come and go, but the German people remain." And this was not the slogan of a front-line newspaper, but an order from the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Stalin. Therefore, our cooks distributed food from camping boilers to the inhabitants of Berlin.

German soldiers acted according to their memo and their ideology. Valentin Falin, to whom I have already referred, was born in a village near Leningrad. He said in a conversation with Savely Yamshchikov, published in the Zavtra newspaper: “Out of about one thousand three hundred people who lived in this village, only two returned after the war: one soldier without a leg and my aunt. The aunt had five children - all five died, and her husband was also killed. Another aunt had four children, all of them died together with her husband, and my grandmother with them. "How did they die?" - asked S. Yamshchikov. “My cousin was shot dead - he tried to enter the house without asking. He was less than 5 years old. And the rest were driven through the forest along the paths - these were laid log roads through the forest, people had to go along them in a crowd. Explode - so there are mines. They won't explode - the Germans can go too. By the end of these campaigns, only my aunt and her daughter remained alive - all the rest died.

Tell me, what other conventions did not Stalin or the Soviet Union sign to prevent such barbarity? V. Falin explains everything with Russophobia of the Germans and Europeans in general, “the most terrible evil that, according to him, Russia has dealt with throughout almost its entire existence.” Russophobia has played and still plays an important role in our time. And yet, I think, there is not only and, most importantly, not so much Russophobia. Patriarch Kirill called the Nazi regime misanthropic. The point is this. The soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht were overwhelmed with a sense of racial superiority: the Russians were for them an inferior race, “subhuman.” Their life in the eyes of the “superior Aryan race” was worthless. Like the life of slaves or livestock.

Recently, a book with a fantastic fate was published in Germany, which became a bestseller. It has the most direct relation to our conversation. This is a front-line diary of Private Willy Wolfsanger, who disappeared in 1944, when Soviet troops smashed the German Army Group Center. He was 23 years old. Several times during the war he came to his native Duisburg after being wounded and polished the future book “Russian Adventures”. So Wolfsanger called her. Then other definitions will appear in the text - “ crusade”, “slaughter” and even curses to those who sent him to war. The manuscript lay all these years in the parents' house until it was discovered by relatives. The author is not a Nazi, from an intelligent family. He wrote poetry: “I burned all the cities, killed women. / I shot children, robbed everything I could on this earth. / Mothers shed tears and wept for their children. / I did it. But I'm not a killer. / I was just a soldier.”

In prose, “just a soldier” is much more specific. He is glad that he sent a parcel to his mother with food that he “requisitioned” (!) from the population. Detail of the “requisition”: “In fear of starvation, one of the peasants tried to take away the loot from the soldier, but he crushed his skull with a rifle butt, shot the woman and set fire to the house.” Another scene: “The next morning, one of the soldiers was unpacking boxes of hand grenades with the help of a hundred captured Russians, and then shot them all with a machine gun.” Together with friends, he laughs merrily when, in front of their eyes, a mine tears a Russian woman to pieces: “We saw in this,” he explains, “comic.” Retreating to the West after the Battle of Kursk, they leave behind ruins and conflagrations: “They went along, setting fire to houses in the villages ... and blowing up stoves. Women were crying, children were freezing in the snow. Curses followed us. But no one paid any attention to it. When we were finally given cigarettes, we lit them on the logs of the smoldering huts.”

Russia Wolfsanger did not know and did not understand. For him, she remained “sinister”, she “has no history”. Although he nevertheless noticed something: “The construction and technical successes of the Russians did not fit into our ideas about Russia. And there twenty years turned out to be enough, for which other countries spent centuries.”

Everything post-war years in Germany, crimes were blamed on Hitler, the Gestapo and the SS. The army remained “nothing to do with it”. In Wolfsanger's unfinished book, the Wehrmacht (and half of the male population of Germany passed through it) appeared in all its “brilliance”. The way the Wehrmacht was.

This is how the martyrology of the victims of the civilian population of the USSR during the Nazi occupation looks like in the “Book of Losses”.

