Auschwitz. Concentration camp Auschwitz I. Concentration camps in Poland were sometimes worse than Nazi camps

Concentration camps in Poland existed 20 years before the German “death factories”

The hell of Polish concentration camps and captivity destroyed tens of thousands of our compatriots. Two decades before Khatyn and Auschwitz.
The military Gulag of the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is more than a dozen concentration camps, prisons, marshalling stations, concentration points and various military facilities such as the Brest Fortress (there were four camps here) and Modlin. Strzałkowo (in western Poland between Poznan and Warsaw), Pikulice (in the south, near Przemysl), Dombie (near Krakow), Wadowice (in southern Poland), Tuchole, Shipturno, Bialystok, Baranovichi, Molodechino, Vilno, Pinsk, Bobruisk...

And also - Grodno, Minsk, Pulawy, Powazki, Lancut, Kovel, Stryi (in the western part of Ukraine), Shchelkovo... Tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers who found themselves in Polish captivity after the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1920 found a terrible, painful death here .

The attitude of the Polish side towards them was very clearly expressed by the commandant of the camp in Brest, who stated in 1919: “You, Bolsheviks, wanted to take our lands away from us - okay, I’ll give you the land. I have no right to kill you, but I will feed you so much that you yourself will die.” Words did not diverge from deeds. According to the memoirs of one of those who arrived from Polish captivity in March 1920, “We did not receive bread for 13 days, on the 14th day, it was at the end of August, we received about 4 pounds of bread, but it was very rotten, moldy... The sick were not treated, and they died in dozens...”

From a report on a visit to the camps in Brest-Litovsk by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the presence of a doctor of the French military mission in October 1919: “A sickening smell emanates from the guardhouses, as well as from the former stables in which prisoners of war are housed. The prisoners are chillingly huddling around a makeshift stove where several logs are burning - the only way to warm themselves. At night, sheltering from the first cold weather, they lie in close rows in groups of 300 people in poorly lit and poorly ventilated barracks, on planks, without mattresses or blankets. The prisoners are mostly dressed in rags... Complaints. They are the same and boil down to the following: we are starving, we are freezing, when will we be freed? It should be noted, however, as an exception that proves the rule: the Bolsheviks assured one of us that they would prefer their present fate to the fate of soldiers in the war. Conclusions. This summer, due to overcrowding of premises unsuitable for habitation; close cohabitation of healthy prisoners of war and infectious patients, many of whom died immediately; malnutrition, as evidenced by numerous cases of malnutrition; swelling, hunger during the three months of stay in Brest - the camp in Brest-Litovsk was a real necropolis... Two severe epidemics devastated this camp in August and September - dysentery and typhus. The consequences were aggravated by close living together of sick and healthy, lack of medical care, food and clothing... The mortality record was set in early August, when 180 people died from dysentery in one day... Between July 27 and September 4, t .e. In 34 days, 770 Ukrainian prisoners of war and internees died in the Brest camp. It should be recalled that the number of prisoners imprisoned in the fortress gradually reached, if there is no mistake, 10,000 people in August, and on October 10 it was 3,861 people.”

This is how the Soviets came to Poland in 1920

Later, “due to unsuitable conditions,” the camp in the Brest Fortress was closed. However, in other camps the situation was often even worse. In particular, a member of the League of Nations commission, Professor Thorwald Madsen, who visited the “ordinary” Polish camp for captured Red Army soldiers in Wadowice at the end of November 1920, called it “one of the most terrible things he saw in his life.” In this camp, as former prisoner Kozerovsky recalled, prisoners were “beaten around the clock.” An eyewitness recalls: “Long rods were always lying at the ready... I was spotted with two soldiers caught in a neighboring village... Suspicious people were often transferred to a special punishment barracks, and almost no one came out from there. They fed “once a day a decoction of dried vegetables and a kilogram of bread for 8 people.” There were cases when starving Red Army soldiers ate carrion, garbage and even hay. In the Shchelkovo camp, “prisoners of war are forced to carry their own excrement on themselves instead of horses. They carry both plows and harrows” AVP RF.F.0384.Op.8.D.18921.P.210.L.54-59.

Conditions in transit and in prisons, where political prisoners were also kept, were not the best. The head of the distribution station in Pulawy, Major Khlebowski, very eloquently described the situation of the Red Army soldiers: “obnoxious prisoners in order to spread unrest and ferments in Poland” constantly eat potato peelings from the dung heap. In just 6 months of the autumn-winter period of 1920-1921, 900 prisoners of war out of 1,100 died in Pulawy. The deputy head of the front sanitary service, Major Hakbeil, most eloquently said about what the Polish concentration camp at the collection station in the Belarusian Molodechino was like: “The prisoner camp at collection station for prisoners - it was a real dungeon. No one cared about these unfortunate people, so it is not surprising that a person unwashed, unclothed, poorly fed and placed in unsuitable conditions as a result of infection was doomed only to death.” In Bobruisk “there were up to 1,600 captured Red Army soldiers (as well as Belarusian peasants of the Bobruisk district sentenced to death - Author), most of whom were completely naked”...

According to the testimony of the Soviet writer, an employee of the Cheka in the 20s, Nikolai Ravich, who was arrested by the Poles in 1919 and visited the prisons of Minsk, Grodno, Powonzki and the Dombe camp, the cells were so crowded that only the lucky ones slept on planks. In the Minsk prison there were lice everywhere in the cell, and it was especially cold because outer clothing had been taken away. “In addition to an ounce of bread (50 grams), hot water was provided in the morning and evening, and at 12 o’clock the same water, seasoned with flour and salt.” The transit point in Powązki “was filled with Russian prisoners of war, most of whom were cripples with artificial arms and legs.” The German revolution, writes Ravich, freed them from the camps and they spontaneously went through Poland to their homeland. But in Poland they were detained by special barriers and driven into camps, and some were forced into forced labor.”

And such a “reception” awaited them in captivity...

Most of the Polish concentration camps were built in a very short period of time, some were built by the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. They were completely unsuited for long-term detention of prisoners. For example, the camp in Dąba near Krakow was an entire city with numerous streets and squares. Instead of houses there are barracks with loose wooden walls, many without wooden floors. All this is surrounded by rows of barbed wire. Conditions of detention of prisoners in winter: “most of them without shoes - completely barefoot... There are almost no beds and bunks... There is no straw or hay at all. They sleep on the ground or boards. There are very few blankets.” From a letter from the chairman of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation at peace negotiations with Poland, Adolf Joffe, to the chairman of the Polish delegation, Jan Dombski, dated January 9, 1921: “In Domb, most of the prisoners are barefoot, and in the camp at the headquarters of the 18th division, most do not have any clothes.”

The situation in Bialystok is evidenced by letters preserved in the Central Military Archive from a military medic and the head of the sanitary department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, General Zdzislaw Gordynski-Yukhnovich. In December 1919, he reported in despair to the chief doctor of the Polish Army about his visit to the marshalling station in Bialystok: “I visited the prisoner camp in Bialystok and now, under the first impression, I dared to turn to Mr. General as the chief doctor of the Polish troops with a description of that terrible picture , which appears before the eyes of everyone who ends up in the camp... Once again, the same criminal neglect of their duties by all authorities operating in the camp brought shame on our name, on the Polish army, just as happened in Brest-Litovsk... In The camp is in unimaginable dirt and disorder. At the doors of the barracks there are piles of human waste, which are trampled and carried throughout the camp by thousands of feet. The patients are so weakened that they are unable to reach the latrines. Those, in turn, are in such a state that it is impossible to get closer to the seats, since the entire floor is covered with a thick layer of human feces. The barracks are overcrowded, and there are many sick people among the healthy. According to my data, among the 1,400 prisoners there are no healthy people at all. Covered in rags, they hug each other, trying to keep warm. The stench reigns, emanating from patients with dysentery and gangrene, legs swollen from hunger. Two particularly seriously ill patients lay in their own excrement, leaking from their torn pants. They did not have the strength to move to a dry place. What a terrible picture.” A former prisoner of the Polish camp in Bialystok, Andrei Matskevich, later recalled that a prisoner who was lucky received a day “a small portion of black bread weighing about 1/2 pound (200 grams), one shard of soup, which looked more like slop, and boiling water.”

The concentration camp at Strzałkowo, located between Poznań and Warsaw, was considered the worst. It appeared at the turn of 1914-1915 as a German camp for prisoners from the fronts of the First World War on the border between Germany and the Russian Empire - near the road connecting two border areas - Strzalkowo on the Prussian side and Sluptsy on the Russian side. After the end of World War I, it was decided to liquidate the camp. However, instead it passed from the Germans to the Poles and began to be used as a concentration camp for Red Army prisoners of war. As soon as the camp became Polish (from May 12, 1919), the mortality rate of prisoners of war in it increased more than 16 times during the year. On July 11, 1919, by order of the Ministry of Defense of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it was given the name “prisoner of war camp No. 1 near Strzałkowo” (Obóz Jeniecki Nr 1 pod Strzałkowem).

One could only dream of such a dinner...

