The government often transported prisoners on Stalin’s slave ships. Michael Solomon, a doctor who was a prisoner describes the conditions he witnessed in the women’s hold aboard Sovietskaya Latvia in the late 1940s. “In that immense, cavernous, murky hold were crammed more than 2,000 women. From the floor to the ceiling, as in a gigantic poultry farm, they were cooped up in open cages, five of them in each nine-foot-square space. The floor was covered with more women… The lack of washing facilities and the relentless heat had covered their bodies with ugly red spots, boils and blisters. The majority were suffering from some form of skin disease or other, apart from stomach ailments and dysentery.” 1257 Thomas Sgovio, an American citizen that the Soviets sentenced to forced labor in Kolyma, describes his 1938 trip to Magadan aboard Indigirka. He said, “As I look back and remember the voyage, I see darkness—the feeling that I am one of three thousand human bodies lying on plank tiers; from up above, vomit is trickling on me; someone is groping his way through the slimy aisle; I see an unending line on the staircase, and I remember the hunger that tormented me… I remember the dead bodies being carried up on deck.” 1258
Elinor Lipper describes her return voyage from the Kolyma camps, “Here was a hell where people fought with one another for a drink of water. I looked around at the gray-faced male prisoners in our locked storeroom, seasick, vomiting from the planks on the floor, or doubled over the battered pail where they must also relieve themselves before the eyes of the two women who were locked up with them. I looked at them lying above and on top of one another. Their hands had stubs where fingers had been frozen off; their legs were covered with sores.” 1259
Between August 28 and October 22, 1941, the Soviets exiled 96,000 Soviet Germans and Finns in the Leningrad Oblast by rail and some by water. The Stalin regime completed the exile of the Soviet Germans residing in Leningrad on March 16, 1946. The NKVD completed the ethnic cleansing of 8,617 Germans from Moscow and other Russian cities, such as the 21,400 in the Rostov Oblast from September 10-15. Stalin appointed Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew from Ukraine, the responsibility of all the German deportations instead of Beria who usually issued the resettlements. They could arrest any German who resisted exile and the authorities could “use decisive means to liquidate any delays, anti-Soviet activities, or armed clashes.” 1260 In the fall of 1941, Stalin deported the entire population, about 400,000 Volga Germans, to the forced labor camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan, Solzhenitsyn’s reknowned Gulag Archipelago. 1261
Kaganovich, of the Soviet politburo (1930-1957), was a key instigator in the famine in the Ukraine and in the deadly purges (1937-1938). When the Wehrmacht occupied a large part of the republic, many of the Germans in Ukraine, about 128,949 people, avoided immediate deportation, 138,983 were deported. Between September 3 and October 30, 1941, the Soviets deported 840,058 Soviet Germans, 438,280 of whom were from the ASSR. The Red Army and other agents successfully resettled 799,459 Soviet Germans in 344 echelons in the eastern areas of the USSR by January 1, 1942. By June 22, 1943, a German census showed that 313,305 Soviet Germans were under the control of the Third Reich. The majority of all ethnic Germans born in the USSR ended up in labor camps by 1945. 1262
With the Red Army’s reoccupation of Ukraine, the remaining Soviet Germans attempted to flee to Germany. The NKVD deported those who stayed. In the fall of 1945, the Allies repatriated the majority of the Soviet Germans who had fled to Germany back to the USSR where the government sent them to the labor camps. Records from the Yalta accords with America, Britain, and the USSR contain stipulations for the compulsory return of all Soviet citizens. Between May 8 and September 1945, the British and the Americans forcibly sent 2,270,000 citizens, including ethnic Germans, and Soviet citizens who fought on the side of Germany, back to the USSR, to a certain death. Many committed suicide rather than suffer torture or face punishment at the hands of the Soviets. Ethnic Germans accounted for one out of every ten Soviet citizens that the Allies repatriated. By December 1945, the Soviets incarcerated 203,706 repatriated Soviet Germans in labor camps, including 69,782 children who were sixteen years or younger. 1263
