As Soviet troops closed in on Germany in January 1945, Ilya Ehrenburg, Soviet Russia's foremost wartime writer, published an article in the Red Army's newspaper, reminding his readers about the larger meaning of the war they were fighting:

Advancing toward Berlin are not only our divisions and armies, but also legions of petrified mothers, inconsolable widows, and children whose hair has turned gray... Advancing toward Berlin are the boots, shoes and slippers of those who have been gassed, among them the tiny shoes of a two- year-old....

In histories of the Second World War, Ehrenburg often figures as a fierce propagandist whose fiery calls on Red Army men to kill Germans contributed to the exceptional violence that defined the German-Soviet war.^{[485] [486]} But in important other respects his writings have been overlooked: as carriers of detailed information about Nazi atrocities in the East, and as catalysts of a moral position from which Ehrenburg's readers, whether they were soldiers at the front or civilian workers in the war economy, were to encounter and defeat the German invaders. The children killed in ravines and death camps were not going away: Ehrenburg's editorials ensured that they lived on in the conscience of Soviet survivors. The violence practised by the German occu­pants, Ehrenburg felt, should incite moral outrage and lead the Red Army soldiers on towards victory and retribution. Ehrenburg had been writing in this vein since the first days of the German invasion - his January 1945 piece marked a culmination of a multi-year campaign to inform, agitate and educate.

World War II differed from preceding wars on three counts: its staggering overall death toll of some 60 million people; the fact that most of the casualties were on the Allied side; and the much higher death rate, again on the Allied side, of civilians over soldiers.

Germany's war in the East rested on a transgression of the moral norms of humanism, which Nazi leaders purposely disavowed to justify the promotion of a particularist racial ethic and the mass annihilation of ‘unworthy' life. Both the moral provocation that defined the Nazi project and its cruel effects for people who were defined as antithetical to the ‘Aryan race' registered profoundly with Soviet observers. Millions of people witnessed German atrocities on Soviet soil first-hand or learned about them through Ehrenburg's writings, political seminars held inside the Red Army, or letters received from family members who had experienced German rule. Soviet commentators seized on the nature of German violence to build a moral case about their war effort, expressed in the imperative need for ‘Soviet humanity' to fight ‘fascist barbarism'. This narrative, replete with detailed information about German atrocities, was paramount in mobilising Soviet people to fight Nazi Germany. In the eyes of many, it also redeemed the Soviet regime, absolving it of its own ample record of political violence.

Increasingly during the war, the Soviet moral language of anti-fascism shaped Western attitudes towards Nazi Germany. Documentations of Soviet suffering presented in newspaper reports or films circulated through many parts of the world where they produced a groundswell of popular sympathy with the Soviet Union. In the process, decidedly communist norms of fighting the German fascist threat to humanity, and fighting it passionately, passed over to the West. While historians have recently begun to point to the deep sense of moral superiority over Nazi Germany as a key binding agent that held the anti­Hitler coalition together and ultimately accounted for Allied victory in 1945, their preconceived notion that morality resided in the West and was defined by it reduces this important insight.

Shared hatred of Hitler held the Allies together until the end of the war, but the alliance fractured soon after the German regime of violence had been overcome. At the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Stalin's brazen insistence on indicting the Germans for a mass murder of Polish officers at Katyn that in fact Soviet forces had committed backfired spectacularly. Many international observers began to distrust the entire Soviet documentary record on German war crimes. With these sources in discredit, some of the worst German atrocities in the East were eclipsed from the historical record. In the postwar West, anti-fascism yielded to anti-totalitarianism, as Stalin began to appear as another Hitler. Western anti-communism and liberal notions of Soviet society as totalitarian have conspired to produce an exceedingly politi­cised understanding of the Soviet war effort as masterminded by a cynical regime. This interpretation is insensitive to a Soviet documentary record of Nazi violence awash with powerful human emotions: shock, grief and hatred. It represses from view the existential perspectives of violated people roaming ravaged homes. Even though serious scholars today believe most Soviet records of Nazi atrocities to be truthful, the Katyn dossier forming the sole exception, this acknowledgement has barely translated into an injunction to explore these records beyond their instrumental aims.

One reason for this omission is a Western-centric understanding of the Holocaust, which liberal scholars have posited as the defining human chal­lenge of the Second World War.