After the conclusion of the Riga Peace Treaty, the concentration camp in Strzalkowo was also used to hold internees, including Russian White Guards, military personnel of the so-called Ukrainian People's Army and the formations of the Belarusian “father”-ataman Stanislav Bulak-Bulakhovich. What happened in this concentration camp is evidenced not only by documents, but also by publications in the press of that time.

In particular, the New Courier of January 4, 1921 described in a then sensational article the shocking fate of a detachment of several hundred Latvians. These soldiers, led by their commanders, deserted from the Red Army and went over to the Polish side in order to return to their homeland. They were received very cordially by the Polish military. Before they were sent to the camp, they were given a certificate that they voluntarily went over to the side of the Poles. The robbery began already on the way to the camp. The Latvians were stripped of all their clothes, with the exception of underwear. And those who managed to hide at least part of their belongings had everything taken away from them in Strzałkowo. They were left in rags, without shoes. But this is a small thing compared to the systematic abuse to which they were subjected in the concentration camp. It all started with 50 blows with barbed wire whips, while the Latvians were told that they were Jewish mercenaries and would not leave the camp alive. More than 10 people died from blood poisoning. After this, the prisoners were left for three days without food, forbidden to go out for water on pain of death. Two were shot without any reason. Most likely, the threat would have been carried out, and not a single Latvian would have left the camp alive if its commanders - Captain Wagner and Lieutenant Malinovsky - had not been arrested and put on trial by the investigative commission.

During the investigation, among other things, it turned out that walking around the camp, accompanied by corporals with wire whips and beating prisoners, was Malinovsky’s favorite pastime. If the beaten person moaned or asked for mercy, he was shot. For the murder of a prisoner, Malinovsky rewarded the sentries with 3 cigarettes and 25 Polish marks. The Polish authorities tried to quickly hush up the scandal and the matter.

In November 1919, the military authorities reported to the Polish Sejm commission that the largest Polish prisoner camp No. 1 in Strzałkow was “very well equipped.” In reality, at that time the roofs of the camp barracks were full of holes, and they were not equipped with bunks. It was probably believed that this was good for the Bolsheviks. Red Cross spokeswoman Stefania Sempolowska wrote from the camp: “The Communist barracks were so crowded that the squashed prisoners were unable to lie down and stood propping each other up.” The situation in Strzałkow did not change in October 1920: “Clothes and shoes are very scanty, most walk barefoot... There are no beds - they sleep on straw... Due to lack of food, prisoners, busy peeling potatoes, secretly eat them raw.”

The report of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation states: “Keeping prisoners in their underwear, the Poles treated them not as people of an equal race, but as slaves. The beating of prisoners was practiced at every step...” Eyewitnesses say: “Every day, those arrested are driven out into the street and, instead of walking, are forced to run, ordered to fall into the mud... If a prisoner refuses to fall or, having fallen, cannot rise, exhausted, he is beaten with blows from rifle butts.”

The victory of the Poles and their inspirer Jozef Pilsudski

As the largest of the camps, Strzałkowo was designed for 25 thousand prisoners. In reality, the number of prisoners sometimes exceeded 37 thousand. The numbers changed quickly as people died like flies in the cold. Russian and Polish compilers of the collection “Red Army Men in Polish Captivity in 1919-1922.” Sat. documents and materials” claim that “in Strzałkowo in 1919-1920. About 8 thousand prisoners died.” At the same time, the RCP(b) committee, which operated clandestinely in the Strzalkowo camp, stated in its report to the Soviet Commission on Prisoners of War Affairs in April 1921 that: “in the last epidemic of typhoid and dysentery, 300 people each died. per day... the serial number of the list of those buried has exceeded the 12th thousand...". Such a statement about the enormous mortality rate in Strzałkowo is not the only one.

Despite claims by Polish historians that the situation in Polish concentration camps had once again improved by 1921, documents indicate otherwise. The minutes of the meeting of the Mixed (Polish-Russian-Ukrainian) Commission on Repatriation dated July 28, 1921 noted that in Strzalkow “the command, as if in retaliation after the first arrival of our delegation, sharply intensified its repressions... Red Army soldiers are beaten and tortured for any reason and for no reason... the beatings took the form of an epidemic.” In November 1921, when, according to Polish historians, “the situation in the camps had radically improved,” RUD employees described the living quarters for prisoners in Strzalkow: “Most of the barracks are underground, damp, dark, cold, with broken glass, broken floors and thin roof. Openings in the roofs allow you to freely admire the starry sky. Those placed in them get wet and cold day and night... There is no lighting.”

The fact that the Polish authorities did not consider “Russian Bolshevik prisoners” to be people is also evidenced by the following fact: in the largest Polish prisoner of war camp in Strzałkowo, for 3 (three) years they were unable to resolve the issue of prisoners of war taking care of their natural needs at night. There were no toilets in the barracks, and the camp administration, under pain of execution, forbade leaving the barracks after 6 pm. Therefore, the prisoners “were forced to send their natural needs into the pots, from which they then had to eat.”

The second largest Polish concentration camp, located in the area of ​​​​the city of Tuchola (Tucheln, Tuchola, Tuchola, Tuchol, Tuchola, Tuchol), can rightfully challenge Strzałkowo for the title of the most terrible. Or, at least, the most disastrous for people. It was built by the Germans during the First World War, in 1914. Initially, the camp held mainly Russians, later they were joined by Romanian, French, English and Italian prisoners of war. Since 1919, the camp began to be used by the Poles to concentrate soldiers and commanders of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian formations and civilians who sympathized with the Soviet regime. In December 1920, a representative of the Polish Red Cross Society, Natalia Krejc-Welezhinska, wrote: “The camp in Tuchola is the so-called. dugouts, which are entered via steps going down. On both sides there are bunks on which the prisoners sleep. There are no hay fields, straw, or blankets. No heat due to irregular fuel supply. Lack of linen and clothing in all departments. The most tragic are the conditions of the new arrivals, who are transported in unheated carriages, without appropriate clothing, cold, hungry and tired... After such a journey, many of them are sent to the hospital, and the weaker ones die.”

From a letter from a White Guard: “...The internees are housed in barracks and dugouts. They are completely unsuited for winter. The barracks were made of thick corrugated iron, covered on the inside with thin wooden panels, which were torn in many places. The door and partly the windows are fitted very poorly, there is a desperate draft from them... The internees are not even given bedding under the pretext of “malnutrition of the horses.” We think with extreme anxiety about the coming winter” (Letter from Tukholi, October 22, 1921).

Camp in Tukholi then and now...

The State Archive of the Russian Federation contains memoirs of Lieutenant Kalikin, who passed through the concentration camp in Tukholi. The lieutenant who was lucky enough to survive writes: “Even in Thorn, all sorts of horrors were told about Tuchol, but the reality exceeded all expectations. Imagine a sandy plain not far from the river, fenced with two rows of barbed wire, inside which dilapidated dugouts are located in regular rows. Not a tree, not a blade of grass anywhere, just sand. Not far from the main gate are corrugated iron barracks. When you pass by them at night, you hear some strange, soul-aching sound, as if someone is quietly sobbing. During the day the sun in the barracks is unbearably hot, at night it is cold... When our army was interned, the Polish minister Sapieha was asked what would happen to it. “She will be dealt with as required by the honor and dignity of Poland,” he answered proudly. Was Tuchol really necessary for this “honor”? So, we arrived in Tukhol and settled in iron barracks. The cold weather set in, but the stoves were not lit for lack of firewood. A year later, 50% of the women and 40% of the men who were here fell ill, mainly from tuberculosis. Many of them died. Most of my friends died, and there were also people who hanged themselves.”

Red Army soldier Valuev said that at the end of August 1920 he and other prisoners: “They were sent to the Tukholi camp. The wounded lay there, unbandaged for weeks, and their wounds were full of worms. Many of the wounded died; 30-35 people were buried every day. The wounded lay in cold barracks without food or medicine.”

In the frosty November of 1920, the Tuchola hospital resembled a conveyor belt of death: “The hospital buildings are huge barracks, in most cases iron, like hangars. All the buildings are dilapidated and damaged, there are holes in the walls through which you can stick your hand... The cold is usually terrible. They say that during frosty nights the walls become covered with ice. The patients lie on terrible beds... All are on dirty mattresses without bed linen, only 1/4 have some blankets, all are covered with dirty rags or a paper blanket.”

Representative of the Russian Red Cross Society Stefania Sempolovskaya about the November (1920) inspection in Tuchol: “The patients are lying in terrible beds, without bed linen, only a fourth of them have blankets. The wounded complain of terrible cold, which not only interferes with the healing of wounds, but, according to doctors, increases the pain during healing. Sanitary personnel complain about the complete lack of dressings, cotton wool and bandages. I saw bandages drying in the forest. Typhus and dysentery were widespread in the camp and spread to prisoners working in the area. The number of sick people in the camp is so great that one of the barracks in the communist section has been turned into an infirmary. On November 16, more than seventy patients lay there. A significant part is on the ground."

The mortality rate from wounds, disease and frostbite was such that, according to the conclusion of American representatives, after 5-6 months there should have been no one left in the camp. Stefania Sempolovskaya, commissioner of the Russian Red Cross Society, assessed the mortality rate among prisoners in a similar way: “...Tukholya: The mortality rate in the camp is so high that, according to calculations made by me with one of the officers, with the mortality rate that was in October (1920), the whole camp would have died out in 4-5 months.”

