The Allies exposed this atrocity to the world’s attention. In the western parts of Germany, the armies of the English, French, and Americans put these camps on public display - first to educate the Germans about the evil they had enabled, second to inform the world about mass murder.
But in the eastern parts of Germany, where the Soviet army invaded, a slightly different scenario took place. The Soviets, like the western Allies, ensured a public display of the camps, long enough for the local citizens to learn and for the world’s media to document. But, after that interval, the Soviets placed the camps off limits. Nobody could go near them.
What was happening in those camps?
The Soviets, after exposing those camps briefly to the world, made them once again secret, and restarted them. The Soviets operated some of the most notorious concentration camps, names like Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, for years after Germany had been liberated from the Nazi dictatorship.
The Soviet renovation and reoperation of the concentration camps was kept secret for many years. It was not until 1989/1990, when the Soviet puppet government in East Germany fell, that the full details of this operation were revealed to the world.
Although the Allies had liberated Germany from the Nazi dictatorship in April 1945, the Soviets had kept the concentration camps running until 1950. The Soviets, having invaded the eastern part of Germany, saw that the camps provided a mechanism for implementing their ideology.
The Soviets rounded up thousands and tens of thousands of civilians and added them to the camps.
There were differences between the Soviet operation of the camps and the Nazi operation of the camps. The Soviets targeted a slightly different mix of victims. The Nazis had sent, along with the millions of Jewish Germans, groups of communists and Slavs to the camps. The Soviets, obviously, did not send people to the camps for being Slavic or communist.
The Soviet operation of the concentration camps was not as well documented as the Nazi atrocities. The Nazis were meticulous in recording the name of prisoners, the dates of their arrivals, and the dates of their deaths. The Soviets, by contrast, killed thousands of people in the camps, but the data about who was killed and when remains incomplete.
Like the Nazis, the Soviets worked to hide their actions. The communists hid behind the high-sounding verbiage of the Allies. While presenting themselves to the world as liberators, the communists had in fact simply continued the operation of the death camps.
Historians Günter Agde, Lutz Prieß, and Peter Erler recount the humanitarian-sounding language with which the Soviet hid their atrocities:
1944/1945 schlug der von Deutschland entfesselte II. Weltkrieg auf das eigene Territorium zurück. Die drei Hauptverbündeten der Antihitlerkoalition - die UdSSR, USA, und Großbritannien - verbanden mit dem Ziel der bedingungslosen militärischen Kapitulation auch konsequenten Maßnahmen der Entmilitarisierung und Entnazifizierung sowie der Sühne von Verbrechen gegen Frieden und Menschlichkeit. Auf der Konferenz von 3. bis 11. Februar 1945 in Jalta beschlossen die alliierten „Großen Drei“, „alle Kriegsverbrecher einer gerechten und schnellen Bestrafung zuzuführen“ und „die nazistische Partei, die nazistischen Gesetze, Organisationen und Einrichtungen zu liquidieren, alle nazistischen und militaristischen Einflüsse in den öffentlichen Einrichtungen sowie dem kulturellen und wirtschaftlichen Leben des deutschen Volkes zu beseitigen und gemeinsam solche anderen Maßnahmen in Deutschland zu ergreifen, die sich für den künftigen Frieden und die Sicherheit der ganzen Welt als notwendig erweisen können.“
Although these events have been documented in detail by a number of historians, they still have not worked their way into the popular consciousness. Given a prompt like “Europe in the decade after WWII” or “the presence of the Soviet army in East Germany,” the average student or well-read adult is not likely to respond with the blunt and horrifying fact that, while the western Allies liberated the prisoners and put the camps on display to the world, the Soviets renovated the physical structures of the camps and restarted them, continuing mass murder for another five years.