This number does not include partisans and underground fighters, whom the Germans referred to as prisoners of war. Not included are 240,000 Jews and 25,000 Gypsies killed between the Dniester and the Bug by Hitler's Romanian followers. It's like a separate account for Romania.

In addition to the victims associated with the fascist terror and the horror of the occupation, the population suffered heavy losses from the combat impact of the enemy in the front-line regions, in besieged and besieged cities. In Leningrad, 641 thousand people died of starvation, 17 thousand from artillery shelling. But there was still completely destroyed Stalingrad, Smolensk, Minsk and 1710 cities and urban-type settlements, 70 thousand villages burned, including hundreds of villages that suffered the fate of the Belarusian Khatyn. Including these casualties, the civilian population lost 17.9 million people.

Military operations on the territory of the USSR continued for more than three years, and, as the authors of the “Book of Losses” write, “the merciless front-line rink“ rolled ”on it twice: first from west to east, to Moscow, Stalingrad, then in the opposite direction.” In Germany fighting lasted less than 5 months. The United States and England, fortunately for them, have not experienced such "skating rinks". Like the Ost plans. Like Babi Yar, Salaspils ...

... The war has long ended. go away the last veterans. The generation of war children is also leaving, for whom Victory Day is not just a historical date, but a part of life that cannot be forgotten. Another 10-20 years will pass, and the Great Patriotic War will become for the next generations as distant as the First World War. This is a natural process. Do not forget only her main lessons.

In the late 60s, they rested with their wife in Pitsunda. Then - a fashionable resort, Intourist, it was unthinkable to get vouchers there. One morning, when the sea was caressing the pebbles, we were sitting with our neighbors at the table at the very edge of the water. They looked at newspapers. Sunbathing. Of course, I would not have remembered that fabulous morning if the neighbor had not suddenly started up and froze in suspense, listening to the conversation of tourists from Germany (I don’t remember which one) who were sitting very close to us. “Do you know what the old German said? - he asked. “He said: just think - all this could become ours.”

Everything! Not only Pitsunda, but also the Volga with Valdai, and the Oka with Yesenin's distances, and the Quiet Don ... Everything!

Can this be imagined?

That old German represented. And the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, who were persecuting two aunts and brothers Falin, represented. They broke into us on June 22 for this.

On many obelisks in our country is inscribed: “No one is forgotten. Nothing is forgotten."

Don't forget what was written.
Nikolay Efimov,"RF Today"

The war was exceptionally cruel, the scale of this cruelty surpassed everything that history knew before. The number of deaths among those who fought with weapons in their hands is a smaller part; for one who fought at the front, there are several dead civilians. In our country, this is due to the fact that the occupying army (I specifically use this term, because they were not only Germans) unleashed a terrible genocide against the civilian population.

Archpriest Alexander Ilyashenko

Recently I was in Belarus, which suffered terribly in the Great Patriotic War, every fourth Belarusian died. The population of Belarus has not yet reached the pre-war level. I was in Khatyn, this is one of the hundreds of villages and villages completely destroyed by the Germans along with their inhabitants.

In the place where each house stood, there is a stele listing the names of those who lived there: old people, children, including babies, two or three years old, judging by the names - Belarusians, Poles, Jews. Different people by nationality, by faith, by culture, but they lived peacefully with each other until the invaders came and brought a new world order.

Destruction of Dresden

In Germany, too, many civilians died because the Allies covered it with a bomb carpet. The so-called strategic bombardments pursued the same goal as, for example, Tamerlane, who chopped off the heads of his enemies and made burial mounds from the severed heads - so that even distant descendants would not even dare to think about fighting such a cruel winner.

Here this was done not with a sword, not with a saber, but with modern weapons - an air bomb. Incendiary bombs, which weighed only a few kilograms, were used to set fire to the city, but there were many of them. And hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people died in the fires.

Obviously, our former Western allies do not want their activities to be perceived as merciless, to put it mildly, so they sharply underestimate the loss of civilians among the inhabitants of Germany.

Generally accepted statistics claim that 600 thousand people died in Germany from the bombings, while in Dresden, who says - 50 thousand, who says - 120, who - 150, died, the value of 135 thousand was widely used. As far as I understand, they simply took the arithmetic average between 120 and 150 and got 135 thousand, such a balanced average figure.

