Tag Archives: World War II

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.


Backup at Rumble.
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.

♦️♦️♦️

👉 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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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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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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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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Decoys and camouflage in the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War

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On May 24, 2021, TV Zvezda aired episode №64 of program “Hidden Threats”, which contained a fragment on the use of decoy mock-ups and camouflage during the the Great Patriotic War. Here we present our translation of this fragment. These days, Iran used decoys to fool the American-Zionist aggressors, just like the Soviet Union had been fooling the German-Nazi ones before.


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Presentation of the material at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

The program was introduced in a dedicated article at TV Zvezda site:

During the Great Patriotic War, the victory of the USSR was forged not only in weapons factories, but also in special factories that massively “stamped” inflatable and plywood tanks and airplanes. They immediately went to the front on a par with real equipment — about a thousand real-sized models “fought” on the Kursk Bulge alone. So the ingenuity of the Soviet people helped in the fight against the Nazi invaders.

In 1942, the 23rd special squad was created, which consisted of more than a thousand artists. Their task was to recreate Soviet military installations, imitated as accurately as possible. Then the dummy armored vehicles were mounted on tractors. For reliability, they were equipped with a soundtrack that mimicked the hum of engines. And branches were attached to the bottom so that the same dust rose after the “tank” as behind real military equipment.

However, it wasn’t limited to technology alone: sometimes mock-ups of soldiers were used to mislead the enemy. For example, when enemy aircraft approached the actual location of the Soviet troops, “equipment” with “military personnel” sitting inside was pushed forward. So, the German pilot fired bullets at it and threw bombs without harming real people.

👉 Original video source at TV Zvezda, and a properly-deinterlaced copy at Odnoklassniki.

Following is a fragment from the memoirs of the head of the engineering troops of the Leningrad Front, Boris Vladimirovich Bychevsky, chapter 4, “The Assault Has Been Repelled”:

I put down the maps and began to show what had been done before the start of the breakthrough at Krasnoe Selo, Krasnogvardeisk and Kolpin, what we have now at the Pulkovo position, what is being done in the city, on the Neva, on the Karelian Isthmus, where miners and pontoons are working.
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Remembering the Khatyn Massacre of March 22, 1943

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83 years ago, the peaceful Soviet Belarusian village of Khatyn was wiped out – nearly all of the inhabitants were burned alive and shot by the SS punitive unit Dirlewanger (Sonderkommando Dirlewanger) and the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion.

Khatyn – a small village of just 26 households – was located 54 kilometres northwest of Minsk. (BATS note: A short node about the name of the village. There is no sound “k” in Khatyn – the first sound is “h” as in “he, home”.)

On March 22, 1943, Belarusian partisans intercepted a Nazi motor convoy in the area, inflicting casualties, including killing a German officer. In retaliation, the Hitlerites encircled Khatyn and decided to unleash their fury on defenceless civilians – women, the elderly and children.

All residents – 149 people, including 75 children – were forced into a wooden barn, locked inside and set ablaze. Those who, in desperation, tried to escape were ruthlessly shot at point-blank range.

✍️ From the interrogation record of Ostap Knap, a collaborator from the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion, a native of the Lvov region (31 May 1986):

“The roof was thatched and immediately caught fire. Screams of horror rose from the barn as those trapped inside, facing certain death, began forcing the door. The policemen surrounding the site opened fire on them”.

Only six people managed to escape the inferno alive – five children and one adult, 56-year-old blacksmith Iosif Kaminsky. He regained consciousness late at night after the perpetrators had left the burnt village. Among the bodies of his fellow villagers, he found his son Adam, who died from his wounds in his father’s arms…

❗️ The atrocities in Khatyn were carried out by the 118th Ukrainian Police Battalion, formed in October 1942 in Kiev largely from Ukrainian nationalists and members of the Organisation of Ukrainian nationalists. Earlier, its members took part in mass executions of Jews at Babi Yar. The battalion was commanded by Konstantin Smovsky, born in the Poltava Governorate, who later fled to the US, where he died in 1960. The Supreme court of Belarus has found him guilty of genocide.

***

In 1969, one of Belarus’s most revered memorial sites – the Khatyn Memorial Complex – was opened on the site of the destroyed village, a silent witness to the monstrous crimes of Nazism. At its centre stands a six-metre bronze sculpture, The Unconquered Man, depicting Iosif Kaminsky carrying his dead son in his arms. Each of the 26 burned homes is marked by a symbolic log structure with an obelisk in the shape of a chimney, bearing the names of those who perished and a bell that tolls every hour.

