The trajectory of World War II seems simple — Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Normandy, and victory on the Western front, good triumphing over evil. But there’s considerably more to the story, such as the Soviet side of things.
For context, the Soviet Union was already in Nazi Germany’s crosshairs, owing to the concept of “lebensraum” (German for “living space,” and a parallel to America’s Manifest Destiny). Granted, the idea existed before World War I, but Adolf Hitler made it a central point of Nazi doctrine, calling for not only the extermination of Jewish communities, but also the acquisition of Soviet lands. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia did enter into a nonaggression pact in 1939, but Hitler chose to break that pact just two years later; what followed for the Soviets were some of the deadliest battles of World War II, to which Germany committed most of its military assets. The western parts of Russia were effectively razed to the ground, veritable ghost towns by 1945. Some 11 million Soviet soldiers died in the war, along with around 15 million civilians, a statistic that has no real comparison on the Western front (though it should be noted that Joseph Stalin’s purges are included in those numbers).
But had Hitler not been around, would any of that have happened? Maybe the Soviet Union would have been less of a target for German aggression, or the nonaggression pact might have stood for longer. (Stalin did seem keen on negotiating with Germany.) Either way, the results might have been less bloody.
