Soviet entry into Polish occupied territory also provided a pathway for Soviets to begin evacuating Jews from the Holocaust. To quote James Rosenberg, “of some 1,750,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping the Axis since the outbreak of hostilities, about 1,600,000 were evacuated by the Soviet Government from Eastern Poland and subsequently occupied Soviet territory and transported far into the Russian interior.”
This is controversial among Western historians, who (writing before the fall of the Soviet Union) could not find documentation. If any documentation of official policy exists we should find it.
See also, which cites this source. Some anti-Stalin brainworms in there, but an important point is that the Soviets prioritized general evacuations from the Nazis. “The plight of the Soviet Jews was portrayed as part of a larger trend: the murder by the Germans of civilians of all nationalities— Russians, Ukrainians, Gypsies, and so on.” So we might not find a document calling specifically for the evacuation of Jews, and only Jews, but they were being rescued all the same. Pp. 896-899 summarize a French translation of what sounds like a very useful essay by Ilya Altman and Claudio Ingerflom, but if that essay exists in English I can’t find it.
One of the biggest things that I absolutely despise about how WWII history is taught is how ‘Hitler killed 6 million people.’
This is wildly incorrect. Hitler’s camps killed somewhere around the lines of 14 million people, 6 million of which were Jews. Were Jews singled out in particular, and enslaved and exterminated with extreme prejudice? Absolutely. But there are millions of others that died in Nazi concentration camps, many of them communists, the mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals (who weren’t upper class) and Roma. As well as the explicit desire for Lesbarum which would have likely seen most of the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbians, and anyone who could have been considered Slavs under Nazi race law would have been explicitly culled to a peasent farming and resource extraction class.
The Nazis were not just a threat to Jews, they were a threat to ALL of working class Europe. Our hyper focus on Nazi crimes against Jews downplays their crimes, and it is baffling to me when I have discussions with literal history majors still quoting this number. This was something the Soviets understood all too well, as was repeatedly talked about in any communist commentary at the time, with them going off of Lenin’s theory of imperialism.
…and the 14 million is just camps. The most current estimate is 17 million people total. About 3 million people were murdered by being shot, stabbed, or beaten to death by Germany’s armed forces out in field before getting tossed into mass graves. These were deliberate acts of ethnic cleansing and they only stopped because it required too many resources and soldiers started developing psychological problems. The death camps were the solution to this as they could kill more people with less and because the entire process allowed Germans to distance themselves from what they were doing, if they weren’t sadists who volunteered for it.
But the total number is over 70 million people dead as a result of WWII, for whom the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and Italy share most of the blame. They have their puppet states and collaborators to be blamed for everything else. Saying anything less is Holocaust denial.
Again, another good follow-up. Imma gonna stop now.
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Great follow-up
Ironically, Jew were also painted as all that’s wrong with capitalism. The majority of German workers were anti capitalist at the time and vilifying the Jews got them on board.
Yes. I finally read Finklestein’s The Holocaust Industry and it’s shocking how recent and intentional this focus is. We can see the consequences of it in arguments about the Ukraine war - “the Azov Battalion can’t be Nazis, because Zelensky is Jewish!” As if fascism begins and ends with a singleminded desire to kill all Jews.
when I was an anarchist I had a sort of pride in the fact that the very first people the nazis realized they had to kill were the anarchists.
but that doesn’t actually prove that anarchists ideas were ideologically or strategically the most correct, just that they were the ones with an ideology/strategy most likely to include immediate violent resistance (which is not necessarily the most effective idea at all times). which is why I am now a communist. but I did take some sort of twisted pride in thinking the nazis knew anarchists were the first they needed to take out, as if that meant anything more than just that anarchists are the most willing to fight back no matter what is strategically effective, and that likely made them the nazis first target.
but yes the fact that the emphasis all gets placed on the jewish deaths in the holocaust is a political project for sure. to erase leftist repression/resistance, to use it to justify israel, etc. that said everyone should go to the US Holocaust Museum if you are ever in DC. it’s very moving. and it does at least mention and talk a bit about the leftists the nazis killed before moving on to the jews and others.
homosexuals
annoying, stupid
Lots of stuff on this topic just says “homosexuals” and yeah maybe that’s all the Nazis identified people as, but queer people of any stripe were in the Nazis’ sights. Many trans people iirc were killed.
