Another group of war criminals

For the past few months we have celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. We are now approaching a similar anniversary for the surrender of Imperial Japan and the end of the war in the Pacific (celebrated throughout the world on either Aug. 15, the day Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender, or Sept. 2, when Japan officially surrendered).

We prosecuted Nazi and Japanese leaders at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals for their horrific crimes against humanity. Yet, there is a third group whose World War II crimes have never been prosecuted: the communists.

Recall how World War II really began. The precipitating cause of hot war breaking out in Europe on Sept. 1, 1939, was that just a few weeks before, the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and its great adversary, Nazi Germany, signed a secret agreement. We know it as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a deal that carved up Eastern Europe, including divvying up Poland and the Soviet Union laying claim to the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

In a sense, global war did not begin when the Nazis attacked Poland, but rather when fierce enemies in Moscow and Berlin agreed not to attack one another, allowing Germany to assault Western Europe while the two divided up Eastern Europe. Over time, the addition of allies to the Axis war effort—i.e., Italy, Japan) made this a truly international contest of historic proportions.

In the West, the Soviets—while still Hitler’s allies—were by 1940 using repression, murder, and deportation in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Hitler turned on Stalin in 1941 and launched an invasion of the Soviet Union. When the Soviets finally turned the tide against the Germans and began to march across Eastern Europe (1944-1945), they used mass rape, plunder, torture, and murder to terrify the populace. As we all know, the crimes of communism in Europe continued throughout the Cold War.

What of the East? As we mark the capitulation of Japan and the formal end to World War II, it is worth reminding ourselves that justice has never been served for the crimes of communism in Asia and the Far East. Just as Soviet troops refused to leave Poland in 1945, so too they abrogated their agreement to leave Iran at war’s end, and in typical revolutionary fashion, Moscow supported separatist movements among Iran’s Azeris and Kurds, as well as in nearby Turkey and Greece.

The Soviet Union only turned its attention to the Far East with vigor in August 1945, after the United States and other Allied forces had fought the bloody battles of the Pacific. Numerous historians and oral documentaries have reported how the 1.6 million-strong Soviet Army enveloped the Japanese military in areas of today’s China, Mongolia, and Korea. The Japanese Army had been on garrison duty for years, and collapsed quickly due to the superior armaments, size, and airpower of the Soviet Union, as well as the chaos at home after the destruction of Hiroshima.

As the Japanese military fled, civilians were left undefended. One author described the carnage this way: “For many it would be a welter of misery, bloodshed and rape.” Stories abound of the brutal murder of Japanese men and any others who stood in the way, and the massive scale of violence against women.

It was not only Soviets who behaved criminally, nor was Japan the only target. The Soviets supported Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communists, which would result in more years of civil war in China and the establishment of the Chinese Communist regime in Beijing in 1949. As detailed in The Black Book of Communism, that regime would prove to be the most murderous of all time, with as many as 60 million deaths caused by murder and famine under Mao’s so-called Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward initiatives.

Furthermore, the Soviet Union invaded Japanese-occupied Korea in 1945, stopping at the 38th parallel (in accord with an agreement with the United States and the United Kingdom). American forces occupied the southern portion of Korea. But, the Soviet occupation led to a harsh communist regime in Pyongyang that just five years later attacked its southern neighbor, leading to an estimated four million deaths in the Korean Conflict.

Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the president of its successor, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, routinely praises Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin, whose crimes have never been dealt with, even posthumously. The crimes of the Soviet Union, Mao’s Red Army, and North Korean communists have never been adjudicated, and China and North Korea remain repressive to their own people and threats to world peace.

As we commemorate the victories of 1945 and thank those last living American warriors who fought in Europe and Asia, it is also right to recall that there is still work to do to vindicate the victims of communism in World War II.