Soviet Atrocities rarly mentioned
                      From: The Washington Times


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.  

------
techie@cellar.org (William A Bacon)
The Cellar BBS - (215) 539-3043