Is it true that the number of those killed in the concentration camps of the USSR and Nazi Germany is almost the same? History of Soviet concentration camps: from elephant to gulag How many Soviet citizens died in concentration camps.

In the early morning of June 22, 1941, about three million heavily armed German soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms, as well as SS units, crossed the eastern border of German-controlled territory and invaded the territory of the Soviet Union. The German generals harbored not only illusions that they would be able to defeat the army of their mighty eastern neighbor during the “blitzkrieg”. They had a whole series of orders from the Central Command of the Wehrmacht and the ground forces, in which new methods of warfare were recorded.

First of all, they had to act with extreme cruelty. Propaganda ordered them not only to defeat the Jewish-Communist enemies, but also to destroy them. The motto of the Wehrmacht was: "Conquer, destroy and wipe off the face of the Earth!"

In particular, on the eve of the campaign to the east, a number of orders were issued, the main of which was the so-called “commissar order”, according to which all political workers of the armed forces of the USSR, without exception, were subject to unconditional destruction, which, however, contradicted the Hague conventions on laws and customs war.

The leadership of the Wehrmacht did not forget about these conventions. The first of the ten rules for the conduct of war by German soldiers, recorded on every military identity card, read: “The German soldier fights nobly for the victory of his people. Cruelty and senseless destruction are unworthy of him.” Given the specific orders valid since the attack on the Soviet Union, this rule, however, was akin to a song from another era.

We are still tormented by the question of how things could have come to the point that the war began to be waged by such criminal methods, contrary to any professional code of the military. One can recall the genocide of the Herero and Nama tribes, arranged by the Germans during the colonial wars of the early twentieth century, which became a kind of forerunner of the campaign to the east of 1941-1944. One can also recall the anti-Semitic, anti-communist and anti-Slavic traditions that existed in the German army long before the Second World War. After the victory over France in 1940, the Germans believed in their own invincibility.

In the last months before the attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler personally set up the high command of the Wehrmacht for the coming war. From his generals, Hitler demanded that he be considered not only the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, but also the highest leader in worldview. There is a specific date and event when this alliance was concluded between Hitler and the generals of the Wehrmacht: on March 30, 1941, Hitler gave a secret speech in his Reich Chancellery. About 250 generals were present there, who were soon to command the troops of the Eastern Front during the "Operation Barbarossa". Moreover, it was not some specially selected, ideologically competent and super-reliable leadership staff, but the most ordinary generals.

The generals gathered in the Reich Chancellery, of course, understood that Hitler demanded that they wage war by methods that were contrary to the generally accepted norms of warfare and the soldier's code of honor. But they did not protest against it.

Very few of them dared to express their doubts, because Hitler's orders could endanger the discipline in the ranks of the army. So in the future, the generals and lawyers of the headquarters began to translate the Fuhrer's theses into practice in the form of appropriate orders.

Many of these orders were subsequently quite rightly regarded as criminal. Not daring to object to the criminal course set by Hitler, the generals of the Wehrmacht on that day, March 30, 1941, lost all respect from civilized mankind, and lost it for a long time.

Especially outrageous was the attitude of the Wehrmacht towards Soviet prisoners of war. Among the cultured nations of modern times there was a principle according to which prisoners of war were to be treated humanely. However, Hitler radically ended this tradition in his speech of March 30, 1941, declaring that Wehrmacht soldiers should not consider Red Army soldiers as their own comrades - neither before nor after capture.

The consequences of this turned out to be horrendous: out of 5.7 million soldiers of the Red Army who fell into German captivity, 3.3 million died, which accounted for 57.5% of their total number. Many of them were shot, but most died in numerous prisoner of war camps. Only in the winter of 1941-1942, the number of dead Red Army soldiers amounted to about two million. In fact, we can say that a young Russian soldier who fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht in 1941 had practically no chance of surviving.

The number of crimes committed against Soviet prisoners of war approached those committed earlier against Jews in Europe. However, this fact did not attract the same attention as the Holocaust. It can be said that neither in the Soviet Union, nor in the former Soviet republics after its collapse, nor in Germany, there were forces that would attract the attention of the general public to crimes against soldiers of the Red Army. Federal President of Germany Joachim Gauck recently very accurately stated that there is still a gap in the memory of the peoples of the world regarding this mass crime.

