This month marked the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union which took place on June 22, 1941. Hitler’s witting or unwitting pre-emptive attack against the Red Army, which were massed on the borders of eastern Germany, western Poland, Hungary, and Romania poised for their own invasion, enabled the Germans to capture or destroy tens of thousands of Soviet tanks and aircraft. Some authors who have examined Soviet archives have suggested the offensive was scheduled to take place a mere two and a half weeks after Hitler’s attack. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union had joined with Nazi Germany in invading Poland and starting World War II as co-aggressors, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill responded to the German invasion of its former Soviet ally by pledging their unqualified support for the Soviet war effort no matter what the consequences of their unqualified political and military support might be. U.S. and U.K government war propagandists went to work to deceive their citizens into believing that the world’s greatest mass murderer, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was, in fact, a gallant ally of democracy and freedom in the fight against Nazi Germany.