Rebooting the Concentration Camps: How the Soviets Continued the Holocaust

Students are familiar with the basic facts of the Holocaust: how the Nazis forced millions of Jews into concentration camps, and then murdered many of them. These victims came from various countries. Although a relatively small number of the murdered Jews were German citizens, many more of them were German Jews — so classified because, even though they’d never set foot in Germany and did not have German citizenship, they were culturally German and spoke Yiddish. Yiddish is a Germanic language and historians estimate that 85% of the Jews who were murdered were Yiddish speakers.

What is, however, less well-known is the history of the concentration camps after early 1945. As WW2 drew to a close, the Soviet army, advancing toward Germany and eventually into Germany from the east, encountered and liberated the camps. The western Allies, advanced from the west, encountered fewer camps. One by one, all the camps were discovered by the victorious armies.

Newspapers and radios around the world delivered the shocking and horrifying details of the atrocities which the Nazis had committed in the camps.

But what happened to the concentration camps after May 1945 — after the German military surrendered, and the fighting in Europe came to an end? After a burst of coverage in the news, when photographers and reporters were allowed into the camps along with the general public to see for themselves what had happened?

Although the Holocaust remained in the news, with the Nuremberg Trials in late 1945 and most of 1946, and photos of the camps accompanied the news stories of the trials, the camps themselves faded from attention: the images were file photos from the liberations in early 1945. Reporters and photographers were not flocking to the camps any longer, and the general public wasn’t either.

With the camps largely out of sight, the Soviet Socialists began to renovate them one by one. The majority of the concentration camps were located in the areas occupied by the Soviet Army: East Germany, Poland, and other parts of eastern Europe.

Those who’ve read about the Holocaust will recognize the names of the camps which the Soviet Socialists renovated: Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, etc.

The Soviets updated and improved Nazi concentration camps in Germany and in Poland. Then they put these camps back into operation. The camps which the Nazis had used to kill millions of Jews were functioning again. They would do so for another five years.

The Soviets rounded up a variety of people — those deemed in any way an obstacle to the Soviet military dictatorship — imprisoned them in the camps, tortured them, and murdered them. This was often done without any legal proceedings or trials. Sometimes the people simply disappeared; their friends, family, and neighbors had no clue as to their whereabouts.

Historians Ursula Haertl, Agnes Nattermüller, and Roswitha Burwick describe one specific example at Buchenwald:

From 1945 to 1950, the Soviet occupation forces used the area of the former concentration camp as an internment camp (Special Camp No. 2). The persons sent to this camp mainly included members of the NSDAP (i.e., the fascist party), officials in positions close to the National-Socialist regime, but also people arrested arbitrarily. Among the total of approximately 28,000 internees, more than 7,000 died mainly as a consequence of neglect and undernourishment. The dead were buried in mass graves north of the camp and near the railway station.

The example of Buchenwald was repeated at the other camps. The Soviets refurbished and used the Nazi concentration camps for five years in the territory of East Germany. In Poland, they not only used the Nazi camps, but also built a few new ones of their own.

The horrors of the concentration camps didn’t end when the Nazis surrendered. The Nazis were gone: they’d been sentenced to prison, or executed for war crimes, or rehabilitated, or escaped to South America.

The Nazis were gone, but the Soviet Socialists kept the camps running for another five years. Exact numbers are debated, but in any case, the Soviets murdered hundreds of thousands of Polish, German, and other victims in the renovated Nazi concentration camps.

The horrors of the Holocaust continued long after the Nazis were gone, long after WW2 was over, and long after the rest of the world thought that the brutality had ended.

Trends in European Car Manufacturing from 2006 to 2024: Eastern Europe Emerges

Following the collapse of Soviet Socialism in eastern Europe in 1990-1991, the economies in each of the individual nations — Poland, East Germany, Hungary, etc. — endured the shock treatment as the old communist systems collapsed, temporarily plunging the markets into chaos and short-term hardship. Then began the long ascent into healthy and vital growth, raising the standard of living in those countries for lower-income level workers.

