Tag Archives: World War II

Donbass Is Behind Us – The unofficial anthem of Donbass

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This song, “Donbass Is Behind Us”, dedicated to the 77th anniversary of liberating Donbass from the fascist invaders, came out in the fall of 2020 and quickly became an unofficial anthem of Donbass.

July 3rd, is Independence Day of the LPR, Lugansk People’s Republic. Here’s a translation of the song, performed by Natalia Kachura and Margarita Lisovina, to English.


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Source of the video: “Донбасс за нами” официальный клип
Translation, adapted to preserve rhyme and rhythm, and subtitles by Putinger’s Cat

🇷🇺 🇷🇺 🇷🇺

In total darkness, came awake the Beast,
And he announced to God a heavy price.
Everyone bent, even brothers in Christ,
Everything bent, but not my Motherland.

A leap year brought rich harvest to the land,
And death was drunk, having a feast of blood,
The sky was bending under clouds of lead,
Everything bent, but not my Motherland.

Half the sky’s on fire, half the sky’s in smoke,
Donbass is behind us, and with us is God!
Half the sky’s on fire, half the sky’s in smoke,
Russia is with us, and with us is God!

Here, fathers’ memory was not betrayed,
Grandfathers’ land stayed in descendants’ hands,
Words can’t describe the heavy price they paid,
Not sparing own lives for the Fatherland.

And now, once more, Russia’s strength fills the hands,
For life and death for Motherland are grand.
Holding the sky, through centuries, she stands,
My unbroken and unconquered land.

Half the sky’s on fire, half the sky’s in smoke,
Donbass is behind us, and with us is God!
Half the sky’s on fire, half the sky’s in smoke,
Russia is with us, and with us is God!

Perhaps, we’re meant to perish on the cross,
But we won’t ever be seen kneeling down.
Out in a bloodied field, alone, for all,
Holding the sky, Donbass is holding ground.

Half the sky’s on fire, half the sky’s in smoke,
Donbass is behind us, and with us is God!
Half the sky’s on fire, half the sky’s in smoke,
Russia is with us, and with us is God!

🇷🇺 🇷🇺 🇷🇺

Liberation of Debaltsevo railway station on September 3, 1943. Painting by Ivan Ryzhkov, 1947. Photo by Sergey Kopylov, 2015.

By their death they death averted. Remembering June 22, 1941

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The following article was written by Nikolai Dolgopolov and published in “Rossijskaya Gazeta” on the 85th anniversary of the most tragic day in the Soviet Union’s, and now, Russia’s, history – June 22, 1941.

While all that is written in the article is historically correct, it is vital to remember the wider context while reading it. In the days before the War, not only correct reports about Nazi German invasion were coming to Moscow, but also numerous false reports from reputable source. Not because those sources has some ill intentions, but because the fog of war had already descended.

From our article The pre-War sabotage of the Soviet peace efforts by Britain and France, seen through the memoirs of Georgy Zhukov and the modern British press, Marshal Georgy Zhukov recalled in his memoirs:

The spring of 1941 was marked by a new wave of false rumours in Western countries about large-scale Soviet war preparations against Germany. The German press raised a howl about them and complained that such information tended to throw a cloud on German-Soviet relations.

“Don’t you see?” Stalin would say. “They are trying to frighten us with the Germans and to frighten the Germans with us, setting us one against the other.”

⚡️⚡️⚡️

For example, on June 13, 1941, Admiral Kuznetsov proposed to recall Soviet ships from German ports.

Navy Commissar Admiral Nikolay Kuznetsov attended a meeting with Stalin on June 13 and reported that German ships were leaving Soviet ports, and requested permission to recall Soviet ships from German ports.

The admiral also reported that on June 13, Captain 1st Rank Vorontsov had informed Moscow from Berlin that “the Germans planned a surprise attack against the USSR between June 21 and 24, 1941. The attack would target airfields, railway junctions, industrial centers, and the Baku region.”

On May 6, Kuznetsov, based on information from Vorontsov, had already reported about an impending attack on May 14. Stalin remembered this previous report. “The boss,” wrote Stalin’s secretariat chief Poskrebyshev, “threw him out.”

Source: WWII Day by Day, translate by Beorn And The Shieldmaiden.

By their death they death averted

Our border guards saw, felt, and were ready. Photo: Social Media

I bow with a low to those, who 85 years ago warned of the coming war, and in its first hours disrupted the fascist blitzkrieg.

There is no date in the annals of the country more tragic than June 22, 1941. We often talk about Stalingrad, the Kursk Bulge, and the shattered Reichstag. Of course, it’s more pleasant to remember the victories than the hard first days. And we also knew less about that time: the June hours of the first military dawn seemed to be just a black nightmare, they were heard by the footsteps of the fascist horde, they were reverberated by huge losses.

