#19 – The Anti-Humans

This episode is about the brutal subjugation of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union in the wake of the Second World War. If you like this podcast, please do consider contributing by subscribing to my Substack page. can be found at martyrmaid.substack dot com. And that's where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes, including interviews, that are available only to subscribers for just five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year.

To all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you guys allowing me to do this. Uh this episode is way too horrible and and dark and brutal for me to hope that you're gonna enjoy it, but I hope you get something out of it. Here we go. I'm content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head. and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it.

But I think my schedule over the next year is actually not so heavy. So he pulls out the list of episodes that he has planned for the next 12 months. and he says in his way, you know, let's see. The first one okay, you're right, lots of murder. Second one, murder Third murder, lots of murder in this one too, torture, mass murder, ah aha. I'm doing one okay, I'll stop with that. I'm gonna lose all my Italian listeners. I'm doing one on Bruce Lee, that's not so bad, right?

But yeah, then murder, genocide, murder, mass murder, murder, murder, torture, murder I I guess you're right. Now granted, Daniele is not exactly a representative cross section of humanity. And I've seen his girlfriend, never mind him, put someone to sleep with a left hook, and the dude has dreams that are like scenes cut out of Conan the Barbarian for being too violent. But then it's not like I can talk.

Let's see, so far I've given you guys what? The Israel-Palestine conflict, human sacrifice, cannibalism, the Mili massacre, a suicide cult and Japanese terrorists. And then there's this episode. I don't know why I'm doing this episode. It wasn't really what I had planned to do next. But I've got an obsessive mind and when it gets locked onto something, it's very hard for me to even think about anything else until I've

I don't know. Not figured it out. Half the time I don't have any more answers at the end of the process than I did at the beginning, but maybe at least until I've figured out what it is that's obsessing me about it. I don't even know if I've gotten that far with this.

I've got a whole nother series in the works. It's a good one. You guys are gonna like it, but While I was working on it, I came across the telling of an incident about which I had read some years back but hadn't thought of for a long time, and once I came across it, it lodged itself in my brain again and The nature of the subject is Is such that it just felt like it was gonna rot my soul if I didn't get it out, and so here we are.

Now given the main subject of this episode, the subject that the episode ends with. A lot of thought. I've read a lot about the history, not only of the specific series of events that we'll talk about, but about tangential events as well as reflections and analysis on similar events that approach the black heart of human evil that we're gonna be entering here today.

I've obsessed and read and thought and talked about it, and the truth is I feel like I understand almost nothing about what happened. And mostly all the thought and reading tends to just make me feel like some kind of voyeur, a sick voyeur indulging something broken in myself.

And to feel like even bringing this episode to you is i it's just something I'm almost doing out of childish and deranged desires to shock you for its own sake. But I've gotta get it out and my cat is not interested in this story, and so that leaves you guys I know I've told you this before. I promise I'll make it up to you some day with some lighter fare, but that day is not this one. And so I thought the least that I could do is start this episode off with a joke.

It's a Polish joke, or a joke about Poles, rather, but they're not the butt of it. We here at the Martyr Made Hot Podcast love Poland and we love Poles, so there will not be any anti Polish jokes here. It goes like this. One day, a Polish farmer, let's call him Jan, Jan was out ploughing his field when he turned over a shiny object.

It was old. Very old. It was caked with dirt But Jan sensed immediately that he had found something that was probably valuable here, because under the grime he could see the color gold and and maybe even what looked like gemstones socketed into the item. It had good heft, good weight to it, which Jan, though a simple man, took as further evidence of its worth.

And so Jan pulls down his shirt sleeve and he looks around to make sure he's not being spied on by any envious neighbors, and he starts to clean it up. He gives it one rub. He gives it two rubs, and you can see where this is going. Three rubs and poof! Out pops a genie from Jan's magic lantern. As you can imagine, it took some explaining on the part of the genie, but eventually Jan came to understand that this is his lucky day, for this all powerful genie is going to grant him three wishes.

And as soon as Jan got it, his eyes lit up. And the genie was glad to see that. He'd been through this many, many times before, and most people are so indecisive that sometimes he'd be stuck with one wisher for weeks, months. But this pole, a farmer, a simple man, this good pole seemed to know exactly what he wanted, so the genie thought he might be out of here this afternoon. But then Jan's eyes changed and he got that other familiar look.

The other one that the genie had seen many times before. The genie said, Oh, I I I got excited there. I thought you knew what you wanted. And Jan says, Oh, I I do, I do. I just have to think of how I want it. Interesting, says the genie. Well, you know the rules, take your time, your wish is my command, and so on and so forth. The poll says, Well, gosh, I I'd hate to keep you waiting, so this'll do well enough. I would like China to invade Poland. You want China to invade Poland. That's right.

But this is Poland. Yes. Um I wish for China to invade Poland. Your wish is my command. So before long the There are low rumbling booms on the eastern horizon, and they grow louder, and then before long the sky above starts to fill with bombers and attack aircraft. The genie says to Jan, you might want to take cover, buddy. And so Jan with this huge maniacal smile on his face runs down to his cellar to hide.

He's down there for a while, but when the screams and the explosions finally die down, Jan ventures out and just finds complete devastation. His farmhouse is burned down, his crops are ruined, the countryside is just completely denuded of life. He can see the nearby town over on the horizon, and it's just a smoking wreck. He finds a radio that he thinks should work and he tries to tune it in to get some news from the rest of the country, but all the stations are down.

And finally after a while, a group of refugees, just starving, naked, broken down refugees comes through the area with news. All of Poland is destroyed, they say. Cities sacked, millions dead. And Jan is just ecstatic. He's laughing like a hyena. The refugees think this guy, like so many others they've come across on their travels, has just been driven insane by deprivation and suffering, never suspecting that it was Jan who had brought this misery down on their country in the first place.

When the refugees pass, Jan pulls out his lamp, gives it three quick rubs, and says, Ready for my second wish. And the genie looks at him, kind of a concerned eye. The other eye is surveying the surrounding wreckage, and the genie says, Well, I'm kind of afraid to ask, but you're the boss, what is it? I wish for China to invade Poland again. You wish for Okay, your wish is my command. Same thing. Explosions, fire, death, starvation, disease, cities burned.

Country roads clogged with homeless refugees seeking shelter and food, and Jan can't get enough of it. Jan's on the ground holding his belly laughing. And finally it's time for wish number three, and again Jan wants China to invade Poland. And Jeannie says, Look man, I was born in Baghdad like a thousand years ago, and we'd always heard you Christians were kind of crazy up here in your own lands, but uh still I thought I'd seen it all. I gotta ask you, why do you hate your own country so much?

All of a sudden, Jan's face changed. Got this shocked look, and then and then his eyes got wide, and his face got real serious. He said, What? Hate my country? Why I love my country. I love Poland more than anything. I love it more than my own vital organs. And the Chini says, Well, then I don't understand. Why do you keep wishing for China to invade and destroy Poland if you love it? Because Jan said, with his wide smile returning to his face, to get here, they had to go through Russia first.

I can't remember where I heard that joke. And I've tried it on different groups of people, and a lot of them don't get it. But Poles get it. And so do Ukrainians and Estonians and Latvians and Lithuanians. And I've never tried it on any fins, but I've been told that they'd probably appreciate it too. Over in eastern and northeastern Europe.

that area that the author Timothy Snyder called the Bloodlands, where the soil has been fertilized with the blood and bodies of millions of people caught in the gears between Hitler and Stalin. A lot of people in the Bloodlands to this day still take a pretty dim view of Russia. In a way that's kind of hard for us to relate to over here in America in some ways.

Because we don't really hold historical grudges in quite the same way, except maybe against ourselves, but you know, our collective memory tends to extend to roughly what we had for dinner last night. And what grudges that we seem to hold? On an international basis.

uh are usually just th when you look at them closely, they're not real grudges. They're usually artifacts generated by the structure of our political system and the openness of it. And the way that it allows motivated minorities to dominate the politics around their pet issues. Just as long as there's nobody else out there who's really motivated to oppose them with equal vigor. And so for example, we might still be putting it to Cuba

But this's not really a grudge that involves most Americans. The only reason our boot's still on Cuba's neck is that Florida's an important swing state in presidential elections, and Florida has a lot of Cuban Americans with longer memories than the rest of us, at least on that issue. If all our Cuban Americans lived in, I don't know, California or Mississippi, some some place that wasn't a swing state in an election, we might have wrapped up the Cuba issue a long time ago.

The vast majority of Ethiopian Americans all live in Washington, DC, LA and New York. If they all lived in Pennsylvania or Ohio, You know, and every four years we might be treated to politicians going on about how America's national security depends on us turning the screws on Eritrea or something. Or take Russia.

It might look like we have a grudge against Russia if you've turned on the T V over the last few years, but Really until the media managed to convince half the people in the country that hating Vladimir Putin was the same thing as hating Donald Trump, and if you didn't hate Putin in Russia, then it must mean you have a closet full of MAGA hats.

Yeah, that was a grudge basically held by the State Department and other agencies of the federal government, not really by the general population, at least since the end of the Cold War. And when you pop the hood of those agencies, it doesn't really take long to see why it works out this way in our system. I remember watching the first Trump impeachment hearings, the one over the phone call with the president of Ukraine.

And the prosecution kept bringing up all of these US diplomats and functionaries who were working the Ukraine or Russian or Eastern European desks to testify. And I remember being struck by how large a percentage of these American Foreign Service bureaucrats had foreign sounding accents or last names that were kind of unfamiliar unless you live in Brighton Beach or someplace like that.

Because it turns out that our Russia facing diplomatic corps is disproportionately staffed with first generation immigrants from places like Ukraine and Poland, or their Russian Jews who came over in the nineteen nineties. Basically a bunch of people who would have laughed at that joke about the genie and whose ethnic grudges against Russia were imported from their birth countries into the US foreign policy establishment.

Maybe kind of like staffing the State Department and Intel agency's Israel desk with a bunch of first generation Palestinian Americans. Now me, I tend to like Russia. I love Russian literature. I think probably Andrey Rublev painted my favorite icons. But then I was never a subject of the Soviet Empire. And I can't say that those people who were don't have their reasons.

One of the great heroes of the twentieth century, or of any century really, was a Polish cavalry officer and covert operative named Vitold Polecki. Puletsky was just nineteen years old when Leon Trotsky and the Red Army approached Warsaw in nineteen twenty. At that point, Poland had only been nominally independent for about a year and a half, and their meager military forces were thought by most observers at the time to be no match for the approaching communist.

And people were very worried'cause once the Red Army pushed through Poland, it was straight on to a prostrate Germany, which had a very powerful, very strong indigenous communist movement, which the Red Army would it be able to link up with there. Its institutions had been collapsed, its population had been decimated by the First World War, very demoralized.

still in recovery from a period of mass starvation after the war. And so there were actually discussions going on between Britain and France about the possible need to invade Germany, this is after the First World War, to invade Germany to prevent the Russian communists from adding that country to its empire. Of course none of that was necessary, and it's the polls that we have to thank for that.

See, the Poles, despite losing their independence more than a century before, had never given up the hope of regaining it, and they were not prepared to go down without a fight. If they needed any more motivation, they had some idea of what they would be in for if they were defeated by the communists. Droves of refugees were being driven before the Red Army, bringing stories of terror and mass murder that had not been told in the region since it was threatened by the Mongols.

They told of priests tortured and killed. They told of church altars used as toilets before the building itself was torched. They told of massive, massive, indiscriminate murder. And this was a feature, not a bug of the Bolshevik approach. that all communist revolutions in the twenty twentieth century. The revolutionaries spoke differently before they had power than after they'd gained it, and they spoke differently among themselves than they did in public.

And so in nineteen oh three Lenin could say that he rejected terrorism, at least on strategic grounds, in favor of organizing and agitation work, but by nineteen eighteen he and the rest of his cadres were crystal clear. The Bolshevik newspaper that year shouted from its pages. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea.

Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Yoritsky, Zinoviev and Volodarsky, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois, more blood, as much as possible. Lenin himself speaking to the Petrograd Soviet about people who tried to store away food to protect their families from the growing famine in the early twenties was very explicit.

We can't expect to get anywhere unless we resort to terrorism. Speculators must be shot on the spot. Moreover, criminals must be dealt with just as resolutely. They must be shot on the spot. End quote. He once complained that Russians are too kind, they lack the ability to apply determined methods of revolutionary terror. While millions of people were starving to death in that famine in the early twenties, Lennon saw it as an opportunity.

It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can and therefore must carry out the confiscation of church valuables. I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred Clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner, and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come.

The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. And so the largest Lutheran church in Europe was turned into an indoor swimming pool with the diving board mockingly put in the place of the altar. Alexander Yakovlev, a former Soviet Politburo member and secretary to the party, wrote in a book published by Yale University Press years later.

And he described priests being crucified and thrown in cauldrons of boiling tar. He wrote about priests being scalped and strangled and forced to take communion with molten lead instead of bread or wine. Over three thousand priests were murdered in just the first year after the Bolshevik communists seized power in Russia. One priest in perm had his eyes gouged out and his cheeks sliced open to the mandible joint, and then he was paraded through town before being buried alive.

When the church delegation when the church sent a delegation from Moscow to go to Perm and investigate reports that all the clergy there had been mass murdered, their train was waylaid by communist militants and every single one of them was shot to death. Slave labor camps and work battalions were full of clergymen and people being punished for their religious devotion. priests were typically given the most degrading work, intentionally humiliating.

They'd be forced to clean manure from pig styes and stables by hand while wearing their religious vestments, things like that. A bishop by the name of Leontius was murdered, along with most of the clergymen in his diocese, after he gave a sermon which included Jesus' words I was naked and thou clothed me. I was ill and now cared for me, which somehow were interpreted as being critical of the Bolsheviks and their policies.

Another priest, named Mikovsky, was murdered in Kharkiv for allegedly criticizing the communists, and when his wife arrived to retrieve his body, The secret police killed her by chopping off her arms and driving a rod through her breasts. These stories were coming in from all over the country.

From the city of Omsk, on the Irtish River in western Siberia, where the Bolshevik government at the time had been temporarily overthrown by non communist forces during the Russian Civil War, forces loyal to Admiral Kolch. An American intelligence officer was there on the ground and he submitted a report to his superiors about what he was seeing in march nineteen nineteen.

He told of rampant crime and murder in the streets, total chaos, and he didn't provide a general defense of Kolchak's cue or of Kolchak's government in general, but he insisted that after what he had seen, he was He would sooner these are his words, he would sooner turn a mad dog loose among a crowd of children, than to subject a civilian population to dominic to domination by these Bolshevik communists.

He even informed his superior officers in an official report that if he had the power and authority to do so he would shoot on sight any persons who admitted for one moment that they were Bolsheviks. A while back, I read a book by a Russian immigrant philosopher named Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyan. It was called On Resistance to Evil by Force and it's basically an entire book wrestling with the determined Christian pacifism of Tolstoy.

In light of the unimaginable horrors that Ilyen had seen visited upon that country by the Bolsheviks, the He takes Tolstoy's arguments very seriously. Ilich knows the Bible. Love your enemy, turn the other cheek. If your persecutor demands your shirt, give him also your coat. After witnessing the sickening bloodbath brought on by the Bolsheviks, the And the cruelty with total abandon that took over the country under their rule, he said that those verses could not possibly refer to this.

That turning the other cheek to this would mean the end of the world. And that true, conscious, determined evil, when it appears in the world, men of good will have not merely the right but the duty, a holy obligation to rise up against it. As the red tide was washing toward Central Europe, the Poles put up a sea wall that stopped it outside Warsaw. Vitol Polecki was first blooded as a young officer there.

Over the ensuing fifteen years or so, under the leadership of the hero General Josuf Pilsudski, Poland built out its institutions and got to work, beginning to to work through the natural struggles of a young nationalist state with significant minority populations and all that that entails, all the while watching from a front row seat The truly unprecedented savagery of the Soviet Union was

Across the border they saw a workers' state that wasn't run by workers, but by writers and activists and other intellectuals. and which killed and enslaved tens of millions of people in the name of the people. They witnessed some fifteen percent of the entire population of Ukraine, right across the border, deliberately starved to death in the early nineteen thirties.

The discomfort grew further as Poles learned that everything they had heard regarding communist anti religious viciousness had hardly scratched the surface of the Bolsheviks' hatred for Christianity. The indiscriminate butchery of priests and the desecration of churches. was followed up once they consolidated power by an anti-religious propaganda campaign led by a party sponsored organization called the League of Militant Godlessness.

By nineteen thirty nine, both Hitler and Stalin had gotten their respective countries sufficiently back on their feet that they could turn their predatory gaze over the horizon, and of course Poland was one of the first selections on the shared menu. Both of them invaded, Hitler taking the western half, Stalin the eastern half of the country. And Stalin, as almost always, was the craftier of the two.

See, Stalin had moles in the French and British governments. And so he knew that those two countries would declare war on Germany over a Polish invasion, despite their previous capitulations on Austria and the Sudetenland that caused Hitler to think that wouldn't happen.

And Stalin knew this the whole time that his representative Molotov was negotiating the deal to divide up Poland with Hitler. And it's probably a major reason why he was so willing to damage his reputation among many global communists. to enter into a treaty with the arch anti communist regime in Germany. And Stalin wisely waited for a few weeks for Hitler to invade first. He was supposed to invade three days later. Instead, he waited a few weeks.

and let the Wehrmacht do the heavy lifting against Polish military resistance, and so that by the time the Red Army moved in, France and Britain had already committed themselves to war on Germany, And couldn't really be distracted by the idea that their pledge to defend Poland should technically have obligated them to war against the USSR as well, maybe?

Although nobody knew at the time about the territorial protocols of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, so Stalin could credibly can't claim that his invasion was. Not even really an invasion, it's a peacekeeping mission, you know, and the defensive posturing against Germany's continued belligerence, because people didn't know at the time. Ovito Polecki fought the Germans.

when they invaded. He fought them with zeal, if not success, which is what could be said of the Poles in general. Although the Poles actually gave the Germans more trouble than they're usually given credit for. And we kind of fetishized the German war machine from from the Second World War and and it was

Ferocious and efficient, but but the but the polls did give him some trouble. The Germans had expected Soviet support earlier than it came, and so in the event, they ended up taking like 50,000 casualties, lost a non-negligible bunch of military hardware. Of course, the balance of forces was such that the end result was inevitable. And when the Soviets did move in, Much of the Polish military, political and cultural leadership was in the eastern part of the country.

in the Soviet zone, away from the Germans, and they had orders not to engage or resist the Red Army when it came in, because they were kind of hoping that that the Soviets were telling the truth about being a peacekeeping force. And very quickly the vast majority were all taken prisoner and sent to camps. Between three hundred thousand and one million Poles were deported to slave labor camps in the Soviet Union in the immediate aftermath of the invasion.

From one deportation of about twelve thousand Poles to a work camp near Kolima, up in northern Siberia. Out of those twelve thousand deported only five hundred eighty three men survived. The Kolima system is where the great Russian writer Varlam Shalomov spent many years. It was also the temporary residence of a Romanian writer named Michael Solomon.