But in recent years, a book has been published by a general who in Germany was responsible for civil defense. He writes that in Dresden, before the entry of the Soviet troops, they managed to count 220-240 thousand corpses, and these are not final estimates. Unfortunately, one can only guess.

In order to imagine the scale of what could actually be, I propose to do elementary calculations: there were more than a million people in Dresden; the population of the city doubled because refugees arrived, they were placed in schools, in theaters, in cinemas, so that people would have a roof over their heads.

As a result of the bombing, more than 60 percent of the buildings were completely destroyed. So, we can assume that 60 percent of the total number of people died. That is, we can talk about 600 thousand victims, among whom were the Americans, the British, and the Russians - prisoners of war soldiers.

One of the main symbols of Dresden - Frauenkirche - was destroyed during the bombing in the truest sense of the word to the ground

In Dresden, the British achieved a firestorm, the temperature in the center was more than 2000 degrees - the brick crumbled. And it is quite possible that there was simply nothing left of the people, and since there were unaccounted for refugees, go and count.

But the bombardment itself was calculated with fantastic cruelty and precision. Dropped on the city great amount bombs, the city was on fire, there were destructions, but the residents were informed in a timely manner and were able to hide in bomb shelters. The planes flew away, people began to leave their shelters to put out fires, help the wounded, and dig up those who fell under the rubble.

At the headquarters of the Royal Air Force, it was quite correctly calculated that in about three hours people would leave the bomb shelters, return, if their houses survived, to their homes, someone would work on the street, and help from nearby cities would just come to them. So, three hours later, when help had already arrived and everyone had left their shelters, a second wave of bombers came in, while the warning system no longer worked, because it was destroyed. And then a firestorm broke out in the city.

The center of Dresden burned with such intensity that people were torn off by a hurricane and thrown into the fire. Streams of already hot air were rapidly coming from the outskirts, because first the outskirts were set on fire, and then the center was set on fire. Everything was calculated.

And in the afternoon, the remnants of those who survived after this nightmare were bombarded again, already by the Americans. They flew during the day, accompanied by fighters, which, when the bombers had bombed, descended to a strafing flight and shot everyone they saw. On our website “ ” there are memories of those who survived these nightmarish bombings.

If not 100,000, or 150,000, or even 200, but more than half a million people died in Dresden, then it turns out that the strategic bombing in Germany tore out the lives of more than a million people.

But what is interesting: half of the bomb tonnage was dropped not on Germany, but on France, Belgium, the cities were bombed because the Germans were there. And now English reports are being published in the open press: so many bombs were dropped on cities, so many bombs were dropped on industrial facilities, so many bombs were dropped on other targets.

Now the question is, what are other goals? After all, the British bombed at night, and in the dark they missed. It's just an amazing ability of the British to conduct an information war - they competently work on wording to confuse people.

And I also want to add that the entire West criticizes Stalin and the Stalin era, but before the war no one criticized like that, before the war they wrote praises to Comrade Stalin. England signed trade agreements with the Soviet Union, knowing that prisoners were working here, they knew this very well. And after the war, when Russia showed itself as a powerful superpower, then they were afraid of the extraordinary strength of our people, and then the era was declared Stalinist. It's like a kind of screen, because they are afraid not of Stalin, but of the Russian nation, because it was not Stalin who won the war, but the Russian people.

It was not at all Stalin who nominated the commanders Zhukov, Rokossovsky, Konev, amazing scientists, engineers, aircraft builders, military men - it was the Russian people who nominated them. Stalin simply realized that he was on the road with the people, that if the war was lost, then it would be about his life and death. The fact that an era is named after him is also to some extent a propaganda move, because the era is created not only by dictators and their henchmen, but by great people: Kurchatov, Korolev, Tupolev.

"Brilliant performance" in Asia

It must be remembered that during the Second World War, more than half of the total civilian population died in Asia. There were no particularly fierce, stubborn battles on land, because when the Japanese advanced and captured Singapore and Burma, the British army offered practically no resistance: the troops either left or surrendered. As it turned out, the British did not want to fight with a trained strong army, why should they shed their blood?