Why did this happen? First, after the end of the war, many facts were not published. First of all, it was hushed up that the death of such a huge number of Red Army soldiers was, in fact, initially planned by the Nazi leadership during the preparation of the attack on the USSR. Thus, the responsibility for the massacres lies entirely with the Wehrmacht, and not with the soldiers of the SS, who at one time were entrusted with the "dirty work" of exterminating Jews in Europe.

Secondly, the cold war contributed to the "weathering" of this topic from the public consciousness. The Second World War is over, but the enemy image of the Bolsheviks has not disappeared. Therefore, the documents testifying to the crimes of the Wehrmacht were quite easily liquidated.

Thirdly, there was a kind of "compensatory effect": in the end, a large number of German soldiers also fell into Soviet captivity, and many of them also died. True, at the same time, the fact was hushed up that German prisoners of war were dying of starvation along with the Russian civilian population - while the Red Army had to die in order to provide the German population with everything they needed.

The criminal actions of the Wehrmacht towards Russian prisoners of war in 1941-1945 remain an indelible shame that lies on the Wehrmacht and the German people. The third rule in the identity card of the German military read: "An enemy who has surrendered must not be killed." This rule, which every German soldier should have followed, was violated by the Wehrmacht three million three hundred thousand times! The knowledge of this must finally be extracted from the hidden corners of our memory. And let it be unpleasant for us - honesty in relation to history will only benefit relations between Germany and Russia.

Auschwitz (Auschwitz 2)

The beginning of the "Holocaust" myth, i.e. about six million Jews poisoned by poisonous gases during the Second World War in German "death camps" and burned in crematoria was supposedly reported by the Soviet "Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the Nazi Invaders" in May 1945 The fact that this message was a deliberate lie will become clear only with the onset of Gorbachev's "glasnost": from the archives of German concentration camps captured by the Soviet army in April 1945, the Soviet command at that moment knew that from 1935 to 1945. in all German concentration camps, 403,713 prisoners died FOR ALL CAUSES (“including” six million victims of the “holocaust”!). In addition to the Soviet command, various Jewish researchers also knew about this, since no one except them was allowed to access these documents. But the myth of the Holocaust was so beneficial for both the Soviet command and Jewish researchers that it was sacredly kept secret for almost 50 years.

This is the subject of a small (115 pages) brochure by the English historian Vivian Bird with the catchy title “Auschwitz: The Final Count”, i.e. "Auschwitz: The Final Count". It was published in January 1999, in May 2000 and (posthumously) in October 2006.

The following is a translation of the author's preface to this brochure, which summarizes the main points of the brochure. The brochure itself in English can be ordered from The Barnes Review, Box 15877, Washington, DC 20003.
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Auschwitz: final tally

"Auschwitz" [Auschwitz], the infamous concentration camp in Poland, has become synonymous with the time period we remember as the "Holocaust". For nearly 50 years, schoolchildren around the world have been taught that "Of the six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis, four million of these innocent souls perished in the Auschwitz gas chambers."

The first public statement that at least 4 million died in Auschwitz came on May 7, 1945. On that day, the United Press reported that “The Russian [meaning Soviet, transl.] Extraordinary State Commission officially announced today that more than four million citizens of the Allied Powers were killed [at Auschwitz]." The main source of this information was the German camp commandant Rudolf Hoess, who confessed to directing the killings of about 4 million people at his disposal in Auschwitz. His confession - obtained under torture - said: "I personally arranged... the gassing of two million people between June/July 1941 and the end of 1943, when I was there [commandant]."

However, after 1945, the numbers of Auschwitz victims jumped up and down endlessly and eventually came to a figure of less than 100,000. It's good to familiarize yourself with this "number game", starting with "high" and ending with "low".

So here are the remarkable descending numbers of Auschwitz victims and the sources (mostly Jewish, it should be noted) that cited them.

9.000.000 - a 1955 French documentary, Night and Fog, which included historians Henri Michel and Olga Wormser-Migot. This film was shown to millions of schoolchildren around the world.

