My own father experienced the Gulags, having been arrested in a German town in the Ukraine in a wave of ethnic cleansings - a fate I escaped by a hair in September 1941, thanks to the Hitler Wehrmacht who came to rescue us!
Please read the following, ***not*** written by a German who bears the stigma of a "Nazi" as I do the moment I speak out in favor of my people.
This two-part essay was written by Dr. Ataullah Bogdan Kopanski, a professor of Polish origin who now teaches at a Malaysian university:
During the period from 1939 to 1949, the Soviets committed mass murders of many peoples. Among those holocausted were: Baltic, Slavic, Caucasian and Turkic people, eastern Germans, and Poles.
There is a cynical answer to the question of why, in 1941, the German liberators of the Soviet death and labor camps were unable to establish stable national government in Russia. Quentin Reynold, an American liberal journalist and author of The Stars Are Neutral, written in 1941 in the Soviet Union, explained it:
Today there is not one fifth columnist, nor one Quisling at liberty in the Soviet Union. The Germans tried desperately to set up local tribunals with local citizens as nominal heads of the tribunals when they captured cities like Odessa, Kiev and others which fell to them during their successful march through the south last autumn. But in no case were they successful. Potential Quislings were all in the labor camps of the far north. Stalin knew what he was doing, back in 1938.
Thus Stalin, called by his propagandists a genial engineer of the people's dreams, ordered the murder of all potential Russian allies of Hitler's army three years before the Barbarossa invasion. Millions of potential reactionaries and fascists were shot in the back of the head before Hitler decided to invade Poland. How far-sighted and visionary was Uncle Joe, indeed!
But in 1941, after three months of constant retreat of the mammoth Red Army, Stalin and his henchmen panicked and ordered the destruction of the files of the notorious Lubianka Prison. The German Panzer divisions reached the western boundaries of Moscow district. In the Baltic states and Ukraine, thousands of Slavs, Byelorussians, Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians flocked to welcome the German troopers. However, in the regions still occupied by the Red Army, thousands of suspected disloyal citizens were prophylactically shot or deported to the slave camps of Vorkuta and Karaganda.
The infamous Soviet inner state of Gulag (the acronym of Glavnoye Upravlenye Ispravitelno-Trudovikh Legerei, or the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps) established in 1934, had a special branch of the security policy called Smersh, who murdered thousands of captives during the war of 1941-1945. The Soviet technology of mass execution was primitive, cheap, but deadly efficient.
In 1941, in the prison cells of the Soviet steamer Dzhurma, 12,000 captives had been frozen to death near Wrangel Island. A whole trainload of 1,650 Polish deportees died in the wintertime of 1940-1941 in unheated and overcrowded cattle cars. Of the estimated 2,000,000 Polish civilians deported to the Russian Arctic regions of Gulag in the terrible railway convoys of 1939-1940, at least one half were dead within a year of their detention. More than 15,000 interned Polish officers, intellectuals, teachers and doctors disappeared in the Okchotzk Sea. They were transferred in April 1940 from three large Soviet detention camps located in Ostashkov, Kozielsk and Starobielsk.
Three years later, the victorious German troops exhumed in the forest between Katyn and Gniezdov near Smolensk a horrible evidence of the Soviet war crime. Katyn was one of the Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutriennikh Del (National Committee of Interior Affairs, NKVD) killing fields since 1918. Polish POWs were transported to Katyn in the so-called Stolypin's trucks or chornyi woron (black crows). In the forest, other prisoners unearthed a huge pit. NKVD firing squads were waiting at the checkpoint. As the victims emerged one by one from the trucks, each was seized by the wardens who tied their hands behind their backs with wire, and they were brought to the edge of the pit. At a sign from the NKVD commissar, the executioners placed their pistol muzzles at the victims' necks. After the order agon! (in Russian: fire!), bullets smashed their way out of the foreheads of the Polish POWs. The lifeless bodies toppled softly into the ditch. Every day, 300 Polish interned officers were slaughtered in the same way. . . A body which moved in the pit was professionally stabbed with a bayonet.
Twenty-two years of experience lay behind the "progressive" state.
On May 11, NKVD men killed the last convoy of Polish prisoners and 4,000 corpses were covered by a thick layer of the Byelorussian sandy soil. A special NKVD forestry detachment shoveled the mass grave and planted rows of pine saplings over the mounds in the site called the Goat Hills by the local villages.
When the Germans disclosed in 1943 the killing fields of Katyn to the shocked world, American President Franklin Roosevelt declared it all to be a Nazi lie and Hitler's plot. The Soviet mass murder in Katyn was well-known to the British and American Intelligence services. Information passed to the Soviet Union by Eduard Pfeiffer, homosexual double agent and his British lover Maclean about a French plan of sending the fifteen thousand Polish officers from the Soviet detention camps to Syria - where Gen. S. Kopanski formed a new Polish Carpathian Brigade - (which) certainly influenced Stalin's decision on liquidation of the intellectual elite of the Polish army defeated in 1939 by the German and Soviet armies.
The German military investigators, who located the mass graves of 4,500 Polish victims of the Soviet policy of genocide, invited an international independent commission and the Red Cross Organization from Switzerland to Katyn. When they began to dig up the mass grave in April 1943, a Soviet plane was observed hovering over the place.
Investigators from several neutral countries found undeniabale evidence of the Soviet war crimes. However, their report was totally ignored by the Soviet, American and British prosecutors during the Nuremberg Trial. Seventeen German officers who confessed their participation in the execution of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn were found quilty of crime against humanity and hanged.
Until 1990, the Soviet dictators and their communist stooges in Poland maintained that the crime in Katyn had been committed by the Nazis. Those who denied it, like Stanislava Kostus, my high school teacher of history in Poland in 1966, were punished and dismissed from work. In October 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin dispatched an envoy to Warsaw to hand over a copy of Stalin's document decreeing in March 5, 1940 the supreme punishment by firing squad of 14,736 Polish army officials, along with another 10,685 Poles held by NKVD in the detention camps at Ostashkov and Starobielsk.
Part II, replete with references, will follow tomorrow.
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Thought for the Day:
"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."
-Mao Tse-Tung
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