Campaigns as Axis?

[David603]

In reply to Anton Yudintsev,

Originally Posted by David603

Stalin ruthlessly killed those who were not ethnic Russians. More than 100,000(1) ethnically Polish civilians were murdered prior to WWII, as too were many Germans who had emigrated to Russia after WWI. People of other nationalities such as Americans who had fled the Great Depression were also persecuted. In my mind there is not much difference between persecuting people because they belong to one specific ethnic group and persecuting people because they have a different ethnic origin to your own.

Russian troops regularly executed captured enemies, including many German pilots, and killed 25,000 Polish officers(2) on Stalin's orders. Around 12-15%(580,000(3) out of around 4 million) of all prisoners of war taken by the Soviets died in the Gulags (penal labour camps).

Advancing Russian troops looted and pillaged the land of the Axis nations they took, and raped tens if not hundreds of thousands of women.(4)

I am not saying what the Russian did during WWII was unprovoked, or necessarily much worse than what the Germans did, but no one had clean hands during WWII and the Germans tend to get isolated as if what they did was greatly worse than everyone else's behaviour.

(1)Kenneth Christie(2002)85,000 ethnic Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians deported between 1940-41, of which 55,000 killed or died.
(2)CIA report on "Katryn Controversy". On 5th March 1940, Stalin signed their death warrant--an NKVD order condemning 21,857 to "the supreme penalty: shooting".
(3)Richard Overy: Russia's War(1997) regarding POWs during WWII "official figures show ca. 580,000 deaths"
(4) I withdraw this statement, I cannot find references of sufficient quality to back this up.

I will be adding more references, but finding the figures takes time and I want to save what I have written down in case something happens to my computer.