8.000.000 - this figure is given on December 31, 1945 by the French War Crimes Research Bureau and the French War Crimes Information Service.

7.000.000 - cited in 1945 by a certain Raphael Feigelson and cited by the French War Crimes Research Bureau and the French War Crimes Information Service.

6.000.000 - this figure is given by Tibere Kremer in the preface to the 1951 book The Auschwitz Doctor by Miklos Nyiszli, who said he was a Jewish doctor working in Auschwitz under the sinister Josef Mengele.

5.000.000-5.500.000 - this figure is given in 1945 by Mr. Bernard Czardybon at the trial of Rudolf Hoess in Krakow.

5.000.000 - this figure appears on April 20, 1978 in the French daily newspaper Le Monde. The same figure is also given on 23 January 1995 by the German daily Die Welt. Note, however, that by September 1, 1989, Le Monde lowered this figure to 1,422,000 (see below).

4.500.000 - in 1945 this figure is given by Henryk Mandelbaum at the aforementioned trial of Rudolf Hoess. The same figure is given by Stirling at the tribunal in 1945 in Lueneberg.

4.000.000 - this is the most "popular" figure, first published in a Soviet document dated May 6, 1945, which was officially recognized at the Nuremberg war crimes court. This is also the figure that in 1990 the employees of the museum in Auschwitz declared false (see below).

3.500.000 - this figure is given in the 1991 edition of "Dictionary of the French Language" and also by Mr. Claude Lanzamann in his preface to "Three Years in an Auschwitz Gas Chamber" by Filip Muller.

3.000.000 - this figure is taken from the confession of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, who estimated the number of people killed in Auschwitz until the end of 1943 as much. , despite the fact that three years earlier, employees of the museum in Auschwitz had lowered this figure by “1,100,000 minimum, 1,500,000 maximum” (see below).

2.500.000 - this figure is an estimate given by the widely publicized "witness of the Holocaust" Rudolf Vrba, when he testified on July 16, 1961 at the trial of the former SS man Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.

2.000.000-4.000.000 - this figure is given by the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer in his book "A History of the Holocaust", 1982. However, by 1989 Bauer decided that a more correct figure was 1.600.000 (see below).

2.000.000-3.000.000 - this figure is given in the confession of SS officer Perry Broad when he testified as a witness for the prosecution at the post-war trial of Dr. Bruno Tesch (see William Lindsey's report on this trial in this pamphlet).

2.000.000-2.500.000 - this figure is taken from a 1945 confession by Dr. Friedrich Entress, who was a doctor at Auschwitz in 1942-43.

2.000.000 - This figure is given by at least three prominent historians of the Holocaust, including Leon Poliakov (1951), “Harvest of Hate”; George Wellers (1973), “The Yellow Star at the Time of Vichy: From Drancy to Auschwitz”; Lucy Dawidowiz (1975), "The War Against the Jews".

1.600.000 is a corrected 1989 figure by the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer of his previous Auschwitz 1982 figure of 2.000.000-4.000.000. Bauer published this figure in the Jerusalem Post on September 22, 1989. Bauer summarized the general controversy surrounding these figures by stating: "The higher figures [of concentration camp victims] have long since been refuted, but these figures have not yet been become public knowledge."

1.500.000 - in 1995, this figure of deaths in Auschwitz became "official", being announced by the Polish president Lech Walesa. This figure was inscribed on a monument in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, thus "replacing" the previous figure of 4,000,000, which was officially refuted (and removed from the monument) in 1990.

1.471.595 - this figure is given by the historian George Wellers in 1983, who (as mentioned above) in 1973 claimed that 2,000,000 died. In his last calculation Wellers decided that in the figure of 1,471,595 who died at Auschwitz, 1,352,980 were Jews.

1.433.000 - this figure appears on September 1, 1989 in the French daily newspaper “Le Monde”, which earlier, on April 20, 1978, gave a figure of 4.000.000.

1.250.000 - this figure is given by the historian Raul Hilberg in his book "The Destruction of the European Jews" in 1985. According to Hilberg 1.000.000 in this figure are Jews.