The tragedy of Khatyn has become a symbol of the inhuman cruelty of Nazism – a living reminder of hundreds of annihilated villages and thousands of innocent civilians of the Soviet Union whose lives were shattered by Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices – a genocide of the Soviet people. Our duty is to ensure that these crimes, which have no statute of limitations, are never forgotten.

On April 19, by Presidential Decree, Russia established the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People during the Great Patriotic War. According to even the most conservative estimates, 13.7 million civilians were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.

🕯 We mourn together with the fraternal people of Belarus.

Source: Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Russia’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova in an Izvestia article

✍️ Today marks the anniversary of one of the most heinous crimes committed by the Nazis and their accomplices – the destruction in 1943 of the Belarusian village of Khatyn together with all its inhabitants.

149 people, including 75 children, were burned alive.

Since 1969, a memorial complex stands on the site of the burned Khatyn, commemorating the mass murder of civilians on the occupied territory of the USSR.
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Stalin against Nepotism

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Vasily Stalin

Unlike many prominent figures of those times, Stalin never sought to protect his family from the war. In total, the leader had four children – two native sons and a daughter, as well as an adopted son.

Iosif sent his eldest son, Yakov, to the front right with the outbreak of war on June 22, 1941. The man did not manage to stay in battle for a long time – a month later he was captured by the Germans.

According to legend, the Fascists offered Stalin to exchange Yakov for the captured German officer Paulus, to which he replied that “one does not exchange soldiers for field marshals”. Stalin’s son spent two years in concentration camps before his psyche broke down and he tried to escape in the hope that he would be shot. And so it happened.

The youngest son, Vasily, built a brilliant career at the front, but his father was also strict with him. According to historians, the officer was offered the rank of general many times, but Iosif always crossed him off the list – he left him there only on the 12th time, considering that now his son was worthy of such an honour.

Source: Historical Facts, translated by Beorn And The Shieldmaiden

When the liberators are made into enemies – Soviet war memorial vandalised in Norway

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“In Neiden in Southern Varanger, a memorial to Soviet soldiers has been subjected to serious vandalism. The incident joins a European wave of attacks on Red Army monuments. Soldiers who died fighting Nazism are now treated as political targets.”

By Dan-Viggo Bergtun, published at Steigan on March 7, 2026

👉 Make sure to read our series of materials on the liberation of Northern Norway at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”, including For the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Northern Norway, the WWII History Is Being Rewritten There.

👉 The erasure of historical memory is nothing new. In our 2024 publication 80 Years since the Red Army liberated Northern Norway from Nazi German occupation we mention “Operation Asphalt”, when in 1951 the graves of Soviet soldiers were ravaged and the remains were taken to the island of Tjøtta, where they were buried in a common cemetery. The stated reason for this was the fear that visits to soldiers’ graves would become a cover for espionage operations of the Soviet intelligence.

Here is the memorial in Neiden that was recently torn down, probably with ropes and snowmobiles. Photo: Hallgeir Henriksen.

Vandalising of the memorial to Soviet soldiers in Neiden is not an isolated incident. It is part of a pattern that spreads throughout Western Europe. War memorials to Soviet soldiers are vandalised, removed, or politically delegitimised. In Norway, too, we are now seeing signs of the same development.

Neiden is a small village in South Varanger municipality in Finnmark, along the E6 at Neiden River, about 40 kilometers west of Kirkenes. Here stands a memorial erected in 1994 on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of East Finnmark. The monument was erected by Norwegian organisations and local initiatives to honour Soviet soldiers who fell in battle against the Nazi occupation in 1944.

On the memorial are the names of soldiers from the Red Army who were killed and buried in Neiden. They came from different parts of the USSR, including Ukraine. They died far from home during the fighting that led to the liberation of Eastern Finnmark from German control.

Nevertheless, this memorial has now been subjected to severe vandalism. The nameplates have been knocked down, probably by means of a snowmobile. This is not accidental vandalism. It is a politically motivated attack on historical memory that makes the liberators into enemies.

The same events are happening across much of Europe. In several countries, Soviet war monuments have been torn down or removed by political decisions. Elsewhere, they are vandalised or subjected to campaigns that attempt to portray them as propaganda.

This is not just a loss of history. It is moral decay.
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We will expose and destroy provocateurs and those spreading panicked rumours

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Before you is a poster by Vladimir Milashevski, published in Leningrad in 1941. Its caption reads: “We will expose and destroy provocateurs and those spreading panicked rumours”. The same was true for Moscow.

We present a publication from our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

Just like in 1941, so now — be on guard and do not fall for provocative rumours that instil fear, uncertainty and doubt!

In his speech at the Red Square parade on the 7th of November 1941, Iosif Stalin said:

The enemy is not as strong as some frightened intellectuals portray it. The devil is not so terrible as they paint him.
The «frightened intellectuals», in today’s terms, would be the liberal 5th column.

