The National D-Day Memorial recently added a bust of Josef Stalin to its lineup.
The Soviets did not participate in D-Day.
The New York Daily News reported:
The National D-Day Memorial has sparked outrage by adding to its lineup of Allied leaders a bust of the Soviet dictator who helped start World War II and the Cold War.
Not only did Joseph Stalin kill more people than Adolf Hitler in his murderous reign, he didn’t send a single Russian soldier to storm the beaches at Normandy in 1944…
Stalin’s hands were soaked with the blood of millions of Ukrainians even before he and Hitler carved up Poland and set off the Second World War in 1939.
As Hitler’s ally, Stalin’s henchmen marched over a million Poles and Jews off to Siberia and murdered 22,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.
William McIntosh, president of the memorial in Bedford, Va., insisted “the function of this sculpture is not to honor Stalin.”
Stalin is included with the busts of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill because the Soviets “secured the eastern front and helped win the war,” he said.
“He’s part of the narrative thread and the mission of the foundation is preserve the legacies and lessons of D-Day. One of the legacies of D-Day is the Cold War.”
That explanation did not wash with Alex Storozynski of the Kosciuszko Foundation in Manhattan, whose father fought at D-Day as a member of a Polish Army unit.
“Given McIntosh’s logic, should America put up a statue of Saddam Hussein because he was an ally of the U.S. in the 1980s when we supported Iraq in a war against Iran?” Storozynski wrote on Huffington Post.