But world history, which has always been harsh towards Russia, has turned towards us in such a way that our slumbering and forgiving memory has awakened. Not for everyone, but for many. In recent years, an interest in the truth has awakened, a desire to understand how it was at the most terrible beginning. Even the children of front-line soldiers are now over 70. And if we missed the chance to ask, to hear first-hand accounts, now that the thirst for truth has been revived, careful research by scientists and newly declassified documents that seemed to be buried alive in archives, have come to the rescue. The cradle of Victory, achieved after the 1418 days of the Great Patriotic War, originate in the forgotten first battles.
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Alfred Rosenberg — The Failed Coloniser of the East. A documentary by Aleksey Denisov, 2021

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Alfred Rosenberg is one of the most sinister figures of the Third Reich. It is believed that he is the author of the concepts of “racial theory” and “the final solution to the Jewish question.” Having become head of the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories on Hitler’s orders in 1941, Rosenberg had the opportunity to put his theory into practice. The task of Rosenberg’s department was to colonise the entire European part of the Soviet Union.

No “independent states” were supposed to be established in these territories. The Nazis planned to partially exterminate and partially evict the indigenous population, and “Germanise” the remaining ones. After the final victory of the Reich, the ideologists of Nazism planned to make those inhabitants of the USSR whom they decided to leave alive slaves serving the German colonists and “Greater Germany.”

This film is another reminder of the future that was in store for the big and small nations of Europe in the event of the victory of Hitler and his satellites. The film uses rare footage of captured German newsreels, photographs from the personal archives of Nazi leaders captured during the storming of Berlin by soldiers of the Red Army. Many of them have never been shown on the air.


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Raw video source at the site of the VGTRK

Additional strokes to Rosenberg’s portrait

An uplifting caricature by Boris Yefimov from 1936, depicting the Ukrainian nationalists marching right from an important appointment with a mug of “Beer”.

Their banner, carrying the proud symbol of Ukraine — with a cherry on top — has the words in a mix of Ukrainian and German:

“Long live our father Rosenberg!”

The words are addressed to Rosenberg — whom Hitler called “the church Father of National Socialism” — standing on the drums of the German Nazi propaganda – the “Völkischer Beobachter”.

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‼️ Both Beobachter and Rosenberg made appearance on the pages of the Danish underground publication “2 Years”, where we can find many a pearl of the German propaganda.

Alfred Rosenberg (1893 – 1946). Top Nazi and the party’s leading racial ideologist, incarnate anti-communist and anti-Semite. Born in Estonia, sentenced to death and executed in Nuremberg for, among other, crimes against humanity.

In the early years, he exercised a decisive influence on the development of Hitler’s thinking and nurtured his visions of his own divine significance.

Rosenberg held powerful political posts in the party and state. He was an influential figure in the occult Thule Society of the nazi elites. He published anti-Semitic literature and was the holder of the Nazi “Blood Order”.

Völkischer Beobachter (“People’s Observer”) – the official newspaper of the Nazis, published by the Eher Verlag, owned by the Nazi Party NSDAP (Nationalsocialistische Deutche Arbeiterpartei), appeared as a weekly from late 1920 to 1923. From 8. February 1923 to the end of april 1945 the newspaper was published as a daily with Alfred Rosenberg as editor.

All Is in the Past — Adolf Rosenberg in His Domain

The caricature by Boris Yefimov appeared in the combined issue №11-12 of the Soviet satirical magazine “Krokodil” in April of 1944.
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When the War Is at the Doorstep. Interview with Nikolai Patrushev

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Interview of the Assistant to the President of Russia, Chairman of the Maritime Board of the Russian Federation N.P.Patrushev to Rossijskaya Gazeta on June 15, 2026.

Nikolai Patrushev: In Ukraine, we are saving our brothers who have fallen under the neo-Nazi occupation

On the lessons of the Second World War, forgotten today by politicians in Europe, who are leading their countries to a new catastrophe. On the role of Russia as a great maritime power. And also, for the first time, about something deeply personal – Nikolai Patrushev, Aide to the President of Russia and Chairman of the Maritime Board, told Rossiyskaya Gazeta in an interview about his parents who were front-line soldiers, his sister who did not survive the siege of Leningrad, childhood friends in Lithuania, and the undisclosed episodes of his service as director of the FSB.

Nikolai Platonovich, we are talking a few days before the anniversary of the most tragic date for our Motherland. The Great Patriotic War began 85 years ago. Do you think our great-grandchildren and their children will be as sensitive to the memory of the war as the generations whose parents still saw it?

Nikolai Patrushev: The Great Patriotic War is the cornerstone of national historical memory, an integral part of our culture. It is impossible to imagine a normal Russian citizen of any nationality who would not consider the memory of the War sacred. It is everyone’s task to fight uncompromisingly for the preservation of this memory. This is the best antidote to the new wars that are being unleashed on Earth today. I am sure that if people in the West were sufficiently deeply immersed in the history of World War II and knew the whole truth about the atrocities of Hitlerism, they would recoil in horror from their governments, which today support neo-Nazism.

