On This Date...History's Path Changes Direction

As it is the 22nd of June today, I thought that another June 22 should be remembered, as it altered the course of human history:
On this date in 1941, the greatest land conflict in human history began in the early hours of the morning - Adolf Hitler sent some 3000,000 men across an immense border into Mother Russia, and the most destructive war in memory was under way, culminating in the destruction of the perpetrator and his evil regime - what, it seems to me, is even greater in dimension than that enormous struggle, is what came out of the ashes, which after almost seventy years, is the world we now live in; certainly, if Hitler had won the war, the equation which represents the opposing factors we call Freedom and Tyranny would almost assuredly have a different form than that which is now before our eyes. No one can inform us as to what that form might be, but the dimensions of the opposing forces in 1941 certainly have to be considered, in my view, a factor in determining our present world status.
How curious a creature Man is - he can make it possible, in about six years, to destroy almost 60,000,000 of his own species world-wide, and during the same period can give us such monumental and provocative statements as the seventh symphony of Shostakovich, or the "War" sonatas of Prokofiev, both composers living and writing in that besieged and defiled country called Russia -
and yet, two and two are still four-
A rather poetic and somewhat ironic incident coming out of all this:
The tyrant Stalin, who outlived Hitler, and the composer Prokofiev dying on the same day in 1953...