Solomon told about his experiences there and it is really something to read. I mean it's uh he's describing a different world. You feel i it's a it's a it's a landscape so dark and alien that you don't even need to wait for him to arrive to the camp before you're overcome by the feeling that everything human has exited the stage. When we came out onto the immense field outside the camp, I witnessed a spectacle that would have done justice to a Cecil B de Mille production.

As far as the eye could see, there were huge columns of prisoners marching in one direction or another, like armies on a battlefield. A huge detachment of security officers, soldiers, and signal corpsmen with field telephones and motorcycles kept in touch with headquarters, arranging the smooth flow of these human rivers. I asked what this giant operation was meant to be. The reply was that each time a transport ship full of prisoners was sent off to the work site.

The administration reshuffled the occupants of every cage in camp so that everyone had to be removed with his bundle of rags on his shoulder to the big field, and from there directed to his new destination. Only five thousand were supposed to leave, but one hundred thousand people were part of the scene before us.

One could see endless columns of women, of old men, of cripples, and even of teenagers all in military formation five in a row, going through the huge field and directed by whistles or flags. When it was finally Solomon's turn to get on board a ship and head for the Colima gold mines, he was stuffed into the filthy, stuffy hold of a ship that he found to be carrying mostly women.

We climbed down a very steep, slippery wooden stairway with great difficulty, and finally reached the bottom. It took us some time to accustom our eyes to the dim light of the dingy lower deck. As I began to see where we were, my eyes beheld a scene which neither Goya nor Gustav Dore could ever have imagined.

In that immense, cavernous, murky hold were crammed more than two thousand women. From the floor to the ceiling, as in a gigantic poultry farm, they were cooped up in open cages, five of them in each nine-foot square space. The floor was covered with more women. Because of the heat and humidity, most of them were only scantily dressed, some had even stripped down to nothing.

The lack of washing facilities and the relentless heat had covered their bodies with ugly red spots, boils, and blisters. The majority were suffering from some form of skin disease or other, apart from stomach ailments and dysentery, At the bottom of the stairway we had just climbed down stood a giant cask, on the edges of which in full view of the soldiers standing on guard above, women were perched like birds and in the most incredible positions.

There was no shame, no prudery as they crouched there to urinate or empty their bowels. One had the impression that they were some half human, half bird creatures which belonged to a different world and a different age. Yet, seeing a man coming down the stairs, although a mere prisoner like themselves, many of them began to smile, and some even tried to comb their hair. Who were these women? And where had they come from, I asked myself.

I soon learned that they had been arrested all over Russia, and those countries overrun by Soviet armies. End quote. It used to be estimated that over three million people were killed in the Kolimagulag camps. That is the number we got from Robert Conquest studies and and from various intelligence agencies up to the sixties. That number's

been revised downwards somewhat by scholars since then. Uh more rigorous studies putting it at about a million with a range between half a million and one point five million from about nineteen thirty to the early fifties, but it's a lot of people.

As Anne Applebaum, author of a very good history of the Gulag system, has written though, so much of this, all of it, occurred inside the opaque walls of the Soviet Union, and over the years has been crusted over by so many layers of deception and cover up that it it's really hard to be precise. You're talking about a mass atrocity when, you know, you estimate the number of people killed as, you know, give or take a few hundred thousand.

Well, after the Soviets invaded Poland, they wasted no time figuring out what to do with the leadership class of that country. In the spring of nineteen forty, twenty two thousand Polish military officers, politicians, priests, writers, police officers Basically anybody that they thought might be a potential leader of any potential resistance that might potentially arise to communist rule, twenty two thousand of them were rounded up, marched out into the forest and murdered.

And I should also mention that that not a hundred percent of those people were Poles, they were representative of Polish society and so There were also Polish Ukrainians and Polish Jews who were serving as officers in the army. They also murdered the chief rabbi of the Polish army, a guy named Bruce Steinberg. They didn't kill Vitol Polecki, he missed that party, but he was preparing for a mission that demanded his full attention.

In september nineteen forty, Puletzki volunteered to have himself locked up in a newly opened German prison camp outside a small town called Auschwitz. in order to organize a resistance movement inside the camp and, if possible, to smuggle information on the camp's inner workings to the outside. And so for two and a half years he was beaten, abused, starved, He got sick without proper medical care, overworked near to the point of death, and through it all he never lost sight of his mission.

He organized an effective camp underground, which actually managed to take over several important areas of the camp. I I don't mean by armed uprising, I mean making sure that their people got elevated up through the camp management system into the camp hierarchy so that they were running things like the carpenter shop, you know, the the metalworking shop, the various supply depots. They were running the hospital.

They were able to do things like f some of their some of their members or other people were sick and were likely to go out and be worked to death today, they would make sure that they got admitted to the hospital or make sure that they got extra supply rations from got extra rations from the supply closet, things like that. Politsky's organization helped several groups of inmates escape Auschwitz.

Sending them out with reports about what was going on inside the camp and instructions for who to bring them to on the outside, people working in the underground resistance movement or with the home army. These were some of the first reports to the outside world of what was going on inside Auschwitz. In april nineteen forty three. with his various covers compromised and the increasingly paranoid camp authorities starting to close in on him and his organization, Puletsky himself had to escape.

and he made his way across the countryside on foot to rejoin the Polish resistance. And he did not rest. There was uh there there are pictures of Pelety. Before he went in in his military uniform, when he went in in his blue and white prison jumpsuit as he's getting processed in, and then pictures of him coming out, and he is a thin, broken down waf by the end.

But he went right back to work, with a unit of saboteurs, even as he was still getting healthy, and from there made his way back to Warsaw to participate in the nineteen forty four uprising in that city.

Pelety had volunteered to fight in the Warsaw Uprising as a common soldier, but after so many officers were killed in the first few days of fighting, he made it known who he was and That he is that he was an officer, and so he was put in charge of a unit assigned to hold an intersection defending a sector of the city.

Polish men, women, and teenagers left absolutely everything on the battlefield in the Warsaw Uprising, forced to fight with weapons and ammunitions that they took off German soldiers, that they killed because they didn't have much of their own. The uprising was timed to coincide with the arrival of the Red Army, in the hope that the Soviets would break the German siege and then together with the Poles drive the Germans out. Instead, the Red Army called a halt at the eastern suburbs of the city.

Because Stalin, by this time in late nineteen forty four, was already planning his takeover of Eastern Europe, and he figured that any Polish patriots with the courage and initiative to fight the Germans like this were probably people with the courage and initiative to resist him, so rather than joining the fray, he ordered his forces to stay back and let the Nazis wipe out the Warsaw resistance. And so they did.

Puletsky's squad fought until they ran out of ammunition. They held up a column of German armor for several hours in one of their major battles. The resistance as a whole managed to hold out in this old city center for two months, and to divert a large amount of German military resources to the pacification effort.

But of course it was eventually crushed. And after it was eventually crushed, then the Soviets remobilized. And the Germans, not wanting to leave shelter and resources to the enemy, put the entire city of Warsaw to the torch. And was all over some hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand Poles had been killed, and another seven hundred thousand or so were driven out of the city.

Once again Polecki was not killed, but he was taken prisoner by the Germans, this time involuntarily, and he was put into a POW camp for Polish officers, which probably seemed like club med compared to Auschwitz, even at this late stage in the war. Later on he was freed by the Western Allies when the Germans were defeated, and with the rest of his countrymen was looking forward to restarting the project of an independent Poland now that the war was over.

It was a big project, but Captain Viktor Polecki would not play a part in it. When he returned to Poland, he was betrayed by his own communist countrymen, who apparently cared nothing for what he had done, for his sacrifices or heroism, in fact considered it potentially dangerous and subversive. And so they had him arrested and tortured and murdered. And then they threw his corpse in a dumpster with garbage. That's what they did with the man who volunteered to go into Auschwitz.

to even talk about the physical and human destruction wrought by the war on Poland. It was almost unmatched anywhere in Europe. In the past six years, six million Polish citizens had been killed, millions more wounded, out of a total pre war population of maybe thirty five million people. The forests and the countryside and the ruined cities were teeming with half wild orphan children rendered feral by deprivation and trauma over the years.

In 1943, when the Germans were occupying the city, a German publisher named Carl Baedeker wrote a travel guide to Warsaw. And the book extols the beauty and the rich history of this city, of course, insisting on the Germanic origins of everything good about it.

But he's still going through admiring the city. And the guidebook laments that a few buildings, yes, have been damaged by the initial assault on the city, but fortunately it's all being rebuilt, you know, once more under German leadership.

Baedaker didn't write about the Jewish ghetto in the western suburbs, and if he had, that whole section would have had to have been removed from any subsequent editions, since Jewish militants in the ghetto rose against German power around the time that the book went to print. The result of which was the SS setting fire to virtually every single house in that four square kilometer section of the city.

The fourteenth century Saint John's Arch Cathedral was mostly destroyed by bombs during the Warsaw Uprising, but then, before leaving the city, the Germans undermined the foundation and destroyed what remained of that. They destroyed the Jesuit church. They blew up the centuries old Saxon Palace and its whole complex of Baroque and Rococo palaces around it.

The Grand European Hotel, one of the finest buildings in the whole city, was burned down during the uprising, and then its remains were blown up in january nineteen forty five. Soldiers were instructed to leave nothing behind for the Soviets when they arrived. No shelter, no supplies, no nothing, and so they went block by block. Destroying a city with a pre war population of over one million people.

Ninety three percent of all houses and apartments were destroyed or irreparably damaged. Ninety three percent of all dwellings. In nineteen forty five, in the summer, there were two working street lights in the entire city of Warsaw. By the end of the war. Poles had become used to living under hollows in the rubble of burned out buildings. Witnesses would describe how you could look out at this ruined city and it would seem to be completely devoid of life.

Just grey mounds of rubble until the sun went down, and the people hiding in the shells. of these ruined structures began to light small fires for heat and cooking and for just for light. And so in the twilight you would look out on these mountains of rubble that were glowing from within as people survived in their makeshift urban caves.

A photographer who surveyed the city for the United Nations after the war wrote, quote, This is really an incredible city, and I want to give you an idea of it, and I don't know how I can do it. It's a big city, see? Over one million pre-war, big as Detroit. Now it is ninety percent all destroyed. Wherever you walk here it is hunks of buildings standing up without roofs or much sides, and people living in them.

Except in the ghetto, where it is just a great plain of bricks, with twisted beds and bathtubs and sofas, pictures in frames, trunks, millions of things sticking out from among the bricks. I cannot understand how it would have been done. It's something so vicious that I can't believe it. End quote. A Polish boy named Andrzej C. I don't have his full last name, just the initial C. had been interned with his mother and sister at a slave labor camp in Bohemia when the war came to its rolling end.

And in its final weeks, the family were all transported down to a town now in the Czech Republic where their German guards finally just left them and disappeared. It was a disorderly retreat by this point. And so Andre's mother walked him and his sister to the west, hoping to reach British or American lines, and they did reach American lines several times, because the Allies were the Western Allies were pulling back and pulling back in keeping with their agreements with the Soviets.

On their trek, the family was not alone. They were part of a river of refugees heading in the same direction. In a forest, Andre came across an abandoned German field hospital. where men remained there locked in cages, with broken arms, or Bandaged up from head to foot. Andre said they were decaying while still alive, their stink radiated throughout the whole area, and these people were still locked in cages after the medical staff had all fled.

He remembered a Polish POW camp where the gates were open, and the guards had long abandoned their posts, but these brutalized prisoners refused to come out because nobody had given them the order to do so. all over Poland and and and all over Eastern Europe and and even in other parts of Europe.

All of the shams and mystifications which usually mediate between people and raw power had all been stripped away, and so roving bands of armed men From small units and militias on up to militaries, armies, they held total power in their respective domains. They were challenged only by the appearance of greater power.

And yet still, despite all this, of the remaining population You could still find carpenters, you could still find bricklayers, even electricians and and all the workers of various kinds that might be needed to rebuild much of the physical infrastructure. What was maybe a more difficult problem was how to organize and deploy the workers and the resources necessary for reconstruction at this scale.

Civil society had utterly collapsed, and there were virtually no functional institutions left in Poland. No police, no fire brigades, no schools or training pipelines for skilled workers, and the more experienced workers under whom younger ones might apprentice were dead, Crops were destroyed, but if they hadn't been, there were no markets, there was no food distribution system.

Shops were closed because they had no products to sell, and even if they did, there was no functional currency with which to conduct the transactions.

The roads and railroads were mostly completely destroyed, and to the extent they weren't they were clogged with homeless, starving refugees, Many of them with no way to survive except for ranging across the countryside, robbing houses, doing whatever they could just to live, and many of them all heading westward, in the wake, the bloody wake of the Red Army across the border into Germany.

The first properly German town encountered by the Red Army was a small one in East Prussia called Nemmersdorf. The night that the communists arrived, most of the village slept. Despite attempts by local officials to suppress panic and defeatism, it was no secret to most people by now that the war was just about over, and that the Red Army was just over the horizon.

The central government had warned people about Soviet barbarism, but by this point they took it as just more anti communist propaganda. They'd been pretty accustomed to that by now. The civilians in Nemmersdorf assumed that if the village were taken, the water was a very good thing. Sure, they'd be rounded up, they'd be interrogated, some of'em might be treated roughly, they they might be imprisoned, they might even be put to work.

And they had kind of resigned themselves to the possibility of captivity and occupation, and few of them had fled the town. What proceeded to happen in this and other villages and towns of East Prussia would cause others to flee, though, and for the brief moment when it was still politically acceptable to consider the wartime suffering of German civilians, made Nemersdorf, the very name, synonymous with hell.

This is from Max Hastings book, Armageddon, The Battle for Germany, nineteen forty-four and forty-five. The first Russian incursions into East Prussia took place on twenty two october nineteen forty four, when the eleventh Guards Army captured Nemersdorf and several other border hamlets. Five days later, General Friedrich Hosbach's fourth army retook the villages.

Hardly one civilian inhabitant survived. Women had been nailed to barn doors and farm carts, or had been crushed by tanks after being raped. Their children had been killed. Forty French POWs working on local farms had been shot, likewise avowed German communists. The Red Army's behavior reflected not casual brutality, but systematic sadism, and what happened in October in East Prussia was a foretaste of the Red Army's conduct across Poland and Germany in the awful months to come. End quote.

Before the Soviets had arrived in force, they were preceded by droves of refugees in flight. A Wehrmacht physician reported On the road through Nemmersdorf, near the bridge, I saw where a whole trek of refugees had been rolled over by Russian tanks. Not only the wagons and teams, but also a goodly number of civilians, mostly women and children. They had been squashed flat by the tank.

At the edge of the road and in the farmyards lay quantities of corpses who evidently had been murdered systematically. A militiaman, who was involved in retaking the village, remembered. In the farmyard further down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position. Beyond stood a barn, and to each of its two doors a naked woman was nailed through the hands in a crucified posture.

In the dwellings we found a total of seventy two women, including children, and one old man all dead, all murdered in a bestial fashion, except for only a few who had bullet holes in their heads. Some babies had their heads bashed in. In one room we found a woman, eighty-four years old, sitting on a sofa, half of whose head had been sheared off with an axe or a spade. End quote.

Each of the crucified women had been violently raped, although it was impossible to tell if they had been raped before or after the nails had fixed them in place. Several of their bodies had apparently been used for target practice after they were crucified. A great many of the corpses were mutilated so far beyond recognition that you couldn't tell even basic features like gender.

Of the women and young girls whose bodies were intact enough to examine, virtually every single one showed signs of having been raped. Dozens of French POWs and Polish workers who had tried to get between the rapists and their prizes had been castrated and murdered by Red Army forces. The Vermont physician continued.

On the edge of a street an old woman sat hunched up, killed by a bullet in the back of the neck. Not far away lay a baby of only a few months, killed by a shot at close range through the forehead. A number of men, with no other marks or fatal wounds, had been killed by blows with shovels or gun butts, their faces completely smashed.

In the nearby villages, similar cases were noted after these villages were cleared of Russian troops. Neither in Nemmersdorf nor in the other places did I find a single living German civilian. Keith Lowe in his book Savage Continent writes As the Soviets advanced, such scenes repeated themselves across all the eastern provinces of Germany.

At Pawyan, near Knigsberg, for example, the bodies of dead women were strewn everywhere. They had been raped, and then brutally killed with bayonets or rifle butt blows to the head. Four women here had been stripped naked, tied to the back of a Soviet tank, and dragged to their deaths.

In Gross Heidekrug, a woman was crucified on the altar of a local church, with two German soldiers strung up on either side. More crucifixions occurred in other villages, where women were raped and then nailed to barn doors. At Metgathen, he was

It was not only women but children who were killed and mutilated. According to the German captain who examined their corpses, most of the children had been killed by a blow to the head with a blunt instrument, but some had numerous bayonet wounds in their tiny bodies. And these scenes were repeated at scale as the Communist Army rampaged through East Germany. In a village nearby to Nemersdorf, old men and boys had had their eyes gouged out, and their genitals removed before being burned alive.

In a suburb of Königsberg, the German Fifth Panzer Division found a collection of deranged women who were being kept in a villa where they had been raped dozens of times a day since the Red Army's arrival. Another witness reported finding two women whose legs had apparently each been tied to different vehicles, which drove in opposite directions and tore them apart.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was a soldier in the Red Army at the time, remembered that all of us knew very well that if girls were German, they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction. It wasn't only in Germany that Soviet soldiers raped. Thousands of women and girls in Poland and Ukraine and the Baltic states had their turns before the communists reached Germany.

When a Yugoslav communist complained to Stalin's face about the mass rapes happening in his country, Stalin replied. Imagine a man who has fought over thousands of kilometers of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones. What is so awful in having his fun with a woman after such horrors? Well And of course Germany got it the worst.

Many second line Soviet soldiers who came in behind the Russian front line were half civilized men drawn from the steppe and other places where vendetta war by massacre was not a deviation. Of course many others had personal reasons, having lost families and friends and homes to the German invasion, and whose lust for vengeance was not going to be satisfied by killing German combatants.

Soviet state propaganda was directed toward the singular goal of increasing the intensity of their bloodlust to the highest possible pitch. A Red Army newspaper published a war poem by Alexei Surkov, simply titled I Hate. Beyond the village the grass goes up to the knees. Between its high banks the dawn flows on. Here the enemy corpses lie, in the foul stench of death. Was it in Paris? Was it in Warsaw that this ginger haired Prussian first covered with blood his dagger's blade?

Here in the plain he shall rot, or the crayfish of the dawn shall feed on his flesh. His wife in Berlin may sob, I do not pity his wife. Here beside him are two more, and hundreds and thousands of other evil dead. Let their children in Germany wait for them. I do not pity their children. My heart is as hard as a stone. My grievances and memories are countless. With these hands of mine I have lifted up the corpses of little children.

I hate them deeply for those hours of sleepless gloom. I hate them because in one year my temples have grown white. My house has been defiled by the Prussians. Their drunken laughter dims my reason, and with these hands of mine I want to strangle every last one of them. Keith Lowe describes other late war Soviet propaganda. Absolute hatred of Germany and of Germans was endemic in Soviet society during the war.

Up until the spring of nineteen forty five, Soviet soldiers had been subjected to the most strident hate propaganda, which demonized Germans and Germany in every possible way. Pravda printed poems by Konstantin Simonov, such as Kill him, which exhorted Russian soldiers to kill a German, kill him soon, and every time you see one, kill him.

