AS we remember the Auschwitz death camp and the Jewish Holocaust, let us recount the greatest mass killer of prisoners during World War II, the by-now-forgotten Soviet Major General Vasily Blokhin.
Blokhin claimed to have executed tens of thousands of prisoners in the Soviet Gulag. He was the chief executioner for the NKVD (Soviet secret police).
Commissar Blokhin used his Walther PPK pistol to kill thousands of his victims with a shot to the back of the head. He wore a butcher’s apron, long gloves, a leather hat and goggles.
His primary target was Polish prisoners. Blokhin and his murderous assistants killed over 7,000 Polish officers, captured when the Soviet Union joined Germany in crushing Polish independence to restore the pre-World War (WW) I status quo. This was also Adolf Hitler’s goal. It was not world conquest, as the Allies falsely claimed.
Russia’s strategic goals were similar. Joseph Stalin ordered the sinister-looking Blokhin to wipe out the flower of Polish aristocracy and erase that nation’s national identity.
Blokhin also executed numerous Ukrainian nationalists as did Stalin’s secret police who, earlier, had executed or starved over six million Ukrainian farmers, a crime at least equal in magnitude to the Holocaust of Jews, the mentally unfit and gypsies.
Why do we hear the endless repetition of the Holocaust and next to nothing about the more murderous Soviet crimes of mass murder?
The artful British were the war’s premier propagandists. They not only helped draw the US into WWII, but they also largely masked the alliance between the US and Britain with the murderous Soviet regime.
The strategic goal of the British was to divert attention away from Soviet crimes by emphasising Nazi transgressions. This process continues today.
The Jewish Holocaust has almost become a state religion while the larger, earlier Ukrainian Holocaust (or Holodomor) is slipping away down the memory hole.
We all know of the German-run Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, but what of the Soviet Gulag death camps such as Solovetski, Kolyma, Magadan, Vorkuta, the Baltic-Volga Canal and the deportation centres in Central Asia.
Without the splendid works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the memory of the Gulag, which stayed operational into the 1970s, would be gone.
No one had a monopoly on suffering. We must not forget that our ally in WWII, the Soviet Union, caused 75% of all German casualties.
British-American propaganda likes to make us believe that the Western allies – Britain, the US and Canada – defeated Germany. Not true. It was the Soviet Union that suffered losses of 8.7 million military and 19 million civilians. And 80% of the Luftwaffe was destroyed on the Eastern Front.
Without Soviet participation, the Allies would not have won the war or defeated Germany and Japan. London and Washington were determined to downplay the key Soviet role in WWII.
Accordingly, British and American propaganda was ordered to focus on the evils of Hitler while ignoring the even more murderous Soviet system.
The bloody destruction of entire peoples such as the Chechen or Baltics and millions of others by Stalin was never mentioned by the democratic allies.
Interestingly, films of Hitler playing with animals and his promulgation of laws to protect animals from human cruelty were censored.
Russia has gone far to erase the memory of the Gulag. The Russian organisation “Memorial” that revealed the crimes of the Gulag was shut down by the Kremlin.
The organiser of the murder by starvation or shooting of six million Ukrainian farmers, Jewish commissar Lazar Kaganovich, was never charged with major crimes.
He died peacefully at 91 on a sunlit park bench in Moscow in 1997. Stalin even called Kaganovich “my Himmler” while talking to British warlord Winston Churchill.
Stalin was a worse tyrant and mass murderer than Adolf Hitler, but he was our tyrant and essential ally, and we chose to ignore the facts.
The writer is a syndicated columnist. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