1.100.000-1.500.000 - this assessment is given by the historians Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum in their 1984 book “Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp” and the curator of the Auschwitz Museum Dr. Franciszek Piper in one of the chapters of the book by the authors Gutman-Berenbaum. Dr. Piper just in 1990 and participated in the refutation of the figure of 4,000,000 and the approval of the figure of 1,500,000 in 1995 in the official statements of the Auschwitz Museum.

On September 8, 1998, Mr. Walter Reich, former director of the Washington Holocaust Museum, admitted in an article in the Washington Post that the 4,000,000 figure was in fact false. Reich confirmed that the figure of 1,100,000-1,500,000 was correct and that most of the victims were Jews.

1.000.000 - in his 1989 book, "Auschwitz: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers", Jean-Claude Pressac became the first historian of the Holocaust (recently) to reduce the death toll at Auschwitz to 1,000,000 - three million less than the figure at 4,000,000, which has been publicized everywhere since the end of World War II. (It should be noted, however, that as early as 1953 Gerald Reitlinger's death toll at Auschwitz was below 1,000,000.) "Holocaust deniers" precisely because in many cases they questioned the Auschwitz death toll given by forensic historians and Holocaust "authorities".

900.000 - On August 3, 1990, the New York Jewish newspaper "Aufbau" lowered the number of victims of Auschwitz to 900,000.

800.000-900.000 - this figure, given by Gerald Reitlinger in his 1953 book "The Final Solution", is much closer to reality than many subsequent claims and is significant in that it reduces the death toll at Auschwitz from the commonly used figure of 4,000,000 at the time of this book's publication .

775.000-800.000 is Jean-Claude Pressac's corrected figure, which he used in his 1993 book "The Crematoria of Auschwitz: The Mass Murder" s Machinery" and reduces his 1989 death toll to 1,000,000. (This time, Pressac stated that among these dead, 630,000 were "gassed" Jews).

630.000-710.000 - a year later (in 1994) Pressac's figures were further lowered in the 1993 German translation of his study of the Holocaust in French. This figure is again significantly lower than the 1989 figure (see above).

73.137 - this figure - a startling drop of 4,000,000 - was reported in a March 3, 1991 report in the New York Times. It was based on documents from German wartime concentration camps.

This figure includes 38,031 Jews.

What happened to Six Million?

The documents from which these figures were derived - the complete, official documents of the wartime German concentration camp system - were seized by the Soviet army in the Oranienburg camp (near Berlin) in April 1945. Prior to "glasnost", access to these documents, according to Russian sources, granted only to Jewish scholars for reasons that will soon become apparent.

FULL REPORTING

These documents, the completeness and authenticity of which no one disputes, state that the total number of all persons who died in the entire system of German prison camps from its creation in 1935 to its collapse in late 1944 and early 1945. amounted to 403.713.

I repeat: a total of 403,713 people of all races and creeds were officially registered as dead (from all causes: typhus, old age, rubella, etc., as well as executions) in the entire system of German prison camps for 10 years. Of these 403,713 people, 73,137 died at Auschwitz, including 38,031 Jews.

The documents themselves are a breathtaking example of the celebrated "German efficiency" - but at the same time they refute claims that the concentration camps were killing machines.

Every month, without exception, the commandants of each camp and each satellite camp were required to send accurate records of their prisoners to the commandant of [all, trans.] camps, SS General Richard Glucks, stationed at Camp Oranienburg.

According to these documents, it is very easy to determine the number of prisoners in each camp on any given day, from where they were brought, their gender and offenses. Mortality was also indicated in these monthly reports.

All campers were assigned numbers upon their arrival at the camp and they were registered. This order was observed very strictly, since the rations and clothes for the prisoners were based on exact figures. The reports also provided lists of prisoners who had entered the camp during the previous 30 days, as well as those who left due to the end of their term or were transferred to another camp in the system.

Leaving aside figures for other camps, the figures for the rather large Auschwitz complex reflect the number of prisoners who died, who they were, and whether they died by execution or natural causes.

