A story about U.S. OWI and Voice of America (VOA) pro-Soviet propaganda originally published by the Online Cold War Radio Museum Ted Lipien for Cold War Radio Museum September 1, 2016 The Office of War Information (O.W.I.), established by Executive Order No. 9182 of June 13, 1942, was the WWII-era domestic and foreign propaganda agency of the U.S. Executive Branch reporting…
Throughout World War II, the arrests and forced deportations of Polish families to labor camps ordered by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin received practically no mainstream media coverage in the United States. After the Soviet Union became an important military ally against Nazi Germany with the sudden collapse of Stalin’s alliance with Hitler following the German attack on Russia in June…
A statement made on the floor of the U.S. Senate on February 8, 1940 by Senator John A. Danaher (R-Connecticut) may have been the first major public reference in the United States to the 1940 deportations of Poles and other nationalities to Gulag forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. Senator Danaher inserted in the Congressional Record the text of…
Following the August 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact and the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, which started World War II, the Soviets began the first mass deportation of Poles on February 10, 1940 from the occupied eastern part of Poland. Whole families were arrested, usually early in the morning, and sent in overcrowded cattle train wagons to forced labor…