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- From: techie@cellar.org (William A Bacon)
- Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy,alt.activism,talk.politics.misc,pa.general,phl.misc
- Subject: soviet atrocities rarely revealed in establishment media
- Message-ID: <Lu0mwB1w164w@cellar.org>
- Date: 31 Dec 92 11:31:08 GMT
- Sender: bbs@cellar.org (The Cellar BBS)
- Organization: The Cellar BBS and public access system
- Lines: 64
-
-
- Soviet Arocities rarly mentioned
- What we are about to reveal is actually not a revelation. In fact, this
- pos-world War II horor event was not particularly hidden from the world. It
- received a little publicity and was quickly forgotten, smothered by the
- pro-Soviet smog of the time. That this horor event is remembered at all we
- owe to the tenacity of George WAtson, a British scholar at Cambridge
- University, and the decision of the editors of Chronicles to publish this
- non-revaltion revelation.
- I was reminded of this horror event as I read reports of how Stalin had
- kidnapped and jailed Allied solidiers, especially Americans, and kept them
- hidden away for years. All this is now coming out in dribs and drabs from
- Soviet archieves, thanks to Boris Yeltsin, not to Mikhail Gorbachev. We shall
- probably never know the whole story of how the Soviets mistreated the
- soldiers of their own allies, who had been captured and imprisoned by the
- Nazis. But Stalin did something even worse, and thisis the story.
- I begin with this question: How many people know or, if they did
- know,remember that, following the German defeat in 1945 and until
- February1950, the Soviet Union filled a dozen Nazi concentration camps in
- what in time became East Germany with thousands upon thosands of Soviet
- political prisoners, many of whom died in those death camps?
- Yes, Nazi Buchenwald became Soviet Buchenwald. As American troops
- liberated the walking skeletons from the Nazi concentration camps, the SOviet
- Red Army and the NKVD secret police took possion of the camps and filled them
- with "anyone known to have a history of dissent or an instinct for free
- debate," as Professor watson said.
- "Soviet Buchenwald was in all likelihood" he wrote in July 1989 Chronicles
- article, "a deadlier place than the Nazi camp, in the sense that a higher
- proportion of the prisoners died. But they died not quickly, by shooting and
- hanging, but by starvatiuon and above all disease."
- In the October 1992 issue of Chronicles, Mr. Watson reports that he has
- found a survivor of its Soviet incarnation of the former Nazi camp
- Sachsenhausen near Berlin. He is Benno Priess, now in his mid-sixties who
- recently published recollections of his arrest by the Soviet NKVD (the
- earlier name for the KGB) as a tenager in 1946. His book is titled, "innocent
- in the NKVD death camps," and is privately printed. Mr. PRiess tells how he
- was arrested by armed guards at his home ostensibly for questioning. That was
- thelast his family heared from him until 1949 when he was finally allowed to
- pen a 12 line letter but forbidden to tell his parents where he was.
- What is most shameful about this horror event, says Mr. Watson, is that it
- was public knoledge in the postwar years that Stalin was running Nazi
- concentration camps inEast Germany and the SOviet Union but there were few
- protests. He recalls that an AFL official dmanded that the U.S. government
- should refuse to trade with the Soviet Union so long as Buchenwald,
- Sachsenhausen and other ex-Nazi camps were being filled with Stalin's
- political prisoners.
- Mr. Priess served time in Soviet Adminstrated Nazi camps in Torgau,
- Bautzen, Waldheim, SAchsenhausen and finally inside the Soviet Union itself.
- Even after the Soviet occupiers closed the ex-Nazi death camps in 1950, Mr
- Priess was still kept imprisoned for another four years inside the Soviet
- Union.In all, he served eight years and he was lucky because not many
- survived the Soviet death camp adminstration. Writes Mr. Watson:
- "millions of prisoners, of many Nationalities, though tried for no criminal
- offense, were killed in the Soviet Union in time of peace and for offendses
- they were never allowed to learn."
- The shame is that the U.S. government did know about it and did nothing.
- Even today we are reminded weekly of the Nazi atrocities but somehow the
- communist atrocities of over 50 million people killed is rarely mentioned.
- /save
- From the washington times.....
-
- ------
- techie@cellar.org (William A Bacon)
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