Tombstones of Soviet prisoners of war in dirt and oblivion

The emigrant Russian press, published in Poland and, to put it mildly, had no sympathy for the Bolsheviks, directly wrote about Tukholi as a “death camp” for Red Army soldiers. In particular, the emigrant newspaper Svoboda, published in Warsaw and completely dependent on the Polish authorities, reported in October 1921 that at that time a total of 22 thousand people had died in the Tuchol camp. A similar figure of deaths is given by the head of the II Department of the General Staff of the Polish Army (military intelligence and counterintelligence), Lieutenant Colonel Ignacy Matuszewski.

In his report dated February 1, 1922 to the office of the Minister of War of Poland, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, Ignacy Matuszewski states: “From the materials available to the II Department ... it should be concluded that these facts of escapes from camps are not limited only to Strzałkow, but also occur in all other camps, both for communists and for white internment. These escapes were caused by the conditions in which the communists and internees were (lack of fuel, linen and clothing, poor food, and long waits to leave for Russia). The camp in Tukholi became especially famous, which internees call the “death camp” (about 22,000 captured Red Army soldiers died in this camp."

Analyzing the contents of the document signed by Matuszewski, Russian researchers, first of all, emphasize that it “was not a personal message from a private person, but an official response to the order of the Polish Minister of War No. 65/22 of January 12, 1922, with a categorical instruction to the head of the II Department of the General Staff : “...to provide an explanation under what conditions the escape of 33 communists from the Strzalkowo prisoner camp took place and who is responsible for this.” Such orders are usually given to special services when it is necessary to establish with absolute certainty the true picture of what happened. It was no coincidence that the minister instructed Matuszewski to investigate the circumstances of the escape of communists from Strzałkowo. The head of the II Department of the General Staff in 1920-1923 was the most informed person in Poland on the real state of affairs in the prisoner of war and internment camps. The officers of the II Department subordinate to him were not only involved in “sorting” arriving prisoners of war, but also controlled the political situation in the camps. Due to his official position, Matushevsky was simply obliged to know the real state of affairs in the camp in Tukholi. Therefore, there can be no doubt that long before writing his letter of February 1, 1922, Matuszewski had comprehensive, documented and verified information about the death of 22 thousand captured Red Army soldiers in the Tucholi camp. Otherwise, you have to be a political suicide to, on your own initiative, report unverified facts of this level to the country's leadership, especially on an issue that is at the center of a high-profile diplomatic scandal! Indeed, at that time in Poland passions had not yet had time to cool down after the famous note of the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR Georgy Chicherin dated September 9, 1921, in which he, in the harshest terms, accused the Polish authorities of the deaths of 60,000 Soviet prisoners of war.”

In addition to Matuszewski’s report, reports in the Russian émigré press about the huge number of deaths in Tukholi are actually confirmed by reports from hospital services. In particular, a relatively “clear picture regarding the death of Russian prisoners of war can be observed in the “death camp” in Tukholi, in which there were official statistics, but only for certain periods of the prisoners’ stay there. According to these, although not complete, statistics, from the opening of the infirmary in February 1921 (and the most difficult winter months for prisoners of war were the winter months of 1920-1921) and until May 11 of the same year, there were 6,491 epidemic diseases in the camp, 17,294 non-epidemic ones. In total - 23785 diseases. The number of prisoners in the camp during this period did not exceed 10-11 thousand, so more than half of the prisoners there suffered from epidemic diseases, and each of the prisoners had to get sick at least twice in 3 months. Officially, 2,561 deaths were registered during this period, i.e. in 3 months, at least 25% of the total number of prisoners of war died.”

A modern monument on the site of a Polish concentration camp for Soviet

According to Russian researchers, the mortality rate in Tukholi during the most terrible months of 1920/1921 (November, December, January and February) “can only be guessed at. We must assume that it was no less than 2,000 people per month.” When assessing the mortality rate in Tuchola, it must also be remembered that the representative of the Polish Red Cross Society, Krejc-Wieleżyńska, in her report on visiting the camp in December 1920, noted that: “The most tragic of all are the conditions of the new arrivals, who are transported in unheated carriages, without appropriate clothing, cold , hungry and tired... After such a journey, many of them are sent to the hospital, and the weaker ones die.” The mortality rate in such echelons reached 40%. Those who died on the trains, although they were considered sent to the camp and were buried in camp burial grounds, were not officially recorded anywhere in general camp statistics. Their number could only be taken into account by the officers of the II Department, who supervised the reception and “sorting” of prisoners of war. Also, apparently, the mortality rate of newly arrived prisoners of war who died in quarantine was not reflected in the final camp reports.

In this context, of particular interest is not only the above-cited testimony of the head of the II Department of the Polish General Staff, Matuszewski, about mortality in the concentration camp, but also the recollections of local residents of Tucholy. According to them, back in the 1930s there were many areas here “where the ground collapsed under your feet, and human remains protruded from it”...

...The military Gulag of the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lasted relatively short-lived - about three years. But during this time he managed to destroy tens of thousands of human lives. The Polish side still admits the death of “16-18 thousand”. According to Russian and Ukrainian scientists, researchers and politicians, in reality this figure may be about five times higher...

Nikolay MALISHEVSKY, “Eye of the Planet”

Poland must answer for its crimes

. *"For 500 years Poland has been causing constant headaches for Europe. It’s time to finally put an end to this topic" -
F.D. Roosevelt, 1945 .

So, Russia the day before witnessed with its own eyes a humiliating act of repentance for unproven, falsified and refuted (and, therefore, de jure non-existent) sins.

Now we need:
1. Repent before the Swedes - for Poltava;
2. Before the Germans - for Lake Peipsi;
3. Before the French - for Borodino;
4. Before the Mongols - Tatars - beyond the Kulikovo field;
And also before the Finns, Turks and Japanese... we must repent before everyone. To do this, it will be necessary to create a State Federal Agency for Repentance - there is a lot of work...

But, as for WHO we repented to this time, it is absolutely necessary to understand what political role played
during these five hundred years mentioned by Roosevelt - Poland.
And this role, it must be said frankly, was unenviable, although the Polish rulers themselves were never particularly embarrassed about this. Numerous historians have repeatedly described this feature of the mentality of the Polish elite as exceptional greed and corruption.

Poland as a state has always behaved this way.
During the period of troubles and during the war between Russia and Swedes, during the Suvorov campaigns and Napoleonic wars (the Poles, together with the French, entered Moscow in 1812), the year before, in the past, and now in this century.
How can you not remember what else? Frederick the Great in the 18th century named Poland "prostitute of Europe ".
And it seems that it sounds insulting, and it’s already the 21st century, but you can’t erase the word from the song... and the Germans for their Friedrich
(as well as the Americans for their Roosevelt, and the British for their Churchill) - the Poles are not offended.
But the Russians, come on - they fight in hysterics, kick their legs in accusatory ecstasy …
But today I’m not talking about repentance that happened the day before. Today is about something else.
******
About Polish death camps

(in this way and not otherwise), since they reflect in the clearest and most concentrated form the entire essence of interwar Poland.

Let's start with the fact that after the departure of the German army (meaning after the First World War), Poland "inherited" a large number of Russian prisoners of war ( about 30,000 people, but this figure is inaccurate, since no one specifically dealt with this issue, especially since the delegation of the Russian Red Cross sent to solve this problem was highly humanely shot by the Poles), captured by the Kaiser’s army during the First World War, whom the new government was in no hurry to release.

Then, during the fighting that began between Poland and Soviet Russia, new prisoners appeared, captured by the Polish army.
In November 1919, in Polish camps there were 40,000 prisoners of war
(they were placed in camps
Bialystok, Brest-Litovsk, Dombe, Grodno, Kovel, Lancut, Pikulicy, Strzalkovo, Szczyperno, Stry, Wadowice),
of which, according to a Polish historian from the University of Torun. Nicolaus Copernicus, Dr. Zbigniew Karpus,
by February 1920, 20,667 people remained.

Karpus himself explains this by saying that some of the captured Galicians were allegedly released before the attack on Kyiv as part of the agreement Pilsudski and Petliura
(with the immediate mobilization of these to strengthen the Petliura army), but since only two Petliura “divisions” operated in the Polish army and, according to the Ukrainian historian Savchenko, one of them had only 2300 fighters, the other - 2000. Thus, loss of 15,000 people cannot be explained in any way based on Karpus’s statement.

One can, of course, attribute them to the high mortality rate during the typhoid pandemic that then swept through Russia and Eastern Europe, but this is also the wrong decision, since the Polish leadership itself made its own active efforts to reduce the number of prisoners.
Thus, a survivor of the camp in Brest-Litovsk recalled:
"The commandant addressed us with a speech: “You Bolsheviks wanted to take our lands away from us - okay, I’ll give you the land.
I don’t have the right to kill you, but I will feed you so much that you yourself will die.”
For 13 days we did not receive bread, on the 14th day, it was at the end of August (1919), we received about 4 pounds of bread, but very rotten, moldy... The sick were not treated, and they died in dozens... In September 1919, 180 died people per day."
...add: The Germans in the concentration camps fed the Jews as best they could and treated them (!). Meticulous barn books were kept about this by the pedantic Germans. Hitler turned to his “masters” with a request to allocate funds for the maintenance of their fellow tribesmen. But the “owners” refused.
Otherwise, after the war there would have been no reason to put a collar around the neck of the German people!
Unparalleled Jesuit gesheft. In Jewish...

