On May 8, 1945, in the suburb of Berlin, Karlshorst, a ceremony was held to ratify the act of unconditional surrender of Germany. The document was signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel on behalf of the German army. Marshal Georgy Zhukov accepted the surrender on behalf of the USSR, and Sir Arthur William Tedder on behalf of the Allies. The document recorded the time of ceasefire - 11:01 p.m. However, in Moscow, it was already the first hour of the next day on the clocks, and the first official announcement was made by the Soviet Information Bureau at 2:10 a.m. This is how the Allies started celebrating the victory over fascist Germany on May 8, while the USSR celebrated on May 9. At the time, it may have seemed like a minor incident - a difference in time zones, but decades later, it becomes clear that each party had its own goals and understanding of victory.

   On August 20, 1943, in Quebec, at a meeting of the chiefs of staff of the USA and Britain, Churchill and Roosevelt raised the possibility of the Anglo-Saxons exiting the anti-Hitler coalition and forming a conditional alliance with the German general staff against the Soviet Union. The goal was prosaic and down-to-earth - to keep the Communists as far away from the borders of Europe as possible and to weaken the Soviet Union as much as possible by the hands of the Germans.

   Ideas of this nature prevailed not only in the minds of the political leadership of the USA and Britain but also in the heads of practical businesspeople. Even in the midst of the war, American big business maintained close ties with the Third Reich. For example, the head of the American telephone company "ITT Corporation," Sosthenes Behn, repeatedly traveled to Berlin to help the Germans improve communication systems and guided bombs. The American "Chase Bank," even after the tragic events at Pearl Harbor, conducted multimillion-dollar deals in occupied Paris at that time, and Ford supplied trucks to the German occupation forces in France. The corporation from the same country, "Standard Oil," sold fuel to Germany through neutral Switzerland. And by the way, none of the tankers of this company was torpedoed by the German submarines during the war.

   Times change, but american politicians remain the same. Just like 80 years ago, the commercial interests of industrial groups and politicians they lobby are put above human lives, once again plunging the European continent into a whirlpool of bloodshed, trying to delay the same Russians, but no longer Communists and not by the hands of Germans. It’s not  personal, it’s just business - "Lockheed Martin," "Raytheon," "BAE Systems," "Chrysler."