https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1sh0wp4/isnt_it_weird_how_the_liberation_of_auschwitz/

Like actually think about it, what are the iconic images and moments of the origin war of the modern world in the West, the biggest concentration of highly charged and mythologized cultural touchstones since the Bible. Omaha Beach obviously. Iwo Jima flag raising. The Nuremberg Rallies.The Nuremberg Trials. The Blitz. Dog fights over Britain. Churchill's speeches. The Fall of France. Dunkirk. Nazis parading under the Arc de Triomph. Pearl Harbour. Hitler raging in the bunker. The city fighting in Stalingrad. Winter in front of Moscow. Mussolini's body hanging. The flag over the Reichstag. Anne Frank in the attic. Auschwitz and the gas chambers, the Holocaust in general. The ghettos, the whole slow boil that led them there, Kristallnacht. Striped Pajamas. Piles of shoes.

But not the liberation of Auschwitz. That's not on the highlight reel. Now a foreseeable objection here is that its just a natural outgrowth of the West being more interested in its own armies and its own battles. But I don't think that flies at all, because the zeitgeist is perfectly willing to make room for places and times allied armies simply weren't there. That's most of the holocaust. That's the whole rise of the nazis and and descent into darkness that is very vividly rendered in media and established in popular imagination. And you'll note that the list does contain some of the Eastern Front fighting, but really one of those examples is thought of more in way of awe at the brutality and savagery and scale, one is more about the hopeless misery and doom of the overextension of the germans, its kind of from their perspective, and one could hardly be avoided with how good that picture is and how definitively it capped the war in Europe.

But not the liberation of Auschwitz. With how much western understanding of the war revolves around the holocaust, and the death camps in particular, that should be like, the most famous moment of the war. At least a contender with D-Day, no matter who it was that liberated it. It should be this overwrought, swelling scene in like, half of the existing movies about the Holocaust. It should be almost obligatory in many of them, the audience should be expecting despite having already seen it so many times

There's this huge hole in the zeitgeist, so enormous you don't see it because you're so used to seeing through it, where there should be the most famous and recognizable moment in history. And its just not there because you can't actually portray it without incidentally making the Red Army and the Soviet Union look too heroic and good.

I'm willing to bet that if you go ask a random person under 50 who liberated Auschwitz, they'll shrug their shoulders and guess America. I'm further willing to bet that when you tell them it was the Red Army, they'll say they didn't know China was in WW2.