More than 4 million people were killed by the Nazis in the crematoriums and on the fires of the Auschwitz camp. This is evidenced by documents from the archives of the FSB of Russia, made public in connection with the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the Red Army.

As a researcher at the Central Archive of the FSB of Russia, candidate of philosophical sciences, associate professor Vladimir Makarov notes, not all documents were destroyed by the Nazis in Auschwitz. In addition, the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry, which drew conclusions about the death of more than 4 million people in Auschwitz, relied on the testimony of witnesses, eyewitnesses and executioners.

He said, referring to archival materials, that, starting from 1940, 10 echelons with prisoners arrived at Auschwitz daily from the occupied territories. Each echelon had 40-50 wagons. There were from 50 to 100 people in each car, while 70% of new arrivals were destroyed immediately.

Only an insignificant part of the healthiest prisoners remained in the camp as temporary labor in military factories and as experimental subjects for various kinds of medical experiments. They were destroyed later.

On the territory of Auschwitz, several pits 60 by 40 meters in size and three meters deep were dug, in which corpses were also constantly burned. These bonfires burned constantly, notes Vladimir Makarov. Also in the archives of the FSB there are testimonies of those who designed the new crematoria.

According to the act of inspection of the Auschwitz concentration camp by an expert technical commission in the period from February 14 to March 8, 1945: in the Auschwitz concentration camp, the Germans organized a huge plant for the mass extermination of people, mainly by killing with the poisonous substance "Cyclone" and then burning in crematoria or at the stake . Echelons with people destined for destruction arrived in Auschwitz from all countries that were occupied by the Germans - from France, Belgium, Holland, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece and others.

As a result of a detailed study of the drawings and documentation found in the Auschwitz concentration camp, a detailed study of the remains of blown up crematoria and gas chambers, on the basis of investigative materials and the testimony of witnesses from among the prisoners who worked at the gas chambers and in crematoria, the commission found that only in crematoria for during their existence, the Germans could destroy: 216 thousand people in 24 months in crematorium No. 1, 1 million 710 thousand people in 19 months in crematorium No. 2, 1 million 618 thousand people in crematorium No. 3 in 18 months of its operation, 765 thousand people for 17 months of operation of the ovens of crematorium No. 4, and another 810 people were burned in 18 months in crematorium No. 5.

Based on the investigative data, the commission came to the conclusion that "during the period of the camp's existence - from 1940 to January 1945 - there were five crematoria for 52 retorts with a capacity of about 270,000 corpses per month." Each crematorium had its own gas chamber, where people of various nationalities were poisoned with the Cyclone poison gas.

The performance of the gas chambers significantly exceeded the capacity of the furnaces and provided the most extreme load during the operation of crematoria. In addition, there were two separate gas chambers, in which the Germans burned corpses on grandiose bonfires. Both of these gas chambers had a capacity of at least 150,000 people per month.

The commission concluded that at least 4 million people were killed in Auschwitz, moreover, it is likely that the actual number of people who died here at the hands of German executioners is much higher.

"In total, at least six million people were destroyed in the death camp during its existence, including children, women, the elderly and old women," follows from the protocol of interrogation of the worker-mason of the Industriya company for the construction of premises in the Auschwitz concentration camp, Pole Anton Honkish, 1912 year of birth, a native of the village of Kozy (Poland).

On January 26, 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution No. 61/255 "Holocaust Denial", condemning the denial of the Holocaust as a historical fact, and proclaimed the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, reminds "Interfax".

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, where, as previously thought, between 1.5 and 2.2 million people died. However, new data released by the Russian FSB suggests that the number of victims of Auschwitz was much higher.

In January 2010, the forged gate plate of the camp was returned to the camp. with a cynical inscription (Work sets you free) since 1940 has been above the main gate leading to the Polish town of Auschwitz.Signs with this slogan were in many Nazi concentration camps, but the most famous one is in Auschwitz. These letters are forged in the forge of the concentration camp. The author of the plate is Jan Livach, better known as "No. 1010". According to historians, in protest, the prisoners deliberately forged the slogan incorrectly: the letter "B" turned upside down. After the war, the tablet became one of the main exhibits of the museum and its main symbol.

