It took Stalin AND Hitler to ignite World War II and the slaughter that came after.

Remember the victims of Communism

by Žygimantas Pavilionis and Marion Smith

Seventy-five years ago this week, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a pact of non-aggression and cooperation. The sinister 1939 pact (along with its secret provisions) between Hitler and Stalin and negotiated by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Nazi German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, would conquer and divide Europe, half Nazi and half Communist. Fascism and Communism became aligned in the early stages of a conflict that would consume millions of lives in the years that followed.

Within days of signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler's armies invaded Poland, and over the next few months, Stalin soon invaded Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. For nearly two years, the Nazi SS and Soviet NKVD worked together. There were instances when Soviet secret police rounded up German Jews who had escaped to the Soviet Union and handed them over to the SS. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union committed war crimes on a massive scale and systematically murdered millions of civilians.

In 1941, Hitler broke the pact and attacked the Soviet Union. When the war ended, the Third Reich was finished, but the Soviet Empire lived on.

In the 1980s — when most people expected that the Soviet Union would never end — refugees from Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland and other Captive Nations began organizing protests on August 23rd, the date of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, calling it "Black Ribbon Day." They wished to remind the West that Joseph Stalin was not a friend of peace in World War II, but helped to cause the war, directly aided the Nazis, and then seized half of Europe in order to impose Soviet Communism on entire populations. Most urgently, these protesters, who had themselves escaped from behind the Iron Curtain, wished to remind the West that the Soviet Union still dominated the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. These protests occurred in tandem with dissident movements behind the Iron Curtain.


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