J
John_TE
Guest
More Catholics were murdered by the Bolsheviks than Jews by the Nazis yet we never hear about that do we?
November 16, 2003 Seven million died in the forgotten holocaust
By ERIC MARGOLIS – Contributing Foreign Editor
Five years ago, I wrote about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my column, they knew nothing of the 1932-33 genocide in which Josef Stalin’s Soviet regime murdered seven million Ukrainians and sent two million more to concentration camps.
How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine’s population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history’s black hole.
So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the communists in the 1920s, the Volga Germans in 1941 and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Poles. At the end of World War II, Stalin’s gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% of them Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.
Almost unknown is the genocide of two million of the USSR’s Muslim peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkirs and Kazaks. The Chechen independence fighters who today are branded as “terrorists” by the U.S. and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.
Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945-47 of at least two million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which two million German girls and women were raped.
Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people in 1932, sending Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch and NKVD secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization.
Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated. NKVD death squads executed “anti-party elements.” Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch - virtually the Soviet Union’s Adolf Eichmann - set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or died of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergen-Belsen death camp.
The mass murder of seven million Ukrainians, three million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of two million more (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like The New York Times’ Walter Duranty, British writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet “agrarian reform.” Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded “fascist agents.”
The U.S., British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine.
The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically and for their own cynical and self-serving reasons, Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and some other senior Communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler’s absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across a fearful Europe.
When war came, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler’s extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.
cont.
November 16, 2003 Seven million died in the forgotten holocaust
By ERIC MARGOLIS – Contributing Foreign Editor
Five years ago, I wrote about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my column, they knew nothing of the 1932-33 genocide in which Josef Stalin’s Soviet regime murdered seven million Ukrainians and sent two million more to concentration camps.
How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine’s population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history’s black hole.
So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the communists in the 1920s, the Volga Germans in 1941 and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Poles. At the end of World War II, Stalin’s gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% of them Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.
Almost unknown is the genocide of two million of the USSR’s Muslim peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkirs and Kazaks. The Chechen independence fighters who today are branded as “terrorists” by the U.S. and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.
Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945-47 of at least two million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which two million German girls and women were raped.
Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people in 1932, sending Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch and NKVD secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization.
Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated. NKVD death squads executed “anti-party elements.” Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch - virtually the Soviet Union’s Adolf Eichmann - set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or died of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergen-Belsen death camp.
The mass murder of seven million Ukrainians, three million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of two million more (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like The New York Times’ Walter Duranty, British writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet “agrarian reform.” Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded “fascist agents.”
The U.S., British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine.
The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically and for their own cynical and self-serving reasons, Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and some other senior Communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler’s absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across a fearful Europe.
When war came, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler’s extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.
cont.