Other writers such as Mikhail Sholokov and Vasily Grossman also wrote vitriolic stories and reports which were designed to increase Soviet hatred for all things German. But it was Ilya Ehrenberg who occupied a special place in the hearts of Soviet soldiers. Ehrenberg's inflammatory chants and Krasnyas of Ezda, the party newspaper, were printed and repeated so often that most soldiers knew them by heart.

The Germans are not human beings. From now on, the word German is for us the worst imaginable curse. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick. We shall not get excited, we shall kill. If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day. If you cannot kill your German with a bullet, kill him with a bayonet.

If there is calm on your part of the front, or if you are waiting for the fighting, kill a German in the meantime. If you kill one German, kill another. There is nothing more joyful than a heap of German corpses. The dehumanization of Germans was a constant theme of Ehrenberg's writings. As early as the summer of nineteen forty two he claimed, One can bear anything, the plague and hunger and death.

But one cannot bear the German. We cannot live as long as these grey green slugs are alive. Today there are no books. Today there are no stars in the sky. Today there is only one thought. Kill the German, kill them all, and dig them into the earth. These grey green slugs were at other times portrayed as scorpions, plague carrying rats, rabid dogs, and even bacteria.

Just as Nazi propaganda had dehumanized the Slavs as Unter mentioned, so Soviet propaganda reduced all Germans to vermin. End quote. And as if Soviet citizens needed any extra encouragement, beyond the destruction of their country and the mass murder of their people by the German war machine. Ehrenberg's propaganda outfit heaped on manufactured claims of mass rape by German forces and called on Soviet soldiers to steal back their honor by raping German women.

Thorough studies conducted in the years since the war have found that some two million women and girls in East Germany two million were raped by communist soldiers, most of them many times, and by many men. And that's with a lot of the East German population having already fled to the West. There are whole swaths of the Soviet occupation zone in East Germany where every female Women, girls, and old ladies had been violently assaulted many times.

Institutionalized rape and casual violence continued for many months after the war was over and in some areas for years. until the Communist Party of the emerging East German Democratic Republic complained to Moscow that these ongoing abuses were hampering the effort to build socialism in the country. Lowe relates a story told by a British lieutenant about what he witnessed on a provincial road.

I saw two men ahead, a Russian making his way to vessel and an old German with a walking stick, moving slowly toward the station. As we approached, the men stopped, the Russian apparently asking the time, because the old man removed a chain pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket. In a combined movement, the Russian snatched the watch and plunged a long bladed knife into the German's chest.

The old man staggered and fell backwards into the ditch. When we drew up, his feet were in the air and his trouser legs had slipped down, showing two thin white calves. The Russian had pulled out the knife and was calmly wiping the blood from the blade on the old man's coat when I rammed the muzzle of my revolver into his ribs. When the Russian was standing on the road with his hands in the air, I gave the revolver to Patrick whilst I jumped down into the ditch to help the victim.

The old man was dead. The Russian, an inarticulate brute, looked down at me kneeling over the body without a trace of emotion or remorse. I took possession of the knife and the watch, and pushed him into the back of the truck and sat facing him with the revolver. We went to the military government office to hand him over to Captain Grubb, but he was out.

So we took the prisoner to the Russians, so he could be dealt with in accordance with Soviet law. I flung the prisoner into the leader's room by the scruff of the neck and accused him of murder, producing the knife and the watch. One of the leaders, who identified himself as the administrator, came forward.

You say this man killed a German? he asked with a smile. I showed him the murder weapon. He moved across to a colleague, and removed a red star badge from his cap, then pinned it on the murderer's breast and kissed him on the cheek. The murderer of the old man, wearing his decoration, slipped out of the room and lost himself among the hundreds in the barracks, and I never set eyes on him again. Now very quickly.

Just to head a few of you off at the pass, in case anybody out there is asking, What about what the Germans did? Why are you only talking about the Soviet Union? There's a simple answer, because this is an episode about the Soviet Union. Maybe we'll talk about the Germans and what they did someday, but I think we all know what the Germans did.

Let that be a background to everything that's going on in this episode. We all know what the Germans did. We're taught about it from a very early age. And yet partly due to the ideological proclivities of many of the people who did things like write school curricula or make movies or television shows in the twentieth century. A lot of people to this day, even now that things have loosened up somewhat, really do not understand what it was we were dealing with in the Soviet Union.

I remember a few years ago a movie called Mr. Jones came out about the journalist Gareth Jones, who tried to report on the Holodomor as it was going on, the starvation of the Ukraine. But was attacked and discredited by the New York Times, which won a Pulitzer Prize for participating in the cover up of that genocide. And it was a pretty good movie, I think, but I may have overrated it a bit, honestly, just because I was so pleasantly surprised to see a movie for once portray a Soviet crime.

I've seen a hundred films about the Holocaust, but it's only been recently that Hollywood would go anywhere near a movie about the Soviet nightmare. And you can't understand anything about the interwar period or the second world war or the cold war or any of the decisions that were made during any of those periods if you do not look straight into the abyss that Russia and its satellites fell into under Stalin.

It's common when discussing these events to highlight the immense sacrifices made by the Soviet Union during the war, and the Soviet soldier did make tremendous sacrifices. A friend reminded me that the Soviet Union lost as many people in one month as the United States lost in the entire war, and then they lost that same number again the next month, and the next month after that for thirty months.

Well I think it is very important to recognize the service and the brutalization of the Soviet soldiers. And how his Unimaginable nightmare experience during the war could be reliably expected, especially with a little push. To turn almost anyone into a cold hearted killer, it's also important to recognize that the Soviet state and the Communist Party did not need the excuse of war. They did not need any encouragement to engage in that kind of brutality.

It's also important to recognize that the state contributed to the brutalization of those soldiers, not only by its treatment of its own men, but by the incessant demonic propaganda and incitement with which it bombarded them. The Soviet state didn't just overlook or permit the descent of its men into bestiality, it did everything it could to drive them into it. And why not?

The party and the state had sanctioned the torture and rape and murder of millions and millions of innocent people long before there was ever a war, long before anybody had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. And the brutality against helpless civilians to which they drove their brutalized soldiers in the late stage and aftermath of the war was no more savage or shocking than what they had been doing for years to their own people and would be doing for years after.

Raphael Lemkin in a nineteen fifty three piece on the genocide in Ukraine wrote The mass murder of peoples and of nations that has characterized the advance of the Soviet Union into Europe is not a new feature of their policy of expansionism. Instead, it has been a long term characteristic even of the internal policy of the Kremlin. It is indeed an indispensable step to the In the process of union that the Soviet leaders fondly hope will produce the Soviet man and the Soviet nation.

And to achieve that goal, that unified nation, the leaders of the Kremlin will gladly destroy the nations and the cultures that have long inhabited Eastern Europe. As the Red Army moved into each country, it worked to implicate local populations in what they were doing. The Soviets would link up with local communist militias and give them power over the local population, and then overlook and in many cases encourage these proxies to emulate the behavior of the Red Army.

The Red Army supervised the violent mass expulsion of millions and millions of ethnic German civilians from several Central and Eastern European countries. In Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia, for example, Soviet soldiers oversaw an orgy of violence against Germans. And again, to be clear, we're not talking about German soldiers, we're not even talking about German nationals. We're talking about ethnic German civilians who had lived in these other countries for generations.

In Prague, German women and children hid in attics and cellars from organized mobs who dragged them out into the streets and beat them and raped them and tortured and killed them. There were several massacres in which hundreds or more were killed at a time. German civilians were rounded up en masse into internment camps to await their expulsion from the country, and there they were enslaved and tortured and frequently simply killed.

A civil engineer named Kurt Schmidt remembered his time as an intern. Hunger and death ruled in the camp. We were even more forcibly reminded of death by the executions which took place in full public view inside the camp. One day, six youths were beaten until they lay motionless. Then water was poured over them, which the German women had to fetch, and then the beating continued until there was no sign of life left.

The terribly mutilated bodies were deliberately exhibited for several days next to the latrines. A fourteen year old boy was shot together with his parents because it was alleged that he had tried to stab a revolutionary guard with a pair of scissors. These are only some examples of the executions which took place daily, usually by shooting, end quote. Lowe writes that women often had a particularly bad time of it. He has one eyewitness recalling that.

Shots were being fired from every house, checked teenagers, often a revolver in each hand, were Demand to see identification papers. I hide in the porch of a house. From upstairs I can hear hair raising screams, then a shot, and then silence. A young man with a face like a bird of prey comes down the stairs, quickly hiding something in his left trouser pocket. An old woman, obviously the caretaker, shouts, Did you let her have it, that German slut? That's right, that's how they all must perish.

End quote, and Lowe continues. The women were constantly subjected to the depredations of Czech guards and Russian soldiers, and the men were powerless to protect them. Now he goes back to Schmidt. If any man tried to protect his wife, he risked being immediately killed. The Russians, and the Czechs as well, often did not even trouble to take the women away. Amongst the children and in view of all the inmates of the camp they behaved like animals.

During the nights one could hear the moaning and whimpering of these poor women. Shots rang out from every corner, and bullets passed over our heads. The presence of so many people created an incessant noise. The darkness was lit up by searchlights, and the Russians continuously fired flares.

Day and night there was no peace for our nerves, and it was as if we had entered hell. And now those quoting a woman witnessed The mob in the streets behaved even worse than the guards, especially the older women excelled themselves and had armed themselves for this purpose with iron rods, truncheons, dog leashes, etc. Some of us were beaten so badly that they collapsed and were unable to get up again. The rest, including myself, had to remove barricades at the bridge.

Czech police cordoned off the place where we worked, but the mob broke through and we were again exposed to their maltreatment without any protection. Some of my fellow sufferers jumped into the Moldov in their d in their desperation, where they were immediately shot. One of the checks had a pair of large scissors, and one after another of us had her hair cut off. Another poured red paint over our heads. I myself had four teeth knocked out.

Rings were torn by force from our swollen fingers, others were interested in our shoes and clothes so that we ended up by being almost naked, even pieces of underwear were torn from our bodies. Young lads and men kicked us in the abdomen. In complete desperation I also tried to jump into the river, but I was snatched back and received another beating, end quote. And finally Lo continues.

The situations for Germans in Prague is broadly representative of the rest of the country, although in many areas the worst excesses did not happen until later that summer. Perhaps the most famous massacre occurred at Ustinad Lebum, where over a hundred Germans were killed at the end of July. Much worse, but less well known was the massacre in the northern Bohemian town of Postoloprti. Where a zealous Czech army detachment carried out orders to cleanse the region of Germans.

According to German sources, eight hundred people were killed in cold blood. Czech sources agree. Two years after the event, Czech authorities uncovered seven hundred sixty three bodies buried in mass graves around the town. In Taos, known to the Czechs as Domoslice, one hundred twenty people were shot behind the station and buried in mass graves. At a place near the Moravian town of Prav, a Czech officer named Carl Pazer

Stopped a train full of Slovakian Germans, ostensibly to conduct a search for former Nazis. That night his soldiers shot seventy one men, one hundred twenty women, and seventy four children, the youngest of them an eight month old baby. Once again they were buried in mass graves. Poser later justified the killing of the children by saying, What was I supposed to do with them after we'd shot their parents? End quote.

Conservative estimates are that between twenty and forty thousand ethnic Germans were killed as a direct result of their treatment in the immediate aftermath of the war in Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia. Some three million were expelled from their homes into Austria or Germany, or were taken back to slave labor camps in the Soviet Union.

The total number of Germans ethnically cleansed from Central and Eastern Europe is estimated at between twelve to fifteen million, and estimates of the number killed range from about six hundred thousand up to about three million. The German government, over the years, has commissioned several studies and maintains today that the number is around two million killed, when you combine those who died in the expulsions and the mass violence with those who died in Soviet slave labor camps.

As with every aspect of the war, so in the post war period does everything become worse and worse the further east you look. The countries in which the war between Hitler and Stalin were fought had seen violence whose sustained intensity was really unmatched in human history. And some of the countries have been flooded by a nearly unbroken deluge of blood since the First World War. Ukraine, for example.

was the stage of massive battles between the Russian Empire and the Central Powers during the First World War. Nearly five million men from the Ukrainian provinces called up and driven into those trenches. That's out of a total pre war population of only about thirty million. So if you figure half of that population is male, you're talking about one in three of all men being called up to fight in the First World War.

And then you figure that some portion of that male population is children and senior citizens. not eligible for enlistment. So probably a majority, a good solid majority of the military age men in Ukraine were conscripted and if their casualty raids matched the rest of the Russian imperial forces You might have had one in five, one in six fighting age men in Ukraine killed or wounded in the First World War.

And then immediately after that, while the Western powers are celebrating their victory, the horror is just getting started in Ukraine, because the Bolsheviks have taken power and they are seeking to subdue all the former subjects of the Russian Empire. The Russian Civil War was right on the heels of the First World War, killed another ten million people, the vast majority of them civilians, a great number of them in Ukraine, and again right on the heels of the First World War.

When the Civil War was over and the Bolsheviks had won, Lenin ordered the brutal expropriation of the Ukrainian peasantry. Writing to Molotov that we must teach these people a lesson right now, so that they will not even dare to think of resistance in the coming decades. The attempted suppression of the Ukrainian countryside spoiled the rest of the already devastated provincial areas.

Causing a famine that killed five, some say up to ten million people in the Soviet Union, maybe another million of those in Ukraine, and eventually forcing into compromise. But Lenin was only around for a few years longer and next up was Stalin and he was not the type to compromise. Stalin stepped up the intensity in the early thirties, purposely starving to death several million more Ukrainians.

Party propaganda promised to liquidate the Kulaks as a class. The Kulaks were the prosperous peasantry, the landowning peasantry out in the countryside. To wipe them out altogether in a process of ultra rapid modernization, as described by the writer Maxim Gorky. Quote Like the Jews that Moses led out of Egyptian slavery, the half savage, stupid, ponderous people of the Russian villages will die out, and a new tribe will take their place, literate, sensible, hardy people. End quote.

Ilya Ehrenberg in nineteen thirty four wrote about the Kulaks. Not one of them was guilty of anything, but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything. Vasily Grossman, who at the time was an ardent supporter of the revolution, wrote decades later. I'm no longer under a spell. I can see now that the kulaks were human beings. But why was my heart so frozen at the time? When such terrible things were being done, when such suffering was going on all around me.

And the truth is that I didn't think of them as human beings. They're not human beings. They're kulak trash. That's what I heard again and again. That's what everybody kept repeating. End quote.

The government set up watchtowers in the fields, from which men with rifles were ordered to shoot any Ukrainian farmers caught slipping a raw grain into their mouths or pockets. Ukrainian children were assigned to walk the fields, keeping a closer watch on their enslaved elders.

Roadblocks were set up to interdict traffic, heading in and out of the regions where the enforced starvation was taking place, and when foreign organizations did manage to get word of mass starvation in the Ukrainian countryside, Stalin denied it. and he refused to allow any food aid to enter the country. This is from Ann Applebaum's book Red Famine.

To anyone who knew the Ukrainian countryside it would have been clear in the autumn of nineteen thirty two that widespread famine was coming and that many people would die. Nevertheless, a remarkably consistent oral history record shows a sharp change in party activist behavior on the eve of the Holodomor. That winter the teams operating in villages all across Ukraine began to search not just for grain, but for anything and everything edible.

They were specifically equipped to do so as special tools, long metal rods, sometimes topped by hooks that can be used to prod any surface in search of grain. Thousands of witnesses have described how they were used to search ovens, beds, cradles, walls, trunks, chimneys, attics, roofs, and cellars.

To pry behind icons, into barrels, in hollow tree trunks, in dog houses, down wells and beneath piles of garbage. The men and women who used them stopped at nothing, even trolling through cemeteries, barns, empty houses, and orchards. Like requisitioners of the past, they were looking for grain, but in addition, they also took fruit from trees, seeds and vegetables from kitchen gardens, as well as honey from beehives, butter and milk, meat and sausage.

Remembered that brigades took flour, cereals, everything stored in pots, clothes, cattle. It was impossible to hide. They searched with metal rods, they searched in stoves, broke the floors, and tore away the walls. Anastasia Pavlenko recalled that they took a bead necklace from her mother's neck, assuming it contained something edible. Larissa Shevchuk saw party activists take away beet and poppy seedlings that her grandmother was cultivating to plant in her vegetable garden.

Maria Bendrick from Cherhosky Province wrote that the activists came and took everything. They looked in kitchen storage tins, took away one person's kidney beans, another person's dried crusts. They shook them out and took them away. In Kiravarod province, Leonid Vernadub saw the brigade take down three corn cobs that had been hanging from the ceiling to dry in preparation for use as seeds the following year, end quote.

They even went around killing the dogs and the cats in anticipation of their future use as food during the manufactured famine. Applebaum continues. The activists also had instructions to return, to surprise people in order to catch them unaware and with their food unguarded. Families were searched, and then searched again to make sure that nothing remained. They came three times, one woman remembered, until there was nothing left, and then they stopped coming.

Brigades sometimes arrived at different times of day or night, determined to catch whoever had food red handed. If it happened that the family was eating a meager dinner, the activist took the food from the table. If it happened that a soup was cooking, they pulled it off the stove and tossed out the contents. Then they demanded to know how it was possible that the family still had something to put in the soup. End quote. One survivor remembered.

I would go to the church up the hill and tear the bark off the linden tree. At home we had buckwheat husks. My mother would sift them, add ground up linden leaves and bark, and bake biscuits, and that's how we ate. and another. As the gooseberries got bigger we picked them, even though they weren't ripe. We ate wild geraniums, the acacia tree bloomed, we shook the blossoms off and ate them. Another said, We grazed on grass and pigweed, like cattle.

Any peasants who were caught with food, or who could not meet the requisition quotas, which none of them could, were assessed fines that none of them could pay. And then their meagre belongings, whatever furniture or clothing, or farm equipment, anything that they had, would be taken away from them to pay off the the fine. But the secret police and party activists would use their power over the people for personal exploitation as well.

Mothers with starving children would be forced to prostitute themselves and their daughters to party officials in exchange for a little bit of bread. One woman remembered what happened to her mother. During the search, the activist asked where was our gold and our grain. Mother replied that she had neither. She was tortured. Her fingers were put in a door, and the door was closed. Her fingers broke, blood ran, she lost consciousness.

Water was poured over her head, and she was tortured again. They beat her and put needles under her fingernails. Applebaum quotes two sisters. Our father hid three buckets of barley in the attic, and our mother stealthily made porridge in the evening to keep us alive. Then somebody must have denounced us, because they took everything and brutally beat our father for not giving up the barley during the searches.

They held his fingers and slammed the door to break them. They swore at him and kicked him on the floor. It left us numb to see him beaten and sworn like that, sworn at like that. We were a proper family, and always spoke quietly in our father's presence. Applebaum continues.

As the weeks dragged on, just being alive attracted suspicion. If a family was alive, that meant it had food, but if they had food, then they should have given it up, and if they had failed to give it up, then they were criminals. Kulak. Polish agents, enemies, A brigade searching the home of Mikhail Bolonovsky in Cherhosky Province demanded to know how it is possible that no one in this family has died yet?

