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
Date: 31 Dec 92 11:31:08 GMT
Organization: The Cellar BBS and public access system


   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.....

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techie@cellar.org (William A Bacon)
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