For a recap, between 1930 and 1931, the NKVD deported 1,803,392 peasants, many of whom were Soviet Germans to labor camps. From 1932 to 1940, the Soviets interned another 2,563,401 people to isolated labor camps where they experienced frigid weather, poor housing, no furnished clothing and a very little food. Between 1932 and 1940, at least 389,521 exiles died in these camps from disease, malnutrition, and exposure. The high mortality continued through the 1940s. On November 24, 1948, the Soviet government established a mandatory eight-year sentence in the camps if the “special settlers,” failed to finish their work assignments. They labored in rail, industrial, mining and timber felling. The camps functioned as permanent confinement for deported Germans. Attempted escapes meant twenty years of hard labor. In 1953, there were 1,224,931 Soviet Germans in the special settlements. Using the 1939 census and given the births and deaths in the camps, there are 176,352 unaccounted for Soviet Germans in addition to the acknowledged deaths of 65,599. 1264
During World War II, the Soviets deported the seven minority nationalities from the USSR to Siberia and Central Asia. They included the Volga Germans, deported in 1941, and the Crimean Tatars and the Caucasian nationalities, the Chechens, the Ingushi, the Kalmyks, the Karachai and the Balkars from October 1943 to June 1944. Soviet officials did not admit to these deportations until 1957. 1265 The Communists slaughtered Russia’s middle class. Stalin was responsible for the murder of about 20,000,000 people during the years 1924-1953. Ultimately, the Soviets slaughtered sixty-six million Russians. Marx’s ten-plank program to transition a society into Communism can be imposed subtly and gradually, over several decades and political administrations or quickly, through violence.
Soviet Scorched-Earth Warfare: Facts and Consequences
Stalin had talked often, but only in private meetings, about liberating Europe from capitalism. He would maintain neutrality while involving the European nations in a physically and financially exhaustive war. Then, at the appropriate time, the Red Army would join the battle. Hitler had no idea he was instrumental in starting the war, but the Soviets had planned it, along with his participation on August 19, 1939, in a special meeting of the Politburo. Later, after the war began, someone leaked the Soviet plans to Havas, the French agency and Havas published them. Viktor Suvorov suggests that perhaps someone in the Politburo opposed Stalin and his war. 1266
Even before Germany defeated Poland, on October 6, 1939, Soviet officials persuaded Hitler to revise the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as the Border and Friendship Agreement, dated September 28, in which Germany agreed to relinquish its interest in Lithuania in exchange for the territory between the Vistula and Bug rivers, an area strategically significant as a route to Leningrad and Moscow. Germany agreed, indicative of the fact that it did not have any military goals against the Soviet Union. The Soviets briefly occupied Lithuania, June 16 to 22, 1940, populated by about 3.5 million people, including over 300,000 Jews. When they withdrew, they confiscated all of the food, including the livestock, literally relegating the population to starvation. Marxist policies, in peace, as in Ukraine, and war, as in Lithuania, included starving civilians. To prevent mass hunger and death, Germany transported huge amounts of food to the area. 1267
In late September 1939, Germany had administered Polish territory in which 1,607,000 Jews resided. The Soviets annexed and controlled territory in which 1,026,000 Jews lived for a total of 2,633,000. Seeing the inevitability of a Polish defeat, the Jews, not waiting for a German occupation, fled eastward in the second half of September, to areas soon to be occupied by the Soviets or into Romania. On March 28, 1946, at a New York press conference, Latvian Chief Rabbi, head of the Mizrachi Organization, and a member of the World Jewish Congress, Mordecai Nurok, said, “It must be emphasized that several hundred thousands of Polish and other Jews found a haven from the Nazis in the U.S.S.R.” 1268<
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By October 1939, the Soviet military occupied half of Poland and employed harsh measures against all the people. Lithuania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary also seized parts of Poland. On January 27, 1940, The Nation published Howard Daniels’ article, Mass Murder in Poland, claiming that the Germans were killing people, especially the Jews. He said that the Soviets and Germany had divided Poland’s 3,000,000 Jews equally. The Soviets occupied and communized more than half of the eastern part where Jews held the top government positions as they had in Moscow over twenty years before. He made two conflicting accusations against Germany: they wanted to 1) exterminate their Jews; and 2) deport them to Russia and that the Soviets were trying to stop this deportation. 1269
The Soviets temporarily occupied the area between the Vistula and Bug Rivers which facilitated the escape of the Jews from Warsaw, Lodz and other large cities to Soviet-occupied areas. The Soviets took all of the livestock from the area west of the Bug River when they withdrew a week later. The Jewish refugees, along with seventy-five percent of the 6,000 Jewish residents of the city of Tomaszow Lubelski, wanting to avoid potential German occupation, followed the Soviet Army as it retreated to a position east of the Bug River. In 1931, the Polish census indicated that there were 386,600 Jews in the area between the two rivers. Based on immigration practices from 1931 forward, there were probably 330,000 Jews residing there at the time the Soviets occupied the area after September 17, 1939. 1270