So, in just one winter 1919/1920 gg. the Poles died in their camps 15,000 people(and this is based on Polish data, which, as happens in such cases, to put it mildly, suffers from some incompleteness).
And at the end of February 1920, these camps received an influx of new contingents. These were not Red Army soldiers,
but quite the opposite - whites: a detachment of General Bredov crossed the Polish border (20,000 bayonets and 7,000 refugees),
forced out of the Odessa region by the Red Army.
It would seem that both the Whites and Pilsudski had a common enemy, but Bredow’s people were not at all welcome in Poland and, moreover,
They saw them as “centuries-old oppressors of the Polish people.”

(those. and these Russians were accused, but of crimes of tsarist oppression! )
Therefore, the arriving whites were thrown into the already existing camps - Dombe, Pikulitsy and Strzhalkovo, where their situation was not much different from the position of the Red Army soldiers:
they received the bread with lumps of salt the size of nuts, pieces of rope and just dirt, so they had to beg
food from the local population and switch to pasture, cooking food over fires, and everything that could be found in the camps, including mattresses, was used for firewood.

After the Soviet-Polish war entered its active phase in the spring of 1920, a new flow of prisoners poured into the camps.
According to daily reports from the II Department of the Polish General Staff to the Polish military attache in Vienna from January 1 to November 25, 1920, 146,813 people were taken prisoner, and this does not count those who were recorded as “many prisoners,” “a significant number,”
"two divisional headquarters."
Their situation was no better than described above.
According to the data of the II Department of the Polish General Staff, published in 1921 in Boris Savinkov’s newspaper Svoboda, 22,000 people died in the Tuchola (Tukhol) camp alone from the fall of 1920 to the spring of 1921.

I emphasize: - This is data from the Polish General Staff, published a long time ago and recognized as a fact a long time ago!

In contrast to the supposed “evidence”, but in fact - falsifications, on the basis of which the well-known repentance took place the day before, about which a State Duma deputy angrily, but factually and convincingly spoke with an open letter to the President Victor Ilyukhin.

But prisoners died not only in Tuchola: the representative of the Soviet side A. Ioffe, having examined the camp in Strzalkowo,
reported on December 14, 1920 to the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs G.V. Chicherin, that according to the calculations of the representative of the Russian Red Cross in Poland, Stefania Sempolowska, confirmed by the Polish official authorities, the mortality rate there is so high that if it does not decrease, the prisoners of war will die out within six months.

Well, the fact that the situation of prisoners in Polish camps is monstrous was agreed upon by such different, and often simply antagonistic in their political convictions, parties as representatives of the joint Soviet-Polish commission, representatives of the Polish and Russian Red Cross, the French military mission in Paris, emigrant press ("Freedom" Savinkov, Parisian "Common Cause", Berlin "Rul") and international organizations (including
American Christian Youth Union and American Relief Administration (ARA)).

After the signing of the Treaty of Riga, Poland handed over to the Soviet side 75,699 prisoners of war(according to the mobilization department of the Red Army Headquarters); before 25.000 decided to stay in Poland.
Total: 40,000 in November 1919, plus 150,000 captured in 1920 (rounded up due to vague reports about a “significant number” of prisoners) and minus 4,300 Petliurists and 25,000 “defectors” give at least 85,000 died in Polish captivity!!

This is the result of the activities of the Polish death camps (and this does not take into account the people of General Bredov who died of starvation!) -
almost 20 times more than the “4,421 executed in Katyn”, for which we (but not the Germans who shot them!!) have been forced to repent and beat our heads on the paving stones until exhaustion since the times of the spotted perestroika.

And Russia has long been designated as the main and only culprit for all sins by the Poles.
By the way, to inflate one of the main reproaches of Russia Poland diligently cultivates the myth of the “two golden decades” of Polish history in the 20-30s of the last century. And that, they say, the bad Hitler, and then the bad Stalin, destroyed this whole pristine, immaculate idyll.

It's time to dispel this myth.

So, the First World War ended. Taking advantage of the post-war weakness of its neighbors, who were also torn apart by civil wars and conflicts, Poland immediately seized territory from them beyond the borders determined by the Entente.

I grabbed it from almost everyone and didn’t forget anyone. For example, it seized the Vilna region along with the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, from bourgeois Lithuania. And when the Entente demanded that this region be returned to Lithuania, the Poles declared that the Polish troops that had captured the Vilna region had rebelled and did not want to leave, and the Polish government, well, was unable to do anything with these troops!

For a whole year they tried to persuade their troops to leave Lithuania, they tried to persuade them, but they were not able to persuade them.
AND Entente in 1923 year agreed with this Polish position. For this reason, Lithuania, of course, did not establish diplomatic relations with Poland.

Poland also seized a piece of territory assigned by the Entente to Czechoslovakia, seized the territories of Germany that were not due to it, but especially profited from the RSFSR, torn apart by the civil war.

Ukraine and Belarus were cut off a little by half. Before concluding a non-aggression pact with Poland, Ukraine even moved its capital to Kharkov, since Kyiv was almost a border city.

That is, at that time when Hitler had not even written his “Mein Kamf” with theses about the need to expand its territories, Poland was already actively
SHA K A L I L A.
Naturally, for this, all of Poland’s neighbors, to put it mildly, disliked Poland and, to be honest, the USSR also did not like it.
And not even so much for the capture and enslavement of peoples of the same blood, but for the fact that Poland, having declared itself a bulwark of the West against Bolshevism, contained on its territory gangs that invaded the USSR, killed Soviet people, and then ran away back.

So, Poland, in relation to all its neighbors, immediately after the First World War behaved like an aggressor state, to be honest, like a racketeer, like a highway bandit. Or, if you want, a jackal at the same time.

But the USSR, weakened to the limit by the world and civil wars, was more important than anyone to have peaceful neighbors on its borders. Therefore, he sought friendship even with such a gangster Poland.
As a result, the more the USSR “crept” under Poland, the more it tried to establish friendly relations with it, the more impudently the Poles behaved.

The ruling circles of Poland, naturally, have repeatedly made demands for the provision of colonies to Poland.
Let us remember that it was Polish diplomacy that voluntarily took upon itself the protection of the interests of Hitler’s Germany in the League of Nations, which Germany defiantly left in 1933!
From the rostrum of the League of Nations, Polish diplomats justified Hitler's brazen violations of the Versailles and Locarno treaties: the introduction of universal conscription in Germany, the abolition of military restrictions, the entry of Hitler's troops into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936, and so on.

The elite of Poland then really set themselves the goal of having Poland within its borders 1772, providing, respectively, the seizure of Ukraine and the creation of Poland from “sea to sea”, i.e. from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
The Polish elite was not embarrassed by the fact that already at that time there were only about 60% of Poles in Poland, nor was it stopped by the fact that nowhere in Ukraine were crowds of Ukrainians walking around with posters “We want to join Poland!”
Well, the nobility of Ukraine wanted it, and that’s it!

And within Poland, Polish racism was established, and in its meanest form - unofficial.
The Germans were much more honest in this regard: they openly declared that Aryans are everything, and non-Aryans are nothing.
Rough, but straight!

In Poland, there was officially equality of all peoples. But look how things actually stood
with the national question.
Summary of the national composition of Polish army officers who were in the Starobelsky and Kozelsky camps of the USSR,
and it was not gendarmes or police officers who were kept there, but simple army and naval officers.
The sample is very large - 8394 people. Let's compare the percentage of different nationalities among officers
with the percentage of these nationalities in the population of pre-war Poland.

Nationality Percentage composition
Population Officers
Poles 60.0 97.4
Ukrainians 21.0 0.1
Jews 9.0 1.9
Belarusians 6.0 0.3
Germans 3.0 0.1
Others 1.0 0.2
So, what comments can there be on this table?

And therefore, in the Poland of that time, the non-Polish population was subjected to discriminatory segregation primarily on the basis of nationality in almost all spheres of life.

And is it, ultimately, worth surprising at these memories of the captured Polish officer Henryk Gorzechowski about the time when, in September 1939, Soviet soldiers escorted him in a column of other prisoners to the camp:
“Then they drove us on foot to Rivne. I remember now: when we walked through the city, in many places, mainly on Jewish shops, narrow red flags hung.
It was clearly visible that these were Polish flags, the top part of which had been torn off. Jewish and Ukrainian women threw filth at us, shouting: “The end of your Polish state!”

It got to the point that in Bursztyn, Polish officers, sent by the corps to school and guarded by a small guard, asked to increase the number of soldiers guarding them as captives in order to avoid possible reprisals against them by the population.
You also can’t imagine it on purpose - being captured by the enemy to escape from your own citizens.

