Muslim Magomaev – The Alarm Bells of Buchenwald
Today marks 75 years since soldiers of the Soviet Red
Army liberated over 7,000 prisoners from the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
After 1,689 days and more than 1 million dead, the murder, suffering and pain
finally came to an end.
Today thousands of events took place all around the
world to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and to say “never again”. And I want to briefly focus on the
implications of what “never again” means in the face of something so monstrous
and evil.
As an editorial by the British socialist newspaper
Morning Star on January 27, 2020 put it: “The murder of six million Jews,
millions of Soviet prisoners of war, hundreds of thousands of Roma and many gay
and disabled people by the Nazi regime and its collaborators is far from
history’s only example of genocide, but the calculated and systematic approach
to a project aimed at exterminating entire races was unique. It justifies
global commemoration of this as the most horrendous crime committed by any
government in history.”
Death was truly an industry in the Holocaust. Camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau have accurately
been termed “murder factories”. And many
corporations, including many that still exist today such as I.G. Farben and
Thyssen-Krupp, made massive profits on the backs of a workforce that was
literally being worked to death. Nazi
officials and SS commanders amassed personal fortunes by stealing from camp
inmates and contracting out slave labor to the big industrial firms. Never before or since has there been such a grotesquely twisted marriage between genocidal violence and industrial capitalism.
And, of course, what followed World War II and the
Holocaust was the Cold War. And the
capitalist powers of North America and Western Europe certainly looked after
their own. Communism was the main enemy now and the fiercely anti-communist Nazis were seen as very useful. And so, apart from the top Nazi
leaders tried at Nuremberg, the majority of the surviving perpetrators of the
Holocaust in West Germany went totally unpunished. Under the protection of the U.S. occupation
authorities, the West German police, courts, military, security agencies and
bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former Nazi
regime or by their ideological sympathizers (in stark contrast to socialist East Germany, where Nazis were thoroughly purged from virtually every profession).
As Michael Parenti points out in his book Blackshirts and Reds, “The
perpetrators of the Holocaust murdered six million Jews, half a million Roma,
thousands of homosexuals, several million Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and others,
and got away with it – in good part because the very people who were suppose to
investigate these crimes were themselves complicit.” Hundreds of Nazi war
criminals were welcomed into the United States and Canada, many of whom did
very well for themselves working for U.S. intelligence agencies during the Cold
War or for an American military-industrial complex that was hungry for Nazi technology
and know-how.
The German capitalists who profited from the Holocaust
were likewise never punished. Hermann
Abs, the head of Deutsche Bank under the Nazis and effectively “Hitler’s
paymaster”, was even celebrated by the New York Times for playing a “dominant role
in West Germany’s reconstruction after World War II.” Of course, as Robert Carl Miller
pointed out in an article in the Portland Free Press in October 1994,
the Times failed to mention that Abs was a Nazi, that his bank had played a key
role in the plundering of occupied Europe, and, as a board member of I.G.
Farben, he was majorly involved in the use of slave labor at Auschwitz. And he’s just one of many examples. US corporations such as Du Pont, Ford,
General Motors, ITT and IBM were heavily involved in the Nazi economy and in
the use of slave labor but were likewise never held to account.
Fighting Holocaust denial means maintaining an
accurate historical memory and, ever since 1945, there have been massive
efforts to re-write history to erase the facts that I’ve just presented, which
implicate capitalism and its role in facilitating the Holocaust.
But equally concerning is the concerted effort to
rewrite the history of the second world war to portray our wartime ally the
Soviet Union as jointly complicit with Nazi Germany in starting the conflict, something
which is both dishonest and dangerous.
Nazi Germany would not have been defeated were it not
for the Soviet Union. 80 per cent of all
German military casualties during the war were on the Eastern Front. The 58 Wehrmacht divisions based in Western
Europe at the time of the D-Day landings, were dwarfed by the 228 divisions
deployed at the same time against Operation Bagration, the Soviet advance from
the east.
