Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.

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Dan Casey

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Root through the annals of world history and you would be hard-pressed to find any more evil and unprincipled person than Adolf Hitler.

Except, perhaps, for Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator and Hitler's partner in infamy.

By most historians' reckoning, Stalin killed at least twice as many people as the Nazi warlord. It's fair to question whether World War II ever would have started if it wasn't for him.

That's why it's rather surprising that the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford plans to erect a privately funded bust of Stalin at the monument next year.

The bust is the fourth in memorial's World War II program recognizing Allied leaders. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman already are on display, as is British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Clement Attlee, who succeeded Churchill toward the end of World War II, will be the fifth leader represented, and China's Chiang Kai-shek will be the sixth and final.

News of the Stalin bust has caused astonishment and consternation both locally and nationally. In previous news reports, Dr. William McIntosh, director of the National D-Day Memorial Foundation, has declined to identify the donor who is paying for the bust, which is raising questions about Stalin's role.

"He's a monstrous person," McIntosh acknowledges. "It's to make people aware of the kind of person he was, the kind of person Allies had to align themselves with."

That explanation doesn't cut it with John Koelsch of Salem, a decorated and disabled Vietnam veteran. He considers a bust of Stalin at the D-Day Memorial akin to erecting a statue of Osama bin Laden at the site of Ground Zero in New York City.

At first blush, that seems outlandish. But the sheer craziness of the comparison wanes the more you think about what the Soviet dictator did before World War II started, and why the Soviet Union later joined the Allies.

Here, I am able only to scratch history's surface. For a much more detailed account, I highly recommend William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."

By 1939, and with little more than whimpers from the Allies, the Nazis had overrun Austria and the Czech Republic. Hitler planned to conquer Poland next.

But Britain and France already had warned him that would mean war. And Hitler knew that with Poland bordering the Soviet Union, he couldn't fight in the west and the east at the same time.

So in August 1939, Hitler and Stalin concluded a nonaggression pact. Secretly, that deal divided Poland and other parts of eastern Europe into "spheres of interest" which Germany and the USSR could conquer without interference from each other.

And that allowed Germany to invade Poland, which launched World War II.

It was only after Hitler stabbed Stalin in the back by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 that Stalin joined the Allies. By this time Stalin had already swallowed Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Bessarabia, Bukovina and parts of Poland and Finland.

So at best, Stalin was a reluctant member of the Allied forces. Moreover, the Soviets were not among the many nations who provided troops for the D-Day invasion.

Lastly, there's plenty of reason to wonder if D-Day ever would have been necessary without the dirty deal negotiated between Stalin and Hitler in 1939.

"I know it's controversial," McIntosh told me last week. "The intent is ... certainly not to glorify Stalin."

"I don't know in the history of mankind that there hasn't been a bust placed on a pedestal when it hasn't been an honor," Koelsch retorts. "I understand the argument. That does not justify the bust." He says a plaque would do.

History can be an ugly thing, and in this instance it certainly is. Sometimes the winners it loves truly are evil.

Stalin fits that bill in a thousand ways.

In that respect, you have to concede Koelsch has a point.