(and others like him), who believes that half of the country was imprisoned in the USSR, and the second was guarding, I suggest that you read this article. The process of identifying the USSR with Nazi Germany began immediately after the end of World War II and continues to this day. It is beneficial for many political forces to present events from the point of view that the USSR at that time was essentially not much different from the Third Reich, and if Germany had not attacked first, then the Land of Soviets would have done it. And after the capitulation of the Nazis, if the allied forces had not intervened, the USSR would have captured the whole of Europe. In addition, the rehabilitation of fascism is gaining popularity around the world, which is characterized by the rise in popularity of nationalist and openly Nazi movements and the elevation to the rank of heroes of collaborators and accomplices of the Nazis during the Second World War.

About how important history plays an important role in management, we wrote in articles"People and Memory" and "People and Memory Part 2: History as a Management Priority" . In this article, we will consider a special case of manipulation and the creation of historical myths. And now the format of such manipulations is becoming so primitive that it seems that modern people, and especially young people, do not think at all about the adequacy of this or that information. Not to mention the fact that this information can and should be verified from primary sources. Fortunately, now with the development of informatization, this process does not take much time.

The tendency to compare the USSR and Nazi Germany has also reached Belarus. So, in the city of Brest, a leaflet with the following content was found on the street:

It is not known who the author of this leaflet is, but there is a lot of such creativity on the Internet. The creators of such information stuffing do not try to concretize the information presented (for example, to clarify the years for which they provide statistical data), not to mention the presentation of links to primary sources. Thus, they primarily express disrespect to those to whom they address this message.

In short, you can go through those points that, according to the authors of the leaflet, are similar in the USSR and the Third Reich.

Presence of concentration camps

First you need to understand what a concentration camp is and why they were created. A concentration camp is a center of mass forced concentration of people who get there on any basis (prisoners of war, citizens of a certain nationality, race, and other categories) and without court decisions. The main difference between concentration camps and correctional camps is the absence of a court verdict that has entered into force, according to which a person is deprived of liberty.

The leaflet also claims the presence of concentration camps in the USSR in the period from 1918 to 1960. The first concentration camps in the USSR were organized on the initiative of Trotsky at the end of May 1918 and lasted until the end of the civil war. Moreover, the conditions of detention there were better than in prisons, and are not compared with the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. After they were transformed into correctional camps and, together with other institutions, they formed a system of execution of punishments, where they served sentences for crimes stipulated by the current legislation of that time. Even during the period when the so-called troikas operated, they worked in accordance with the laws of that time.

The leaflet could have written about the poor conditions of the prisoners, raised the question of the statistics of judicial errors, as well as the legality of decisions on deprivation of liberty, but instead it mentions concentration camps. Why? In the minds of most people, concentration camps are associated primarily with the death camps that operated during Nazi Germany, in which people were purposefully exterminated, and this image has long been associated with genocide, suffering and is unequivocally recognized as evil. Therefore, calling the system of correctional institutions in the USSR concentration camps can strengthen the negative image of the country at that time.

1942 in Buchenwald concentration camp

Number of camps and places of detention

In the leaflet, the number of places of deprivation of liberty and camps is called more than 30 thousand. This information is most likely taken from the website of the Memorial society. If you look at the maximum number of prisoners who served their sentences in all colonies, camps and prisons for a year, then it will be about 2,500,000 people. Dividing the number of people by the number of institutions announced by Memorial, we get that in each prison, colony or corrective labor colony, on average, 83 people were imprisoned. For comparison: in today's Russia as of March 1, 2015 according to the Federal Penitentiary Service 549,488 people were serving sentences in 727 colonies, that is, on average, there are 755 people in one colony. How profitable is it to maintain such a huge number of institutions? Or is it still more profitable to keep a larger number of people in one institution?

In order to understand the extent to which people were jailed in the country, the criterion for the number of places of detention is not suitable, and it is necessary to analyze the number of people per year that were in various institutions of the penitentiary system. And the figure of 30,000 is presented for even more intimidation and comparison with Nazi Germany, because there were 15,000 camps there, according to the leaflet, two times less. Thus, the authors encourage the idea that the USSR was even worse than the Third Reich, at least in relation to its own citizens.