A brigade searching the roof thatch at the home of Krihori Moraz in Sumi Province failed to find any food and demanded to know with the help of what do you live? With each passing day, demands became angrier, the language ruder. Why haven't you disappeared yet? Why haven't you dropped dead yet? Why are you alive at all? A communist state official recorded.

When travelling, I often witnessed administrative exiles haunting the villages like shadows in search of a piece of bread or refuse. They eat carrion, slaughter dogs and cats. The villagers keep their houses locked. Those who get a chance to enter a house drop on their knees in front of the owner and with tears beg for a piece of bread.

I witnessed several deaths on the roads between villages, in the bathhouses and in the barns. I myself saw hungry, agonized people crawling on the sidewalk. They were picked up by police and died several hours later. In late April, an investigator and I passed by a barn and found a dead body. When we sent for a policeman and a medic to pick it up, they discovered another body inside the barn. Both died of hunger with no violence. End quote.

Before long there were no dogs and cats left to slaughter for food. There were no birds to catch. There were no worms to dig up, no leaves on the trees or the bushes. For months and months nothing at all. A ten year old girl without any adults left capable of taking care of her. wrote a letter to her uncle in another part of the country.

Dear uncle, we do not have any bread or anything to eat. My parents are exhausted by hunger, they have laid down and do not get up. My mother is blind from hunger and cannot see. I have carried her outside, and I want bread very much. Take me, uncle, to Kharkiv with you, because I will die of hunger. Take me, I am small and want to live, and here I will die because everybody dies. And there she did die along with her parents. Mass starvation.

was A weapon of choice, not merely because it was more convenient than shooting millions of people, and in fact other regions of the Soviet Union suffered due to the food shortages that occurred because of what was going on. But as with Soviet campaigns of mass terror and communal torture in other countries. The Holodomor was not only intended to destroy the bodies of the hated Ukrainian peasantry, but to destroy the minds and the spirits of the people who survived.

to break the bonds of trust and love for family and community that bind together a national culture, that can sustain resistance to state communism. This prolonged mass starvation drives people mad. drives a community mad, drives a country mad, drives them into a state where morality falls away and where neighbors and families become so desperate that they're capable of doing terrible things to each other.

Because as Timothy Snyder wrote in his book Bloodlands, those who didn't tended not to survive. Quote, the good people died first. Those who refused to steal or prostitute themselves to party officials died. Those who gave food to others died, those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died, parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did.

Ukraine in nineteen thirty three was full of orphans, and sometimes people took them in. Yet without food there was little that even the kindest of strangers could do for such children. The boys and girls lay about on sheets and blankets, eating their own excrement, waiting for death. Anne Applebaum records a story of a farmer who couldn't bear any longer to watch his children suffer.

The man lit a fire in the stove and closed the chimney in order to kill them. The children began to suffocate and cry for help because of the fumes, then he strangled them with his own hands, after which he went to the village council and confessed. The farmer said he had committed the murders because there was nothing to eat, During a subsequent search of his home, no food was found at all.

Vigilantism became widespread. Armed guards would shoot gleaners on sight, and anyone who tried to steal from a warehouse met the same fate. As the famine worsened, ordinary people took vengeance on those who stole. Alexei Litvinsky remembered seeing a collective farm boss pick up a boy who had stolen bread and slam his head against a tree, a murder for which he was never held responsible. Hanatsivka knew of a woman who killed her niece for stealing a loaf of bread.

Mikola Basha's older brother was caught looking for spoiled potatoes in the kitchen garden of a neighbor, who then grabbed him and put him in a cellar with waste high water. Another survivor's aunt was stabbed to death with a pitchfork for stealing scallions from a neighbor's yard. Real insanity of various kinds, hallucinations, psychosis, depression, soon resulted from hunger.

A woman whose six children died over three days in May nineteen thirty three, lost her mind, stopped wearing clothes, unbraided her hair, and told everyone that the red broom had taken her family away. One survivor recalled the horrific story of Varvara, a neighbor who was left alone with two children. At the beginning of nineteen thirty three, Varvara took her remaining clothing and travelled to a nearby city in the hope of exchanging it for bread.

She succeeded, and returned home with a whole loaf. But when she cut the bread, she began to scream. The bread was not a whole loaf, it was stuffed with a paper sack, which meant that once again there was nothing to eat. She took the knife, turned around, stuck it into her son's back, and began laughing hysterically. Her daughter saw what was happening and ran for her life. The Soviet writer Vasily Grossman wrote In the beginning, starvation drives a person out of the house.

In its first stage he is so tormented, and driven as though by fire, and torn both in the guts and in the soul. And so he tries to escape from this home. People dig up worms, collect grass, and even make the effort to break through and get into the city. Away from home, away from home. And then comes a day when the starving person crawls back into his house. And the meaning of this is that famine, starvation has won, and the human being cannot be saved.

He lies down on his bed and stays there, not just because he has no strength, but because he has no interest in life, and no longer cares about living. He lies there quietly and does not want to be touched, and he does not even want to eat. All he wants is to be left alone and for things to be quiet. And Applebaum adds.

Indifference soon spread to death itself. Traditional Ukrainian funerals had combined church and folk traditions, and included a choir, a meal, the singing of psalms, readings from the Bible, sometimes professional mourners. Now, all such rights were banned. In any case, nobody had the strength anymore to dig a grave, hold a ceremony, or play music.

Religious practices disappeared along with churches and priests. For a culture that had valued its rituals highly, the impossibility of saying a proper farewell to the dead became another source of trauma. There were no funerals, recalled Katarina Marchenko. There were no priests, requiems, tears. There was no strength to cry. End quote.

So when I say X hundreds of thousands killed or X million people starved to death or X million people deported to slave labor camps where Y portion of them died. Don't just think in terms of absolute numbers, which are appalling enough, but in terms of percentages. Adjust for population, and Stalin's holodomore would have been like killing forty to fifty million people in the United States today, with our population of about three hundred and thirty million.

Starving that many people to death on purpose and not touching the cities. And that happened after tens of millions had already died in the First World War and the Russian Revolution a decade earlier. And then another decade after the mass starvation, Ukraine would lose about a fifth of its population that it had left in the Second World War. A fifth of the US population today is sixty-six million people. So think about that. It's so overwhelming.

and really incomprehensible. And every time I think about it, I'm not really able to understand how a people that went through all of that for such an extended period of time manage to to hold the national idea together at all, manage to hold themselves together as a national community. And then, of course, the reward for their perseverance for getting through all that was just to be reincorporated back into the Soviet police state after the war.

As the end of the Second World War came into view, countries there in the Bloodlands had other problems besides just what the Nazis and the communists were doing. Again, the continent was in such a state of devastation after the war that it is extremely hard to convey or fathom. The book I've been quoting here, Savage Continent by Keith Lowe, he does a decent job of it, but you really just cannot get it across.

A little pet project that I've had rattling around in the back of my mind for a while, put aside for that utopian day when I somehow have nothing else on my plate, is to do the research and draw various maps of Europe that reflect the the demographic and economic and infrastructural realities of Europe right there in the summer of nineteen forty five. Because the political boundaries of a normal geographic map tell us almost nothing real.

Tell you almost nothing about what was actually going on and how things looked on the ground. Sovereign borders have been meaningless for years. You had millions of non Germans in Germany, most of whom had been brought there as forced labor by the Nazis, many of whom had no homes to return to and no way to get there if they did, and

Millions of ethnic Germans who had lived outside Germany for centuries would not be living there much longer. Millions more Germans were being held outside Germany as POWs or civilian prisoners. Huge amounts of the railway capacity, not just the railroads, but the rail cars and rail engines were destroyed. The roads were destroyed. Every type of infrastructure you can think of had been annihilated. Millions and millions of buildings destroyed. Even the pre war borders themselves.

It had only been in place for twenty years or less. And so Europe at the time those those borders, they weren't pinned down by the weight of history or custom. The w the way today we think of like that's a national border, you violated our national borders. These things had not been around very long. Didn't carry the same weight. Prior to the First World War, the whole of Central and Eastern Europe were either part of the German, Russian, or Austro Hungarian Empires.

In the wake of that war after nineteen eighteen, those empires were broken up and their constituent peoples were given ethnostates under the principle of national self determination. But one of the things about empires is that all the different peoples within them tend to move about quite a bit. And so these new ethnostates, once they were established, all had significant minority populations left over from that earlier imperial period.

All around Germany, outside the borders of Germany, but but there along the borders were significant populations of ethnic Germans in these neighboring countries.

And someone like Hitler looked over the border into a place like Czechoslovakia, a country that had only existed as a political unit for twenty years, when Hitler annexed the Sudetenland, and Hitler didn't see why He should give more credence to a 20-year-old line on a map than to the actual fact that 90% of the people there were German and had been for a long time. To the Czechs and Slovaks, of course, the annexation was just an act of unprovoked aggression by Germany against them.

But many of the people living in the Sudetenland just saw it as correcting kind of an obvious mistake or injustice of a Versailles treaty that by now even many people in the Allied countries saw as a relic of a post war moment when, you know, everybody was real heated and and leaders, especially of France But also if Britain were thinking more in terms of vengeance against Germany than whether any of this was sustainable over the long term.

Same with many of the ethnic Germans in Austria, um Western Poland, and so on. And Hitler was, again, far from alone in this way of thinking. Some of the new nation states established after World War I provided sovereignty to people who had not had it for centuries. Poland was carved up by the Prussians, the Russian Empire, and the Austro Hungarian Empire in 1795. And then in nineteen eighteen, all of a sudden you've got a country again. If you can hold on to it and that is not going to be easy.

But Within the borders of this new country, you've got a bunch of ethnic Germans in the West. Right across the border from a German state that is not happy about having lost that territory or its people. You've got a bunch of Ukrainians in the south who have been They've got some three million Jews in the country, Polish Jews. And while many of them were Polish patriots, a lot of them were either Zionists, although there were a lot of Zionists who were Polish patriots.

Or a lot of them were communists and were looking with their loyalty over to the Soviet Union. So all of these groups are looked at as potential problems by a country that rightly, it turned out, felt itself to be in a very insecure position. I mean when Hitler invaded Poland in nineteen thirty nine He pointed to discrimination against ethnic Germans in Poland as his excuse for doing so. He said he was defending those people.

Just as discrimination and mistreatment against ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine provided the impetus for Putin's intervention in the Donbass in twenty fourteen. The Munich Conference of 1938 is remembered, of course, for the appeasement of Germany when the Reich annexed the Sudetenland, but less remembered is that Poland At that conference, also peeled off a chunk of northern Czechoslovakia that contained a plurality of ethnic Poles.

It's very important not to project modern American ideas about minorities onto these countries. It's just a completely different context. Because for one thing, we're not talking about immigrants. We're talking about people most often who have lived where they are for hundreds of years. in relatively homogeneous communities and who only ended up in someone else's ethnostate because of how the leaders of the Entente happened to hammer out the Versailles Treaty.

You know, it led to all sorts of boring administrative difficulties which nevertheless ended up later on causing a great deal of resentment and then suffering and then bloodshed. You know, countries had to operate separate school systems teaching in different languages, for example, which reinforced regional homogeneity as well, and also in many cases reinforced minority loyalty to the mother country.

You see people in the US today complaining about people not speaking English and the importance of a common language for binding together a national culture and all that. That's not some uniquely American prejudice. Many Czechs and Slovaks felt the same way when the language was German instead of Spanish. And again, this was a time when all these national movements were were really the it was a time when the blood was running hot, you know.

Imagine you're Polish. And now Poland has its own sovereign nation state for the first time since seventeen ninety five. But David Lloyd George and Clemenceau and the other powers that be decided to draw the southern border of the new Poland just north of where you live. And so you don't get to be part of it.

Instead, you're part of Ukraine, which very quickly loses its independence to the Red Army. So now you're part of the Soviet Union. Where not only are you not part of this new grand Polish project, But where the Polish national idea itself and pride in its traditional culture are ruthlessly suppressed by the secret police.

People on all sides of these divides were very aware of how tenuous their position was, especially up and down the Bloodlands where you had two restless expansionary superpowers on either side both of whom are quite willing to use your national minorities as a wedge for splitting off territory and just for general subversion.

At the end of the Second World War, as the Germans were pulling out, every country knew, every one of these smaller countries in Eastern Europe where the Soviet Union was coming in. Every country knew from the Germ from the moment the Germans left that they were fighting for their national lives. And so the tendency to view minorities as potential fifth columnists, either for cross-border rivals or for the Soviet Union, became even more intense. And furthermore, those who had survived the war

You know, you just have to think about what these people have been through. They have been submerged in blood and fire for years. Again, not only from World War Two, but a lot of these people all the way running back to World War One, twenty years before that, the Russian revolutions, the Red Terror, the Soviet starvation camp, all of it. These people who had been so thoroughly brutalized and inured to violence.

And you know, for people who are under thirty years old So they were kids during the First World War, came of age in the bloody twenties and thirties. And then their most recent experience was being run over multiple times in a war of annihilation. You take people who by now could step over corpses without breaking stride and say, Hey, those people over there, they're dangerous. They might be a problem.

And you can kinda understand why for those people the solution to that problem might look very simple. Hostility had existed for a long time between ethnic Poles and Ukrainians at the frontier of their two countries, and the breakdown of order during and after the German occupation unleashed forces that turned that hostility into extreme violence between the two groups.

In both countries, the Red Army was really the only institution with real nationwide reach, and when the war was over, the Communists made sure that it remained that way until they could consolidate their power. Stalin used the post war chaos to demographically remake the entire region. And very often actually encourage ethnic conflict in many of these areas in order to drive the local populations to do the work for them themselves.

As Lo wrote, The Soviet solution was simple. If Poles and Ukrainians could not get along, they should be separated. Poles should live in Poland, Ukrainians should live in Ukraine. That's probably a good sign that I need to check my premises when Stalin seems to be the only one making sense on an issue, but you don't have to look further than how the population transfers, to use the popular euphemism, were carried out.

Again, under the watch of the Red Army and the communist parties in both of those countries, to see some problems with the basic concept. one of thousands of acts of mass violence that facilitated this ethnic cleansing campaign was a massacre at a village called Zwodka Murachowska in southeastern Poland And it's not remarkable in itself, but it is emblematic of what was happening across the borderlands at the time. Quote

The army came to the village at dawn. All the men began to run to the woods, and those who remained attempted to hide in attics and cellars but to no avail. The soldiers were looking everywhere so that not a single place was left unsearched. Whenever they captured a man, he was killed instantly. Where they could not find a man, they beat the women and children. My father was hidden in the attic and the soldiers ordered my mother to climb up the ladder to search for him.

These orders were accompanied by several rifle butt blows. When Mother started to climb, the ladder suddenly broke and she fell down, breaking her elbow. Five soldiers began to beat her again with rifle butts, and when she could not lift herself they kicked her with their heavy boots.

I ran to her with my four year old daughter and wanted to shield her, but the soldiers began to beat me and my child. I soon fell unconscious, and awoke to find my mother and child killed, and the entire village afire. Lo adds to the Worse than the murders was the manner in which they were committed. Many were beaten to death, disemboweled, or set on fire. Some women had their breasts sliced off, while others had their eyes gouged out or their noses and tongues removed.

According to one of the soldiers who took part in the massacre, there were some among us who were enjoying this butchery. And this just went on and on. And on and on and on. A Polish partisan named Vladimir Lotnik remembered the cycle of escalation. They had killed seven men two nights previously. That night we killed sixteen of theirs.

A week later the Ukrainians responded by wiping out an entire Polish colony, setting fire to the houses, killing those inhabitants unable to flee, and raping the women who fell into their hands. We retaliated by attacking an even bigger Ukrainian village, and this time two or three men in our unit killed women and children. The Ukrainians in turn

Took their revenge by destroying a village of five hundred Poles, and torturing and killing all who fell into their hands. We responded by destroying two of their larger villages. This was how the fighting escalated. Each time more people were killed, more houses burnt, more women raped. Men become desensitized very quickly, and kill as if they know nothing else. End quote.

In this way were nearly eight hundred thousand Poles expelled from Soviet Ukraine, and another two hundred thirty thousand from Belarus and one hundred seventy thousand from Lithuania. Just between 1944 when the Soviets conquered the country, and 1946, when they considered the campaign completed. With Soviet support, the Poles in their turn expelled almost half a million ethnic Ukrainians.

And then three million German POWs were shipped off as slave labor in the Soviet gulag, a million of whom would be killed, and many of whom survived were not released until well into the nineteen fifties. The Soviets rounded up millions of non German nationals to be worked as slaves. For example, six hundred thousand Hungarians were deported to the east, many of them were never heard from again.

The Soviets were remaking Eastern Europe not only demographically but geographically as well, adjusting borders according to the whims of Stalin. At the Tehran conference.

Stalin had insisted, successfully, that on moving the western border of Russia further west into what had previously been eastern Poland before the war, and Churchill and Roosevelt said, Fine, so long as Poland is compensated at the expense of Germany, With its own western border being shifted further west into what had previously been eastern Germany.

Well the regions that were to be included in the new western region of Poland had been home almost exclusively to ethnic Germans for hundreds of years, and when the decision was made, some eleven million ethnic Germans still lived there. And all parties at the Tehran Conference understood that all eleven million people would be expelled. Probably the largest act of ethnic cleansing in history. many of these people had

fled rape and massacre by the Red Army by the time the decision was actually put into place. But by the war's end there were still about four and a half million German people living there and another one and a quarter million who came back after the war hoping to resume their lives in the place that they'd always lived.

According to plans made by the Soviet government, all of the nearly six million ethnic German civilians in the region would either be enslaved in the Gulag or expelled from the country. Lowe describes the human reality of these expulsions. On Sunday, one july nineteen forty five, at around half past five in the evening, the Polish army came to the village of Makuswörder in Pomerania and told the people that they had thirty minutes to gather their things and leave.

Almost the entire population of this village was German, and since most of the men had long since been lost to the war, it consisted mainly of women and children and old people. Bewildered and afraid, the villagers began to gather up their valuables, family photos, clothes, shoes, and any other essential items they could fit into their bags and hand carts.

They gathered outside their houses and on the road that ran through the village. Then they were made to walk in the direction of the new Polish German border. Amongst them was a farmer's wife, and mother of three named Anakintop. Later, in a sworn deposition, she described the ordeal that she and the rest of her village had to endure.

The journey, she said, lasted six days, and passed through a blasted landscape still covered in the detritus of war, and the remains of previous treks to the border by other refugees.

they came across their first dead body just beyond Landsberg, a woman, who was blue in the face and whose body was swollen with decay. Thereafter, corpses became a common sight. In a forest they passed through They could see the dead bodies of both animals and human beings, whose heads and feet were poking through the earth at their shallow graves.

Occasionally, members of her own trek succumbed to exhaustion. Some, including her own daughter, became sick from drinking contaminated water from troughs and wells along the way. Others succumbed to starvation. Now he's quitting Kintop. Most of the people on the trek lived solely from what they found in the fields or ate unripe fruit on the side of the road. We had very little bread. The result was that many people got ill.

Small children under one year of age almost all died on the track. There was no milk, and even if the mothers made them a thick meal soup, the journey was too long for them. Then the changes in the weather, first a scorching sun, and then showers of cold rain which were fatal. Every day we got a bit further. Sometimes we did nine kilometers, on one day perhaps only three, then twenty or more.