After less than a decade, the eastern European nations were ready to be significant players in the global market. Companies from western Europe were eager to establish themselves in the East, with its lower real estate costs and large labor supply.

By November 2006, John Tagliabue could write:

For Slovakia, the recent inauguration of an $890 million automobile factory was a major event. The prime minister and other government officials attended. French executives from Peugeot Citroën, which built the factory, flew into the tiny town of Trnava, where the sprawling factory is expected to employ up to 3,500 people and churn out as many as 300,000 compact cars a year. After the collapse of Communism in 1989, many foreign carmakers rushed to acquire local carmakers or build their own factories in countries like Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic.

By the end of 2022, Slovakia would be home to four car assembly plants as well as several part supplier plants, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).

The Slovakian automobile industry would be producing 12.6 cars per worker by the end of 2023, making it the second most efficient car industry in Europe, as stated by ACEA.

This was the vision back in 2006: the eastern European nations were growing into the world economy, and while recovering from the Soviet Socialist era, they still had advantages and resources which allowed them to complete, as John Tagliabue wrote:

That relative trickle, though, is now a flood. The money has been pouring in, and the pace and frenzy is prompting talk of Europe’s auto industry shifting from west to east.

By 2010, the Czech Republic could nearly double its production over last year, to more than a million cars. Indeed, as a whole, Eastern Europe has become Europe’s backyard manufacturing center, and it could be producing 3.4 million cars annually by 2010, a 33 percent jump over 2005, according to forecasts by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Even Russia’s production is expected to rise to 1.6 million cars a year from 1.2 million now.

The Czech Republic’s efficiency was, however, half of Slovakia’s at the end of 2023. The Czech automobile sector produced 6.3 cars per worker.

In Slovakia, at the end of 2021, 16% of all the country’s manufacturing workers were in the auto industry, making it the most auto-oriented economy in Europe.

In the 35 years of post-Soviet growth, there have been setbacks. In 2022, Slovakia produced 970,275 motor vehicles, all of which were passenger cars. In that same year, the Czech Republic produced 1,221,246 vehicles, of which 1,214,746 were passenger cars.

Despite these impressive numbers, it was in western Europe where the largest per-country numbers of vehicles were manufactured, with Germany in first place in 2022. The former Soviet-bloc countries came in at fourth place (the Czech Republic) and fifth place (Slovakia).

While total European car manufacturing peaked in 2017, with an output of around 14,914,629 units, Slovakian car manufacturing peaked in 2019, with 1,107,902 units. The decline in European totals began pre-pandemic, while Slovakia was going strong until the pandemic.

While Slovakia has returned to almost pre-pandemic levels, with an output of 1,080,000 in 2023, Europe as a whole has not returned to its 2017 peak, manufacturing 10,890,123 cars in 2022.

Industry trends and market trends are constantly changing, but it can be said that eastern European nations have become major players in the auto industry during the last 35 years.

Reasons to Be Cheerful — Part 6

The psychological configuration of the human mind is such that it has a preference for bad news. Swedish scholar Hans Rosling discovered that humans are more likely to believe bad news than good news. When people hear bad news, they quickly internalize it, and proceed to think about what caused this problem, who’s to blame for this problem, what people should do to fix this problem, etc.

When people hear or read good news, they are often skeptical, find it boring, or find ways to minimize what’s encouraging about the good news: “Yes, but …”

Rosling’s work is carried on by his son and daughter-in-law, who created the Gapminder Foundation to further his research.

In the book Factfulness Rosling listed a number of encouraging facts about the world, and studied people’s tendency to ignore, disbelieve, or downplay salutary facts. People readily believe and amplify falsehoods, when those falsehoods are depressing and discouraging. People have a predisposition to embrace propositions which ignite sadness or anger.

