The Munich Conference, held on September 29-30, 1938, brought together in the German city the heads of government of the United Kingdom, Neville Chamberlain; France, Édouard Daladier; Germany, Adolf Hitler; and Italy, Benito Mussolini.
According to Neville Chamberlain, the pact resulting from that conclave guaranteed world peace, but the consequences were catastrophic: despite Hitler's promises, in March 1939 Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.
In reality, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the surrender of Poland, and the future German attack on the USSR had been agreed in Munich.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union formulated, in 1938, an alliance to the leading circles of France and Great Britain, which was rejected.
It was dawn on June 22, 1941, when all Soviet radio stations broadcast the government's declaration of the German invasion. Without any declaration of war, the fascist hordes had burst into Soviet territory.
On March 30, 1941, Adolf Hitler declared, in the Barbarossa Decree: "This is a struggle for extermination... In the East, cruelty is a good for the future.
After his rapid conquest of France, Hitler believed that a country populated by Untermenschen ("subhumans") would be easily subdued. By mid-August, however, Soviet resistance had disrupted German plans to win the war in the fall of 1941. In December of that year, the "invincible" German army was defeated at the gates of Moscow.
The battles fought between 1942 and 1943 proved decisive. The conquest of Stalingrad - a key strategic objective for the Wehrmacht - ended with the surrender of the German troops in February 1943. The balance on the Eastern Front tipped in favor of the USSR. World War II had turned the tide.
Soviet soldiers defeated Nazi troops in Moscow, Stalingrad (present-day Volgograd), Leningrad, the Kursk front, the Dnieper River, Belarus, the Baltic and Berlin.
During the war, 607 enemy divisions were defeated on the Soviet-German front. The losses of Germany and its allies exceeded 8.5 million people, and more than 75% of their armament was destroyed or captured.
It is impossible to erase from the collective memory the fact that the fascist aggression against the USSR cost the lives of about 27 million people, including ten million soldiers of the Red Army. A total of 1,710 cities and more than 70,000 villages were totally or partially destroyed.
The Great Patriotic War culminated in the Soviet victory. The German Act of Unconditional Surrender was signed on the outskirts of Berlin on May 8, 1945, at 22:43 (May 9, 0:43 Moscow time).
This outcome was not the product of luck, chance or the "Russian winter", but of the spirit of sacrifice, military mastery, the superiority of the Soviet economic system, and the incomparable heroism of a people who refused to surrender to barbarism.