I often saw people lying on the side of the highway, blue in the face and struggling for breath, and others who had collapsed from fatigue, and never got to their feet again. Back to low. They spent their nights in bombed out houses or in barns, but since these tended to be filthy, Anna herself preferred to remain in the open air, Sleeping away from where the others were congregated also saved her from the depredations of the soldiers, who used the cover of darkness to come and rob the refugees.

She often heard shots in the night, as those who tried to defend their possessions were dealt with by their assailants. The precariousness of her situation was brought home to her one day when she and her party were stopped by a group of armed men. And a terrible scene was enacted before our eyes, and touched us most deeply.

Four Polish soldiers tried to separate a young girl from her parents, who clung in desperation to her. The soldiers struck the parents with their rifle butts, particularly the man who He staggered and they pushed him across the road down the embankment. He fell down, and one of them took his machine pistol and fired a series of shots.

For a moment there was a deathly silence, and then the screams of the two women pierced the air. They rushed to the dying man, and the four soldiers disappeared into the forest. Back to Lo. Anakintop suspected that the men had intended to rape the young girl, though it is possible that they merely wanted to conscript her into some form of forced labor.

Of course, this does not mean that she would not have been raped in any case, as happened to hundreds, perhaps thousands of others. Many of those who told their stories attest to having been sexually assaulted in similar circumstances, often repeatedly.

They were effectively kidnapped during their trek to the border in order to be put to work on farms or in local factories, but once they no longer had their families around them, they became easy targets for the soldiers or foremen who were responsible for them. It was probably one such roundup for forced labor that Anna Kintop witnessed when she arrived at Tomso, although she had no idea about this at the time.

We had to pass through a lane of soldiers, and people were taken out of the column. These had to drop out, and go to the farms on the highway with their carts and all that they had with them. No one knew what this meant, but everyone expected something bad. The people refused to obey. Often it was single individuals, particularly young girls who were kept back.

The mothers clung to the girls and wept. Then the soldiers tried to drag them away by force, and as this did not succeed, they began to strike the poor terrified people with rifle butts and riding whips. One could hear the screams of those who were whipped far away. I shall never forget it in my life. Soldiers also came to us with riding whips in their hands. With flushed faces they ordered us to get out of the column and to go to the farms.

Elsi and Hilda Mitag began to weep, but I said come, it is no use resisting, for they will beat us to death. We will try to escape afterwards. Russians were standing there, looking on cynically. In our desperation we begged them for help, but they shrugged their shoulders. End quote.

One of the Soviets favorite moves when involving the local populations and establishing their dominance over postwar Eastern Europe was to identify and select aggrieved minorities in each country and put them in critical positions of power, in order to assure that there would be no problem motivating the local authorities there to the desired levels of barbarism.

And so in Poland and Romania and a few other countries, for example, the communists would often specifically select Jews who had lost their families. to wartime atrocities. They would find those people specifically and then put them in posts such as interior minister, which controlled the gendarmerie and the secret police. Now, on an individual level. It's hard to begrudge a Jewish victim his desire for vengeance in the aftermath of World War two.

When American troops liberated the Dachau concentration camp, infamously, they enabled an orgy of violence by the former inmates against captured guards and German soldiers there. American GIs were just standing by and watching as these newly liberated inmates were beating German POWs to death, torturing them in in horrible ways. Sometimes the Americans would shoot the German POWs in the legs and then give the former inmates the tools they needed to go to work on them to their heart's content.

But that only lasted for a few days, and it was recognized even at the time as an unacceptable breach of military discipline. On an interpersonal level, again, I kinda get it, especially when in the case of Dachau, you're at least talking about the inmates' former guards or at least German soldiers. I don't condone what happened there, but

I can understand where a soldier, especially the the American soldiers in Dachau, thought they were going into battle and then they came across the camp. So they were all keyed up and ready to go. But when a government adopts this kind of thing as policy As a means of governing a country by terror, i you can understand what it is that they're really trying to accomplish by it.

When the Red Army passed through Poland after the Second World War, the camps were emptied out of their inhabitants and then immediately refilled, primarily with ethnic German civilians. The purpose of the facilities was barely disguised by their official designation as punishment camps, in practice for the time that they operated, holding German civilians until their transfer to the Soviet gulag or back into Germany could be arranged. They essentially functioned as extermination camps.

One of the most infamous was made out of an abandoned labor colony at Zagoda. When a new batch of prisoners arrived, they were met by the camp director, who was a Jewish man whose family had been killed at Auschwitz. and who took pleasure in participating in the torture and degradation of the prisoners he had control of. Their torture began immediately after passing through the gates, over which hung a sign that read Arbeit Macht Frey Work's work makes you free.

in imitation of the infamous Auschwitz welcome panel. Quote. Members of the Hitler youth were told to lie on the ground while the guards trod on them, or they were forced to sing the Nazi Party anthem, the horse vessels song, with their arms raised while the guards beat them with rubber truncheons.

Sometimes the camp director would throw prisoners on top of each other until their bodies formed a huge pyramid. He would beat them with a stool, or he would order prisoners to beat each other for the guards' entertainment. Occasionally, prisoners were sent to the punishment chamber, an underground bunker where they were made to stand for hours in freezing chest deep water.

Special occasions were marked with extra beatings. On Hitler's birthday, for example, the guards entered block number seven and set about beating them with chair legs. On VE Day, the director took a group of prisoners from Block eleven for another celebratory beating. The conditions in which these prisoners were forced to live were deliberately subhuman.

The camp was built for a capacity of only fourteen hundred inmates, but by July it already had more than three and a half times this number. At its peak, five thousand forty eight prisoners were interned here, all but sixty six of them Germans or Volksdeuts. They were packed into seven wooden barracks buildings crawling with lice, where they were denied adequate food or access to proper washing facilities.

Rations were routinely withheld by greedy camp staff, and food packages sent by concerned relatives outside the camp were confiscated. Two thirds of the men were sent daily to the local coal mines, where they were sometimes literally worked to death.

When an epidemic of typhus struck, sick prisoners were not isolated but forced to stay in their overcrowded barracks. As a consequence, the death rate accelerated rapidly. According to one prisoner tasked with burying the dead, up to twenty people died daily.

Anyone who tried to escape this hell was immediately singled out for special treatment. Gerhard Gruska, a fourteen year old boy imprisoned in the camp, witnessed the punishment meted out to one escape who had the misfortune to be recaptured. His name was Eric Van Kalsterin.

Once he had been brought back to the barracks, a group of guards repeatedly beat him to the ground with fists and clubs, while the rest of the prisoners were made to watch. According to Grushka, it was one of the most brutal beatings he ever saw. Eric suddenly tore himself away from the militiamen, and clambered onto one of the plank beds. The four rushed round behind it and dragged it into the center of the room. They were obviously extremely irritated by such an attempt at resistance.

One of them fetched an iron bar from the corner of the room where we kept the vat used for fetching our food. When pushed through both handles of the vat, this bar made it easier to carry the full container. Now, however, it became an instrument of torture. The militiamen took in took in took it in turns to strike Eric's legs with unrestrained rage. Whenever he fell to the ground they worked him over with kicks, pulled him up again, and beat him again with a steel bar.

In his desperation, Eric begged his torturers, just shoot me, just shoot me. But they beat him even harder. It was one of the most terrible nights at Zagoda. Miraculously, Van Kalstern somehow survived this beating. Like Grushka, he was only fourteen years old. He was also a Dutch citizen, and so should never have been imprisoned in Poland in the first place. A repa a report from a British officer to the Foreign Office read.

Concentration camps have not been abolished, but have been taken over by new owners. Prisoners who do not die of starvation or are not beaten to death are made to stand up to their necks night after night until they die in cold water. Another man with the bad luck to have spent time as a prisoner in both Auschwitz under the Germans and in Zagoda said I'd rather be ten years in a German camp than one day in a Polish one.

Roughly one in three people who entered the Zagoda punishment camp never left. Quote. It would be tempting to dismiss Zagoda as the individual vengeance of a single brutal camp commander, were it not for the fact that similar conditions prevailed in many other Polish camps and prisons.

At the prison in Trebuca, for example, German inmates were regularly beaten for sport, and often had dogs set on them by the guards. One prisoner was forced to crouch down and hop around his cell while his warder beat him with an iron tipped stick. The prison at Levize was also run by former prisoners of the Nazis who used broomsticks, clubs, and spring loaded truncheons to beat prisoners.

Survivors from the prison at Clodsko tell of stories of prisoners who had their eyes beaten out with rubber cudgels and all kinds of other violence including straightforward murder. Women suffered just as much as men. At the work camp of Potolic Women were routinely raped, beaten, and subjected to sexual sadism by camp staff.

Others were made to undress while on work parties, and buried in liquid manure, and even to have witnessed a guard catch a toad and shove it down a German prisoner's throat until he choked to death. Perhaps the most notorious Polish camp, however, was that of Laminovice, or Lamsdorf, as it became known to its German occupants. This former POW camp was reopened in July nineteen forty five as a forced labor camp for German civilians awaiting expulsion from the New Poland.

It was run by the twenty year old Cheslav Gaborsky, a depraved looking pole who only made himself understood with kicks. According to one of the first prisoners, the atrocities began almost immediately. On the evening after they arrived, he and forty others were woken and hounded out of their barracks into the camp yard, where they were forced to lie on the ground while the militiamen jumped on their backs. They then had to jog around the yard while being beaten with lashes and rifle butts.

Anyone who fell to the ground was immediately set upon by groups of militiamen. The next morning we buried fifteen men, said this witness. For several days afterwards I could only move with the greatest pain. My urine was mixed with blood, my heart beat irregular, and fifteen men were in the ground. When the first large transport of prisoners arrived a couple of days later, the atrocities continued.

Before my eyes he struck a baby dead, whose mother had pleaded for some soup for the child, which at Lamsdorf was supplied for the smallest children. Then he chased the woman, still clutching the tiny bloody body in her arms, lashing her across the yard, and then he retired to his room with his assistants and polished off the soup meant for the infants. According to the same witness, the camp guards became gradually more inventive in their sadism.

For entertainment, the camp commandant forced one of the men to climb a tree that stood in the yard and call out I'm a great big monkey, while he and his guards laughed and took pot shots at him until he eventually fell to the ground. Perhaps the most disgusting allegation by this witness is the description he gives of what happened to the women of the nearby village of Gruben.

They were sent to exhume a mass grave that was discovered near the camp, in which the bodies of hundreds of Soviet soldiers had been buried by the Nazis. These women were not given gloves or any other protective clothing. It was summer and the bodies which were in an advanced state of decay gave off an unbearable stench. As the corpses lay out in the open, the women and girls were forced to lie face down on top of these slimy and disgusting corpses.

With their rifle butts the militiamen shoved the faces of their victims deep into the hellish decay. In this way human remains were squashed into their mouths and noses. Sixty four women and girls died as a consequence of this deed. End quote. This campaign of unrestrained bloodletting and barbarism was going on up and down the Bloodlands, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, in every country in between.

In many ways, Yugoslavia and what was happening there in the late stages and aftermath of the war were emblematic of Eastern Europe as a whole. Lowe calls his chapter about Yugoslavia where General Tito's communist forces were busy consolidating their control. He calls it Europe in microcosm. And

If you'll forgive one more extended quotation, I'm almost ready to move on to the next section. Um I'm I'm using low here again because to be perfectly honest, the complexities of Yugoslavia, especially right after the war here, still go a little over my head. And all I'd really be doing is rewriting sections from the handful of books I've read on the issue and kind of passing it off as my own work. And so I would rather just give credit where it's due. So here's Lowe.

Quote, If the transfer and exchange of ethnic populations across Eastern Europe was often brutal, it was not the worst that could happen. Indeed, the reason such movements were endorsed by so many governments, including the governments of the Western Allies, was that it was so widely regarded as the least worst option.

At the beginning of the war, the Germans had used their minorities in other countries as an excuse for invasion. Removing those minorities was considered therefore the only practical way to prevent future conflicts from breaking out. Even those who were forced to leave their homelands often accepted flight as their only option. Their lives had been made so unbearable that they regarded their successful transfer to another country as a lucky escape.

However, population transfers were by no means the answer to every ethnic question after the war. Some groups could not be driven out, no matter how unpopular they were, because they did not have their own country to go to. Gypsies, for instance, who were everywhere almost as unwelcome as the Jews.

Some countries were obliged to integrate separate communities in an effort to cover up the internal splits that had burst open during the war, the Czechs and the Slovaks, for example, or to a lesser degree, the Flemings and Walloons of Belgium. In the most extreme cases, governments were forced to pretend that ethnic problems did not exist at all, because to acknowledge them would be politically impossible.

This was the case in the USSR in Yugoslavia, where the authorities struggled to convince the population that the violence of the war had been the result of class differences rather than ethnic ones. Yugoslavia requires special mention because it encompasses all of these problems and more. Since most of the groups who had been responsible for the violence during the war were not outsiders, they could not be expelled. Indeed, when some tried to flee the country, they were prevented from leaving.

nor could they be separated from one another within the country. There were suggestions at the time that this should be done. Some individuals are asking why Serbs shouldn't have their own federal Slavonia, stated one report by the Yugoslav Intelligence Service, or why Croats shouldn't move to Croatia and Serbs to Serbia.

But the whole purpose of reestablishing the Yugoslavian Federation was to hold these separate nations together under a single banner. How would Marshal Tito be able to speak of brotherhood and unity while at the same time banishing each nationality to separate corners of the country? And how could he allow such nationalist tendencies to thrive while he continued to preach the internationalism of Communist Party doctrine?

The different ethnic groups were therefore obliged to continue living side by side, despite the fact that each regarded the others with undisguised hatred. As the Ustasha regime finally abandoned Zagreb on sixth may, a measure of hysteria took hold of the civilian population. Large numbers of refugees joined the fleeing troops. This vast crowd, numbering hundreds of thousands, trekked northwards through Slovenia toward the Austrian border.

They were determined to reach Austria before they surrendered, and as a consequence continued to fight long after the war was over in the rest of Europe. The battle raged on until fifteenth may nineteen forty-five, when the first Croatian units finally arrived on Austrian soil at Bleiberg. Here they immediately attempted to hand themselves over to British forces.

But the British refused to accept their surrender. Despite the desperate campaign that they had just fought, the Ustas and all their hangers on would be obliged to hand themselves over to the communists after all. Accusations of betrayal have also been directed at the way that the British treated those who did manage to surrender to them.

A few days before the arrival of the Croats, a force of about ten thousand to twelve thousand Slovenian home guards had reached Austria. The British disarmed them and put them in a camp near Viktring, a small town just a few kilometers south west of Klugenfer, But they had no intention of keeping them. Instead they planned to return them to Yugoslavia at the earliest opportunity.

Realizing that the Slovenes would resist any attempt to send them back to the Communists, the British pretended that they were only transporting them to camps in Italy. Similar deceptions were employed against Cossacks captured in the region, whose officers were told that they were being taken to a conference when in fact they were to be handed over to the Soviets.

Such blatant dishonesty adds weight to the body of evidence suggesting that the British knew exactly what lay in store for these prisoners. For those who were sent back across the Austrian border or who were captured by Tito's partisans in the northernmost parts of Slovenia, an epic and often tragic ordeal lay ahead. A large proportion were marched along the Drava River toward Maribor, where Tito's forces had set up transit camps.

At first these marches were conducted in a fairly orderly manner, but they became more dangerous the further away they progressed from the safety of Allied lines. The prisoners were given neither food nor water by their guards, and were stripped of any valuable items, such as pens, watches, wedding rings, boots, and shoes.

When gaps in the column inevitably opened up, those at the rear were ordered to run and to catch up. To encourage them to move faster, those who lagged behind were often shot without warning. In the nineteen sixties, scores of testimonies were gathered from those who had experienced the force marches back into Yugoslavian territory, most of which agree on these details.

The testimonies of German soldiers gathered by a German government commission in the nineteen sixties provide further corroboration. Conditions on these death marches were extreme. As they trudged toward Maribor, Croatian soldiers and civilians alike were gunned down using any conceivable excuse. Those who tried to escape were, of course, considered fair game, but even stepping out of the column to relieve oneself could prove fatal.

In villages along the way some people had left food and water for them, but anyone who made a move to gather them might also receive a bullet. Running out of energy was not an option. One survivor, a man named Stonkovic, tells the story of a fifty year old priest who was killed for no better reason than that he was too tired to walk any further. Sometimes people seemed to be singled out at random.

A communist officer would yell out suddenly, Kill that fellow whose head is sticking out above all the rest of the criminals. Then another would cry, Kill that little runt over there. Someone else would order that anyone wearing a beard, or someone who had been stripped of his shirt should be done away with.

According to another eyewitness, the Reds began to shoot whomever they happened to feel like shooting. In the beginning they took individuals out of the formation and killed them in the nearby woods. Later, they fired directly into the prisoner column. The shooting was entirely indiscriminate. Many survivors speak of small groups of men being led away into the forest and shot. To verify what had happened, I went up and found fifty four bodies, which some other soldiers were then burying.

I saw pools of blood, and one corpse that had been knifed, but I reckoned that the rest had been knifed also, for I only heard two or three revolver shots, and there were fifty four dead. A prisoner named Franjo Krakaj tells how Ustasha soldiers were singled out for special treatment. He himself was misidentified as an Ustasha leader and immediately let off into the forest with a group of other similar men to be shot.

He escaped when one of the others ran at the guards to distract them. Krukaj's story is interesting because he escaped from partisan hands not once, but four times. Each time he was obliged by hunger to give himself up once more.

In the first instance, he put his brush with death down to the sheer bad luck of falling into the hands of a particularly sadistic group of soldiers. It was not until he was almost executed a second time that he realized that wholesale killing was part of a wider partisan policy. On this occasion, he had his hands bound behind his back and was loaded onto one of a number of trucks along with his fellow prisoners.

After a ride of about twenty minutes, we were lo unloaded like sacks of wheat at Maribor Island, which is upstream from the town. As we approached this place, we heard the staccato firing of a machine gun, along with single rifle shots from time to time. So we had now no doubt concerning our fate, I landed on my feet when I was tossed out of the truck, thus I was able to take a good look at a scene of horror that would have inspired a twentieth century Dante.

What absorbed my interest were several mass graves which had been dug about three hundred yards apart. Since they were almost filled with bodies, I could not determine how deep they were. I judged that each of them contained perhaps three hundred corpses. On top of these masses of cadavers I could discern movement. Some of the victims were still alive. Out of these grisly holes came screams Brother, kill me, shoot me once more.

I remember that cry being repeated several times and Also there were unwounded men in the graves who were smothering as bodies were thrown on top of them. They were trying to make themselves heard too. Some intended victims were trying to get away into the woods and the partisans were shooting at them.

Trucks drove up, bringing other groups of prisoners. As the guards started to unload them, the volume of rifle and machine gun fire increased tremendously because the prisoners made a break for it as soon as they hit the ground. Although my hands were still bound behind my back, I also took off at a run.

Bullets were whacking into the trees and cutting the shrubbery all around me. I tripped over a fallen branch and fell down headlong. Probably this saved me, because the guards evidently thought that I was accounted for and turned their attention elsewhere. It is obvious from accounts like this that, far from being the actions of a few isolated individuals, the killing of Croatian prisoners by the communist partisans was the work of entire units of men.

