Setting aside current conflict (meaning please don’t muddy this thread), the 80th anniversary of the final surrender of Germany’s 6th Army at Stalingrad (31st January-2nd February 1943) shouldn’t pass without notice.
Many hundreds of thousands of young men on both sides lost their lives in possibly the most horrendous battle in modern history. Revisionist historians can get lost, if the Red Army hadn’t fought the Wehrmacht to a standstill from August 1942 to February 1943 at Stalingrad (and again at Kursk in July 1943), it’s fairly unlikely any Allied operations in western Europe from 1943 onwards would have had any chance of success.
Tomorrow 80 years ago Von Paulus was promoted to Field Marshall, Hitler intending that he’d commit suicide rather than be taken prisoner. Eventually he’d testify at the Nuremburg trials against fellow Nazis in the dock, somewhat disingenuously that he was only following orders to preside over the atrocities committed against Russian civilians, commissars, Jews and prisoners of war.
What happened after 1945 is another matter, as is what’s happening today. But we should never forget who contributed most to, and sacrificed more than any other country, to the final defeat of Nazism.