There is anopinion that the number of citizens loyal to the Nazis and their active supporters in Europe was an order of magnitude greater than the number of resistance participants…

Nikolai Patrushev: Not an opinion, but a fact that even European historians recognise. Of the forty million French, about three and a half served the occupiers. I emphasise that they did not just sympathise, but actively served. About two hundred and fifty thousand French participated in the Resistance. The numbers are not comparable. The last defenders of the Reichstag were the French SS. Nevertheless, France became one of the victorious powers and won a seat on the UN Security Council thanks to the French anti-fascist movement and Stalin’s personal respect for General de Gaulle.

Storming of the Reichstag during the Berlin offensive. Troops of the 150th and 171st Rifle divisions of the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army of the 1st Belorussian Front are fighting near the central sector of the building. Photo: Ivan Shagin / RIA Novosti

Few people know about the German occupation of the Normandy Islands in the English Channel, which belonged to the British. There, such mutual understanding was established between the British and the Germans that British police even patrolled the territory together with German soldiers. At the same time, many ordinary residents of the islands turned out to be more courageous than the British authorities and sheltered Soviet prisoners of war brought for forced labour by the Germans.

In general, it’s long been necessary to understand that the whole of Europe consciously fought against the USSR. Almost half of the SS divisions were staffed by representatives of other countries – Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, France, Croatia, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and several others.
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The mystery of the death of the first commandant of Berlin, Nikolai Berzarin

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June 16 marks the 81st anniversary of the death of the first commander of Berlin, Colonel-General Nikolay Erastovich Berzarin.

On April 24th, 1945, as the Soviet troops were still in the process of taking Berlin, three-star General Nikolai Berzarin was appointed as the commandant of the city, by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, and tasked with restoring order in the former capital of the Third Reich.

A million and a half civilians still remained in the ruined city with no water, electricity, food, public transportation or anything else. Following an order of his command, General Berzarin brought the German city back to life and gave hope to its exhausted by the war inhabitants.

Soviet Colonel-General Nikolai Berzarin was in charge of the 5th Shock Army that took Berlin during the final push for victory that started on April 16th, 1945, and ended with the capitulation of Nazi Germany. He was appointed the first commandant of Berlin, and did a spectacular job bringing the city back to life.

Fifty-four days later, on June 16th, 1945, Nikolai Berzarin’s life was cut short in a terrible crash. But was it just an unfortunate road accident or something much more sinister?

Watch this great documentary, translated by Putinger’s Cat, showing some aspects of what was going on in East Germany immediately before the end of the Third Reich and right after.


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Source of the video: SMERSH. The mystery of the death of the first commandant of Berlin Nikolai Berzarin

As a sidenote, in case you’ve never heard of it before or are not sure of what it means, SMERSH was a Soviet counter-intelligence organization that officially started working in April 1943 and was dissolved in May 1946. Coined by Joseph Stalin, the name “SMERSH” is a portmanteau formed by combining the first letters of two Russian words “смерть шпионам” meaning “death to spies”. SMERSH was tasked with subverting attempts of nazi forces to infiltrate the Red Army on the Eastern Front and perform subversive activities.

A Hero of the Soviet Union, an outstanding military commander and a man who played a key role in the post-war reconstruction of Berlin. It was he who organized food supplies, opened field kitchens, provided children with milk, delivered scarce medicines to the city and prevented a humanitarian catastrophe.

Under his leadership, the reconstruction of the infrastructure began: a power station was launched, bridges, roads, power lines and the city’s life-support systems were repaired. In just 54 days, he laid the foundation for the future peaceful Berlin.

Nikolay Berzarin tragically died in a car accident on June 16, 1945, in the streets of the liberated city.

On April 19, 2024, the name of Colonel-General Berzarin was officially assigned to a school at the Russian Embassy in Germany — in recognition of his heroism and historical significance.

👉 More information about his life, feats, as well as photo and video materials – on the dedicated website.

Source: Russian Embassy in Germany

The Unknown Cold War. Film 1. ‘Unthinkable’ Allies. An RT Documentary

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‘Unthinkable’ Allies is the first documentary in The Unknown Cold War series. The film explores how decisions made by Western leaders in the 1940s led to an era of nuclear tension.


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Watch the feature on the RT.Doc website.

In the summer of 1945, the leaders of World War II’s victorious powers – the USSR, US, and UK – convened in Potsdam to formalize agreements that would determine how the postwar world was to function after the defeat of Nazism. The leaders sat at the negotiating table, while reporters described the triumphant atmosphere – it seemed like the beginning of a new era, in which the great powers would live in peace. But it was precisely these agreements that became the starting point of a new war – the Cold War.

The cooperative image concealed a growing alienation. The new US president, Harry Truman, viewed the Soviet Union with distrust. While smiling at Stalin, Winston Churchill was discussing plans for a possible strike against the USSR. Instead of mutual understanding between former allies, a latent hostility was growing that would transform into a prolonged confrontation, step by step. The outcome was a world divided into opposing poles.

