OŚWIĘCIM LIBERATION AND THE WORLDWIDE MISSION
OF RUSSIA
People in the world who call the Great Patriotic War "the
Nazi-Soviet" one are becoming more and more numerous and they are willing
to discuss all the "delights" of the German occupation. But the
Oświęcim is exactly what could have happened to any of us and
any of them had the Nazi Germany and its henchmen won the Second World
War. Their henchmen are the Baltic nationalists, "Banderovites", "Galicia"
division and the so-called "Russian Liberation Army" of General Vlasov
etc.
65 years ago, on the 27th of January, 1945 Soviet troops
under command of marshal Ivan Stepanovich Konev (1897-1973) have liberated
the biggest Nazi concentration camp "Auschwitz", also known as Oświęcim.
This event signified the liberation mission of the Russian Soviet Army and
in 2005 UN General Assembly proclaimed the 27th of January
to be the International Holocaust Victims’ Commemoration Day.
Originally Oświęcim was a name of the Polish city — located
in 60 kilometers from Krakow — which was occupied
by Germany in 1939. Germans gave it their own name —
Auschwitz — and the entire non-Slavonic world knows it under
this it. Near the Oświęcim-Auschwitz German authorities have built the
famous concentration camp, or being precise, entire complex of the
camps, that have made this name to be denominative. By the
present day the memory of the crimes against humanity — as the
prosecution of the Nuremberg process has precisely defined the Nazi
deeds — is vanishing along with the last witnesses of these
crimes. Today rare pupil not only in Germany but also in Poland and
in Russia itself has the concept of the concentration camp
in mind and he doesn’t know why the human race should forever
remember this nightmare if it wants to remain human.
The idea to isolate certain category of enemies and prisoners
in the special allotted places and drive to death by the
harassing labor and endless psycho-biological experiments
is authorless — its initiators may be imagined existing
at any point of space and time. But it was the country
of the prevailed national-socialism, "civilized" German Empire of the
20th century where this idea was brought to life in full, with the
German methodicalness and Nordic calmness. It is also impossible
to calculate the precise number of people who died
in Oświęcim — just like the number of victims of the
concentration camp system in any totalitarian state — as long
as the very idea of such camp doesn’t surmise keeping any records and
statistics.
The idea to murder people in the gas chambers — that terrifies
any sane person today — at those times was considered
to be the peak of progress and even the most "humane" means
of all possible; mind, that it were not the single person who was
to be killed but thousands of them and, preferably, without
unnecessary bloodshed. First tests of the gas suffocation in Oświęcim
were carried out on the 3rd of September, 1941 when — due
to the order of Obersturmführer-SS Karl Fritzsch, camp commandant
deputy — about 600 of Soviet war prisoners and 250 more prisoners
died from asphyxia in a short period of time. In future,
more than 20.000 people could have been murdered during a day. People died
from tortures, hunger, unbearable exhausting labor, after the attempts
to escape, if someone suspected them of disobedience and because
of their own suicidal attempts that they conducted at this hell
of the human design.
All in all, due to the general estimates about one and half million
(!) people died in Oświęcim only. At that, Rudolf Höss, camp
commandant during the 1940-43 admitted at the Nuremberg trial that
approximately two and a half million (!) people were killed and stated
that nobody was ever counting them. When the Russians liberated Oświęcim
on the 27th of January, 1945 they’ve discovered about seven and
a half thousand people there, while it were about 1.185.345 men and
women uniform suites at the warehouses. During the short period
of time Nazi have managed to take away and murder more than
58 thousand people.
Encounter of marshal Konev’s army with Oświęcim can only be compared
with the encounter of Scipion army with Carthage — as well
as Romans have seen the Baal’s heathen temple with thousands
of corpses of burnt alive people sacrificed to this demon,
Russians have suddenly seen the hell that the "enlightened" Germany has
prepared for them. That was an encounter with the barbarity that passed
itself as a culture. And one should have had very strong will
to life and hope for salvation to keep pretending that nothing like
that had ever happened even after this encounter. That is why philosopher
Theodor Adorno used to say that writing the poetry after Oświęcim
is an act of barbarity — after all, are we, who
survived, really better than those who fetched themselves in that
hell?
Oświęcim experience shows us what the men — who stopped to treat
humanity itself as value — are capable of. People who lived
in Germany in 30s-40s of the 20th century are not inferior
to any other people that used to live at any other place and
period of time, but it were only them who managed to create the
state that was systematically exterminating other people on the ethnic
lines and were sincerely sure that this would continue forever. This
is existence proof of that abyss of evil where a man can
fetch himself by his own will — the abyss that what we call
culture is trying to protect the man from. And even today there are
a lot of people in the world who are ready to voluntarily
set up numerous Oświęcims — had they obtained such opportunity. They
perceive our worries regarding the past to be our mere personal
problems — the thought that any new Oświęcim may concern themselves (and
quite often at the very first place) has never occurred
to them.
People in the world who call the Great Patriotic War "the Nazi-Soviet" one
are becoming more and more numerous and they are willing to discuss all
the "delights" of the German occupation. But the Oświęcim is exactly
what could have happened to any of us and any of them had the
Nazi Germany and its henchmen won the Second World War. Their henchmen are the
Baltic nationalists, "Banderovites", "Galicia" division and the so-called
"Russian Liberation Army" of General Vlasov etc. If they would have
won then we’ve got our own Oświęcim. This is the exact reason —
hatred to the historical Russia — that makes them ready to step
over the last line and deny even such facts as the Holocaust tragedy and
the Great Victory of 1945 that are recognized by entire European
civilization, which they desire to perceive themselves
to be a part of. And how can they call for sympathy for
their historical pain if it is to be done for the
account of the quite real pain of all the rest?
Fact of Oświęcim liberation by the Russian army has not been
evaluated enough at the world history yet. In the Soviet Russia this
event was considered to be the natural component of the victory
over Hitler’s Germany, while in the West image of the Russian
warrior-liberator was thoroughly ousted by the American one, so today
average European schoolboy might be sure that it were Americans who
have liberated all the concentration camps, while there, allegedly, were
no Russians who participated in the war at all. But there are
facts that just cannot be denied — the fact that it was Russia
who won the Second World War, the fact that it was Russia who liberated
the Oświęcim on the 27th of January, 1945. This is the great
achievement of our national history — not less significant than the
sputnik launch or Gagarin’s flight. We’re talking of liberating the
living men and the victory of the most inhuman regime of all
times — the one that could have once destroyed the entire humanity —
here. Having liberated the Oświęcim Russia has accomplished its historical
mission once again and the Soviet regime was morally justified for the first
time — so the USSR before and after the war are two completely
different states. That is why the Oświęcim liberation
is to become one of the most important page of the Russian
history textbooks and it is exactly our country that has
to shoot the movies and TV programs about it and even this very
event is to become the symbol of the worldwide mission
of Russia as a state that has repeatedly saved the European
humanity from death.
By Arkady Maler
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