Germany was busy fighting Britain and France from May 10-June 24, 1940 as both had declared war on Germany for its invasion of Poland. On June 15, Germany gave the Soviets an ultimatum to leave Germany’s area of interest, according to the stipulations in the treaty, as Soviet occupation violated both of the Soviet-German treaties and the Soviet-Lithuanian Treaty of Mutual Assistance, of October 10 1939, a treaty that the Soviets were supposed to inform Germany about, but failed to do so. The Soviets also wanted to occupy the Bukovina region of Romania, and gave Germany twenty-four hours to agree with a Soviet invasion/occupation although that area was not a part of the original treaty. 1271
The Soviets also demanded huge “geographic concessions” in Europe, all in violation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Border and Friendship Agreement. Soviet leaders mandated the execution of all Germans upon capture, even the seriously wounded. The West German Military History Research Institute reported that ninety to ninety-five percent of the German soldiers perished during their Soviet captivity between 1941 and 1942. That institute states that, within days of the German invasion, the Kremlin initiated a scorched earth policy. The Soviets ordered the army and the special demolition battalions to destroy everything of value in the path of the oncoming German Army without considering the hardships to the local population. The Soviet leadership planned to execute total warfare against Germany, meaning that they would target the civilian population. 1272
Between 1940 and 1942, in their efforts to destroy German troops, the Red Army abandoned all concern for its civilians, except for the Jews. Using a scorched-earth strategy, the Soviets deported and resettled millions of men, women and children and reestablished thousands of factories. They demolished raw material depots, removed the majority of all agricultural machinery and cattle and grain stocks. They methodically destroyed, by burning or blowing up, immovable infrastructure, product inventories, factories, mines, homes, public buildings, along with their records and cultural monuments. They intended to starve the remaining Russian population, which would soon fall under German occupation. Court historians have ignored Soviet actions and have failed to identify those responsible for the war or the circumstances that all but guaranteed a high civilian mortality rate. 1273
Stalin, with the assistance of thousands of experts from Europe and America, began preparing for European warfare with the first Five-Year Plan and the industrialization in the Urals and Western Siberia in 1928. He intended to surpass other industrialized countries between 1941 and 1946 and sacrificed millions of his citizens in order to achieve military supremacy. The Soviets intended to attack Germany in late summer 1941. They constructed a network of power lines and electric-power plants in the sparsely populated Ural area. They built temporary low-end factories and a railroad network throughout the southern Urals and western Siberia to accommodate Soviet military needs. 1274 The Soviets implemented their Plan of Economic Mobilization as soon as the Germans invaded the western frontier. They anticipated that the Germans might occupy the same large sections of the country that they had in World War I and planned accordingly. They determined the procedures and the locations to which they would transport and resurrect the factories, taking into account the interdependence between the individual industries. They removed the equipment and people about eight to ten days before the army planned to retreat. Special demolition squads destroyed what remained, including water and power facilities. The army provided cover until the squads completed their tasks. 1275
The Soviets relocated thousands of collective farms and over 1,360 industrial operations to the interior within the first three months of the war and were able to achieve prewar production totals. They reassembled the factories, using factory shells built years before, in just three to four weeks, working the deportees twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. They had already relocated millions of trained workers, managers, engineers and specialists to oversee the factories. By February 1940, German intelligence knew about the deportation of the Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish populations from western Ukraine. In June 1940, the Soviets deported about one million Jews and thousands of Poles from German-occupied Poland to Siberia. Just before the German invasion, the Soviets engaged in mass civilian deportations from Hungary and Romania to work in the Ural industrial region, especially in the armaments factories. 1276