It was also fairly well organized. Prisoners were executed not only individually and in small groups but on a massive scale. Slaughter like this would not have been possible without an element of central organization by authorities. The local headquarters of these authorities appeared to have been at the nearby town of Meribor. Near to the town were long lines of anti tank trenches, which had been dug by German troops as elastic defense against the communists.

Prisoners were brought here by truckload, where they were lined up along the edge of the trench and shot. These prisoners knew precisely what lay in store for them, because they could see the corpses of previous groups of prisoners lying at the bottoms of the trenches. Many of them had been stripped of all their clothes. They had their hands bound behind their backs to prevent them, trying to escape or lash out at their guards.

The following account is by a Croatian officer who, like many who escaped Yugoslavia, but still had relatives there during the Cold War, wished to remain anonymous. In the evening the communists undressed us, tied our hands behind our backs with a wire, and then tied us two and two. After that we were taken in trucks to the east of Maribor. I managed to untie my hands, but was still tied to the other officer. We were brought to huge ditches where there were already dead bodies piled.

The communists started shooting at our back and Fast as lightning, I threw myself on top of the dead bodies. More dead bodies fell on top of me. When the partisans were through shooting our group, they left. They did not bury us because there was room for more. So they went to Maribor for more victims. I untied myself from my dead partner and crawled out of this mass grave. I was naked, and covered with the blood of other victims, and so full of fear that I could not walk very far.

I climbed a tree not far from the execution place. Three more times the communists arrived with officers and priests and killed them all. When the sun started to rise I went away. The killing at Maribor lasted several days, and when the anti tank trenches were full, special burial squads were detailed to pile earth across them and then level them off.

Bodies were also buried in shell holes, bomb craters, and specially dug mass graves. One former communist partisan who later fled Yugoslavia gave a graphic description of what it was like to work on one of these burial parties. As we were performing our grim duty, another group was detailed to dig out a large hole that began where the trenches ended. To my horror I saw that this pit too was full of bodies.

Since the dead in this hole were quite stiff or already putrefying, they probably had been killed days before. We were still engaged in the task of burial at five PM when a hundred prisoners were brought to the newly excavated abattoir. We were told that they were going to help us inter the dead, but then these prisoners were lined up at the edge of the hole where the other corpses lay. Next they were looted of what belongings they had, and finally the hundred prisoners were machine gunned.

I watched this slaughter from a distance of one hundred yards or less. Some of the prisoners threw themselves down flat and escaped the machine gun fire. They pretended to be dead, but the partisans went from one apparent corpse to another and ran their bayonets through everyone whom they suspected of being alive. Screams rent the air, providing grim evidence that those who had dodged the machine gun fire had not eluded death for long.

All of the new victims were thrown into the hole on top of the old corpses. Then the partisans directed several more bursts of machine gun fire into the pile of bodies, just to make sure that they had not left anyone alive. Maribor was by no means the only place where such massacres occurred. The vast majority of the twelve thousand members of the Slovenian National Army who had escaped to Austria and who were then handed back to the Communists by the British were murdered in the forest.

They were taken to the edge of deep ravines and either shot or thrown over the edge alive. The walls of the ravines were then dynamited in order to topple masses of rock onto the corpses below. According to eyewitnesses, there was no discrimination between the victims. There was no questioning of the prisoners, nor did any of them receive any kind of trial, nor was there any selection made among them. Every one who was brought was doomed to die.

At least eight thousand to nine thousand Slovenians were killed in this way, as well as some Croatians, Montenegrin Chetniks, and members of three Serbian volunteer corps regiments. There were also a handful of women amongst the victims, and around two hundred members of the Ustasha Youth Movement aged between fourteen and sixteen. Similar events occurred in an abyss at Podutic, only a few kilometers outside Ljubljana.

Here the mass of decomposing bodies began to contaminate Ljubljana's water supply, so in June a group of German POWs were made to exhume the bodies and bury them in mass graves. The communists used any and all methods in order to kill their victims. In Lasco and Rusnik, Croatians were thrown down mineshafts and hand grenades thrown in after them. In Rifnik, prisoners were driven into a bunker that was then blown up with them inside it.

In the POW camp at Bezegrad, prisoners were locked inside an enclosed reservoir which was then flooded until they were all drowned. In Istria, on the border between Yugoslavia and Italy, hundreds of Italian prisoners were thrown down deep pits and ravines to their deaths. Inevitably, as at Maribor, there were some who managed to survive. One survivor, who was shot along with hundreds of others at Kamnik, tells a story that, were it not for the terrifying circumstances, might seem almost comic.

He and his fellow prisoners were told to form a circle, after which the guards opened fire on them. Despite being hit in the forehead, he somehow survived. As he lay amongst his dead and dying comrades, he heard the partisans arguing amongst themselves. They were quite upset because when the fools lined us up in a circle and began firing, they were spread out in a circle too, outside of ours. Thus, in effect, they were shooting one another as well as us.

Two partisans were killed and two others severely wounded because of this bit of stupidity. Explaining the mass murder by Yugoslav communists after the war. Tito's deputy Milovan Gilas put it this way. Yugoslavia was in a state of chaos and destruction. There was hardly any civil administration, there were no properly constituted courts, there was no way in which the cases of twenty to thirty thousand people could have been reliably investigated.

So the easy way out was to have them all shot, and to have done with the problem. So we put an end to it, once and for all. In many other countries Resistance to communist domination was not something that they were able to put an end to once and for all so quickly. Some places it continued for years. Ukrainian nationalists fought for many years for their country's independence. The Baltic states Estonia, Latvia Lithuania fought well into the nineteen fifties.

hoping in vain for Western support that never materialized, and and they did so without the baggage of widespread ethnic cleansing that was carried out by the Ukrainian resistance. When the Soviets swept into the Baltic States in the fall of forty four, many thousands of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians had already had a taste of Stalinist rule, and had had enough of it, and intended to die before submitting to it again.

And so they left their homes, they left their families, some of them living on the run for a while, moving from place to place, and then after a while, eventually most of them took up residence in the forest. And then from the forest, they found each other and they began to organize and launch guerrilla attacks against communist forces.

Their lives were hungry and cold. They were scrounging for food or accepting it from courageous sympathizers who risked their lives and their families' lives merely by associating with the fugitives. Any of them who were wounded in battle could count on little more than basic first aid, and even that with very limited supplies. It was a hard life for many years for some of these people.

Among the Baltic fighters were enough military men that they were able to organize themselves into a competent force at arms. Men and women were organized into units with a military style command structure, and tasks such as the building of shelters and bunkers, as well as gathering and distributing food and other supplies was handled in a fairly organized manner.

The Lithuanians were particularly fierce and numerous, often engaging not only in hit and run tactics, but getting into pitch battles against small red army contingents and ambushing NKVD soldiers. assassinating communist leaders and and launching attacks even on prisons to free their comrades that had been taken captive. In may nineteen forty five, as the war was coming to an end in Europe, Lithuanian militiamen engaged a large force of NKVD men in a forest in the southern part of that country.

They were led by a former army officer named Jonas Nefalta, a nationalist respected for having fought against both the Nazis and the Soviets. Nefalta had been on the Soviet kill list since the Red Army first moved into the country in nineteen forty, but he'd managed to evade murder while helping to lead the resistance even as conditions kept rapidly changing.

The previous summer in nineteen forty four, Nefalta had taken a Soviet bullet to the chest, but he was able to escape the hospital where the communists had placed him under armed guard. After he escaped he made his way to an out of the way farm that belonged to a relative, and once he'd recovered a bit he gathered his wife and the two of them took to the forest.

Because there could be no question of leaving your loved ones out of the fight with the Soviets. They had been infamous since the Revolution for taking family members as hostages and threatening their torture and murder against the continued absence of any fugitive. And so for six months the two gathered up the other fugitives and refugees that they found and began to organize and train them in basic combat operations and survival skills.

and then their ragtag group began a campaign against the Soviets and their local collaborators. Well after a while, The Communists had had enough of this group of guerrillas, and they sent a large detachment of NKVD troops into the Kalnysk's forest in mid May nineteen forty five. NKVD got a beat on the general area where Naifalto was located with his people, and they surrounded it in a wide net and began to move in. Seeing that there was no way out.

Nefalt and his followers fell back to a hill in the middle of the forest. quickly erected some makeshift fortifications and got ready to fight. And with small arms and a few grenades, which is all they had, they fought for hours and hours, but before long they were coming down to the last of their ammunition,

And so the only hope of avoiding a general massacre of every one of them was to somehow break through the Soviet lines. So Nefalta took the two dozen or so of his remaining fighters, gathered up all the rest of their ammunition, And they attacked with full force a single point in the Soviet cordon, and they broke through and they made their way to a nearby marshland and made their way to safety.

Behind them lay forty-four of their dead comrades, including Nefalta's wife, who died with a machine gun in her hands. They did not go to their desk without company. They had killed over 400 NKVD men. But of course, this is the Soviet military. They could lose four hundred men every day for a year without being seriously degraded. Nefalta, being a traditional army officer.

was very brave and he was an inspiring leader, but his mentality was not particularly well suited to guerrilla operations. Yeah, it's a shame somebody couldn't have gotten him a copy of Mao's manual on Gorilla Warfare or something. Losing forty four fighters to inflict four hundred KIA on the enemy is a huge success in any traditional military context, but Nefalto lost half his people that day.

That November, he and his remaining partisans were once again surrounded, this time at a farmhouse, and after a fierce firefight, Jonas Nefalta fell in battle. But the Soviet government was becoming concerned with the determination and the ferocity of the Baltic resistance. Lavrentiberia, head of the NKVD, one of the most sadistic men in the Soviet government, truly evil monster. He sent General Sergei Kruglov to crush the Baltic rebellion.

Kruglov had just recently completed a swift and savage campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Tadars of Crimea, loading some two hundred thousand of them into cattle cars over just a few days and deporting them to Kazakhstan and in the process killing at least a quarter of the of all Crimean Tatar, some forty to eighty thousand people. And his methods were of the kind to please a man like La Verne di Beria. Quote, One of the cornerstones of Soviet methods was the use of torture.

This usually took the form of beating prisoners, a practice that was so common and so violent that in one district of Latvia, eighteen percent of police suspects were reported to have died during interrogation. Other methods included the administering of electric shocks, burning the skin with cigarettes, slamming doors on prisoners' hands and fingers, and waterboarding.

One former prisoner suffered the same torture as the hero of George Orwell's nineteen eighty four. Eleanora Lobonoskin was locked in a toilet stall the size of a telephone booth, along with fifty rats released from a cage. Such torture was officially frowned upon by the Soviet authorities, but in reality it was sanctioned at every level of the Soviet administration.

Stalin himself had claimed before the war that the use of torture was absolutely correct and useful, because it brought results and greatly accelerated the unmasking of enemies of the people. While the torture did provide the authorities with intelligence, it also had other, less welcome results.

All partisan memoirs state with pride that the Forest Brothers would rather die than surrender, and there are numerous stories of partisan units trying to shoot their way out of hopeless situations rather than giving themselves up peacefully. This is not mere myth. Soviet reports also describe the extraordinary determination of partisans in both Ukraine and Lithuania to die fighting.

For example, a Lithuanian police report from january nineteen forty five describes how security troops surrounded a house containing twenty five partisans who refused to surrender even after the house was set on fire. Five of these partisans broke out and crawled across a field towards a machine gun crew in an attempt to silence it.

They were shot one by one, but did not give up advancing until they were all dead. The rest of the group carried on fighting from the burning house until it finally collapsed and buried them. The use of torture was just one element of a system that was designed to terrorize both the partisans and their support networks amongst the civilian population.

Other methods of intimidation included the public hanging of local guerrilla leaders, the deportation of those suspected of links to the resistance, and the display of dead bodies in market squares. In his memoir, gives half a dozen examples of dead partisans being propped up in villages, sometimes in obscene poses, as a method of terrorizing the population.

Even his own brother's body was treated this way. Sometimes the NKVD would force local residents to come and look at the bodies, and their reactions were observed in order to discover where their loyalties lay. If they saw people passing by the corpses who revealed any sadness or pity, they would go out and arrest them and torture them, demanding that they reveal the names and surnames of the dead men.

There are numerous stories of parents being shown their dead children and being obliged to show no emotion for fear of betraying themselves. The price of revealing one's loyalties in situations like this could be high. Zealous security officials thought nothing of targeting the friends and family of known partisans if they thought it might flush the insurgents out into the open.

The very least such people could expect was arrest and interrogation followed by the threat of deportation to Siberia. This was perhaps another reason that the partisans were so reluctant to give themselves up during a siege. Many who found themselves surrounded would hold a grenade to their heads and blow themselves up, specifically so that the Soviets would not be able to identify them and so be able to target their families.

Sometimes Soviet security forces would resort to even more brutal methods amongst the general population. The burning of homes and farms was widespread in Lithuania as a method of punishing suspected partisans and terrorizing their families and communities.

Eventually the practice was banned by the chief of the security troops himself, but it seems that his objections were not on the grounds that the practice was unlawful, but because he suspected that his troops were targeting innocent civilians as a way to avoid fighting the real partisans. Yeah. We have an account from one of the NKVD soldiers engaged in this campaign.

Private Janine set the house on fire from the outside. When an old woman, crossing herself, came out of the house, followed by a girl, Lippin told them to go back into the burning house. Then the old woman and the girl started to run. Lippin took out his pistol and began shooting at each of them, but missed.

One soldier shot down the old woman, while Lippin ran after the girl and shot her at close range. Then he ordered two soldiers to take the bodies and throw them through the window into the house. The soldiers took the old woman by the hands and feet and threw her into the burning house, then did the same with the corpse of the girl. Soon an old man and the elder son ran out of the house, through another door.

Soldiers opened fire but could not get them. Then I and two other soldiers were ordered to catch and kill the sun, but we failed as it was dark and he escaped. On returning to the house we started combing the rye field. We found the old man there. He was wounded and crawling through the rye. One of the soldiers finished him off and we brought the corpse to the house. End quote. For years the Lithuanians and the Estonians and the Latvians fought like heroes.

For their freedom from Soviet tyranny, and did so against the odds of Barkokba. I mean, there was no hope here. The hundred thousand plus Lithuanians and the twenty to forty thousand each of Estonians and Latvians, they drew inspiration from stories like these, of these men and women who became known as the Forest Brothers. them and that helped carry them through long years of deprivation and cold and the extreme brutality of the Soviets.

Over the years their real heroic deeds were mixed in with legend and the stories became part of the national mythology of these tiny countries, and one of them A famous Estonian partisan named Ants Kalurand, known as Ants the Terrible. was being hunted by the NKVD, but according to the story, he liked to taunt and brazenly defy them by announcing his imminent reno arrival into a new district by mail ahead of time.

And so the story is that Ants the Terrible was going to arrive in Parnu, and so he mailed a particular restaurant manager that when he got there he expected to have a hearty meal waiting for him. And so of course the manager passed the letter on to the authorities, and NKVD men in plain clothes filled and surrounded the restaurant to an ambush.

But somehow, Ants, the terrible, had managed to commandeer a Russian car and the uniform of a high ranking Russian officer, and the unsuspecting secret policeman just let him walk right in past them, enjoy his meal, and then walk right back out. And the way the legend goes, under his plate he left a generous tip and a thank you note signed in his own name, Ant the Terrible.

And so stories like that nourish hungry fighters for a hopeless cause. The last well-known resistance fighter was not captured until nineteen fifty-six. And as late as nineteen sixty-five, Lithuanian partisans were still being hunted down and still fighting with Soviet forces. The last Estonian partisan was not killed until the late seventies. And even though they lost, their their sacrifice was not in vain.

Even after the Soviets had consolidated power over their countries, the names of the Forest Brothers remained as a subterranean rallying cry for resistance against total submission to Soviet domination. And they reemerged as popular heroes as the Baltics began to break away and reconstitute their communities as the USSR fell apart. Yeah, it's a hard question, that question of whether it's better to fight to the bitter end, even with no real hope of victory.

To this day, Jews debate whether the suicides at Masada were an example of holy dedication or amoral extremism. But there are no such questions here. Not when you knew as these people did, what lay in store for them if they lost. I don't know if any of you are MMA fans. I'm a big MMA fan. If you are, you might have caught a comment recently from Rose Nama Yunis, the UFC women's straw weight champion before her fight with Zhang Hui Li. A reporter.

kind of trying to bait her a little bit, asked her something about fighting an opponent from communist China in Rose. Who's this tiny little thing, usually very soft spoken, sweet, very respectful of her opponents, was all of a she was pretty strident all of a sudden. And she didn't mean any individual disrespect for Whaley, I don't think, but part of her answer was better dead than red.

Well, Rosa's family comes from Lithuania. Her great grandfather fought against the Soviet invasion in nineteen forty and then was forced into the Red Army during the Soviet occupation. When the Nazis invaded, he tried to go back to his normal civilian life, but when the Soviets reinvaded in nineteen forty four, he was arrested by the NKVD and sent to a concentration camp. And then in nineteen sixty eight, KGB agents murdered him near his home.

And then her family still had to suffer under the communist regime until they were able to leave in nineteen ninety one. So when she said better read than dead, she's speaking from experience. Because that is the thing about the Soviet Union that made it so frightening. It wasn't what they would do in the course of their conquests, which is mostly what we've been discussing in this episode up to this point.

Their methods of conquest were as savage and unrestrained as any the world had ever seen, including from the Germans and Japanese in the Second World War, but they weren't unique. Armies have been committing mass murder and rape and indiscriminate destruction of property, ethnic cleansing, genocide for a long, long time. And the Soviets were bad, but they weren't alone in being bad.

What set the communists apart as an evil that was truly unprecedented in human history was not what they did to take control, but what they did once they had it. It's become somewhat of a trope in recent years to compare the body counts of fascism and communism. I don't know, relative body counts just don't get at the heart of what made communism.

So scary. Sc scarier than the militant nationalism that manifested in countries like Spain or Italy or or even Germany. Scarier to me at least. Or maybe not scarier but more alien or when when I when I think about fascism, I don't see anything that I don't recognize in one form or another.

from other regimes in history. It doesn't look particularly unfamiliar. Even Hitler. You know, y yes, he covered over his animality with the sheen of modernist racialism and the eugenics theories that were popular at the time among Western intellectuals and kind of took that idea to its horrific logical conclusion, but at the bottom of it, when I read about him, when I read about Hitler, I Yeah, I see a pretty straightforward genocidal dictator.

I don't see anything that I don't really recognize from somewhere in the past. You know, yes, he had modern theories attached to it, and he had the efficient German state and modern technology, so he was able to fashion a killing machine that We had never really seen before, perhaps, but but basically I see Genghis Khan spouting racial pseudoscience. Emil Sharon wrote somewhere. That

After everything that had happened in the preceding thousand years in Europe, the ups and downs and accomplishments and failures and everything, that after everything, Europe deserved a higher quality monster than Hitler and his petty bourgeois thugs. Schimran always had a way of putting things. You know, the fascists, again, they just look more familiar to me. They wanted what you had. Maybe they wanted your resources or your land. Maybe they wanted to enslave you.