In one photo album dedicated to the war, I saw a photo - so blurry, you have to look closely to understand: human bodies are lying and it is written that this is the result of a bombing. If you look closely, you can see that there is no destruction, and you can see that the woman is lying on her stomach in a pool of blood, her skirt is pulled up. This is not a bombardment, but the monstrous cruelty of the Japanese - most likely, they abused her, and then killed her. They buried the Chinese up to their necks in the ground, chopped off their heads, starved them, but we know practically nothing about this. Why, it's hard to say.

The British in the information space worked extremely subtly, competently and presented their failures as their victories. In 1956, the book “History of the World War” was translated into Russian, in which there were articles by major German generals.

Walter Warlimont, chief of staff of Rundstedt's army in the West, writes about the British evacuation from Dunkirk. The fact is that the Germans hit at the junction between the British army and the French, the English was deployed from the coast, and the French further. And although the English army was fully put on alert - equipped the latest weapons, she had hundreds of tanks, aircraft, artillery - she was sitting in the trenches, but, as it turned out, she was absolutely unable to resist.

Instead of opposing the German tank divisions with their tanks, artillery, and aircraft, they simply scrambled from the battlefield, betraying and abandoning their allies. Not only from the battlefield, but also from the mainland, here they must be given credit, they were able to evacuate almost all of their soldiers with the exception of those whom they call deserters. They appeared on the seashore in the very last days, and before that they hid in basements and other secluded places. But they did not evacuate them, but left them on the shore.

Now let's ask ourselves the question: after all, the whole army is retreating, and everyone is trying to get on the ship as soon as possible, why waste time and hide somewhere? Only those who held the defense around Dunkirk could come up last. These are not deserters, but defenders, but they were betrayed twice, abandoned on the shore, doomed to captivity, in addition, they were labeled deserters.

So, General Warlimont writes: "Even the victorious fanfare of Goebbels could not cast a shadow on this brilliant performance." Military terminology knows the offensive and retreat, but does not know "performances". Obviously, the translator has found a perfect equivalent to the English original. And there can be no splendid flight. That is, if you carefully read this phrase, it is clear that the German general could not write like that, this is the hand of the English editor.

I understand that the German generals in the West were allowed to publish their memoirs on the condition that they comply with some requirements of the British secret services. So, there can be no “brilliant performance”, translated into Russian it is called “shameful flight”. But those who are waging an information war in England, of course, must be given their due, just great. Unfortunately, we can't do that. In the information space, they win the lost battles, and we lose the won ones.

They say that in Germany in school textbooks they already write that America won the war, it's just amazing! But as for the victory over Japan, here, of course, the priority really belongs to America. During 1942-44, the war was fought at sea, and the war at sea, whether you like it or not, is conducted according to some rules: after all, the enemies do not see each other in the face, there are no local residents, there is no unjustified merciless evil.

But when the war approached the borders of Japan, the Americans applied the same method as in Europe: huge air armadas dropped bombs on peaceful Japanese cities, on civilians. For example, in Tokyo they staged the same firestorm as in Dresden. It is estimated that about 100 thousand people died, more than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, such a massive bombing surpasses the atomic bombing in its efficiency and effectiveness.

Information warfare: are all methods good?

Americans used atomic bombs, this is a manifestation of scientific and technical power, on the one hand, but from a military point of view, this is a demonstration of their own cowardice and the absence of an elementary tactical and strategic level, because, in fact, they fought not with an army capable of responding blow for blow, but with peaceful residents who cannot resist.

When I began to collect the memories of people who survived the atomic bombings on the Internet, then, to my surprise, there were very few of them, I found about a dozen and a half at most. They don't publish. And they all end with a call for peace.

But along with the memories of the survivors of the bombings, the names of feature films, for example, “London after the Soviet nuclear bombing” and several other films where the Russians bomb someone. Brilliantly, simply brilliantly waged information war. Of course, illegal methods are used, but it is not necessary to demand legal methods, if atomic bombs were used against the civilian population, why is it necessary to observe historical truth? And now the unprepared reader gets the impression of the aggression and monstrous cruelty of the Soviet Union.