A review by the Russian Foreign Ministry

The film explores how the Western allies of the Soviet Union in the anti-Hitler coalition — whose peoples, side-by-side with our nation crushed Nazism — eventually abandoned allied solidarity forged in fire of WW2. Under the pressure of ideological differences and their profound rejection of the post-war model of development promoted by Moscow, the Allies embarked on the path of confrontation and containment of the USSR.

The evidence, files and testimonies presented in this feature elucidate facts behind some pivotal political decisions by the UK and US leaders driven by the determination to “defeat”, as they put it, the ‘Red Menace’. Those political superstitions reigning in the minds of the Western leaders and hostility toward the Soviet ideology effectively put the world into an era of bipolar confrontation with the unprecedented risks of mankind descending into nuclear catastrophe.

In the summer of 1945, the Potsdam Conference was held on the defeated Nazi German soil.

The Leaders of the victorious powers — the USSR, the United States, and UK — framed together the post-war world order and reached the final settlement of the German issue by dismantling Nazi military and industry, having eradicated Hitler’s ideology.

Nazism was defeated. The Reich was no more.

In the aftermath of the Great Victory, it seemed that a new era was upcoming — the final and, seemingly, long-awaited moment when the Great Powers, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, would build their relations upon the principles of constructive cooperation, mutual trust and respect, cemented by the common background of years of the allied fight against the evil of Nazism.

Yet, the Western block, emboldened by the successful testing of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos (at first, designed as a means of deterring Nazi Germany, but, following its final surrender, the bomb was further seen by US leadership as the deadliest instrument of blackmail) and by the bomb’s subsequent use against the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the hostility toward the Soviet Union and Soviet people was just increasingly growing and seemed implacable.

👉 In the UK government, the discussions were held on the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against Moscow — the infamous plan later exposed as the top secret Operation ‘Unthinkable’.

Instead of seeking better understanding and trust, the former WWII Western allies were nurturing aggressive plans that further evolved into dangerous Cold War confrontation.

“The New Adventures of Schweik”. A fragment of a 1943 Soviet film.

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“Iosif Schweik escaped from prison and enlisted in the army in the Balkans, where a punitive detachment operates. Without doubt or fear, he is trying to help the partisans by coming up with clever ways to kill Hitler.”


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The entire film source on YouTube.
Publication at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

Before you is a fragment of a 1943 Soviet comedy film, created at the joint film studios of Stalinobad* and Soyuzdetfilm**.

It very abruptly stops being a comedy when the monologue of Aunt Adele (played by the legendary Faina Ranevskaya) tears right through at your soul. It is Motherland speaking on behalf of all those mothers, whose children were killed by the Nazis. It is an accusation of Nazism and a declaration of the ultimate judgement to come, a public judgement which, as we know, manifested in the Nuremberg Trials.

Transcript:

Schweik: Oh, you, despicable dog! Who are you calling for, fool?
You’ve killed everyone, but you should’ve started with me.

After all, I am Iosif Schweik. Yes, yes, the very same! The book about whom you burned on the squares of Berlin. The one that hates you, like all the Czechs, like all the Slavs, the whole world!

Close your mouth! Stand at the wall!

Aunt Adele: What are you going to do, Schweik?

Schweik: I want to shoot him, Aunt Adele.

Aunt Adele: Put the revolver away. We are going to judge him.

Listen, you! I don’t even know how to call you. There is no suitable word in the human language. My children were shot at at your behest. Thousands of graves are along your way, and in each lies my child, killed by you. I fed and watered each one of them, taught them to walk, waited for each one of them, but the wait was in vain. No one came back home, did not sit at the table with me, did not lead the old me along the street by my hand, and at night, did not breathe with one breath under the same roof with me.

Why did you kill them?!

Are you silent?!

But you will answer us, you will answer to everyone, for whom you brought suffering and grief.

Schweik: Not so fast! Nothing will help you now.

♦️♦️♦️

Trivia:

This film might have served as an inspiration to the 1978 Italian comedy “Uncle Adolf, Nicknamed Führer”, a fragment from which we posted earlier.

* Stalinobad is the name of the present-day Dushanbe — the capital of Tajik SSR. It was called thus between 1929 and 1961 — literally the Stalingrad of Tajikistan. Dushanbe means “Monday”, and stems from the name of the village, where the capital was founded in 1925. Before that, the village was literally called Dyushambe-Bozor — “a market on Mondays”.

** Soyuzdetfilm is an abbreviation for “The Union’s Children’s Films”.

Who Created Hitler

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In just two minutes, this short clip from 2023, formed as a cinematic film teaser, lays bare who stands behind the fascist War — both past and present.


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The clip is also published at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

🦇 One important remark regarding Nuremberg Trials: it was Iosif Stalin who insisted on the open trials over the Nazi criminals, documenting their crimes. The Western “allies” wanted to simply quietly finish them off.