The peoples of the Soviet Union also paid the highest
price for victory, with 27 million lives lost — more than one in seven of the
country’s entire population. To dismiss this colossal sacrifice on the part of
millions of Red Army soldiers or to portray them as oppressors no better than the
Nazis they fought, as is now commonplace in Ukraine, Poland and a number of
other eastern European countries, is a shameful insult to the memory of those
who liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as a shameful distortion of history.
The 21st Century propaganda effort, in
North America and in the European Union, to present communism and fascism as
twin “totalitarian” ideologies is likewise an insult to the communist partisans
and Resistance fighters — “the bravest of the brave,” in the words of the late British
Labour leader Michael Foot — who formed the backbone the underground resistance
to Nazi occupation and fascist regimes in the occupied parts of the Soviet
Union, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Czechoslovakia and France among other
countries.
This re-writing of history facilitates the
rehabilitation of fascism and legitimizes modern far-right movements that are
growing in power and influence across Europe and beyond; posing a direct threat
to marginalized peoples, ethnic minorities, working class people, women,
migrants, and LGBTQ people.
Stepan Bandera, who has been elevated to the status of
a national hero in Ukraine since the Maidan coup of 2013 swept a far-right,
US-backed government to power in that country, was a blatant and high-profile
Nazi collaborator. His Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists participated in the Holocaust and massacred hundreds of
thousands of Jews and ethnic Poles, working hand-in-glove with the Nazi
occupation authorities.
This is hardly an isolated case, however. Poland has passed laws against referring to
the role of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust. Lithuania is now debating a
similar ban. Monuments to the Red Army liberators of Europe are torn down and
defaced while fascist regimes from Hungary to Italy are being rehabilitated.
Anti-Semitism is growing throughout Europe along with
the growth of far-right movements and political forces. As I’ve pointed out on previous shows, the
Government of Apartheid Israel has effectively shifted the framing of
Anti-Semitism from attacks and discrimination against Jewish people to any
criticism of the State of Israel and its genocidal, colonizing policies toward the
Palestinian people. I talked last month,
in the aftermath of the British election, about how Jeremy Corbyn was
relentlessly attacked in the media as an Anti-Semite because he is a supporter
of Palestinian rights, while the real far-right Anti-Semites who firebomb synagogues
and smash Jewish graves effectively got a free pass…to say nothing of the
Neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, who worship monsters like Stepan Bandera, and who
are now getting their guns from Israel. This
what the Israeli human rights activist Shir Hever had to say about this particularly
disgusting form of political and historical revisionism on the Real News Network
on January 24:
Midnight Oil – White Skin, Black Heart
Now, there’s another less well-known anniversary today
that I would like to draw your attention to, comrades and friends. January 27th, 1944 – the siege of Leningrad
was lifted – it lasted 900 days. The starving besieged Red Army garrison and
workers’ militias managed not only to lift the siege but even to encircle and eliminate
the Nazi troops which had besieged the city from 1941-1944.
According to different estimations, from 600 000 to
1.5 million civilians died of famine and bombing during the siege.
Economic destruction and human losses in Leningrad
exceeded those of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Moscow, or the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite the massive hardship and
destruction, the people of Leningrad didn't surrender and continued heroically
resisting the Nazis. The capture and destruction of Leningrad was one of three
strategic goals in the Nazis' Operation Barbarossa, in which over 4 million
soldiers invaded the USSR along a 1,800 mile front, the largest invasion in the
history of warfare.
The Nazi focus on Leningrad was motivated by its
political status as the former capital of Russia and the symbolic capital of
the Russian Revolution, its military importance and industrial importance,
including numerous arms factories. The brutal siege on the city was finally broken
in the wake of the Operation Iskra offensive. After fierce battles the Red Army
units overcame the powerful German fortifications and on January 27, 1944 the
Soviet forces expelled German forces from the southern outskirts of the city,
breaking the siege.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union ultimately
resulted in 95% of all German Army casualties from 1941 to 1944 and 65% of all
Allied military casualties accumulated throughout the war. It was in Leningrad
and Stalingrad that the incalculable sacrifice and heroic resistance of the
Soviet people broke the back of the Nazis and ensured the defeat of fascism in
World War 2.
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