Half of the country was sitting, and the other half was guarding ...

The number of prisoners in the above leaflet is from 20 to 50 million people. Let's turn to the data that is documented.

The number of prisoners in the GULAG (as of January 1 of each year) Zemskov VN GULAG (historical and sociological aspect) // Sociological research. - 1991. - No. 6-7

We repeat once again that the peak-maximum of those who were simultaneously imprisoned was in the 50s and amounted to 2.5 million people, and if we take the figure in relation to 100,000 people, we get 1,333 prisoners per 100,000 people. Is it a lot or a little? To do this, we compare the same indicators in modern Russia and the United States.

As of March 1, 2015, 673,818 people were kept in the penitentiary institutions of the Russian Federation, i.e. 461 per 100,000 people. In the USA, according toInternational Center for Prison Studies (ICPS) there were 2,228,424 prisoners in 2012, but the population was larger than in the USSR in 1953, so there were 707 prisoners per 100,000, which is about two times less than in the USSR at the very peak of the number of prisoners. Question two: can we say that everyone who is currently in prison in Russia or in the United States is there illegally? The same can be said about the USSR. In addition to the so-called political prisoners, there were also ordinary criminals. What is the proportion of all those who served time? In the table above, one can estimate the number of people who were convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes in relation to the total number of prisoners.

Dynamics of the proportion of political prisoners in the USSR from 1934 to 1953

If we analyze the dynamics of the ratio of the number of “political” and make a graph, then the very peaks of the number of “political” were during the beginning of World War II and in the first years of the country’s restoration after the end of the Great Patriotic War, which is understandable, since wartime laws were in force at that time which are stricter in every country. Where, then, do the figures of tens of millions of prisoners come from? You can, of course, add up all those who were imprisoned every year, but after all, they were imprisoned in camps and prisons for more than a year. Be that as it may, but the scale that is drawn in such myths does not correspond to reality.

The number of deaths from terror

On February 1, 1954, Khrushchev prepared a certificate signed by Prosecutor General Rudenko, Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov and Minister of Justice Korshenin on the number of people convicted of counter-revolutionary crimes in the period from 1921 to February 1, 1954. According to the certificate, 3,777 were convicted during this period 380, including 642,980 people sentenced to capital punishment, 2,369,220 people to detention in camps and prisons for a term of 25 years or less, and 765,180 people to exile and exile.

Also, many people died while serving their sentences in the Gulag camps. According to the certificate on the death rate of prisoners in the Gulag system for the period 1930-1956, compiled according tomaterials of OURZ GULAG (GARF. F. 9414), a total of 1,606,748 people died during the above period.

Considering the above figures, we find that 2,249,728 people died directly from terror (this figure is the sum of the number of those sentenced and those who died in the camps for various reasons approx. master7009). This figure is in no way consistent with 10-60 million.

Population dynamics in the USSR 1920 - 1959

From the 1920s to 1939, a positive trend was observed. The jump after 1939 was caused by the annexation of the new territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. From the age of 41 to 46, the population decreased from 196.7 million people to 170.5, which is associated with losses during the Great Patriotic War. According to Wikipedia, the total demographic losses during this period amounted to 26.6 million people. After the war, the population continued to grow. Consequently, if in any of the periods there would be mass mortality, then this would be reflected in one way or another on the demographic curve. Especially given the declared 10-60 million deaths from terror.

In addition, the very demographic growth during the Soviet period speaks volumes, especially in comparison with the demographic trends of today's Russia or Belarus.

Why is it necessary?

These were difficult times for the country, the death toll is huge, many people suffered hardship and suffering. You can't argue with this. We will not in this article give an assessment of that time, justify or blame anyone. Someone may say that the archive documents of the NKVD could be forged, but then the data on which the conclusions are based are invented or simply taken from the ceiling. You can also point out that some facts were not taken into account, but all this in any case will not radically change the scale.

What are the compilers of this kind of information emissions trying to achieve? They act consciously or not realizing what they are doing for the sake of modern trends and fashion, denigrating the Soviet Union and at the same time denigrating their history, their ancestors. Other countries will adopt all the best that has been developed by us, and we, having imposed a taboo on this entire era, will disdain even the fact that this is part of our history.

