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Against Stalin and Hitler

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Students of any historical subject are constantly faced with the risk of falling victum of the conventional wisdom of the subject matter at hand. This is especially true when the subject happens to be the second world war. After all does history favor the victors and is it not the victors who earn the privilige to write the history? Indeed it is unfortunate that historians tend to paint events with a broad brush. Perhaps readers do feel more comfortable seeing events in black and white. Wilfried Strik-Strikfelds autobiographical narrative, "Against Stalin & Hitler 1941-1945" is an attempt to question such conventional wisdom. Its author was an officer in the German Army Propaganda department assigned the task of creating one of the greatest, but now forgotten myths of the war, that of the so called Russian Liberation Army. This was in fact a non-existant army created for propaganda purposes during the war. Though it existed only on paper, it did have a leader in the name of General Andrei Vlasov.This book details the authors involvment in the Russian Liberation Movement and his friendship with the said general. Vlaslov was a high ranking Officer in the Soviet Army who after valient resistance, fell prisoner to the Germans while defending Moscow in July of 1942. He later became figurehead of the so called ROA, but more importantly, was the idealogical leader of the estimated 800 millian russians whose opposition to Stalins reign of terror forced them to collaborate with the Nazi Germans. As the book's title implies, the russians found themselves in a particular dilema, can one serve one tyrant to fight another. Throughout the text, Strik-Strikfeldt makes it clear that the russians, mostly prisoners of war, are in truth fighting a war on two fronts, one against Stalin, but still another against the Nazi hierarchy who holds them as racially inferior. In spite of these obsticles, Vlasov and his russians make their objectives clear, that they are woirking for a free and democratic Russia; o! ne opposed to Nazi or Bolshivik tyrany.