From our post “Nuremberg Tribunals 1.0” at Beorn And The Shieldmaiden:

It was primarily the Soviet Union that insisted on its [Nuremberg’s] implementation, while the Western powers, who had suffered significantly fewer casualties in the war, were not averse to dealing with the Nazi leaders without trial. This idea was expressed by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill back in 1942, and US Secretary of State Cordell Hull said that he would prefer to “shoot and physically destroy the entire Nazi leadership”.

The leadership of the USSR turned out to be much more far-sighted and wiser than many Western politicians, advocating a legal procedure for punishing war criminals. When Churchill tried to impose his opinion on Joseph Stalin, he firmly objected:

“Whatever happens, there must be … an appropriate judicial decision. Otherwise people will say that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin simply took revenge on their political enemies!”

👉 Documentary “The Great Unknown War”, which we translated earlier, tells in great detail about the construction of the Third Reich with the Western Capital.

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👉 Raw video source, kudos to ЭТО Я from a friendly channel’s chat for the lead. We tried to locate the author and the source, but only the following AI-generated response could be traced, with no sight of the mentioned channels themselves:

Original source: The video was published on the account @vladimir_gron (https://t.me/vladimir_gron) (Владимир Грон – Vladimir Gron) on Instagram and TikTok. Date of appearance: Late 2023. Voice: The text was read by a professional narrator (or by the author himself using high-quality equipment) specifically for creating content in the style of “behind-the-scenes secrets”.

The author’s (Vladimir Gron) main links: Instagram: vladimir_gron — here the video gained millions of views and went viral. TikTok: @vladimir_gron (https://t.me/vladimir_gron) — a duplicate platform with similar content. Telegram: GRON — a channel where the author posts his thoughts and full versions of the texts from the videos.

Transcript of the clip

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“Stalin’s Delaying Tactics Against Hitler. Two Years of Astute Manoeuvring”

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In the present, the West is howling, recalling the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Meanwhile earlier, they were admiring Stalin’s cunning in concluding this pact. Not just immediately after the treaty was signed, but even while waging war against Hitler.

I came across a large and competent analysis of Soviet-German relations, published in the “Times” exactly 85 years ago – on May 1, 1941, a month and a half before the start of the Great Patriotic War. As you can see, the article is titled: “Stalin’s Delaying Tactics Against Hitler. Two Years of Astute Manoeuvring”.

The author, thoroughly analysing Stalin’s motives, writes: “On May Day two years ago, Soviet Russia looked like a country under the greatest threat.” The subtitle reads: “The Threats Have Been Eliminated.”

Speaking of Stalin, the “Times” pays him tribute:

“Perhaps. His strong, complex, pragmatic Caucasian mind is less inclined to theorising than to strategic facts. Since 1939, Soviet Russia has indeed avoided major threats. When Stalin saw that Germany had decided to move east, he withdrew from negotiations with Britain and France and met Germany halfway, making it easier for the Germans to go to war, while keeping the Soviet Union out of it.”

At the same time, the author directly writes that Germany continues to prepare for war with the Soviets, about which German officers are quite openly talking everywhere. He mentions, by the way, the Germans’ preparation of Ukrainian militants to fight against the Soviets. And he even hints unambiguously at the time of the possible start of a German attack on the USSR — the coming summer.

He also writes about how the Russians, taking advantage of the respite, are intensively preparing for the upcoming war. Both in military and ideological terms. In particular, he notes that recently the Soviet media have been writing less about the “world revolution”, and more about the “Soviet Motherland”, which needs to be defended…

A very sensible analysis. And no hysteria about the “devilish conspiracy” and the “cunning tyrant”. I emphasise, by that time, the British had been at war with the Germans for almost two years!

Source: @newsEconomics

Translation from our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”. In this context it does good to remind that the Soviet-German non-aggression pact was far from the first signed between Germany and other world powers. Read: The complete list of pacts concluded between Germany and other European countries before and during World War II

The “Burned villages” layer has been updated on the public cadastral map on Belorussia

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On the eve of the Great Victory Day, the Belorussian National Cadastral Agency, together with the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Republic of Belarus, updated the information layer “Burnt Villages” on the public cadastral map.

This thematic layer, published in 2021, has become a kind of digital monument to the victims of the war and an important tool for preserving historical memory. Its content is based on data obtained by the Prosecutor General’s Office during the investigation of the criminal case on the genocide of the Belarusian people. According to the results of investigative actions over 5 years, more than 4,000 previously unaccounted-for settlements were additionally mapped.

Results of the current update:

  • 15 villages identified during the investigation have been added.;
  • The descriptive information for more than 300 villages has been clarified;
  • The location of 35 villages has been adjusted.

Today, the map contains data on 12,858 affected villages. A special place in this list is occupied by 290 settlements that shared the sad fate of Khatyn. These villages were burned down along with their inhabitants, disappearing forever from the map of the country.

Data collection, verification, and updating are ongoing.