Among the uplifting facts listed in the book are:

• In the year 1800, over 190 countries in the world allowed slavery, which Rosling defines as a situation in which “forced labor is legal or practiced by the state.” In 2017, fewer than ten countries had legal systems which permitted slavery.
• In 1979, oil accidentally spilled from tanker ships into the sea amounted to 636,000 tons. After a consistent downward trend, only 6,000 tons were spilled in 2016.
• The price of solar panels in 2016, measured in terms of dollars per watt produced, was one one-hundredth of what it was in 1976.
• In 2016, new HIV infections worldwide were fewer than half of what they were in 1996.
• In 1800, 44% of children died before their fifth birthday. In 2016, only 4% of children died before that point.
• After the United States developed the catalytic converter in the 1970s, the number of countries using leaded gasoline fell from more than 190 in 1986 to fewer than 5 in 2017.
• Measured as a ratio of deaths to miles flown, plane crash deaths in the era of 2012 to 2016 were less than one two-thousandth (0.04%) of what they were in the years between 1929 and 1933.
• Some of Rosling’s definitions are imprecise or ambiguous, but the numbers are still encouraging. He defines “child labor” as “children aged 5 - 14 who work full time under bad conditions.” Whatever ‘bad’ might mean, it’s good that only 10% of children were subject to such labor in 2012, compared to 28% of children in 1950.
• Likewise, the phrase “deaths from disaster” is somewhat vague: what counts as a ‘disaster’? But in any case, those deaths fell from 971,000 per year in the 1930s to 72,000 annually in the years between 2010 and 2016.
• Air quality has improved. In 1970, for every person on the planet, 38 kg of SO₂ particles were emitted in smoke. In 2010, only 14 kg of such smoke particles were emitted per person.
• The planet’s food supply continues to grow quicker than the population. Over the last five decades, the world has produced more food annually than is needed to feed the earth’s entire population. The yield of cereal grain per acre more than doubled between 1961 and 2014.
• The global literacy rate went from 10% in the year 1800 to 86% in 2016.
• “Child Cancer Survival,” defined as “5 year survival of those diagnosed before age 20, with best treatment,” went from 58% in 1975 to 80% in 2010.
• Rosling also lists statistics showing significant increases in the “share of people with some access to electricity” and the “share of people with a cellphone,” as well as the “share of people using the internet.” The number of scholarly articles published per year also continues to increase.

Rosling is certainly not arguing that the world has no problems. The problems are real and significant. But the world is also experiencing some salutary trends.

The innate inclination of the human mind to focus more on problems than on benefits. The structure of the news media, relying as it does on using strong emotions like fear and anger to elicit clicks on websites and keep eyes on continuously updated posts, amplifies this already troublesome human tendency.

To obtain a more accurate understanding of the world, the public must develop an intentional and disciplined habit of looking for good news. It’s there.

The Historiography of Islam in the 1700s: Explaining the Eighteenth Century

Islam, as a socio-political movement, has organized itself in a variety of associations over the centuries, sometimes successively, and sometimes simultaneously in parallel. One of those associations was the Ottoman Empire, sometimes also cited as the Turkish Empire. This empire lasted until 1922, and in previous centuries had ruled, at various times, areas including North Africa, Yugoslavia, Greece, parts of Persia, the Levant generally, and of course the region now known as Turkey.

Islam had at times hoped to expand further northward, and mounted military campaigns to capture Vienna in 1529, 1683, and other times. Islam also invaded and briefly occupied parts of Poland and Ukraine.

The reign of Ahmed III from 1703 to 1730 saw another stirring of Islamic expansionism. He oversaw the Muslim armies which invaded what is now Romania, Ukraine, and Russia in 1711; this invasion was ultimately unsuccessful. Likewise, he ordered his armies to attack Venice; Austria came to the aid of Venice, and in 1716, Prince Eugene of Savoy led an Austrian army to defeat the Islamic army in the Battle of Petrovaradin (also known as Peterwardein).

