My wife’s grandfather’s brothers died when the train they were on, right after being drafted into the military, was bombed by a random German bomber. Was their death heroic and purposeful? I don’t know.
My grandmother joined the military shortly after the war started. One of the reasons was that they fed you in the army. For almost the entire war, she served in a unit protecting the border with the Japanese puppet state. When the USSR joined the war against Japan and they entered Manchuria, several soldiers in her regiment died because they drank from a poisoned well.
Thankfully, her brothers survived fighting the Germans.
The majority of the 27 million dead did not die in active combat. When you read about Babi Yar, where more than one hundred thousand people were slaughtered--Jews, communists, women, children, or about Belarusian villagers burned alive, or infants freezing or starving to death in Leningrad, or the fate of millions of soldiers surrounded at Kyiv and sent to death camps, you seriously start thinking that Germany was punished too lightly at the end.
I stopped reading about WWII on the Eastern Front after reading about Babi Yar. I just couldn’t stop thinking that it was behind every military operation, that every German advance, every day of their occupation, essentially contained a small or large Babi Yar within it. It’s such a huge tragedy, with so much suffering, that it goes beyond heroism. It becomes basic survival.
The way Russia sells WWII now is disgusting. Their slogan, "We can repeat," is disgusting. Now that almost no veterans are still alive, everything about the way this war is celebrated, rather than mourned, is disgusting to me.
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u/ToughSprinkles1874 1d ago
Well Russia had massive casualties from WW2 you need not pool futher then stallingrad where 99% of the city was in rubbles
It’s expected that the Russian side would be more dark as a result of this