re: Do Russian history students learn about WWII the other way around?

Until I did my own reading and research of WWII, I thought the world was a pubic hair away from all speaking German until America swooped in and saved the day

Edgy post of the day: Would we have been better off had Germany won WWI? WWII likely wouldn't have happened, at least not in the capacity of how it kicked off.

WWII began as a direct result of the Treaty of Versailles.

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Would we have been better off had Germany won WWI?

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really don't think it would have mattered much. We still would have had a massive second war after

They also used to tell their people that they made Jeeps in a town called "Willys-Overland" in southern USSR.

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But did the Russians fight Japan?
like, They went balls out against Germany but did they assist on other fronts?

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No, they didn't declare war on Japan until the US had already dropped the first bomb. Then they moved into Manchuria and Korea. Opportunists.

As others have pointed out, there really wasn't "one" country that defeated nazi Germany. It was a combined effort between the United States, England, and the soviets in which all three were equally important

They probably emphasize the defense of Moscow, Stalingrad and their huge tank battles and skip the part where they partitioned Poland with Hitler or when they attacked Finland and were stymied.

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Is that not correct in your opinion?

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No, it is not correct at all. In fact Roosevelt was bending over backwards to give Stalin war goods way before we entered the war. Thousands of ships and planes and tanks and jeeps were given to russia by the US. The only thing that really pissed Stalin off about the US, was that we went to Africa before Europe. The US wanted to push the Reich back from it's weakest parts, while Stalin wanted a front opened on France ASAP.

Another topic for another day is how, before the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, the Japanese were trying to get the soviets to mediate a more amicable peace treaty between Japan and the united states

Obviously this will veer the thread off course, but prejudice against Jews was present everywhere in Europe, not just Germany. It was rooted in the fact that, under the medieval Catholic Church, usury (lending money at interest) was prohibited by papal decree. Judaism had no such prohibition, so naturally many Jews became moneylenders. As banking became a thing in the Renaissance, it was also then natural for Jews to be heavily involved in them, since they had already been carrying out some of the same functions. Jews also, again naturally, tended to keep to themselves, and of course there was a great deal of prejudice directed towards them for the Jewish role in the crucifixion and just from a religious standpoint in general. Combine all of that together and let it stew for a few hundred years, and you get the Jewish stereotype: selfish, evil, in control of the world's money, and only interested in stealing whatever money they didn't control already.

Germany post-WWI was a powder keg looking for a match. The Great War had cost them millions dead with nothing to show for it. Also remember that there was never any serious fighting on German soil, and that just two months prior to the German surrender, at the height of the German 1918 offensive, it seriously appeared that Germany would win. This combined to produce in the average German a willingness to believe that Germany hadn't truly been beaten, that they had been sold out and betrayed when victory was still possible. It didn't help that prominent military leaders at the time were saying the same thing in an effort to not be blamed for the defeat. All that was needed was a villain, and Hitler and the Nazis helpfully stepped in to provide one in the form of international Jewry, who were already hated and who no one really cared what happened to. All of the anger and pain and shame people felt over the extraordinary cost of losing the war and the awful economic collapse afterwards suddenly had a focus, and that focus is what allowed Hitler to gain power.