Describing Islam in the mid-1700s, historian Will Durant explains the expanse of its influence:

It still dominated Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Persia, Asia Minor, the Crimea, South Russia, Bessarabia, Moldavia, Wallachia (Romania), Bulgaria, Serbia (Yugoslavia), Montenegro, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Greece, Crete, the Aegean Isles, and Turkey. All these except Persia were part of the immense empire of the OttomanTurks. On the Dalmatian coast they touched the Adriatic and faced the Papal States; on the Bosporus they controlled the sole naval outlet from the Black Sea, and could at will block the Russians from the Mediterranean.

He surveys Islamic culture from Turkey to North Africa to Persia, and then presents his generalizations.

Although he admired Islam and often praised it, Will Durant was not blind to the fact that Muslim “women stayed at home, or walked” subservient “under their burdens and behind their veils.” He gives the date of 1754 for significant Ottoman legislation which made even stricter the requirement for veils and burqas, but he does not cite the source of this date.

Infatuated with a romanticized concept of Islam — an image promulgated by some European poets — Durant describes the Muslim women, wrapped in burqas, carrying baskets or large clay jars on their head, as moving with a “certain ease and grace” and “in stately dignity.” He is either oblivious to, or deliberately disguising, the oppression under which these women lived and worked — or perhaps he sees the situation clearly, and is honoring the character of these women as they carry on despite the most brutal subjugation.

While Christianity appeared as, and developed ever more into, a personal spirituality or belief, Islam constituted a political, social, and military program, as Will Durant explains:

Religion was more powerful and pervasive in Islam than in Christendom; the Koran was the law as well as the gospel, and the theologians were the official interpreters of the law.

Islamic morals were entrenched. The social patterns of Islam persevered. While Christianity promoted an ethic, Islam promoted a morality, as Will Durant writes:

Morals hardly changed from century to century. Puberty came earlier than in the north; many girls married at twelve or thirteen, some at ten; to be unmarried at sixteen was a disgrace.

In the passage quoted above, Durrant’s partiality towards Islam can be detected. If there were any difference between the north and the south in the onset of puberty, then it was indeed slight. No biologist will claim otherwise. Instead, it was merely Islam’s authorization to allow unrestrained male lust. The same was true of “the polygamy that Koranic law allowed.”

The Qur’an dictated such inequality. The same asymmetry in the legal treatment of women was applied to cases of adultery:

A cuckolded husband was not only permitted by law, but was encouraged by public opinion, to put the offending wife to death.

Forgiveness, not only in the case of an adultress, was rare or unknown. “Islamic theology,” writes Durrant, “considered woman a main source of evil, which could be controlled only by her strict subordination. Children grew up in the discipline of the harem.” Women moved “with a certain” motion, which they derived “from carrying burdens.”

The physical role of women in Islam was clear, as Durrant explains:

Polygamy did not prevent prostitution, for prostitutes could provide the excitation that familiarity had allayed. The courtesans of Egypt specialized in lascivious dances; some ancient monuments reveal the antiquity of this lure. Every large town allotted to prostitutes a special quarter where they might practice their arts without fear of the law.

Christianity’s earliest sources were not in Europe, but rather in the same ancient near east which also birthed Islam. Yet while Christianity imperfectly but increasingly gave status to women, Islam did the opposite. While Hildegard of Bingen was issuing written rebukes to popes and kings, Muslim women were bound by their gender to subservient roles.

Yet strict legalism sires energetic defiance.

So it was that Islamic civilizations, based upon the most stringent of written legal codes, rebelled correspondingly in the most excessive exploitation of women. The laws of the Muslims repressed sexuality in an extreme way, so the lives of the Muslims violated those laws in the most extreme way. Islamic rigidity fueled Islamic hypocrisy.

Women skilled in erotic dances were engaged to vibrate before male assemblies, and in some cases, women also took pleasure in witnessing such performances.

Again, Durrant’s fondness for Islam persuades him to understate, or to phrase in the most gentle way, his description of what was standard practice in Islamic society in the mid-1700s. The reader will understand what a less euphemistic account of these realities might be.