Here is a short fragment of an article «How Stalin dismantled the 5th column in the fall of 1941».

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The problem of the 5th column existed, exists and will exist, perhaps, forever. It is not so easy to identify the 5th column, only the master can do this. And Stalin did it in October 1941!

Reading the memoirs of Academician Vernadsky, you discover two details that seem to contradict each other. Many people see this in the media about the Defence of Moscow: they say that the hardest days were October 16-17, that’s when panic arose. The «worst» part of the population, it must be assumed, imagined that German tanks were about to enter Moscow, trampling the streets with their tracks. There were some reasons for this hallucination – first of all, the fact that on the morning of October 16, the Sovinformburo did not give, as always, a summary from the theatre of military operations, and it was briefly reported that the Germans broke through the front. And that’s it.

In addition of the case with the radio, the top management instructed to open industrial goods stores, where everything was distributed for free — take as much as you like. And grocery stores received instructions to dispense food on the food cards up to the end of the month and even gave more than what the card norms provided for — from which many concluded that all food stocks are being liquidated and this can only mean one thing — the end. Even the trams stopped running.

Some strangers called the institutions and shouted at the directors that it was necessary to leave Moscow immediately, leave it as soon as possible. Many directors who had transport at their disposal filled these trucks with food, plus grabbed huge amounts of state money, and tried to leave Moscow, but the population quickly organised themselves into people’s outposts, these cars were stopped and panickers were killed. There is a (very poor) reconstruction of these posts in the 1985 movie “Battle for Moscow”.

By the evening, policemen joined the people’s outposts and also began to participate in the elimination of alarmists.

But not everyone rushed out of the city, obeying the calls of unfamiliar voices on the phone, not all the directors turned out to be cheap panickers — there were many who continued their work. Many people not in high positions remained calm — they formed the backbone of the people’s outposts, which dealt with the alarmists.

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Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was in fact in Moscow on November 16-17 and participated as a member of Komsomol in the people’s outposts. She is the epitome of steadfastness! Reportedly, according to her mother’s words, Zoya said about the 5th columnists at that time: «The ship is not yet sinking, but the despicable rats are already running.»

The French-Lithuanian falsification of WWII history by SBS

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On 8 February, SBS aired the film The Anti-Soviet Fighters (French-Lithuanian co-production), which is built entirely on lies and a cynical falsification of history.

Members of the “Forest Brothers” armed gangs are portrayed as heroes who “waged a decade-long fight against Soviet control in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia”.

In fact, the core of this “movement” was composed of former military personnel of the Baltic states belonging to the territorial SS battalions. They were involved in bloody crimes against civilians. The Nuremberg Tribunal designated all persons officially admitted as members of the SS as criminals.

According to official figures, between 1944 and 1956, the “Forest Brothers” killed more than 25’000 people in Lithuania, including over 1’000 children (52 of them were under the age of two), more than 2’000 in Latvia and 800 in Estonia. The overwhelming majority of the victims were local common people who supported the Soviet authorities or simply refused to assist underground bandit formations.

❗️This film is an attempt to brainwash the SBS audience, revise the outcomes of the Nuremberg Tribunal and glorify murderers depicting them as “freedom fighters”.

Rewriting the history of the Second World War is a dangerous path to revival of Nazism and to tragedies which must never be repeated.

From: Russian Embassy in Australia

The Liberation of Krakow

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Below are two fragments from chapter 7 of the book «1945. The Red Army’s Blitzkrieg» by Valentin Aleksandrovich Runov, which we initially presented at our Telegram channel “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

Contrast the following testimony to how Anglo-Americans treated Dortmund, Dresden, Prague, Königsberg, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and more….

Wawel castle and its cathedral

Writer Boris Polevoy shared his impressions of his stay in Krakow on the first day of its liberation:

Yes, it is fortunate that this city was saved. We were driving through medieval streets, and the guide was telling us: the fifteenth century, the sixteenth century, the eighteenth century.

— Please, stop here.

We went out, and the teacher solemnly declared:

— This is the tenth century. The chapel of Felix and Adauctus (https://wawel.krakow.pl/en/exhibition-constant/the-lost-wawel-1). The pearl of Europe.

And indeed, one could admire the example of magnificent architecture. The architecture is strict and at the same time peculiar, unique. The building would definitely be flying, aiming at the sky.

Then the old man took us to some kind of cathedral. We could hear our footsteps somewhere ahead of us, and the echo diligently duplicated our voices, as if responding to us from somewhere under the dome. Excellent sculptures were looking at us, but the guide kept leading us forward, not letting us stop.
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