Each marker on the map is not just a dot, but a tribute to the memory of millions of innocent victims, and our duty is to protect the truth about the events of the Great Patriotic War and pass it on to future generations.

📖 Out of the Fire

Make sure to read the book “Out of the Fire”, available at the Internet Archive!

English translation of Out of the Fire [Я з вогненнай вёскі (Ya z vognennaj vyoski) / Я из огненной деревни (Ya iz ognennoj derevni) / I Am From a Fire Village], published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1980. Originally published in Belarus in 1975/6. Writers Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl, and Vladimir Kolesnik conducted interviews with survivors – mainly women and grown children – of fascist Germany’s genocidal violence against the Soviet Union, when hundreds of Belarussian villages were burned to the ground and their inhabitants murdered. Some snippets of these transcriptions would later work their way into Adamovich’s novel Khatyn. His script for Come and See also used this same source material. An anti-fascist masterwork of horror and hope. Translation by Angelia Graf and Nina Belenkaya. Book design by Arlen Kashurevich.

Sweden in the service of the Third Reich

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Sweden — the not so neutral “neutral state”!

The collection of documents covering years 1939 – 1945, declassified by the SVR on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Victory, holds a treasure trove of revelations.

We have extensively covered the Finnish part both at the Beehive here, and at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden” in theie aggression against the USSR. But the neighbouring “neutral” Sweden was also not neutral at all. It has long been know that Sweden supplied Germany with iron ore, which became tanks, killing Soviet people.

The document, received and deciphered on July 29, 1941, shows that Sweden was also in the same boat with Finland, almost literally.

According to the verified data, it was established through various sources:

1. Starting from July 14, 2-3 Finnish steamships run daily from Sweden to Finland with ammunition and food received from Sweden. The vessels, each with a displacement of 2,000 tons, are escorted by Swedish torpedo boats and submarines. In the opposite direction, they are escorted by one Finnish motorboat.

2. By July 26, there were 4 German ships in Abo with 4-5 thousand tons each, one Finnish and two Swedish. The Abo city is completely destroyed, but the port has minor damage.

3. On July 26, 3 companies of German infantry arrived at the port of Abo.

4. At the time of the explosion, there were 60 German wagons loaded with ammunition and bullets, and 9 Swedish platforms loaded with German guns, including 12 ten-and-a-half-centimeter guns and 9 40-millimeter guns.

5. The commander of the eighth German army, General Braskovich, has been dismissed.

The article by Lara Mikhalevskaya was published in Swedish at Steigan.no. All that you are about to read, and more, is covered in the must-see documentary “The Great Unknown War”!

Sweden among those who financed Adolf Hitler and his war

It is a separate story that Sweden, despite formally remaining neutral during World War II, actively cooperated with Nazi Germany by providing strategic resources, financial support and logistical assistance. This cooperation played a significant role in maintaining the war machine of the Third Reich.

Iron ore supplies

Iron ore was a key resource that Sweden supplied to Germany. In 1939, 70% of Swedish iron went to Germany, and in 1940, 11.5 million tons of the 15 million tons of iron used by German industry came from Sweden. Between 1940 and 1944, Sweden sold more than 45 million tons of iron ore to Germany. By 1944, Germany had exported 38 million tons of iron ore from Sweden, covering about 90% of the country’s needs. Each German tank or cannon contained up to 30% Swedish metal. The Swedish iron ore was of particular value, since it contained approximately 60% of pure iron, which is made of the manufacture of the military equipment is more profitable as a result of Germany.
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The Great Unknown War. A must-see documentary about the WWII prelude. By Andrey Medvedev

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It is assumed in our historiography that the USSR and its allies – the United States, Britain and France – fought with Nazi Germany, which was supported by its allies – Hungary, Romania, Italy, and Japan. And the Soviet Union won this unbearably difficult war.

But it is very important to understand whether our allies were really sincere, on whose side were the so-called neutral countries, and why the war on the Eastern front was so violent with mass destruction of the population.

Without understanding who brought Hitler to power, who financed him, who earned money from the war, we will never realize the greatness of the feat of the Soviet people.

Without a deep understanding of the causes of the war and an analysis of diplomatic agreements, we will not see that the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 was the result of a serious geopolitical process.

An important question is: who was behind Hitler, who in Europe needed such a Germany and why? Aggressive, militarized, anti-Bolshevik and anti-Russian.

What would Germany be without American loans? Without investment from American companies? Germany could not have fought in the East without receiving for free the top-notch factories of Czechoslovakia, which it gained by the Munich Conspiracy of 1938, when England and France gave up the whole country to Hitler. What for? What were the Western politicians planning?

Why did the allies take so long to open a Second front and what is the Bank for International Settlements? Why did its participants meet every month throughout the Second World War?

How many foreigners fought in the SS, and who defended the Reich Chancellery in May 1945? For whom in Europe were Hitler’s ideas so dear: nationalism, anti-Semitism and living space in the East.