And if you were in the way, of course that that sucks to be you. And I I and I know, it's it doesn't matter to the victims who puts a bullet in your head or who puts your family in a gas chamber or in a mass grave. But I'm just speaking as an observer, you know, thinking about the history, trying to figure out where did this come from? How could this happen? And fashion just fascism just doesn't look completely unfamiliar to me. But I go through my history book.

From ancient to modern times, and I don't find anything. I don't find any precedent. for what we saw in the early decades of Soviet communism. At least not at scale. You might be able to point to a short-lived religious cult or two or you know something like that where You know, where it compares to the way the Soviet communists insisted on absolute control over not only your words and your deeds, but over your thoughts.

If you take the definition of totalitarianism literally, as a system that seeks not mere obedience but absolute control over the total person and the society. then the fascist states, while certainly authoritarian and brutal, were not even necessarily properly totalitarian, at least not during peacetime, not all the time. Whereas the fascists viewed certain political movements and racial groups or ideologies as potential threats. Communists saw all of mankind as the enemy.

All of mankind had been corrupted by bourgeois, feudal, or religious institutions from birth. And so required a transformation and rebirth in order for the new Marxist communist man to emerge. And they applied this way of thinking even to themselves.

You know, even the inner of the inner circles of the communist cadres, whether you're talking the Soviet Union or Maoist China, or even individual revolutionary groups around the world Would put themselves through these regular struggle sessions, you know, that were intended to to to to root out the corruption and purge the corruption in each one of their own hearts. Even when you consider the most extreme example, which is of course the Nazis' relationship to the Jews.

To put it very crudely, the the Nazis wanted the Jews gone. If they could have put them on a spaceship and sent them to colonize Mars on a one way trip, they probably would have done it. In the 30s, the Gestapo was working with Zionist groups to help them run the British blockade of Palestine.

During the Evian Conference in nineteen thirty eight, when countries around the world got together to try to work out a solution where they would each take some number of Germany's Jews and just end the crisis that way. Hitler said if they could come to an agreement, I'll put'em all on luxury liners and send'em on their way.

He may have just been cracking, but I mean a lot of the Nazis actions up to and even after that point uh kind of run in that direction. Eve even to the point while the war was going on. The German government was still actively exploring ways to possibly send the Jews to a colony on Madagascar or out over the Ural Mountains somewhere.

Again, I'm not I'm not condoning or downplaying at all any of that stuff. I'm more just saying that I I recognize it. I open up a history book and I recognize it from somewhere. Basically the Nazis wanted the Jews to leave and they wanted it enough so that once all those other options were foreclosed, they engaged in systematic mass murder. The Soviet Union didn't want you to leave. In the Soviet Union, you weren't allowed to leave.

It wasn't about wanting to get rid of you. They wanted you there. Because again the horror of communism wasn't what they did to achieve power, although it was horrifying, comparable in every way to the worst fascist crimes. It was what they did to their subjugated populations once they had you.

And then the Soviet Union invaded and occupied large regions of eastern Romania. And so one of the things that you see throughout Eastern Europe during the war is that countries and even resistance groups were often faced with a binary choice between either the Germans or the Soviet Union. And the decisions that they made were very often driven by recent experience.

And so for example, Finland joined the Axis powers, partly because it had been recently invaded by the Soviet Union. In nineteen thirty nine they'd lost territory to them. The Baltic states tended to side with the Nazis because the Soviets had invaded them in 1940. Until the Katin Forest Massacre was publicized in nineteen forty three, the Polish government in exile sided with the Soviet Union because the Nazis had invaded first.

in the Soviet connivance in that plan hadn't really been fully revealed and so they went with the Soviets. When the Germans marched into Ukraine, despite their abject brutality against the population, they were able to find willing collaborators among a population that had been savagely abused by Stalin for years. You know, they kinda had the attitude of like When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Churchill's supposed to have said that famous line, If Hitler invaded hell

I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. Well, every country in Eastern Europe kind of felt that way, although some of them reversed it to if Stalin invaded hell. You know, if Stalin and not Hitler had been their most recent tormentor. Romania was one of these countries. The king of Romania, Carol II, he wanted to maintain neutrality in the war, even in nineteen forty, but by then his civilian government did not.

They were losing territory in the east to the Soviet Union. Germany was offering an alliance and offering them support. Germany looked unstoppable. They didn't have any enemies on the continent at the time. They weren't at war with the Soviet Union. And so King Carol II was deposed in favor of his nineteen year old son Michael. And Romania entered the war on the side of Germany. Although again at the time

Germany had no enemies on the continent, they were only at war with Great Britain, and so Romania did not know that it was placing itself dead in the center of what would shortly become the largest and most destructive war in human history. After that war raged for a few years.

In nineteen forty four, as the Soviets were breaking through, the young King Michael saw what was happening, but he was overseeing a civilian government that had grown fanatical during the war, and was intent on fighting to the bitter end, but Not wanting to see his entire country destroyed by pointless fighting in an already decided war, King Michael deposed a civilian government and made a separate peace with the Soviet Union and the rest of the Allies.

Now, unlike most other Eastern European countries before the war, Romania did not have a strong Communist Party or indigenous movement. Romanian university students and much of the intelligentsia, which are typically the wellsprings of communist sympathy in other countries, they were among the most dedicated to their faith and to Romanian independence.

And unlike a country like Poland, which had been just completely destroyed during the war, just again torn down to the studs, or like a big scrub brush had been taken across the landscape, Romania's institutions remain largely intact. Even the physical infrastructure was largely intact since the Soviets had really only passed through a section of the northern part of the country on their way to Central Europe.

And so the Soviets had a different set of problems, but also different opportunities when the Red Army occupied Romania and began to impose the Soviet program there.

Again to compare it to Poland, in Poland they were more or less working from a blank slate. It was just everything was gone. The Red Army was the only institution in Poland on the ground with the capacity to do even basic things, like provide security or Restore essential infrastructure, perform the basic functions of government, you know, distribute food and other resources to the population, and so forth.

Also in Poland, they could count on a strong communist movement on the ground, an indigenous movement there, as well as in many of the other countries that they conquered. And many of those local communists have been hardened by years of war and partisan fighting, like we've discussed, and so they had no problem adapting to the intensity of Stalin's brutality.

On the other hand, it meant that, you know, when you're working from a blank slate, you got a lot of work to do. A whole lot of work to do. In Romania The Soviets didn't have as much work to do, but they had to contend with the fact that there were existing functional institutions there. And they had to contend with the fact that they didn't have a strong on-the-ground indigenous communist party to do their bidding.

But on the other hand, all they had to do to take over the country completely was to take over those existing institutions. And so that's what they did. First by deception, and then when the Romanians started to catch on by force.

They had to take certain measures that were similar to the ones they took in other countries. For example, they didn't trust the army, they didn't trust the police, and so while these were still used for basic law enforcement, Communist militias were used for more important or politically sensitive tasks. In Romania as in other countries, the Soviets often empowered aggrieved minorities by placing them in politically significant positions.

In Romania in the immediate post-war period, this often meant Jewish communists, because Jews had not had an easy time in Romania during the war, or or even before the war really, to say the least. And some of those who made it through were more than happy to take up positions of power over the people that they perceived as their persecutors.

And so as a result, the head of the Communist Party in Romania, and the interior minister in charge of the military police, and the head of prisons, and the foreign minister, and the head of the secret police. For much of the time from the communist takeover, these positions were filled by by Romanian Jewish communists until Stalin got paranoid about Zionism in the early fifties and started purging them.

This is obviously a very difficult aspect of the story to talk about, given the way that it's used to reinforce anti Semitic attitudes. including in many of these countries to this day. But again, you always have to remember that even if the whole upper echelon of the government consisted of Jews, which it didn't, You're still just talking about a handful of people. You can always find a handful of people from any group to carry out some evil for you.

If you colonized the United Kingdom and wanted to install a terror regime to unleash hell on the English population, You could probably still find enough Irish nationalists who have enough hatred for the British to fill a lot of key roles in the administration, but that doesn't really tell us anything at all about what most Irish people feel or what they would be willing to do.

In any way, this was a tactic by the Soviets. It's why you see it repeated in several countries, and why you saw similar tactics in European colonial governments around the world. You know, Syria to this day is a majority Sunni Muslim country run by a Shiite Muslim government. Until the Iraq War, Iraq was majority Shiite country run by a Sunni government. Neither of those were by accident. In both cases, the French and the British found a group that they could put in charge.

that the majority of the local population would not be particularly thrilled about. And who knew that if they lost their position, whether it was because they lost the favor of the colonial master or because they weren't willing to employ the sufficiently harsh methods to suppress popular opposition, they would be the first ones to suffer.

In each of the Eastern European countries, as you get out of the immediate post war period and as the communist governments stabilized and their power was more secure, you saw a transition away from governance by minorities to government primarily by the local ethnicity. I think that Romania in the late forties and early fifties. provides the clearest and most unobstructed view of what Soviet communism was when they had full control and the brakes were removed.

And again, this was partly because the presence of existing institutions, such as the Internal Security Service, allowed the communists to establish total control more quickly than would have otherwise been possible. And so it allowed them to go to work on the population almost right away.

By the time they were able to achieve that in some of these other countries, you know, the the the darkest period of the of the Stalinist era had passed and and the Soviet Union had started to change a little bit. And that work they wanted to do on the population in Romania had all the normal features, of course, you know, pervasive informants and secret police, show trials, imprisonment and murder of dissidents, and the casual use of torture.

And torture is what we're gonna end the episode talking about.

And so torture was frequently performed in public, according to strict rituals in which both the torturer and the tortured, as well as the audience, all had their roles to play in the drama. And often as the victim was being tortured on his way to execution, he would put on a bit of a performance, kind of gain the sympathy of the crowd. Dan Carlin has a great episode about this where he kind of discusses Some incidents that make it really clear the roles different people had to play.

He gained the sympathy of the crowd first by demonstrating toughness and resolve in the face of his suffering, but then by coming back into the social fold, so to speak, by repenting of his actions and begging for forgiveness and mercy. We've learned a lot since then, and in a way, we might know better what they were really up to back then than they even knew themselves. Or at least we're able to describe it with fewer metaphors and analogies.

In our day, as Foucault's described, official punishment has been transferred primarily from the body to the mind, or the spirit if you like. And we strangely find it cruel and unusual to assign someone twenty lashes, but not twenty years in a cell. This transition from physical to psychological punishment reflects a deeper understanding of the true purpose of torture.

Which is made explicit when it's used to extract information from an unwilling participant. That is, torture of the body is just a back door. It's an indirect route to the real target, which is the mind. And this was true even in pre modern examples of public display, which is why the intention and goal of those displays was to bring the show to a climax with the repentance and absolution of the guilty victim. Torture's not meant only to break down the will to resist further pain.

It's meant to reduce the victim to a pliable, almost infantile state of openness and dependency on the torturer. Our contemporary discussions about torture tend to center on its ineffectiveness for extracting reliable information from people. But that unreliability is largely due to the fact that you can never really be sure whether the person you're torturing actually knows anything at all.

If you got a pool of people and you torture them for information, Unless you mess up and accidentally kill them, or unless they're one of those monks during the Vietnam War and can just go into some trance while you're doing whatever it is you're gonna do, they're all gonna break and tell you something eventually. Especially if they know that you can wait.

But for all you know, none of them have any valuable information, and you were probably better off having no information at all than a flood of bad information to sift through. But a skilled torturer given enough time doesn't really have to extract information from unwilling subjects. If a torturer knows his job and has enough time, again, that is really critical, The subject will tell his persecutor what he wants to know

Not simply for a reprieve from the pain, but because he wants to. Because he wants to please his torturer. Genuinely wants to gain his approval. extended torture of a fully captive individual or group drives subjects through the back wall of the psyche into into such a state of dependency that they'll actually blame themselves, and not their captor, for every new prick of the knife or crush of the hammer. This is why sophisticated torturers know to construct little games.

where the victim seems to bring the pain upon himself. You know, he'll be given an impossible task and then punished when it's not accomplished to the torture of satisfaction, which is of course completely arbitrary. He may be told to stand with his arms straight out to the sides holding a weight in each hand, and told that he'll be beaten if his arms drop, and when he drops his arms, inevitably he is beaten, and he blames himself for failing to keep his arms raised.

Even though he knows on some rational level that That this is all designed for him to get another beating. You know, he's not going to blame himself the first time. He might not blame himself the second time or the third time. But we know quite a bit now about how the human mind works in extremis.

When Soviet and American intelligence agencies were experimenting with drugs and hypnosis and sleep deprivation as a means to extract information from people, They were attempting to remove the messy step of bodily suffering in order to go straight at the mind, to attack the mind directly. Attempts to implant information and even take control of a subject's personality, they were based on the understanding that the ultimate goal of torture is the complete breakdown of the personality.

so that it could then be reordered according to principles determined by the master. One of the stated goals of these programs was to see if they could take somebody. and have them reverse their most closely held And deepest feelings, their deepest moral beliefs. Can we get them to violate those? Can we get them to not even believe in those? The spiritual warfare carried on in Romanian prisons.

In the immediate post war period allows us to see that incidents such as what happened at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, where humiliation was a key technique approved by interrogators. Or at the Waco siege in the nineties where threats and sleep deprivation and other means of psychological terror were employed against the people there, that those meet the definition of torture as surely as beatings and fingernail extractions. They're just more sophisticated.

The communists were dogmatic materialists, and so they approached torture as a scientific endeavor. It was be it was b it was it was applied behavioral psychology to them. Just as dogs could be modified into almost entirely new creatures through operant conditioning, so could human beings be transformed into the new Marxist man by a consistent clinical application of Pavlovian reinforcement.

Later on the Soviet Union would weaponize psychology in a very sophisticated way, to pathologize all forms of dissent and dissatisfaction with the party. In this earlier stage, the methods are cruder, But the goals are maybe more ambitious. Victor Frankel, the existentialist and psychologist who survived the Nazi camps.

and wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning based on his reflections on those experiences He wrote that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of his human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way, to He meant that no matter what you're subjected to.

No matter the pain, no matter the humiliation, the degradation that man or the devil himself could dream of inflicting, There is something at your core that is still in your possession that cannot be taken from you until your own will falters and you decide to give it up. Well, at Petesh Prison in Romania, in the late forties and early fifties, the communists set up an experiment to prove that this was not true.

In order for the experiment to succeed, the subject's defenses would have to be stripped away completely, and anything in which he might take refuge would have to be taken away from him. And this is why in every country where the communists took power in the twentieth century, the institutions of family and faith and nation, those three things, were consistently and savagely attacked.

As Varlaum Shalomov, the Russian writer who survived seventeen years in the Gulag at Kolima, wrote, I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians, almost all of them, and most priests.

This wasn't because they were constitutionally better people, but because they had shelter. They had something to stabilize their minds and spirits, something to hold on to as they were tossed about in a sea of chaos and suffering. I mean this is the key difference between the authoritarian and the totalitarian. The authoritarian wants your compliance. The totalitarian wants everything. Like the judge in Blood Meridian saying he experiences the freedom of birds as an insult.

With the anti communist opposition in Romania very quickly crushed, Moscow sent advisors to help oversee this experiment. And for their lab rats, they chose activists from the Romanian student movement. 'Cause see with virtually all of Romania's leadership class dead or imprisoned by this point. The task of the resistance fell to their children's generation. And in Romania as elsewhere, colleges and universities were centers of political activity for enthusiastic young people. These

students mostly most of the students were the sons of peasants or middle class households, and virtually all of them were very devout Christians. To this day, Romania is one of the most religious countries in Europe, and Christianity has been a central part of Romanian identity

The patriotism and piety of these student anti-communists made them widely popular among the Romanian population, and their example was an inspiration to all of those out there who were still holding on to a shred of resistance in their hearts. And this was reason enough for the students as a class to be specially targeted, but those individuals brought to Patesh prison had been selected for another reason.

an additional one. The student subjects of this experiment were specifically selected for their deep commitment to Christianity, for their hardened discipline and their Romanian patriotism. Seminarians and students of theology were actually preferred. For the stated purpose of the experiment was to destroy and reorder the personality, such that the objects of one's love and one's hatred could be reversed.

So take the men who are the most devout, the most attached to their families and communities, the most patriotic Romanians. And cause them by a predictable process to hate their religion and hate their families and hate their country. If you could accomplish that with these men, then less difficult alterations of less fanatical personalities shouldn't be a problem.

The means by which this goal was to be achieved were pain and degradation and terror applied under the careful observation of psychologists, doctors, and political officers, again, including advisors sent from Moscow. Most of these students were already in prison, had been for a while. They had experienced deprivation, torture, and other forms of abuse already without cracking. That was just a prerequisite for consideration as a subject.

Those who showed the most courage in their resistance to the usual methods were selected and sent to the Securitate prison at Pitesht. And Alexander Solzhenitsyn called what happened at this prison in the late forties and early fifties the most terrible act of barbarism in the contemporary world. The author of a book on the subject came to an awareness of the Patesh experiment while it was still ongoing.

He was himself a political prisoner of the Romanian communists, and he described how he first learned that something terrible. More terrible than the mass killing and brutal torture that were already typical of the Romanian communist regime by this point, that something even more terrible was happening. He wrote

My first night in Cluj, I spent in a vain attempt to adjust to a cell six and a half feet long and two feet wide. The second night I was taken out into a search room and there I found myself in the company of three other prisoners, who had been brought from the prison of Gerla.

I knew them. Two were students from Bucharest, the third was a worker. Although we had been tried separately, the two students had been engaged in activities connected with mine. We were placed in an automobile and taken to the depot. At eleven that night we left for Bucharest on a fast express train, guarded by two securitate officers and a guard sergeant. Bound in pairs by handcuffs, we were kept in a compartment that was unlighted to prevent our being recognized by other travelers.

It was night. Now and then the moon shone through the car window lighting the faces of the three. It were strange faces. I had passed through many prisons in Romania, I had met thousands of prisoners, but never had my eyes rested on such faces. Beneath the pallor common to all prisoners, their faces reflected an exceptional physical weakness.

And over the emaciated faces a shadow of terror, a fixed expression of terror which stemmed from some uncommon experience, gave all three a fight frightening appearance. When, late in the night, the student who was handcuffed to me fell asleep from exhaustion and rested his head on my shoulder, I could no longer suppress a reaction to the fear that came over me.

I moved my shoulder to wake him up. His head, illuminated by the light of the moon, appeared to be that of the corpse of one who had died surprised by a horror so hideous that it had accompanied him into the world beyond. In former times he had been a swimming champion and a man of courage and Speech among ourselves was strictly forbidden. Every now and then our eyes met, and there I could read the same terror that was impressed on their faces, a terror akin to madness.

And so he and the other prisoners were soon separated, and his own suffering in prison soon pushed that memory out of his mind. But then later, a little bit later, he was reminded of that incident in the train. Later on, in the summer of nineteen fifty-two, I came again into contact with individuals who reminded me of the puzzle I had partly forgotten.

Other prisoners, transferred from the forced labor camps on the Danube Black Sea Canal, brought news that increased my suspicions regarding an entire category of prisoners who had once been the most dedicated and the most faithful defenders of the nation's freedom, the student body.

Accusations were brought against them which to the unknowing observer seemed utterly revolting, and yet the men who told me could not be lying, for they were speaking from experience of what they themselves had suffered. The reeducated students, they said, beat them, denounced them, were spies for the secret police, increased the work norms and tortured any who could not meet them. All of these were accusations of an enormous gravity.

