Review: ‘WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West’
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Series revisits the intricate dance of ruthless dictators that played out on a war-torn world stage.
War is not known to produce many saints, at least not among its policymakers whose decisions often come down to negotiating degrees of horror. World War II is no exception and no other figure makes that so frighteningly clear as Josef Stalin.
Almost 20 years after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, conventional wisdom concedes that Stalin was just as brutal a dictator as Adolf Hitler, ruthlessly deporting, imprisoning and murdering millions.
But he was also, along with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, a member of the Big Three and one of the main reasons the Allies were able to defeat the Germans.
‘WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West,’ which begins tonight on PBS, is a riveting, revelatory and at times unsettling exploration of the role Stalin played in World War II, first as an ally of Nazi Germany and then of the United States and Britain.
For years, ‘Uncle Joe,’ as he was called by Roosevelt and Churchill, was the only European leader with a will, an army and a winter strong enough to eventually push back the German forces. That he was also in the habit of murdering anyone he considered even vaguely a threat was something the British and American leaders were prepared to deny or ignore, at least until the war was won.
Read the entire review of ‘WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West’
-- Mary McNamara
Photo: Alexei Petrenko, left, as Stalin, Bob Gunton as FDR, Paul Humpoletz as Churchill. Mike Hogan / BBC