Well, where there is forced segregation, concentration camps for “white blacks” and other untermensch should automatically and immediately appear. Of course, they immediately appeared in Poland.
As an example: in June 1934 in the city of Bereza-Kartuzskaya (now the city of Bereza, Brest region, Belarus) in the buildings of the former barracks of the Russian army, a concentration camp was created for opponents of the ruling regime - only 15 months after the appearance of Dachau in Germany (and three years before the opening of Buchenwald).
******
Poland concentration camp

The isolation camp (later called the “isolation camp”) consisted of three main buildings, one of which remained behind the outer fence (it housed the camp commandant, his assistants and their families).
The second building contained a guardhouse, police barracks, a bakery, and warehouses for food, weapons and ammunition.
The third building housed prisoners. The first floor was converted into a kitchen and dining room.
There were cells on the second and third floors, separated along their entire length by a corridor. In addition to these premises, on the territory of the camp there were warehouses, a bathhouse, a room for storing fuel and lubricants and a punishment cell - eight damp stone bags in a cellar in the middle of a field.
The camp was fenced with a high plank fence, and barbed wire was stretched over the fence. At each corner of the fence there were guard towers with machine guns. From the outside, the camp was guarded by a patrol that did not have an exact movement schedule.
The building in which the prisoners were kept had additional barbed wire fencing. In addition, the camp yard was divided into separate sections using wire fences.

By order of the Polesie voivode Vaclav Kostek-Bernacki dated July 2, 1934, it was prohibited:
- be close to the camp, that is, cross the line marked by the wire fence in front of the concentration camp fence;
- take photographs of the camp and the persons contained in it;
- have any form of contact with prisoners.
Violators were subject to a fine of up to 500 zlotys or imprisonment for up to 14 days, or both.
On July 12, 1934, the Polesie voivode toughened the punishment for contacting and helping prisoners - now the perpetrators themselves could be imprisoned in a concentration camp, as persons posing a threat to public safety and order. This fate, for example, befell Dr. Zelinsky and his son, who in July 1934 photographed the premises of the concentration camp.

The concentration camp was specially located in a fairly remote place - away from unpleasant foreign correspondents and League of Nations officials. Entry into the town itself without special permission was prohibited; permission to enter was given only by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Warsaw. The police, “precipitators” and various agents monitored the roads to prevent strangers from appearing, and local residents were obliged to report them to the nearest police station; Every passerby had their documents checked.

The first commandant of the concentration camp (until December 1934) was Boleslav Greffner. Greffner characterized the camp practice: " From Bereza you can go to your own funeral or to a mental hospital."

According to the decree, the concentration camp was created for people opposed to the existing regime. At first, more than half of the prisoners were Ukrainian nationalists, members of the National Democratic Party and communists, members of the Communist Party of Poland, right-wing Polish extremists from the "ONR" (Polish: Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny - National Radical Camp - Polish nationalist organization).
Over time, people who committed economic crimes, mostly Jews, also began to end up in the camp.

Unmarried policemen aged from 25 to 35 served in the camp. Since the organization of the concentration camp, the police contingent was about 60 people. At the end of 1937, due to the increase in the number of prisoners, their number increased to 162, and in April 1939 there were 126 people alone among the rank and file.
At the same time, the camp commandant constantly sent reports to the Polesie Voivodeship with requests to increase the number of police officers to the full strength of the infantry company, that is, to 141 privates. Later their number exceeded this figure.

The concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzskaya was supervised by the Polesie voivode Kostek-Bernacki, who was the highest representative of the Polish government in this territory. He often came to the camp and not only got acquainted with the general conditions that existed there, but also delved into the small details of the treatment of prisoners and gave orders to tighten conditions. The relations developing in Bereza were also known to the central political bodies.
This is evidenced by the presence in the camp of the director of the political department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Kovetsky, who threatened those released from the camp with repeated imprisonment if they talked about what they experienced in Bereza.

But the prisoners in Bereza-Kartuzskaya had a lot to endure. Let's start with arriving at the camp - this is how he describes it
Stepan Ivanovich Burak, member of the Communist Party of Western Belarus since 1934, who was in the camp from April 1937 to March 1938 and in September 1939. (camp number - 1079):
- “The distance from the camp gate to the barracks is about 150-200 meters. If two prisoners were handcuffed with the same handcuffs, then these received much more blows than those who were handcuffed alone.
Those who arrived were given a number, which each had to sew on the back and right sleeve.
In a cell where 30 people were imprisoned, the same numbers were attached across the top of the bunks.
The new arrival was placed in a single isolated room, where he was beaten for six to seven days in a row. In this case, the prisoner had to stand facing the wall and not move, not fall to the floor without a command.

This was done in order to immediately stun the prisoner, exhaust him, and demoralize him. And indeed: whoever was unstable in character, weak in health, he could falter and sign a declaration of renunciation of his beliefs.
When the newcomers were left half-dead on the floor, the “old men” tried to support them with these words:
“Comrades, take heart. You need to endure no more than seven days. Then it will be easier, you will remain human.”

Prisoners remember the camp order this way: “The prisoner’s surname was abolished, he appeared only under a number. The special policeman appointed for the “training” first of all forced him to repeat the words:
- “Mr. Commandant, prisoner such and such asks you to humbly go there.” If the prisoner made a mistake, he received sticks.

For failure to comply with orders, the commandant (as the guards are called here) has the right to punish the arrested person physically (with a baton). If the order is not carried out when repeated, the arrested person is subject to punishment in a punishment cell for seven days, and if, after taking these measures, the arrested person still does not comply with the same order, then the commandant has the right to shoot “from armor” (from a firearm) or “kill him with a bagnet” (stab with a bayonet) "...

.and what, in fact, is the difference between a typical Nazi concentration camp and a typical Polish one?! Nothing!
However, let's continue with the quote:
- “No conversation was allowed between the prisoners, nothing could be conveyed even with a glance. Any movement was only on the command “Run and March.” For the slightest violation - beating with rubber truncheons until you were half to death.
In the dining room, whoever received the food first, in a hurry, could somehow consume it, and whoever received the last had to throw the food into the ditch, because very little time was given, the command sounded to finish dinner and run to the washbasin to wash the pots. The entire cell, 20-30 people, was allowed into the restroom at once for five minutes, and since there were only 4 glasses, people fell straight onto the floor. The police hit them on the head with batons and pushed them into the feces, and then forced them to remove the feces from the floor of the restroom with their bare hands.

It was forbidden to receive food parcels in the camp. If anyone received parcels, the guards threw them out to the pigs. You could only get a needle, thread and some clothes."

The original idea of ​​the camp's founders was to carry out a brief but very intense physical and psychological terror in order to frighten the prisoner for the rest of his life and wean him from opposing
Great Poland.
Therefore, if someone decided to publicly (through newspapers) repent and renounce their previous beliefs, then they were released early - the camp had done its job.

But other measures were applied to the “unrepentant” - in 1934, the Prime Minister of Poland Kozlovsky stated that persons who were not corrected by a one-time three-month sentence could be detained in the camp for a long period, therefore, although formally the term of imprisonment was set at three months, the camp administration and judges often extended this period for the next three months, and those isolated in Bereza no one knows by whose decision, usually secretly, they never knew the end of their isolation.
This same the technique - extrajudicial imprisonment in a concentration camp for an unlimited period and unlimited abuse of prisoners - was also used in those years in Nazi concentration camps, and in our time in numerous secret US prisons around the world, including in the territory of independent and democratic Poland.

In addition, for the same reasons, the concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzskaya did not carry out any production functions
(except for a little self-care) - the prison labor used there was intended solely for suppression and exhaustion. Prisoners also testify to this:
- “The work often consisted of putting so many stones on the stretcher that it was difficult to lift, and forcing them to carry it from one place to another and back. If with a loaded stretcher you had to walk at a fast pace, then with an empty one you had to run. At a measured pace It was forbidden to walk here at all.
Often prisoners were harnessed to a cart, filled with sand, and forced to be driven to a designated place or to a road construction site. Every day several people went with barrels to fetch water. One prisoner was harnessed to the shafts of a gig with a barrel, the other was pushing from behind.
The Ukrainian Kazachuk and I were harnessed to a harrow. The harrow was a large wooden one with iron teeth, on which two large stones were placed. We harrowed the rye sown in the potato field. We were harnessed like horses to a harness and belted across our chests.
We thought they would do a short test on us. It turned out that we harrowed the entire first day. Our arms and legs were shaking, and then we began to fall. A policeman who was following the harrow, armed with a machine gun and a rubber truncheon, began beating us.”

In the history of “landings” at Bereza-Kartuzskaya, three stages can be distinguished:
1. Summer 1934 - 1935- A period of mass arrests, isolation of political figures of various political forces.
2. 1935-1936 - reducing the number of arrests; liberation from the concentration camp of all members of the National Democratic Party and OUN members (the latter in connection with the emerging rapprochement between the OUN and the Polish authorities, who saw it as a possible ally in a future war against the USSR).
3. From spring 1936 to autumn 1939- a massive influx of prisoners in connection with the “restoration of order” in preparation for war (in June 1939, the state-political department informed the Ministry of the Interior: “The work is currently in full swing, after its completion it will be possible to house and thousand people"), and from the summer of 1939 Polish Germans joined this flow.