The era of the USSR cannot be assessed unequivocally good or unambiguously bad, as, in principle, any other historical period. There were achievements, but there were also mistakes. Scientific discoveries and inventions, superiority in space, great minds, the best education system in the world, the moral and ethical image of the Soviet person and the ideals of that time, which were formed from childhood through cultural works, films.

But the most important thing is that in this way the concept of the life order of society, which was announced in the USSR, is sealed - the state's focus on the development of the majority of the working population of the country and the exclusion of the exploitation of man by man, which was directly stated in Article 4 of the Constitution of 1936. The USSR at that time gave the world a development option that was alternative to the capitalist society.

P.S.

Fascism as a phenomenon in the global historical process is deeper and more dangerous than we are accustomed to perceive it, associating to a greater extent with those attributes that were inherent in Nazi Germany, and certainly not the movement in Italy that gave rise to the term itself.

In reality, this phenomenon is not tied to any country, specific regime, or dictator. Fascism can arise everywhere. It consists in building a misanthropic system of governing a society with a rigid hierarchy and dominance over society by a narrow group of people. In most cases, it is brought to power by a crowd of people, which is subsequently exploited by a minority.

Fascism can be dressed in various ideological shells. In the leaflet we are considering, the authors state that the ideology of Nazi Germany was condemned, but not in the USSR, but for some reason they do not mention the ideology of liberalism, which not only emerged victorious in the Cold War and dominates today throughout the world, but that the most dangerous leads to fascism by default on a global scale.

In 1945, fascism was defeated at the level of military priority - with the destruction of the regime that openly declared it. About the true essence of fascism and the relationship between fascism and liberalism, more and more materials and works are now beginning to appear that can be found in the public domain on the Internet. I would like to believe that fascism will not pass in the new history of mankind, in whatever guises it may appear.

There is a large list that shows the concentration camps in Germany during the Great Patriotic War. About a dozen of them are the most famous and heard even by those who were born after the war. The horrors that took place there will make the heart of even the most callous person tremble.

German concentration camps during WWII, list:

The list can start with the Dachau camp. It was created one of the first. Dachau was located near Munich and was a model of the mocking end institutions of the Nazis. The camp lasted twelve years. It was visited by the military, various activists and even priests. People were brought to the camp from all over Europe.

Following the example of Dachau, 140 additional institutions were created in 1942. They contained more than 30,000 people who were used for hard work, medical experiments were carried out on them, new drugs and hemostatic agents were tested. Officially, no people were killed in Dachau, but the death toll according to the documents is over 70 thousand people, and how many there were in reality cannot be counted.

The largest and most famous concentration camps in Germany 1941-1945:

1. Buchenwald was one of the largest. It was created back in 1937 and was originally called Ettersberg. The camp had 66 affiliated similar institutions. In Buchenwald, the Nazis tortured 56,000 people of 18 different nationalities.

2. - also a very famous concentration camp. It was located west of Krakow, on Polish territory. It had a large complex of three main parts - Auschwitz 1, 2 and 3. More than 4 million people died in Auschwitz, of which 1.2 million were Jews alone.

3. Majdanek was opened in 1941. It had many subsidiaries on Polish territory. During the period from 1941 to 1944, more than 1.5 million people were killed in the concentration camp.

4. Ravensbrück was at first an exclusively female concentration camp, located near the city of Furstenberg. Only strong and healthy were selected, the rest were immediately destroyed. After some time, it expanded, forming two more departments - for men and for girls.

Salaspils should be mentioned separately. It was divided into two parts, one of which contained children. The Nazis used them to provide fresh blood to the wounded Germans. Children did not even live up to 5 years. Many died immediately after pumping lion's doses of blood. Children were deprived of even elementary care, and were additionally used in experiments as guinea pigs.

In addition to those listed, other equally famous German concentration camps can be mentioned: Düsseldorf, Dresden, Katbus, Halle, Schlieben, Spremberg and Essen. They committed the same atrocities and killed hundreds of thousands of people.