In Memory of 22 June 1941

 

Alexander Alexandrovich Metla, Executive Director of the Stalin Line Historical and Cultural Complex

Why do we return today to the date of 22 June 1941? Because on that day, the soldiers and commanders of OUR Red Army began their struggle against Hitler’s Germany and its European allies, whose aim was to destroy US. We were victorious then. 

 

On 22 June 1941, German troops invaded our Motherland. From that fateful moment, the countdown to Nazi Germany’s defeat began. Despite the Wehrmacht’s victories at the beginning of the war, the Third Reich would collapse less than four years later. Germany’s easy victories in Europe had so intoxicated the German nation that many believed Germany could enslave Soviet Russia as well!

Soviet Russia…

 

Contrary to the expectations of its enemies, a quarter of a century of communist rule in the USSR had not distorted such concepts as Duty and Motherland. In the historical memory of the new Soviet generation, the images of the Russian leaders Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy had not faded. It transpired that, alongside films such as Chapaev and Battleship Potemkin, the Soviet Union also produced films about Suvorov, Minin and Pozharsky, and even Tsar Peter the Great!       

 

In the run-up to the war against the USSR, every available book in Germany about Napoleon’s campaign in Russia was bought up. With the inexorable truth of history, they recounted how Napoleon’s capture of Moscow had resulted in… the Russians entering Paris! 

 

But who learns from the mistakes of others?

 

Quite the opposite. Within a short time, Nazi propaganda had stripped ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers of the most basic moral principles to such an extent that they sincerely came to regard Soviet citizens as subhuman and their murder as an act of European progress. Although the extermination of the Soviet population under the Generalplan Ost was intended to begin only after the defeat of the Red Army and to be carried out exclusively by special Sonderkommandos, German soldiers began murdering civilians from the very first days of the war. 

 

Thus, on 24 June 1941, near the Białowieża Forest, the Germans burnt down the village of Murava and shot 18 local residents. This was done not by SS thugs, but by ordinary infantrymen. 

 

On 27 June, 28 residents of the village of Latyshki on the River Ushacha were shot, and their homes were burnt down. And so it continued, day after day, as the German forces advanced. However, their eastward advance proved less rapid than had been planned in Berlin. Moreover, the tenacious resistance of the Red Army thwarted the ‘Blitzkrieg’. 

 

The myth of the German army’s exceptional effectiveness began to crumble within the first hours of the war. This is best illustrated by the assault on Brest Fortress. The German command had allowed just eight hours for its capture. 

 

It took them... nine days!

 

A disgrace? Absolutely! After all, the Germans had expected to capture by assault precisely fortress —as a system of defensive structures. In reality, however, it was merely a large and extremely spacious barracks with thick brick walls, built in the time of the last Russian emperor’s… GREAT-grandfather! Such an archaic structure (dating from 1842!), without a single cubic metre of modern reinforced concrete, was NOT considered a fortress in the USSR. Therefore, when the war began, our troops started leaving this enormous barracks, as would be expected. Unfortunately for them, the Germans trapped around 4,000 Soviet soldiers inside. In a similar situation, the Belgian defenders of the supposedly invincible fortress of Fort Eben-Emael simply laid down their arms. But Soviet soldiers were not Belgians. Through their unparalleled heroism, our heroes managed to turn the barracks in fortress, holding up an entire 17,000-strong infantry division for nine days. This was despite the Germans using every type of artillery during the assault, including monstrous 600 mm guns, as well as self-propelled guns and captured French tanks, while relentlessly bombing from the air.  

 

No less humiliating for the Germans was the assault on the basement premises of Brest railway station, where around 40 of our soldiers were holding out and disrupting railway operations… for ten days!

 

Another disastrous chapter for the Wehrmacht was the fighting on the Stalin Line. It had been built to defend the country against Polish infantry and cavalry, so 90% of its pillboxes were armed with machine guns. The Germans, however, attacked it with tanks, against which a machine-gun pillbox was powerless. The positions in the Minsk Fortified Region were held by our divisions at half strength and without ammunition. Despite this, Soviet troops managed to tie down the enemy in fighting for three whole days! During those three days, the Germans managed to lose 210 tanks knocked out (while in all 40 days of the ENTIRE campaign in France, the Wehrmacht lost only 640 tanks).

 

In the Polotsk Fortified Region of the Stalin Line, the Germans were held up for 20 days; in the Novograd-Volynsky Fortified Region, for six days; in the Korosten Fortified Region, for 14 days; and in the Kiev Fortified Region, for 60 days! The Karelian Fortified Region was never breached throughout the entire war. In the end, the blitzkrieg could be written off, and Hitler might as well have poisoned himself as early as the autumn of 1941!