September 18, 1939 g., due to the appearance of German troops in the vicinity of Brest, the concentration camp guards fled, and the prisoners dispersed (arranging lynching over the unwary guards - and after everything described, they are very easy to understand).
The concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzska was not the only weapon of Pilsudski and his associates in the fight against political opponents. In 1931, military courts were officially introduced in the country.
In the same year, 16,000 people were arrested for political reasons, and in the next year - 48,000.
And for this atrocity, Poland must also bear responsibility before all the peoples who suffered from the bloody Polish regime.
******
Patriotism in Polish is anti-Russian!

what convenient terms the enemies of humanity have given us: Nazism, nationalism, patriotism... - a play on words, by manipulating which, you can accuse entire peoples of something that they do not even suspect about themselves, you can pit them against each other,
and destroy!
Anti-Russian attacks in Poland are not only popular today, but anti-Russianism in modern Poland is practically a necessary condition for “Polish patriotism.” Russia is now viewed by the Poles as a barbaric Asian country, for which nothing good is recognized. Look through the Polish central publications: political newspapers that consider themselves liberal, in fact, turn out to be extremely chauvinistic towards Russia.

And leading Polish politicians not only do nothing to stop this wave of Russophobia, but, on the contrary, they themselves actively participate in it. And all the “repentances” of the Russian authorities only strengthen the Polish imperious arrogance and arrogance. It seems that if the entire Russian parliament crawls to the Polish border on its knees, then Polish politicians will be dissatisfied: “You’re not bowing so low, you idiot! There’s not enough remorse on their faces!”

It is Poland that must repent!

But on the eve we should not have repented, but remembered the Red Army soldiers and simply Russian soldiers who were tortured, abused, executed, and also deliberately killed by hunger and disease in Polish captivity in 1921-1922.
Why the day before?
Yes, because the official date of commemoration of the soldiers brutally exterminated by Poland in 1921-1922 has not yet been established, and the only date that can be considered significant is December 4, 2000, when a bilateral agreement appeared between Russia and Poland, when the Russian State The Military Archive and the Polish General Directorate of State Archives made an attempt to find the truth based on a detailed study of the archives, which, unfortunately, was only partially successful, since the Polish side is trying in every possible way to avoid disclosing reliable information and avoid responsibility for this crime.

But okay, if it’s not December 4, let there be another date. But let it be! We must remember our compatriots who were brutally tortured in Polish death camps and constantly remind the arrogant Poles of their monstrous crime (real, not imaginary). And Poland must repent of this crime - genocide. Officially repent!
And when will Russia demand repentance from the Poles for the genocide of the Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and other peoples?...

Executions 1921 - 54 Let's compare the number of prisoners

That is, for the entire period from 1921 to 1954 (for 33 years) sentenced to death 642,980 people. These data were published a long time ago and have not been refuted by anyone.

It turns out - order 20 thousand executed per year. Is it a lot or a little?

First, let's take into account that in reality, Stalin came to power de facto in 1928 (1927 -?) (Lenin died in 1924, and for three or four years Trotsky and others squabbled for power).
That is, six or seven years from these statistics on the fact of repression (including against the Russian Orthodox Church - since this is the work of the Trotskyists) must be deleted from Stalin’s account - and these are not such small numbers in the conditions of the civil war, once here, then there the whites, greens and others, as well as nationalists of all stripes (the Basmachi galloped across the sands and mountains in Central Asia almost until the mid-30s) shot in the back of the new government.

And if you remember the Kronstadt uprising (21, repressively suppressed), Antonov’s and others, then from 21 to 28 a lot of things will happen. Only this, excuse me, has nothing to do with Stalin.
These are Trotsky, Tukhachevsky and others.
But all the same, from the camp of the liberals one immediately hears the familiar annoying (but essentially idiotic) howl about the notorious “tear of a child” and about the tyrant Stalin.
******
In order to understand whether Stalin was really that cruel, let’s first compare these figures with today’s democratic Russia, in terms of population, which is one and a half to two times smaller than the USSR (at different times).

Reference: Number of prisoners in the USSR (at the end of the year), thousand people.
Year / ITL / ITC and prisons / Total
1935 / 725 / 240 / 965
1936 / 839 / 457 / 1296
1937 / 821 / 375 / 1196
1938 / 996 / 885 / 1881

And this despite the fact that the population of the USSR in 1938 was approximately 190 million people.
In total, in the “bloody” year of 1937, there were 629 prisoners per 100 thousand population.
Are these numbers big or small? To answer this question, you need to compare it with something.

According to the director of the Federal Penitentiary Service, as of March 1, 2007, 883.5 thousand people were in custody in Russia, or 655 per 100 thousand population. This is less than in the US (710).
However, it should be taken into account that only prisoners of the GUIN institutions of the Ministry of Justice are included in official statistics. But they hold only 90% of all prisoners.

That's how it is... it turns out that in today's democratic Russia there are MORE prisoners per capita than in the "bloody-tyrannical" 1937!
By the way, liberals love to talk about the fact that all the achievements of Stalin’s five-year plans were entirely created by the forced slave labor of Gulag prisoners. But in democratic Russia today the same number are in prisons and camps. So, where are today’s “miracles” built by “democratic prisoners”?

On April 27, 1940, the first Auschwitz concentration camp was created, intended for the mass extermination of people.

Concentration camp - a place for the forced isolation of real or perceived opponents of the state, political regime, etc. Unlike prisons, ordinary camps for prisoners of war and refugees, concentration camps were created by special decrees during the war, the aggravation of political struggle.

In Nazi Germany, concentration camps were an instrument of mass state terror and genocide. Although the term "concentration camp" was used to refer to all Nazi camps, there were actually several types of camps, and the concentration camp was just one of them.

Other types of camps included labor and forced labor camps, extermination camps, transit camps, and prisoner of war camps. As war events progressed, the distinction between concentration camps and labor camps became increasingly blurred, as hard labor was also used in concentration camps.

Concentration camps in Nazi Germany were created after the Nazis came to power in order to isolate and repress opponents of the Nazi regime. The first concentration camp in Germany was established near Dachau in March 1933.

By the beginning of World War II, there were 300 thousand German, Austrian and Czech anti-fascists in prisons and concentration camps in Germany. In subsequent years, Hitler's Germany created a gigantic network of concentration camps on the territory of the European countries it occupied, turning them into places for the organized systematic murder of millions of people.

Fascist concentration camps were intended for the physical destruction of entire peoples, primarily Slavic ones; total extermination of Jews and Gypsies. For this purpose, they were equipped with gas chambers, gas chambers and other means of mass extermination of people, crematoria.

(Military encyclopedia. Chairman of the Main Editorial Commission S.B. Ivanov. Military Publishing House. Moscow. in 8 volumes - 2004. ISBN 5 - 203 01875 - 8)

There were even special death (extermination) camps, where the liquidation of prisoners proceeded at a continuous and accelerated pace. These camps were designed and built not as places of detention, but as death factories. It was assumed that people doomed to death were supposed to spend literally several hours in these camps. In such camps, a well-functioning conveyor belt was built that turned several thousand people a day into ashes. These include Majdanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka and others.

Concentration camp prisoners were deprived of freedom and the ability to make decisions. The SS strictly controlled every aspect of their lives. Violators of the peace were severely punished, subjected to beatings, solitary confinement, food deprivation and other forms of punishment. Prisoners were classified according to their place of birth and reasons for imprisonment.

Initially, prisoners in the camps were divided into four groups: political opponents of the regime, representatives of “inferior races,” criminals and “unreliable elements.” The second group, including Gypsies and Jews, was subject to unconditional physical extermination and was kept in separate barracks.

They were subjected to the most cruel treatment by the SS guards, they were starved, they were sent to the most grueling works. Among the political prisoners were members of anti-Nazi parties, primarily communists and social democrats, members of the Nazi party accused of serious crimes, listeners of foreign radio, and members of various religious sects. Among the “unreliable” were homosexuals, alarmists, dissatisfied people, etc.

There were also criminals in the concentration camps, whom the administration used as overseers of political prisoners.

All concentration camp prisoners were required to wear distinctive insignia on their clothing, including a serial number and a colored triangle (“Winkel”) on the left side of the chest and right knee. (In Auschwitz, the serial number was tattooed on the left forearm.) All political prisoners wore a red triangle, criminals wore a green triangle, “unreliables” wore a black triangle, homosexuals wore a pink triangle, and gypsies wore a brown triangle.

In addition to the classification triangle, Jews also wore yellow, as well as a six-pointed “Star of David”. A Jew who violated racial laws ("racial desecrator") was required to wear a black border around a green or yellow triangle.

Foreigners also had their own distinctive signs (the French wore the sewn letter “F”, the Poles - “P”, etc.). The letter "K" denoted a war criminal (Kriegsverbrecher), the letter "A" - a violator of labor discipline (from German Arbeit - "work"). The weak-minded wore the Blid badge - “fool”. Prisoners who participated or were suspected of escaping were required to wear a red and white target on their chest and back.

