September 8, 2019, Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia) https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/09/08/lessons-from-liberation-majdanek/
On July 22, the world should have
remembered the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Majdanek, the first of
Hitler’s infamous extermination camps to be captured and shut down. But of
course the brave Russian – and Ukrainian, Kazakh and other Soviet nationalities
– soldiers of the Red Army got no credit across the West for doing so.
It was one of the most important
liberations of World War II. On that day in 1944, troops of the Soviet Second
Tank Army liberated the notorious death camp near Lublin in Poland.
What happened at Majdanek dwarfed
the future discoveries of at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and the other
well-publicized German concentration camps uncovered by the Western allies.
Probably close to a quarter of a million people were killed there. First
estimates at the time put the figure as high as 1.5 million. (Current
conventional estimates of 78,000 victims are simply ludicrously low, as
respected Polish historian Czeslaw Rajca has rightly pointed out)
The horrific facts of Majdanek were
reported around the world almost immediately. Alexander Werth of the British
Broadcasting Corporation, one of the greatest of Western war correspondents
sent graphic reports which ran on BBC News. But they were virtually totally
ignored in the West as
(supposedly) communist propaganda.
Almost no living survivors of
Majdanek remain to testify to its particular horrors. However, as late as 2014,
Nazi hunters in modern democratic Germany were still hunting at least 17 former
guards at the camp.
However, the anniversary of the
liberation and the true facts surrounding it need to be remembered. They
contain crucially important lessons essential for the preservation of world
peace in the 21st century.
In recent years, Western historians
have increasingly embraced a doctrine of moral equivalency between Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union. In recent days, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a
man who himself has never raised a single objection to any US, British or NATO
bombing campaign that killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, or the
unleashing of uprisings and civil wars that cost millions of lives, made the
same allegation.
Far worse, Johnson shamefully
compared Russia hosting the 2018 World Cup in soccer – a notable success deeply
enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of visiting fans – with Hitler hosting the
notorious 1936 Olympic Games with his hateful racism.
Yet visitors to Moscow today can –
and should – visit the state-backed Museum to the Millions of Victims of
Communism. And in July 1944, the Red Army did not occupy Majdanek to keep it
running. As they did half a year later on liberating Auschwitz, the Soviet
forces shut it down at once and its medical units worked day and night in
desperate, often miraculous efforts to save the survivors. It is a repulsive
lie of Russian-hating racists to say these policies were morally equivalent to
Nazi extermination.
The Red Army eye-witnesses from the
lowest combat soldier to top ranking generals at the liberation Majdanek all
shared the appalling horror and reacted in the most decent and admirable way to
the unimaginable evil they confronted.
The great British military historian
Michael K. Jones in his 2011 work “Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin”
documents this vital and untold story with vivid accounts from the
eye-witnesses. “When we saw what (Majdanek) contained, we felt dangerously
close to going insane,” recalled Vasily Yeremenko of the Second Tank Army.
Captain Andrey Mereshenko of the
Eighth Guards Army never forgot that when he arrived at Majdanek, “the ovens
were still warm.”
War correspondent Konstantin Simonov
wrote in the newspaper “Red Star” that his mind refused to recognize the
reality of what he had seen with his own eyes.
The Soviet soldiers and senior
officers who liberated Majdanek reacted with horror at what they found: Many of
them feared they were going insane. But they were not: They were retaining
their humanity in its most precious forms.
“When death camp prisoners “realize
we want to help them,” some moan with joy,” Col. Georgi Elizavetsky wrote to his wife
Nina. “And when they see bread, others literally howl, kiss our feet and
become quite delirious. … There is a children’s barracks in the camp. When we
entered I just could not stand it anymore.”
In recent decades, as only a handful
of combat war veterans from the three great Allied nations remain alive; this
crucial truth has been lost: There was no moral equivalence. The soldiers of
the Red Army suffered vastly more casualties than the Western Allies. They
inflicted 90 percent of combat losses on the Nazi armies. They did more to win
the war against the Nazi evils than anyone else.
They also deserve primary credit for
ending the Holocaust. On September 23, 1944 troops of the Soviet First
Belorussian Front also liberated the extermination camps at Sobibor and
Treblinka. On January 27, 1945, they liberated the biggest and most diabolical
murder factory of them all – Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Yet two decades into the 21st
century, this proud and crucial record has been entirely forgotten in the West.
The bravery and sheer decency of the
millions of ordinary Russian, Ukrainian and other nationalities in the Red Army
who won the war and liberated the worst Nazi death camps needs to be remembered
and honored, not forgotten in the West, or swept under the carpet. Their
achievements should be the lasting foundation for a new generation of
understanding and mutual respect between the thermonuclear superpowers.
It is shameful that from the
hysterical London of Boris Johnson to the militaristic globe-strutting
arrogance of neoconservative Washington, this simple sanity is no longer recognized.
*Martin Sieff: During his 24
years as a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and United
Press International, Martin Sieff reported from more than 70 nations and
covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and global economic issues.
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