Notably they were transported very very far from the front lines.
Oh my god, before they were stealing Ukranian kids they were stealing Jewish ppl!!!
I have this page I’ve tried to source for years that gets into it you might find relevant.
YES
THANK YOU 
I was hoping posting it would get me the source from the bigbrained internet sleuths
Thank you for posting it; I love these old pamphlets.
Of course he did, one example of it was the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, though it was created just immediately after the Russian Civil War
After the war ended in 1945, there was renewed interest in the idea of Birobidzhan as a potential home for Jewish refugees. The Jewish population in the region peaked at around 46,000–50,000 Jews in 1948, around 25% of the entire population of the JAO.[14]
Unfortunately, it seems things went awry, in the decades following… because unhospitable geographical conditions and the USSR opposing any hint of ethnic supremacism/national chauvinism
Also to do with the reasons why it failed, was the suspicions against Zionism in the aftermath of the colonisation of Palestine. The USSR adopted an openly anti-zionist posture, and I’m guessing that doesn’t exactly help the cause of creating a Jewish autonomous oblast, even if the idea is very different from that of the Zionist project.
Sidebar, but I once had a professor claim that the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was the same as the US forcing indigenous peoples onto reservations…
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Here’s a reply I had to someone a while ago about a similar issue. I was focusing on the negative side of things.
'Lots of Jews were sent to Siberia during the war in order to shield them from the German advance that would’ve executed them on the spot. It is true that in 1940 there was a mass deportation of Polish and Jewish people to Siberia. In Siberia, conditions were definitely harsh but they were harsh for everyone, and were the way they were out of necessity for the war on the doorstep. Many who lived through the Siberian camps note that they were allowed to observe the Sabbath, that they were fed within the means of what was available, and that they received adequate medical care.
As for a move from Auschwitz to a Siberian work camp - that is certainly unfortunate but a very fringe occurrence. In accounts that this is reported to have happened, it has been on account of misunderstandings of Nazi collaboration - some Jews survived by performing acts of service and skill to their Nazi masters - a moral choice I cannot judge, that was in some cases misconstrued by soviet commanders as criminal.’
some Jews survived by performing acts of service and skill to their Nazi masters - a moral choice I cannot judge, that was in some cases misconstrued by soviet commanders as criminal.’
Kapos were instrumental to the operation of concentration camps. They were often informers and enforcers for the guards. Many of them were beaten to death by their fellow inmates when the nazis evacuated during the advancement of Allied forces. That was if they made it to the end of the war. Kapos were regularly murdered in their sleep or shanked by other inmates if the kapo was seen as an asshole.
This wasn’t the case with all kapos, as a lot were involved in resistance efforts. Some would even take jobs for the SS doing whatever so they could get extra rations, which they smuggled back to their barracks at great risk to themselves (IIRC Elie Wiesel had this kind of kapo and its partly the reason he survived).
Anywho, my point is it’s not surprising soviets liberating the camps acted the way they did towards kapos because a lot of them had been collaborators. If there was no one alive to vouch for them, it makes sense the soviets would imprison them. They probably thought what they were doing was humane.
Despite the Soviet state’s official opposition to antisemitism, the spring of 1918 saw widespread anti-Jewish violence perpetrated by members of the Red Guard in the former Pale of Settlement.
An entire paragraph sourced by a single book with no page number or link given. It’s a well worn technique of chud editors on Natopedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_in_the_Soviet_Union lots of examples on this page