The total number of concentration camps, their branches, prisons, ghettos in the occupied countries of Europe and in Germany itself, where people were kept in the most difficult conditions and destroyed by various methods and means, is 14,033 points.

Of the 18 million citizens of European countries who passed through camps for various purposes, including concentration camps, more than 11 million people were killed.

The concentration camp system in Germany was liquidated along with the defeat of Hitlerism, and was condemned in the verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as a crime against humanity.

Currently, the Federal Republic of Germany has adopted the division of places of forced detention of people during the Second World War into concentration camps and “other places of forced confinement, under conditions equivalent to concentration camps,” in which, as a rule, forced labor was used.

The list of concentration camps includes approximately 1,650 names of concentration camps of the international classification (main and their external commands).

On the territory of Belarus, 21 camps were approved as “other places”, on the territory of Ukraine - 27 camps, on the territory of Lithuania - 9, in Latvia - 2 (Salaspils and Valmiera).

On the territory of the Russian Federation, places of forced detention in the city of Roslavl (camp 130), the village of Uritsky (camp 142) and Gatchina are recognized as “other places”.

List of camps recognized by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany as concentration camps (1939-1945)

1.Arbeitsdorf (Germany)
2. Auschwitz/Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland)
3. Bergen-Belsen (Germany)
4. Buchenwald (Germany)
5. Warsaw (Poland)
6. Herzogenbusch (Netherlands)
7. Gross-Rosen (Germany)
8. Dachau (Germany)
9. Kauen/Kaunas (Lithuania)
10. Krakow-Plaszczow (Poland)
11. Sachsenhausen (GDR-FRG)
12. Lublin/Majdanek (Poland)
13. Mauthausen (Austria)
14. Mittelbau-Dora (Germany)
15. Natzweiler (France)
16. Neuengamme (Germany)
17. Niederhagen-Wewelsburg (Germany)
18. Ravensbrück (Germany)
19. Riga-Kaiserwald (Latvia)
20. Faifara/Vaivara (Estonia)
21. Flossenburg (Germany)
22. Stutthof (Poland).

Largest Nazi concentration camps

Buchenwald is one of the largest Nazi concentration camps. It was created in 1937 in the vicinity of Weimar (Germany). Originally called Ettersberg. Had 66 branches and external work teams. The largest: "Dora" (near the city of Nordhausen), "Laura" (near the city of Saalfeld) and "Ordruf" (in Thuringia), where the FAU projectiles were mounted. From 1937 to 1945 About 239 thousand people were prisoners of the camp. In total, 56 thousand prisoners of 18 nationalities were tortured in Buchenwald.

The camp was liberated on April 10, 1945 by units of the US 80th Division. In 1958, a memorial complex dedicated to Buchenwald was opened. to the heroes and victims of the concentration camp.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, also known by the German names Auschwitz or Auschwitz-Birkenau, is a complex of German concentration camps located in 1940-1945. in southern Poland 60 km west of Krakow. The complex consisted of three main camps: Auschwitz 1 (served as the administrative center of the entire complex), Auschwitz 2 (also known as Birkenau, "death camp"), Auschwitz 3 (a group of approximately 45 small camps set up in factories and mines around general complex).

More than 4 million people died in Auschwitz, including more than 1.2 million Jews, 140 thousand Poles, 20 thousand Gypsies, 10 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and tens of thousands of prisoners of other nationalities.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. In 1947, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Auschwitz-Brzezinka) was opened in Auschwitz.

Dachau (Dachau) - the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, created in 1933 on the outskirts of Dachau (near Munich). Had approximately 130 branches and external work teams located in Southern Germany. More than 250 thousand people from 24 countries were prisoners of Dachau; About 70 thousand people were tortured or killed (including about 12 thousand Soviet citizens).

In 1960, a monument to the victims was unveiled in Dachau.

Majdanek - a Nazi concentration camp, was created in the suburbs of the Polish city of Lublin in 1941. It had branches in southeastern Poland: Budzyn (near Krasnik), Plaszow (near Krakow), Trawniki (near Wiepsze), two camps in Lublin. According to the Nuremberg trials, in 1941-1944. In the camp, the Nazis killed about 1.5 million people of various nationalities. The camp was liberated by Soviet troops on July 23, 1944. In 1947, a museum and research institute was opened in Majdanek.

Treblinka - Nazi concentration camps near the station. Treblinka in the Warsaw Voivodeship of Poland. In Treblinka I (1941-1944, so-called labor camp), about 10 thousand people died, in Treblinka II (1942-1943, extermination camp) - about 800 thousand people (mostly Jews). In August 1943, in Treblinka II, the fascists suppressed a prisoner uprising, after which the camp was liquidated. Camp Treblinka I was liquidated in July 1944 as Soviet troops approached.

In 1964, on the site of Treblinka II, a memorial symbolic cemetery for victims of fascist terror was opened: 17 thousand tombstones made of irregular stones, a monument-mausoleum.

Ravensbruck - a concentration camp was founded near the city of Fürstenberg in 1938 as an exclusively women's camp, but later a small camp for men and another for girls were created nearby. In 1939-1945. 132 thousand women and several hundred children from 23 European countries passed through the death camp. 93 thousand people were killed. On April 30, 1945, the prisoners of Ravensbrück were liberated by soldiers of the Soviet army.

Mauthausen - the concentration camp was created in July 1938, 4 km from Mauthausen (Austria) as a branch of the Dachau concentration camp. Since March 1939 - an independent camp. In 1940 it was merged with the Gusen concentration camp and became known as Mauthausen-Gusen. It had about 50 branches scattered throughout the former Austria (Ostmark). During the existence of the camp (until May 1945), it housed about 335 thousand people from 15 countries. According to surviving records alone, more than 122 thousand people were killed in the camp, including more than 32 thousand Soviet citizens. The camp was liberated on May 5, 1945 by American troops.

After the war, on the site of Mauthausen, 12 states, including the Soviet Union, created a memorial museum and erected monuments to those who died in the camp.

Nazi sadists largely repeated the actions of their Polish predecessors. ( And if the Germans acted more like ants - doing routine work, then the Poles killed with passion and pleasure - arctus)

It is known that in Poland history has long been a character active on the political scene. Therefore, bringing “historical skeletons” to this stage has always been a favorite activity of those Polish politicians who do not have solid political baggage and, for this reason, prefer to engage in historical speculation.

Original taken from arctus in Polish concentration camps of the 20s surpassed the Nazi ones in atrocities

The situation in this regard received a new impetus when, after winning the parliamentary elections in October 2015, the party of the ardent Russophobe Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Law and Justice (PiS), returned to power. The protege of this party, Andrzej Duda, became the President of Poland. Already on February 2, 2016, at a meeting of the National Development Council, the new president formulated a conceptual approach to Warsaw’s foreign policy: “The historical policy of the Polish state should be an element of our position in the international arena. It must be offensive."

An example of such “offensiveness” was the recent bill approved by the Polish government. It provides for imprisonment of up to three years for the phrases “Polish concentration camp” or “Polish death camps,” in reference to the Nazi camps that operated in occupied Poland during World War II. The author of the bill, the Polish Minister of Justice, explained the need for its adoption by the fact that such a law would more effectively protect the “historical truth” and “the good name of Poland.”

In this regard, a little history. The phrase “Polish death camp” came into use largely due to the “light hand” of Jan Karski, an active participant in the Polish anti-Nazi resistance. In 1944, he published an article in Colliers Weekly entitled “The Polish Death Camp.”

In it, Karski told how he, disguised as a German soldier, secretly visited the ghetto in Izbica Lubelska, from which prisoners Jews, Gypsies and others were sent to the Nazi extermination camps “Belzec” and “Sobibor”. Thanks to Karski’s article, and then the book he wrote, “Courier from Poland: Story of a Secret State,” the world first learned about the Nazis’ mass extermination of Jews in Poland.

I note that for 70 years after World War II, the phrase “Polish death camp” was generally understood as a Nazi death camp located on Polish territory.

The problems began when US President Barack Obama in May 2012, posthumously awarding J. Karski the Presidential Medal of Freedom, mentioned the “Polish death camp” in his speech. Poland was outraged and demanded an explanation and apology,since such a phrase allegedly cast a shadow on Polish history. Pope Francis' visit to Poland in July 2016 added fuel to the fire. Then, in Krakow, Francis met with the only woman born and survivor of the Nazi camp Auschwitz (Auschwitz). In his speech, the Pope called her birthplace "the Polish concentration camp Auschwitz." This clause was replicated by the Vatican Catholic portal “IlSismografo”. Poland was again indignant. These are the known origins of the above-mentioned Polish bill.

However, the point here is not only the above-mentioned unfortunate reservations of world leaders regarding the Nazi camps.

The Polish authorities, in addition, urgently need to block any memories that in Poland in 1919 - 1922. There was a network of concentration camps for Red Army prisoners of war captured during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919 - 1920.

It is known that due to the conditions of existence of prisoners of war in them, these camps were the forerunners of the Nazi concentration death camps.

