In remembering that the Eastern Front was the largest and most vicious of those in the fight against Nazism, we should be careful not to swing to far in the other direction and minimize the contributions of all Allied powers, or to project our current politics on the war. https://twitter.com/freedomrideblog/status/1391539110511353857

If we’re going to discuss communism as it relates to the Eastern Front, it’s also important to discuss why it mattered from the Nazi worldview. The Nazis were anticommunist because to them it was Judea-Bolshevism. Nazi anticommunism cannot be separated from Nazi anti-Semitism.

That distinction is a factor in why the graph in the quoted discussion is so distorted; it includes Soviet civilian deaths as part with military deaths. This is not wrong, per se, if you’re going to talk about the Holocaust. The Nazis were fighting a “Vernichtungskrieg.”

That is, a war of annihilation: German captors planned that Soviet POWs would die. Nevertheless, the blood shed by the constituent Soviet people (which, let’s remember, are not just Russian, but Ukrainian, Armenian, Kazakh, etc.) was not spilled in a vacuum.

The T-34s which poured forth from behind the Urals to stanch the Nazi invasion were underwritten by dollars. Ford Motor Co, White Trucks, and Baldwin and the American Locomotive Company carried the logistical burden which let the Soviet government pour its resources into tanks.

It’s disingenuous to frame the horrific deaths caused by a Nazi genocide as proof that one particular Ally was more important than another. It’s even lower to use it as a chip in a Twitter argument about communism and capitalism.