 

A comparison of troop resistance statistics showed that, at the beginning of the war, for every Red Army soldier killed, only four surrendered; among the Poles, the figure was nine, and among the British and French, seventeen!

On the ninth day of the war against the Soviet Union, Hitler declared that the joint war against Russia had united the European Union as never before. And this was no slip of the tongue. What was it, if not a European Union, when, in addition to Germany’s own forces, the armies of Finland, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Spain, Slovakia and Croatia took part in the invasion of the USSR? The ranks of the SS also included Europeans from Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Sweden, Switzerland and even Poland! They all rallied beneath the banners of Nazi Germany to ‘take part in the battle between the progressive forces of Europe and the Communist East’.

 

And what had our country done to displease them? Was it because, unlike ‘progressive’ Europe, it conscientiously honoured its agreements, reliably supplying Europe with grain, oil and timber?

This was at a time when Britain and France, contrary to their military commitments, refused to defend Austria, Czechoslovakia and then Poland from Hitler, thereby unleashing the carnage of the Second World War.

 

Or was Europe annoyed that it STILL had to pay for our grain, oil and timber? In other words, ‘we STILL had to die so that they—the Europeans—could live’? 

Der Russe muss sterben, damit wir leben – Russians must die so that we may live – the Germans wrote on a Soviet school blackboard. Ukraine, 1941.

Why not? It is so very European: kill the Native American, the African, the Indian. And finally, kill the Soviet citizen – then his land, natural resources and property will be yours!

 

In the late 1980s, my father served in Germany. During a friendly gathering, he decided to put to a German friend an argument that was being so vigorously promoted at the time. Namely, that “we Russians should never have resisted during the war. If we had surrendered, perhaps we would now be drinking Bavarian beer at home.” To this, the elderly German sternly replied to my father: “You, you would not be drinking. NONE of you would even exist!»

Yes. Hitler’s European Union failed to kill us and seize our wealth.

 

But the essence of European policy has remained unchanged. Only the methods have changed – seize Russia’s 300 billion and do whatever you like with it! How ‘civilised’ and in keeping with the new era.

While Europeans themselves fought for the interests of Hitler’s European Union during the Second World War, Europe has now found a new soldier – the Ukrainian.

 

Through the inertia of our shared history, we continue to regard Ukrainians as a brotherly people. When disaster struck Ukraine in 2014, our President took in refugees. My father did the same, providing several families with accommodation at Stalin Line. After February 2022, I did the same.

 

Yes, we still cherish our fraternal kinship with Ukrainians and are striving to preserve it. That is why we do not proclaim to the whole world WHO actually burned Khatyn and WHAT soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are doing to prisoners today.

 

Yet Americans Tucker Carlson and Scott Ritter, and the Frenchman Adrien Bocquet, openly tell the international community how the ‘warriors of light and goodness’ crush the heads of living captive soldiers beneath a tank, their hands tied behind their backs… 

 

Why is it Carlson, Ritter and Bocquet who are raising the alarm, rather than us? Because they are foreigners and know perfectly well how monstrously Western propaganda dehumanises people.

 

And we are the children of Soviet propaganda, which made us brothers. Our President continued along the same path, and we knew no other policy. That is why today we are SO shocked and cannot accept the terrible reality that, as a result of Western propaganda, Ukrainians openly call us — us, of all people! — occupiers. Yet we still call the Ukrainian people our brothers. We even manage to make excuses for them, sheepishly blaming their shortcomings on the Ukrainian elite, which, we are told, is Ukrainian in name only.

 

We also turn a blind eye to the fact that an ordinary soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, without any orders from Kyiv, paints fascist crosses on his tanks, while we are afraid even to ask OURSELVES: why does he do it?      

The answer, however, is obvious: to be called a European, and NOT a brother to a Belarusian or Russian.

 

And this, unfortunately, is the choice of Ukrainians themselves. That is why they fight to the death for this European identity, sparing neither themselves nor their ‘dear motherland’. And the extent of their dehumanisation is such that, if ordered to do so, believe me, they will burn down more than one Khatyn.

 

A miracle is needed to prevent this. During the Great Patriotic War, that miracle was the heroism of the Red Army soldiers who defeated the hordes of the fascist European Union.

 

As for the European Union and ‘fascist’, that was no slip of the tongue. Take a close look at these figures.

This is the number of prisoners taken by the Red Army in that war. As you can see, almost all of Europe is represented there. Why fascist? Because on 22 June 1941 it came to us not so that we could now drink beer, but so that we would now no longer exist.!

 

To forget such lessons of history is to court death.