A Zaney Romp through 1940s Europe

Yes, this little aspect of the beginning of WWII is often overlooked, because the UK and the US were forced by necessity (i.e., Germany was successfully conquering Europe) to ally with the Soviet Union. The reason why this is so ironic (although that is something of a weak term for it) is that it was the invasion of Poland BY GERMANY that caused the UK and France to declare war on Germany. However, the invasion of Poland was undertaken because Hitler concluded a non-agression pact with Stalin, part of which was that they would carve up Poland between them (before Poland regained independence at the end of WWI, Germany and Russia occupied most of it). So the Western allies went to war against Germany when it invaded Poland from the West, but didn't go after the Soviet Union for invading it from the East at the same time. After Hitler trounced Poland in September, 1939, then successfully conquered most of Western Europe in the Summer of 1940, he could then turn his attention again to the Soviet Union, and invaded them the next year, taking back the part of Poland that the Soviet Union had taken two years previously. Because of that, the Soviet Union's sins were whitewashed and it became one of the Western allies. The ultimate irony was that, at the end of WWII, the Soviet Union incorporated the Eastern part of Poland into it (transferring the population to the West), and occupied the rest of Poland, so that the causus belli initiating WWII (the invasion and occupation of Poland by a hostile power) was accepted at the end of the war - and several more countries in Eastern Europe suffered the same fate. That brought on the Cold War, so we all became anti-Soviet, but we never seemed to re-raise the fact that the Soviet Union was one of the intial aggressors in WWII (possibly because we had acquiesced in it for so long).