I wanted to believe that because the majority of these men were simple and untutored that they erred, making generalizations on the basis of their own personal experience, for I had known the students and in a totally different light. But further news, instead of refuting what I hoped was not true, actually confirmed aspects which entered the domain of the tragic.

This time it was a student who spoke to me. I had known him for years at the Polytechnical School in Bucharest. At first he would not speak. He was afraid of everyone. But when I told him I came to Constanta from Ayud, where, up to a few months previously, nothing out of the ordinary had happened, he loosened his tongue. It was from him that I found out for the first time about the unmaskings. The student warned me to fear the other students, and even to fear himself.

Beware of the students as you would of Satan in person, even if they come under a mask of friendship, for they are perfidious. They have done a lot of evil and some continue in their wrongdoing. Why is it that everybody talks thus about the students? What happened to them if they became so depraved? For you know well that they were not like this before. I do not know, and I do not want to know what happened to them. I am telling you only that they bite badly, and on the sly. Beware,

We did not know at that time, and perhaps he is still ignorant of the fact today, that in the process of degradation their souls were killed, and they had passed through hell. End quote. And so it went like this. As a preliminary to the process of unmasking, the students were put through the usual regime of abuse, sleep deprivation, starvation, and communist indoctrination.

Being committed political activists, the students were not expected to succumb to these, but the purpose of this initial stage was only to test the students' resolve in order to verify that they were fit subjects for the experiment to come. Those who showed any signs of cracking in this initial stage were spared what was to come, and they were screened out. They were instead sentenced to the usual terms of hard labor and indoctrination or were simply shot.

Only those students who scorn the communist crude attempts at re education were selected for re education at Pitesh. When those selected arrived to Potesh they were confined, alone in the dark for a period of days or weeks, after which they were transferred to a cell that they shared with another inmate.

This other inmate would be another student, one who had already been through the Patesh program or some portion of it and was now working with the prison authorities. For the n initial group, this role was played by a group of communist inmates who volunteered for it. So their new cellmate had the job of befriending the new arrival.

and gaining his trust, and he would be left in that cell with him as long as it took for him to gather and report any and all information that might be useful to the authorities during what was to come. Whenever possible, the new arrivals were placed with friends that they had known before and trusted before their arrest. Students arrived in groups to detest, and at a certain point the group, along with their assigned cellmates, were led into a room and stood up in rank.

A communist inmate, flanked by several others, would stand in front of the group and and give a speech calling on them to denounce their old ways and embrace communism. They'd heard all this before. The speech was so pat and corny that the confused students believed he the guy was joking, doing some kind of a parody of communist propaganda, and so they began to joke back.

And as soon as that happened, the speaker lifted his cap, and the communist inmates in front, as well as all of the cellmates who had spent weeks befriending the new arrivals, grabbed clubs which had been hidden beforehand and attacked. With indescribable fury they began to hit him, with fists, cudgels, and feet, and to toss him from one to another until the bloodied wretch fell almost senseless and could no longer rise.

after they had given him a few more kicks to the head, two of them picked him up and threw him on the bunk, making him sit with his hands in his pockets and his head bowed according to the order. Then another followed, then another, as though in a devilish ring dance intended to annihilate the last speck of physical and moral resistance of those who entered their rabid game. End quote.

The first hand account of this first attack comes from one of the earliest Patest inmate subjects quote There followed a terrible scene, lasting unbelievably for several hours, during which one could hear only the thwacks of the bludgeons, the groans of the sufferers, and the profanity of the warden and his henchmen.

The student communists helped the guards every now and then, when some unfortunate managed to separate himself from the group of those beaten and tried, futilely, to find a hiding place. The guards dealt their blows with all the viciousness they could muster, venting their spite on us for having defied them previously.

Weakened by our designedly inadequate diet, overwhelmed by the number and force of the guards as well as by the authority they represented, little by little we ceased our futile but still instinctive efforts to avoid the blows. By now the guards struck us as they would so many empty sacks. The floor was full of urine and blood. Prostrate and exhausted by beating, our bodies were strewn on the floor like corpses on a battlefield. Finally, the guards left the room.

We thought that it was finished, but this was only the beginning, for now another group took over and set upon us. And that was how the experiment began. Severe beatings with clubs and whips and other things randomly but consistently administered were just background noise at Pit. Prisoners were beaten often for hours at a time, as frequently as possible without killing them in order to keep them in a compromised state of suffering.

Doctors were kept on hand to ensure that the prisoners didn't die under torture, and to revive them if they fainted or were knocked unconscious so that the torture could continue. But otherwise, the inmates were denied basic medical care, and so sores festered and skin rotted away because they were always filthy and forced to live in clothes soaked with blood, excrement, and other bodily fluids. They were kept on a starvation diet, of course, and denied regular sleep.

Bright lights would be kept on during their sleep hours, and inmates were required to sleep in a specific position without moving a muscle. And another inmate who was further ahead in his re education was assigned to stand over the sleeper with a club, and if the sleeper so much as twitched, the club was brought down as hard as possible, usually on the shins or the soles of the feet.

After a few times of being awakened by a hard club to the shins, inmates were so afraid of inadvertently moving while asleep that they rarely slept at all, and so over time became more and more disoriented and exhausted. In the earlier discussion of the Forest Brothers, I quoted Stalin's approval of torture. He said that the use of torture was absolutely correct and useful because it brought results and greatly accelerated the unmasking of enemies of the people.

That term unmasking seems straightforward enough. You're trying to hide something that the torture unconceals, but unmasking was a technical term in communist torture regimes. doctor Shirley Spitz, in a paper called The Psychology of Torture written in nineteen eighty nine, wrote Detention without trial and torture bring constant reminders of the helplessness of the victim and can result in severe regression to emotionally preverbal vulnerability.

In such a state, mature defense mechanisms are lost, and the victim has to resort to primitive mechanisms such as splitting, dissociation, and introjection. Here we can mention the widely documented defense of identification with the aggressor. The torturer is introjected or swallowed whole as a psychic attempt to control an intolerable conflict situation.

However, the victim also interjects the torturer's abusive and negative view of himself. This can often lead to self destructive attitudes and behaviors. Under conditions of torture, where emotions and physical reactions have to be repressed, the victim's sense of coherence and self-experience are shaken, and he begins to lose a sense of familiarity with himself. His identity begins to fragment.

If we add at this point the experience of extreme physical pain, Where the contents of consciousness dissolve, he will experience a breakdown in his conviction about the very existence and reality of his external world and of the own his own reality of his of himself. All that may be left is physical pain and the internalized definition of himself as non human, worthless, and deserving of his torture.

These unconscious, traumatic meanings that he attaches to his experience reflect the underlying shattering of archaic narcissistic fantasies. He can no longer believe in his own invulnerability, nor in the safety of a benign other. The CIA's nineteen eighty three Human Resources Exploitation Training Manual puts it this way. The purpose of all coercive techniques is to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist.

Regression is basically a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioral level. As the subject regresses, his learned personality traits fall away in perverse chronological order. He begins to lose the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to deal with complex situations, to cope with stressful interpersonal relationships, or to cope with repeated frustrations. It's worth mentioning that torture at Pitesht was not intended to extract information.

Again, unlike in some other Eastern Bloc countries, there was no civil war in Romania. There was no militant anti communist resistance. And the Red Army had taken care of that. This was about something else. These inmates had mostly been incarcerated for some time, many of them years, and so any information they might have had would have been long obsolete. This wasn't about information.

Instead, the torturers would extract confessions of shameful events in the victim's life just to humiliate them, or force them to admit false confessions that they had knowledge of terrible crimes committed by their parents or priests or friends. Torture at Petesht had one aim to harm, and to degrade and dehumanize in order to confuse and weaken the subject for the next stage of the experiment, called unmasking. Or as the writer Baku puts it in the Anti Humans, a book about the Patesh prison.

Investigations conducted in the Ministry of the Interior and in various regional securitates managed to wrest quite a few secrets from the students, not so much because of moral weakness as by means of brutal methods of interrogation. These were such that it was almost impossible for a student to deny an offense even if he had committed none. He admitted the crime to avoid further torture.

But even though the Securitate did succeed in tearing secrets from tortured minds, it was unable to affect the structure of the soul. On the contrary, having passed through these investigations, the students came out more convinced than ever of the righteousness of the cause for which they were suffering, and of the absurdity of the newly imposed system.

As long, then, as the soul remained unaltered, there had been no defeat. So it was precisely the soul that remained the principal target, its utter destruction, the aim. Those who masterminded and directed the operation wanted more than the mere torturing of the victims. They were determined to penetrate into the most intimate recesses of the human soul, probing and prodding it.

finding even the smallest cleavages, discovering everything that can be struck, broken, destroyed in man to leave him only a body made passive and void of volition. Beasts kill out of biological necessity to feed, but the beast man when he uses reason to implement his hatred, knows no limits. Only men capable of both great lucidity and frenzied hate could have decreed Pitesh, end quote and From another book on this called The Devil's Mill by Eugen Mugarescu, we have this.

In a so called act of depersonalization, students were forced under torture, permanent and unimaginable torture, to betray all that they held dear, God, their own parents, brothers, sisters, friends. They were constrained to drink urine and eat feces. The human being was thereby annihilated. Disgusted at his weakness, he would never be able to recover himself before his own conscience. The pain was beyond human endurance and

Then they undressed me. What followed is indescribable, beatings on the head to induce stupefaction, beatings on the face for disfigurement, thousands of blows to the back below the ribs, to the solar plexus, and to the soles of my feet. Dozens of fainting, dozens of times fainting, and then all over again for hours and hours on end. One of the communists' primary weapons was time. They had all the time in the world. An inmate who was still holding on to something, anything that made him human.

And something other than clay in the experimenter's hands could be told that look, countless others have already been through this program. People way stronger than you. They all felt just like you thought. and one hundred percent of them had been broken completely. And these young men were not tortured for days or weeks, but every day in shifts without reprieve for months.

They were told that it would go on as long as it had to, that they would be tortured and tortured, and if they passed out, the torture would continue when they woke up. And they weren't trapped in a cave by ISIS. There was no hope, however dim, of Delta Force coming to the race rescue. The communists were in control. You couldn't hope that the authorities would find out what was happening. The authorities were doing it.

The torturer could threaten that even if the victim went into a coma for thirty years, that he'd be there waiting in the hospital room when he woke up. It's a different thing to be tortured and not merely beaten or mutilated, but tortured in a way designed by people who sat down around a table and figured out ways meant to drive your pain to the highest possible intensity. and to know that there is no hope coming from the outside.

As doctrinaire atheists and materialists, a central claim of the communists in the twentieth century was that the material world is all there is. And so history and politics and human psychology are all subject to the same natural forces that govern falling bodies and chemical reactions. The experiment at Patesh took this claim to its logical conclusion with regard to the individual person. Its purpose was to demonstrate that

its ostensible purpose was to demonstrate that there was no soul. There was no hidden kernel, no mystery at the heart of man that could not be cut out and laid on the operating table for scientific prodding. Your beliefs, your values, your loves, your loyalties are just ephemera. Those are mass. Worn over the true man which in his essence is no different from any other animal. And for this reason did the experimenters refer to the crucial stages of their program as unmasking.

Once subjects had been reduced to the condition of animals, they could be shaped, without interference by the principles of operant conditioning. Just as was Pavlov's dog and B. F. Skinner's Animal Subjects or Alex from a Clockwork Orange. But first they had to be pulled down to that level.

And so inmates were required to eat like animals, on all fours without using their hands. They were made to empty their bowels and their bladders in the same dish in which their food was served, and they were forbidden from washing it. They were required to clean filthy toilets with their mouths. When they vomited, they were required to eat the vomit and everything it contained.

This is from an account taken by Kostin Moriska in the Pitesh tragedy. Quote You were made to pull at each other's genitals, or one of them would put his penis in your mouth. If you soiled yourself during beatings, you were made to eat your own feces and to lick the dirty long johns, or to eat another's feces from your own mess tin, without being allowed to wash it after that. You were made to kiss each other's bottoms. You were made to urinate in each other's mouths.

When you begged for water, you would be given urine from the bucket, or they would urinate in your mouth, or others would spit in your mouth. You were made to spit in each other's bottoms and then lick it up. They would wipe a stick smeared in feces on your mouth and in your mouth. You were made to stick your finger up your bottom and then suck it. End quote.

Typically, once the program had been going on for a while, these tortures would be administered by other prisoners, other student prisoners under coercion. The designers of the experiment had created a kind of Evil Genius.

self reinforcing system of escalating torture by involving the inmates in this way. Because one of the recurring questions that would be posed to inmates under torture was whether any of their fellow inmates that were assigned as their persecutors had shown any signs of leniency toward them, any sympathy toward them.

Had anyone held back with the club? Had anyone ever shown you mercy during a beating? Had you ever moved while sleeping, and the person who was supposed to hit you with the club let you off the hook? Had anyone ever shared food with you? Had anybody helped you in any way? Shown any compassion?

The inmate torturers, they were further ahead in the program. They'd all been through this themselves already. And so they knew from their own experience that no one would stand up to the torture over time. So when it was their turn to be the torturer, they removed all the brakes on their cruelty for fear that they would then later be accused of holding back and find themselves cycled back to the beginning of the program, which is what would happen.

And most of them were cycled back through several times anyway, for real or invented reasons, just to remove any impression that they had some kind of control over their circumstances. And yet even still, torturing your best friends. Because that's what these were. The hardcore student movement was a small and closely knit group, and many of them not only knew each other but they'd been through a lot together.

torturing your comrades and being tortured by them, this was still just condition setting. Preparation for the true purpose of the experiment, which again was to reorder the personality. The most fundamental values and beliefs of these men, who have been pre selected for their rigid discipline, their patriotism, and their commitment to Christianity. Quote Performances on religious subjects, such as black masses staged at Easter or Christmas, horrified the detainees.

On such occasions it was the theology students who were to suffer the most, dressed up as Christs, clothed in cassoc and smeared with excrement. They were made to take communion with urine and feces standing in for bread and wine, and instead of the cross a phallus was fashioned, which all the others were made to kiss. Alongside them hymns were sung with evil words in which the commonplaces were insults against Christ and the Virgin Mary.

Sometimes the detainees would be stripped naked, and sexual plays were performed on the orders of the guards. On Good Friday, he assigned inmates their roles. This one is Joseph, another is Mary Magdalene, the Virgin, Christ, and so forth, as well as one assigned to play a donkey. And they were forced to perform. The donkey is phalated by Mary Magdalene, and then sodomized by Joseph, before ending with its muzzle between the legs of the Virgin Mary while being sodomized by Jesus.

The guards displayed a diabolical pleasure in mocking the faithful. Such scenes had a terrible effect on the victims who, as a rule, had found their only solace in the faith itself. However, after participating in these black masses, their entire faith was shaken to its foundations, end quote.

One favorite tactic of the guards was to chant baptismal rites, while buckets of urine and feces were brought before the inmates, whose heads would be sh pushed down into the sewage until it filled their lungs and they began to drown from it. The head was pulled out long enough for the inmate to take a breath and regain his senses enough to hear the religious chanting before he was resubmerged again, and again and again in a mockery of the baptismal rite.

When they vomited excrement, they were beaten and forced to eat it. A prisoner would be smeared in excrement and dressed in the phony vestments of a priest, while others were forced to come before him, kneel, cross themselves, and intone a reverential prayer, and then lick theses from his genitals or his behind. Prisoners would be forced to perform sex acts on one another.

Or they would be sodomized with large clubs and other painful instruments while being held down face to face with an icon of Christ or the Virgin Mary while liturgical music played. The goal of that was simple. and apparent to anyone who's seen a clockwork orange, it was to cause the inmates on a deep, unconscious level, to associate the symbols of their Christian faith with suffering and degradation.

Each of these prisoners, by definition, had been willing to risk his life by engaging in anti communist activism, and every one of them would have rather died than torture their friends or endure the torments of this prison. And so the authorities took great care to prevent any possibility of suicide, because the prisoners would take the narrowest opportunity for it.

In one instance a prisoner was being led up to a cell on a third floor mezzanine and when his guard got temporarily distracted, just for one moment, in that one moment of distraction, he took the opportunity and threw himself to the concrete floor below and died. All sharp objects would have to be kept from them because there would be no hesitation if they had the opportunity to take it and go for one of their vital arteries.

Several members of one class, for lack of a better word, tore out the veins in their wrists using their teeth, and so the others in the class had their teeth knocked out. After that, other measures were put in place to make sure that inmates were under supervision and control at all times to prevent suicide. Quote, Everything of the past which could offer any kind of refuge was to be muddied and denigrated. This included the heroes of history and the folklore of Christian inspiration.

Then, to be given special attention was the destruction of love for family, in order to completely isolate the victim in his own misery, bereft of religion, love of country, and family. This would break the chain that links together a community of national thought and gives meaning to a national struggle.

When the individual was thus cut off from his history, faith, and family, the ultimate step in re educating him was to destroy his existence as a personality, as an individual This, to the victim, was to prove the most painful step of all, and was called his unmasking.

The torture continued during the unmasking stage because again, the torture was mostly just condition setting. That was just their at le again, background noise, just to keep'em in the proper state of openness and vulnerability and dependency.

During inmates unmasking, when they were being reprogrammed, They would be made to do things like write sworn affidavits, accusing their families and friends and priests of all manner of barbaric behavior, you know, mothers prostituting themselves to priests. Fathers raping their daughters and so on, and those letters would be signed and then brought back to the inmates' home villages and circulated around the community. shown to their parents, shown to their neighbors.

But it's worth emphasizing again that none of this was meant to extract information. And it's also worth mentioning that even calling it an experiment, I think it rings pretty false. Even taking the Clockwork Orange aspect at face value is The means were so crude and haphazard that it's very hard to avoid the conclusion that the experiment was just an official euphemism for putting these men through hell just because they could.

These educated, nationalist, deeply Christian young men were the flower of the Romanian nation. They had been the bulwark against communism before the Red Army arrived. And now they were in the hands of their enemies, again the majority of whom at this stage were not even ethnic Romanians, and for all the scientific gloss on these events. The accounts are hardly different in any detail from what you'd expect to read about people who had fallen into the hands of a deranged serial killer.

A further piece of evidence that the whole idea of an experiment was only a fig leaf is the fact that after the experiment at Pitesh, most of the students were sent to slave labor camps and worked to death anyway. So it's not as if the th the authorities were real concerned with whether their personalities had been truly sustainably altered.

You know, yeah, there was a lot of demagoguery and excesses during the Red Scare, but also too being struck by the fact that uh too many people just have no understanding of what we were really dealing with here. There had never been anything like the Soviet Union under Stalin. Not at that scale and with that kind of power and with those global totalizing ambitions.

And the funny thing is, as instinctually conservative as I am in certain ways, I actually appreciate Marx and many Marxist thinkers. But the version of Marxism refracted through Lenin and politically manifested in the USSR that sought not only to smash capitalism and replace it with centrally planned collectivist economics. But made it its mission to destroy everything that people had valued for thousands of years.

To cause children to hate their parents and parents to suspect their children, to make people hate their national culture and disavow their faith and spit on their heritage and their traditions and To my mind it was something like Satanism in a modern disguise. And there was never