The film “The Great Unknown War” is a story about what the Soviet Union actually faced. And the terrible cost at which we won a war that we were not supposed to win.

Please read the very relevant to this documentary, poignant, and important insights in President Vladimir Putin’s article The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of World War II, published in The National Interest on the 18th of June 2020.

We published the first translation of this documentary 6 years ago, on June 20, 2020.
On March 16, 2022, YouTube freedom-of-speeched the Russian-language channel Rossia24, where the official untranslated video of the documentary was hosted, so we uploaded the film with embedded subtitles to Odysee platform.
Now, on May 8, 2026 we present an updated version with revised and corrected subtitles.


Backup at Rumble.
Original video source at the VGTRK.

During the work on the translation, a lot of background checks were done, and every date and name was verified. Most quotes of the Western politicians are re-translations from Russian, except for a few, where open original sources were available. The links to the sources are added both to the transcript further down the page and the downloadable subtitles (as comments).

While watching the documentary, it was hard to shake off the feeling of the stark parallel of how the Nazi Germany was propped up, and how, in much the same way, the Nazi Ukraine is being propped up now. One example: just replace the name of Henri Deterding of the British-Dutch “Shell” with that of Biden Jr. to see the present-day play of interests. Or replace “Bank for International Settlements” (BIS) with the International Monetary Fund. But there are big differences, too. While Germany was heavily invested into, to make it into a battering ram against Russia, Ukraine is being turned into an ideological battering ram, while at the same time being plundered of its last Soviet industrial legacy.

However, the target was always Russia, and WWII was just a fifth act in a war that lasted for several hundred years, dotted by a few armistices. Here is a list of those wars (with some documentaries in Russian):

  1. The Napoleonic Wars of 1812
  2. World War 0 of 1853-1856, mis-nomered as “The Crimean War”, when that was but one of many battles. Just think of one simple fact: if Russia lost the Crimean War, why did Russia retain Crimea?
  3. The war with Japan and the first attempt to conduct a coup d’etat in Russia in 1905
  4. World War I, which was a suicide for Europe, started in 1914, and culminated in the capitalistic coup d’etat in Russia in February of 1917.
  5. World War II and the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945…
  6. …immediately followed by the Cold War, which was planned to not be that cold. Even before it started Winston Churchill ordered development of the “Plan Unthinkable”, the goal of which was to strike the USSR in July of 1945. I am not quoting The Guardian often, if ever, but this article from 2002 is worth the read: The Soviet threat was a myth
  7. This “Cold War” lead to another coup d’etat in Russia and a forced instalment of the bloody Yeltsin regime in November of 1993, the Wild 90’s that took the lives of over 30 million Russian and Soviet people over the course of 7 years of oligarchic rule; and the destruction of the Yugoslavia by NATO in the process.

It is all intertwined. But now, let as zoom in on the developments between WWI and WWII.

One other parallel that sprung to mind is how the German Weimar Republic and its achievements were appropriated and privatised by the Anglo-Saxon (or, rather, “Naglo-Saxon” West), while the Republic itself became demonised once West-sponsored Hitler took power. The same happened to the great legacy of the Soviet Union now, after the West-sponsored Yeltsin took power in Russia. For example, IG Farben Industries, which gave to humanity fertilisers, magnetic tape and magnetophones and many other things during the Weimar Republic, but once it got taken over by the Nazi state and developed the murderous gas “Zyklon B”, that’s all that remained, while origins of the prior works were earased and ascribed to the “victors” after WWII. More about it in the article “IG Farben – the main weapon of the XX-th century“.

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Following the trail of the missing January 19 order “On behaviour on the territory of Germany”, and presenting authentic documents on the topic

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Reading time: 10 minutes

Presumably, on January 19, 1945, the USSR People’s Commissar of Defence Iosif Stalin signed an order “On behaviour on the territory of Germany”. Many reputable historical sources recite the wording of the supposed order. Last year, we too, presented a translation of the text, only later coming to realise that the order as such does not exist.

For the reference, here is the text of the “order” and additional information that was provided by Historian Magazine back then:

On January 19, 1945, the USSR People’s Commissar of Defence Iosif Stalin signed an order “On behaviour on the territory of Germany”, which stated:

“Officers and Red Army soldiers!

We are going into the enemy’s country. Everyone must maintain self-control, everyone must be brave…

The remaining population in the conquered areas, regardless of whether they are German, Czech, or Polish, must not be subjected to violence. The guilty will be punished according to the laws of wartime.

Sexual relations with the female sex are not allowed in the conquered territory. Those guilty of violence and rape will be shot.”

Stalin’s order was followed by orders from the commanders of the 1st and 2nd Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts, Marshals of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov (January 29), Konstantin Rokossovsky (January 21, order No. 006) and Ivan Konev (January 27), who prohibited “oppressing the German population, robbing apartments and burning houses.”

The commanders called on the Red Army soldiers to direct their feelings of hatred “to the extermination of the enemy on the battlefield.”

