The Red Army would have been welcomed as the liberators by Western Europeans, where many of their bourgeois governments had already fled or ended up collaborating with the Nazis. It was the communist partisans, local resistance and the Red Army who drove the Nazis out.
That is, if America didn’t conveniently enter Western Europe to fight the Nazis by 1944, when the Nazis had already suffered their decisive defeat the year before and were already on the retreat from the east.
it’d have taken months–>year longer and tens–>hundreds of thousands of soviet lives. the soviets really didnt want to and quite appreciated the western front, their main complaint being it took too long for Overlord to go off
It was the stance of the Soviets under Stalin that something like that would be a Bad Idea, because the Soviets probably would not have survived such an endeavor. I think it’s debatable that they should have found some way to secure all of Germany, even if there was limited military conflict with the other Allies, for the sake of denazifying and a more economically viable GDR. Such an effort could easily have turned into a WW2.5 that the USSR would probably lose, so that’s the “debatable” part.
Damn, should the soviets have invaded western Europe?
The Red Army would have been welcomed as the liberators by Western Europeans, where many of their bourgeois governments had already fled or ended up collaborating with the Nazis. It was the communist partisans, local resistance and the Red Army who drove the Nazis out.
That is, if America didn’t conveniently enter Western Europe to fight the Nazis by 1944, when the Nazis had already suffered their decisive defeat the year before and were already on the retreat from the east.
it’d have taken months–>year longer and tens–>hundreds of thousands of soviet lives. the soviets really didnt want to and quite appreciated the western front, their main complaint being it took too long for Overlord to go off
It was the stance of the Soviets under Stalin that something like that would be a Bad Idea, because the Soviets probably would not have survived such an endeavor. I think it’s debatable that they should have found some way to secure all of Germany, even if there was limited military conflict with the other Allies, for the sake of denazifying and a more economically viable GDR. Such an effort could easily have turned into a WW2.5 that the USSR would probably lose, so that’s the “debatable” part.