Don’t Forget the Crimes of Communism in World War II

By Eric Patterson

Saturday, June 28, 2025

 

This summer, we observe the 80th commemoration of the costly Allied victory over the Axis Powers in World War II. These countries, characterized by evil, racial ideologies that justified grotesque violence, were beaten on the battlefield and accepted “unconditional surrender.” Their elite leadership faced war crimes at the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and their inhuman savagery was documented and widely published. To this day, our schools and institutions are committed to depicting the Axis crimes: Never Again!

 

Yet there remains unfinished business.

 

In the aftermath of World War II, crimes of communism were never held to the same standard. Soviet communism was complicit in the advent of war in 1939. Its hordes unleashed havoc in Eastern and Central Europe at war’s end, brutally imposing a totalitarian imperialist order — with global consequences for the next half century.

 

We have yet to hold communism accountable for those crimes.

 

It is often forgotten that a crucial permissive cause of Hitler’s September 1, 1939, attack on Poland was a secret treaty between Moscow and Berlin. Signed on August 23, 1939, the non-aggression treaty divided up Eastern Europe, with the Soviet Union accepting a sphere of influence that included parts of Poland, Finland, parts of Romania, and the three Baltic states. The deal gave Hitler a free hand. The first thing he did with it was assault Poland, one week later.

 

By mid-1940, the Soviet Union had invaded Finland and unlawfully tightened its grip on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Soviet crimes in these countries are well documented. The most notable are incarceration, extrajudicial killing, and the mass deportation of teachers, lawyers, farmers, business owners, and faith leaders via cattle cars to work camps in the east.

 

Later in the war, the Soviet Union unleashed its troops on innocent civilians, bringing an onslaught of killing and rape across Eastern and Central Europe. Regional communist leaders, such as Stalin’s close lieutenant Josip Broz Tito, were responsible for their own war crimes and crimes against humanity: the torture and execution of priests, the murder of POWs and surrendered civilians, and predatory crimes against women and children.

 

The difference between West and East is startling. The U.S. and the U.K. led the liberation of Western Europe; the Soviet Union callously smashed Eastern and Central Europe, setting up vassal governments across the region. Over the ensuing decades, the crimes of communism only compounded within the area bounded by the Iron Curtain.

 

Scholars have attempted to document many of the Cold War crimes of communism. Refer, as the most exhaustive example, to the Black Book of Communism. It provides nearly 1,000 pages of documentation drawn primarily from the archives of former communist states. These documents detail the cruelty and destruction caused by communist governments.

 

Although the World War II crimes of communism have never been addressed, some countries, such as Germany, have attempted to deal with the Cold War crimes of communism by opening up the archives of the secret police, holding senior communist leaders accountable, and publishing secret documents and dossiers to facilitate transparency and accountability. In places such as Poland, Lithuania, and Hungary, governments have established institutions to preserve an accurate historical record. Some, such as Romania, have passed laws requiring evidence of communism’s crimes to be taught in schools.

 

Yet some countries have never dealt with the crimes of communism that occurred during the Cold War — much less those of World War II.

 

Countries like Bulgaria somehow find it difficult to rid themselves of the colossal sculptures glorifying Stalin and the Soviet takeover of the country in 1945. Several governments, particularly those in the Balkans, such as Croatia and Serbia, have found it difficult to create mechanisms to appropriately teach about the crimes of communism and portray an accurate history of those crimes. In some cases, most notably Belarus and Russia, we are even seeing a renewed glorification of the communist era. Just a few weeks ago, there was a dedication of a monument to Stalin in a Moscow subway station.

 

It should not surprise us that countries which glorify Russia have bullied and attacked their neighbors, such as Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, and have used the old tactics of imprisonment, torture, and assassination against critics and dissidents.

 

There are models for a better way. Poland, Hungary, the Baltic countries, East Germany, and others established mechanisms for truth and justice.

 

As we commemorate not just the battlefield victories of 1945, but also the moral victory of the Western moral order outside the Iron Curtain, we should recognize the unfinished business of World War II. It is time for a public accounting for the crimes of communism during World War II: the crimes of aggression that contributed to the war, the war crimes perpetrated by communist conquerors, and the unlawful occupations that followed the war. Such accounting provides a new, revitalized foundation for our commitment to: Never Again!