The Soviets transferred much of their railroad system such as locomotives, rail cars and other machinery to prevent the Germans from seizing and utilizing such strategic equipment. They relocated most of the rolling stock and left the tracks. The Germans, after moving hundreds of miles into the Soviet interior, were only able to capture 577 locomotives, 270 passenger and 21,947 freight cars, less than three percent of the total amount. Before war erupted, the Soviets moved one million railroad cars laden with equipment, products, and people away from the frontline. They left over ninety million people in the territory that Germany conquered while deporting between twenty-five to thirty million, giving preferential treatment to skilled, educated Jews and Russians, especially from the Ukraine and White Russia over the “more hostile native population.” Due to the earlier deportation operation, the Germans captured cities in the western frontier areas that the Soviets had depopulated by about fifty percent, on average, and some by as much as ninety percent. 1277
In 1928, the Soviet Union had initiated its massive armaments project before Hitler came to power in 1933. The Soviets invested in the under-populated and under-developed western area in order to advance its transportation system, power network, and heavy machinery industry. They erected temporary factories to which they could move industrial equipment from the more urbanized, eastern areas of the country should those areas become vulnerable because of the war they were planning. While they had factories and farms, they lacked housing, hospitals, schools and other amenities necessary for the millions of civilians that they deported to the area. Therefore, about fifteen to twenty million civilians perished between 1940 and 1941 because of hunger, epidemics, exhaustion, lack of housing and clothing and the harsh Siberian winter. 1278
Because the Soviets had destroyed the water, power and food production systems, and had dismantled industry and the railway, along with access to coal, iron ore, crude steel, and cement, the Germans created the Economic Staff East (ESE) in order to care for the remaining ninety million, largely unskilled citizens in the territory they now occupied. The ESE had to quickly resuscitate any productive facilities, especially those associated with food and basic essentials, a difficult task g
iven what the Soviets had done, especially without local skilled managers and mechanical specialists. Even with dedicated effort, the Germans, by the end of March 1943, restored only one-quarter of the prewar electrical power in Ukraine and about fifty percent of the power in White Russia and the Baltic countries. However, the lack of coal supplies prevented the full use of electrical power. The growing “partisan menace” also challenged the German occupiers and their efforts to provide power and commodities for the civilian population. 1279
In 1940, there were conceivably ten million industrial workers in the area. By the end of 1942, because of the Soviet deportation, during the German occupation, there were only about 600,000 employed in the industrial industries in the area, a devastating blow to the overall economy. Prior to the war, there were about seventy-five million people connoting that industrial employment under German occupation equaled one-tenth of the productivity of prewar averages. Because the Soviets had deported as much as seventy percent of the managers and skilled technicians, there was insufficient expertise so the Germans had to bring in about 10,000 specialists from Germany to compensate for the acute labor shortage. There were as many as two to three million available, under-skilled workers available, but due to other extenuating economic circumstances, Germans could only supply work to just over a million which caused widespread unemployment. The Soviet’s brutal sabotage, dismantling, demolition, fire, and deportation taxed Germany’s military strength and her own struggling industrial capacity. 1280
The ESE report for October 1-10, 1941, describes the absence of raw materials for food production and the resulting hunger among the population. The Soviets had methodically removed farm equipment, quickly harvested the fields, destroyed or rendered natural resources, including cattle and all food supplies, unusable or uneatable, before retreating. There was no available produce, especially grains, to supply the factories engaged in food production. The desperate occupying Germans even considered retreating from the larger cities. Militarily, they could not do that and therefore had to feed millions of starving citizens. The conquering Wehrmacht had to feed the large urban populations even though Germany experienced a decreasing domestic food production. To do this, they had to reduce the supplies for its army or decrease the wartime rations in Germany. 1281
The Ruling Elite Page 46