I have the Battle of Guam video disc, there are two amazing things in there. First, the American command decided to seize the island, of course, that it was necessary to land troops. And so the Marines from the landing craft land and go on the attack, but, as the announcer says, it turned out that they land at low tide, when the sea recedes several kilometers from the coast. This means that some staff official mixed up the time of high tide and low tide, he doesn’t care, he sits at the headquarters, and nothing will happen to him.

“Heroic marines, overcoming difficulties, go along the bottom, well done,” but this is horror. An order is an order, an order is not discussed, and thousands of young guys die under the bullets of Japanese machine guns. And if they approached at high tide, then the naval artillery could act more effectively. This is one moment.

And the second point: the announcer says that the Japanese treated the local population terribly, which is apparently correct, but “these Japanese said that the Americans treat the civilian population terribly and so scared their poor that they just run away.”

The announcer's voice comments on the documentary footage: "Do you see the woman running?" Indeed, the camera holds a running woman: “she is running from an American soldier who wants to catch up with her, to say that he does not want anything bad, but she runs, you see, runs up to a cliff and jumps off a cliff.” She really jumps and breaks. "But look, there is a child, and he is trembling: this is how the Japanese scared the local civilians." Here, by chance, an American soldier with a rifle appears in the frame, and is immediately removed.

Valor of Russian soldiers

And in contrast to this, on our site “Invented stories about the war” there is a memory of a unique person - Viktor Nikolaevich Leonov. Marine, officer, twice Hero of the Soviet Union - an epic personality on an epic scale. Twice heroes - there are pilots, twice heroes - there are commanders, but twice heroes - infantrymen, I don’t know how many such heroes who were on the front line, because they quickly died there.

“One of the most high-profile cases of the Leonov detachment is the capture of 3.5 thousand Japanese soldiers and officers in the Korean port of Wonsan.

“We were 140 fighters,” says Leonov. - We suddenly landed on the Japanese airfield for the enemy and entered into negotiations. After that, we, ten representatives, were taken to the headquarters of the colonel, the commander of the aviation unit, who wanted to make us hostages.

I joined the conversation when I felt that the representative of the command of the captain of the 3rd rank Kulebyakin, who was with us, was, as they say, pinned to the wall ...

Looking into the eyes of the Japanese, I said that we had fought the war in the west and had enough experience to assess the situation, that we would not be hostages, but would rather die, but we would die together with everyone at headquarters. The difference is, I added, that you will die like rats, and we will try to get out of here ...

Hero of the Soviet Union Mitya Sokolov immediately stood behind the Japanese colonel, the rest also knew their job. Andrey Pshenichnykh locked the door, put the key in his pocket and sat down on a chair, and the hero Volodya Olyashev (after the war - Honored Master of Sports, repeated champion of the Union in ski racing) lifted Andrey together with a chair and placed him right in front of the Japanese commander. Ivan Guznenkov went to the window and reported that we were not high, and Hero of the Soviet Union Semyon Agafonov, standing at the door, began tossing an anti-tank grenade. The Japanese, however, did not know that there was no fuse in it. The colonel, forgetting about the handkerchief, began to wipe the sweat from his forehead with his hand and after a while signed the act of surrender of the entire garrison.

Three and a half thousand prisoners were built in a column of eight people. All my commands they were already running. We had no one to escort such a column, so I put the commander and chief of staff with me in the car. If at least one, I say, runs away - blame yourself ... While they were leading the column, there were already up to five thousand Japanese in it ... "

And on September 2, 1945, this monstrous bloodshed was finally summed up, the manifestation of the most extreme limits of the human spirit - from the lowest, which can include gas chambers, and strategic bombing, medical experiments on living people, to extraordinary heights of generosity and valor . And we are grateful to those who fell on the fields of this bloody war, fighting not for some class, political, national interests, but for the truth of God.

The Soviet Union and the Russian soldier turned out to be worthy in the spiritual sense, and the Lord granted the Great Victory to our Fatherland.

Prepared by Tamara Amelina