Where do the legs grow from..?

Let us perform source research of the above text.
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The Third Reich’s genocidal strategy of famine, aimed at the Soviet population

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Reading time: 15 minutes

April 19 is Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People, committed by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

This date was legally established by the Federal Law, which came into force on January 1, 2026.

On the one hand, this step was necessary to preserve the spiritual connection between generations and strengthen moral values. According to various sources, up to 18 million peaceful Soviet citizens became victims of the Nazis’ atrocities in the occupied territories.

Their memory is sacred to us.

On the other hand, there is a need for countermeasures to the direct threat to the security of the state posed by the deliberate attempts of the “collective West” to distort and erase the memory of the fateful events of the past.

To counter this concept, a law was signed on April 9 by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the introduction of criminal liability for denying or approving the genocide of the Soviet people, for insulting the memory of the victims of the genocide of the Soviet people and for desecrating their graves on the territory of the Russian Federation or beyond its borders.

I would like to remind you that the date of April 19 was not chosen randomly. On this day in 1943, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued Decree No. 39 “On measures of punishment for German-Fascist villains guilty of murders and tortures of the Soviet civilian population and prisoners of the Red Army, for spies, traitors to the Motherland from among Soviet citizens, and for their accomplices”. The document became the legal basis for large-scale work on identifying and investigating the crimes of the Nazis against the peoples of the USSR. This work continues to this day by the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation.

◼️ According to the commission, there were fully or partially destroyed and burned:

🔻 1710 cities and urban-type settlements,
🔻 more than 70 thousand villages and hamlets,
🔻 over 6 million buildings,
🔻 deprived of shelter by about 25 million people.
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The Road to Space. A fragment of Yuri Gagarin’s book

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Reading time: 17 minutes

On the 65th anniversary of humanity’s first Space flight, we publish our translation of the first chapter of Yuri Gagarin’s book “The Road to Space”, where he tells about his younger years and the War time.

The original text of the book can be found here as an HTML or downloaded as a PDF from our blog. We also embedded the PDF at the bottom of this article.

Today, on April 19 – the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People – this fragment of Yuri Gagarin’s book serves as a sombre reminder of tragedy that befell the Soviet Union before it could lay the road to the Space.

SMOLENSK REGION IS MY NATIVE LAND

…The family in which I was born is the most ordinary one, it is no different from the millions of working families of our socialist Motherland. My parents are simple Russian people, for whom the Great October Socialist Revolution, like for all our people, opened a wide and direct path in life.

My father, Alexei Ivanovich Gagarin, is the son of a poor peasant from Smolensk. He had only two classes of parish school education. But he is an inquisitive man and has achieved a lot through self-education; in our village of Klushino, near Gzhatsk, he was known as a jack of all trades. He knew how to do everything in a peasant household, but most of all he did carpentry. I still remember the yellowish foam of the shavings, as if washing over his large working hands, and by the smells I can distinguish the types of wood — sweet maple, bitter oak, astringent taste of pine, from which my father made useful things for people.

In short, I have the same respect for wood as I do for metal. My mother, Anna Timofeevna, told me a lot about metal. Her father, and my grandfather, Timofey Matveyevich Matveyev, worked as a drill biter at the Putilov plant in Petrograd. According to my mother, he was a tough man, a master of his craft — a highly skilled worker, one of those who could, as they say, shoe a flea and forge a flower out of a piece of iron. I did not get to see Grandfather Timofey, but our family keeps the memory of him, of the revolutionary traditions of the Putilovites workers.

Our mother, like our father, was unable to get an education in her youth. But she’s read a lot and knows a lot. She could correctly answer any question the children asked. And there were four of us in the family: the elder brother Valentin, who was born in the year of Lenin’s death; sister Zoya, three years younger; and finally, me and our younger brother Boris.

Childhood years. Yuri Gagarin (sitting in the center), his older brother Valentin, younger brother Boris and sister Zoya.

I was born on March 9, 1934. My parents worked on a collective farm, my father was a carpenter, and my mother was a milkmaid. For her good work, she was appointed head of the dairy farm of the collective farm. She worked there from morning until late at night. She had a lot to do: either the cows were calving, then to worry about the young ones, then she was worried about the feed.

Our village was beautiful. Everything is green in summer, deep snowdrifts in winter. And the collective farm was good. People lived in prosperity. Our house was the second on the outskirts, by the road to Gzhatsk. There were apple and cherry trees, gooseberries, and currants in the small garden. There was a flowery meadow behind the house, where barefoot children were playing “Lapta” (traditional Russian folk team sport, similar to “baseball” and “cricket”) and “Gorelki” (an old Russian folk gane of Spring, similar to “Tag”). I still remember being a three-year-old boy. My sister Zoya took me to school on May Day. I was reading poetry from a chair there:

The cat sat on the window sill,
She purred in her sleep…

The schoolchildren applauded. And I was very proud: after all, the first applause in my life.
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