However, the Polish side does not want to recognize this documented fact and reacts very painfully when statements or articles appear in the Russian media that mention Polish concentration camps. Thus, the article caused a sharply negative reaction from the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Russian Federation Dmitry Ofitserov-Belsky Associate Professor of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Perm) entitled “ Indifferent and patient"(05.02.2015.Lenta.ru https://lenta.ru/articles/2015/02/04/poland/).

In this article, the Russian historian, analyzing the difficult Polish-Russian relations, called Polish prisoner of war camps concentration camps, and also called the Nazi death camp Auschwitz Auschwitz. He thereby allegedly cast a shadow not only on the Polish city of Auschwitz, but also on Polish history. The reaction of the Polish authorities, as always, was immediate.
The Deputy Polish Ambassador to the Russian Federation, Jaroslaw Ksionzek, in a letter to the editor of Lenta.ru, stated that the Polish side categorically objects to the use of the definition of “Polish concentration camps”, because it in no way corresponds to historical truth. In Poland from 1918 to 1939. such camps allegedly did not exist.

However, Polish diplomats, refuting Russian historians and publicists, once again got into a puddle. I had to face critical assessments of my article “The Lies and Truth of Katyn”, published in the newspaper “Spetsnaz Rossii” (No. 4, 2012). The critic then was Grzegorz Telesnicki, First Secretary of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Russian Federation. In his letter to the editors of Spetsnaz Rossii, he categorically asserted that the Poles did not participate in the Nazi exhumation of Katyn graves in 1943.

Meanwhile, it is well known and documented that specialists from the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross participated in the Nazi exhumation in Katyn from April to June 1943, fulfilling, in the words of the Minister of Nazi Propaganda and the main falsifier of the Katyn crime J. Goebbels, the role of “objective” witnesses. Equally false is the statement of Mr. J. Książyk about the absence of concentration camps in Poland, which is easily refuted by documentation.

Polish forerunners of Auschwitz-Birkenau
To begin with, I will conduct a small educational program for Polish diplomats. Let me remind you that in the period 2000-2004. Russian and Polish historians, in accordance with the Agreement between the Russian Archives and the General Directorate of State Archives of Poland, signed on December 4, 2000, prepared a collection of documents and materials “ Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922."(hereinafter referred to as the collection "Red Army Soldiers...").

This 912-page collection was published in Russia in a circulation of 1 thousand copies. (M.; St. Petersburg: Summer Garden, 2004). It contains 338 historical documents revealing the very unpleasant situation that prevailed in Polish prisoner of war camps, including concentration camps. Apparently, for this reason, the Polish side not only did not publish this collection in Polish, but also took measures to buy up part of the Russian circulation.
So, in the collection “Red Army Soldiers...” document No. 72 is presented, called “Temporary instructions for concentration camps for prisoners of war, approved by the Supreme Command of the Polish Army.”
Let me give a short quote from this document: “... Following the orders of the High Command No. 2800/III of 18.IV.1920, No. 17000/IV of 18.IV.1920, No. 16019/II, as well as 6675/San. temporary instructions for concentration camps are issued... The camps for Bolshevik prisoners, which should be created by order of the Supreme Command of the Polish Army No. 17000/IV in Zvyagel and Ploskirov, and then Zhitomir, Korosten and Bar, are called “Concentration camp for prisoners of war No....».

So, gentlemen, a question arises. How, having adopted a law on the inadmissibility of calling Polish concentration camps, will you deal with those Polish historians who allow themselves to refer to the above-mentioned “Temporary Instructions...”? But I will leave this issue for consideration by Polish lawyers and return to Polish prisoner of war camps, including those called concentration camps.

Familiarization with the documents contained in the collection “Red Army Soldiers...” allows us to confidently assert that the point is not in the name, but in the essence of the Polish prisoner of war camps. They created such inhuman conditions for keeping Red Army prisoners of war that they can rightfully be considered as the forerunners of Nazi concentration camps.
This is evidenced by the absolute majority of documents placed in the collection “Red Army Men...”.

To substantiate my conclusion, I will allow myself to refer to the testimony of former prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau Ota Krausa(No. 73046) and Erich Kulka(No. 73043). They went through the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz-Birkenau and were well aware of the rules established in these camps. Therefore, in the title of this chapter I used the name “Auschwitz-Birkenau”, since it was this name that was used by O. Kraus and E. Kulka in their book “The Death Factory” (M.: Gospolitizdat, 1960).

The guard atrocities and living conditions of Red Army prisoners of war in Polish camps are very reminiscent of the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz-Birkenau. For those who doubt, I will give a few quotes from the book “Factory of Death”.
O. Kraus and E. Kulka wrote that

• “They didn’t live in Birkenau, but huddled in wooden barracks 40 meters long and 9 meters wide. The barracks had no windows, were poorly lit and ventilated... In total, the barracks housed 250 people. There were no washrooms or toilets in the barracks. Prisoners were forbidden to leave the barracks at night, so at the end of the barracks there were two tubs for sewage...”


• “Exhaustion, illness and death of prisoners were caused by insufficient and poor nutrition, and more often by real hunger... There were no utensils for food in the camp... The prisoner received less than 300 grams of bread. Bread was given to the prisoners in the evening, and they ate it immediately. The next morning they received half a liter of a black liquid called coffee or tea and a tiny portion of sugar. For lunch, the prisoner received less than a liter of stew, which should have contained 150 g of potatoes, 150 g of turnips, 20 g of flour, 5 g of butter, 15 g of bones. In fact, it was impossible to find such modest doses of food in the stew... With poor nutrition and hard work, a strong and healthy beginner could only last for three months...”

Below I will give similar examples from Polish camps. Surprisingly, the Nazi sadists largely repeated the actions of their Polish predecessors. So, let’s open the collection “Red Army Men...”. Here is document No. 164, called “ Report on the results of the inspection of the camps in Dąba and Strzałkowo"(October 1919).

• “Inspection of the Dombe camp... The buildings are wooden. The walls are not solid, some buildings do not have wooden floors, the chambers are large... Most of the prisoners without shoes are completely barefoot. There are almost no beds or bunks... There is no straw or hay. They sleep on the ground or boards... No linen or clothes; cold, hunger, dirt and all this threatens with enormous mortality...".

• “Report on the inspection of the Strzalkowo camp. ...The state of health of the prisoners is appalling, the hygienic conditions of the camp are disgusting. Most of the buildings are dugouts with holes in the roofs, earthen floors, planks are very rare, the windows are boarded up instead of glass... Many barracks are overcrowded. So, on October 19 this year. The barracks for captured communists were so crowded that entering it in the midst of the fog it was difficult to see anything. The prisoners were so crowded that they could not lie down, but were forced to stand, leaning on one another...".

It should be noted that in both Nazi and Polish camps, the beating of prisoners of war was commonplace. Thus, in the above-mentioned document No. 334 it was noted that in the Strzałkowo camp “ To this day, violations of the personalities of prisoners occur. The beating of prisoners of war is a constant phenomenon..." It turns out that brutal beatings of prisoners of war in the Strzałkowo camp were practiced from 1919 to 1922.

This is confirmed by document No. 44 “ Attitude of the Ministry of War of Poland to the High Command of the Eastern Military District regarding an article from the newspaper “Courier Nowy” regarding the abuse of Latvians who deserted from the Red Army with a transmittal note from the Ministry of War of Poland to the High Command"(January 16, 1920). It says that upon arrival at the Strzalkovo camp (apparently in the fall of 1919), the Latvians were first robbed, leaving them in their underwear, and then each of them received 50 blows with a barbed wire rod. More than ten Latvians died from blood poisoning, and two were shot without trial.

Those responsible for this barbarity were the head of the camp, Captain Wagner and his assistant lieutenant Malinovsky, characterized by sophisticated cruelty.
This is described in document No. 314 “ Letter from the Russian-Ukrainian delegation to the Polish delegation of the PRUSK with a request to take action on the application of Red Army prisoners of war regarding the former commandant of the camp in Strzałkowo"(03 September 1921).

The Red Army statement said that

• “Lieutenant Malinovsky always walked around the camp, accompanied by several corporals who had wire lashes in their hands and ordered whoever he didn’t like to lie down in a ditch, and the corporals beat him as much as was ordered. If the beaten one moaned or begged for mercy, it was time. Malinovsky took out his revolver and shot... If the sentries shot the prisoners then. Malinowski gave them 3 cigarettes and 25 Polish marks as a reward... Repeatedly it was possible to observe how a group led by por. Malinovsky climbed onto machine gun towers and from there fired at defenseless people...”

According to the calculations of the Russian military historian M.V. Filimoshin, the number of Red Army soldiers who died and died in Polish captivity is 82,500 people (Filimoshin. Military History Magazine, No. 2. 2001). This figure seems quite reasonable. I believe that the above allows us to assert that Polish concentration camps and prisoner of war camps can rightfully be considered the forerunners of Nazi concentration camps.

I refer distrustful and inquisitive readers to my research " Antikatyn, or Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity”, presented in my books “The Secret of Katyn” (M.: Algorithm, 2007) and “Katyn. Modern history of the issue" (M.: Algorithm, 2012). It gives a more comprehensive picture of what was happening in the Polish camps.

Violence due to dissent
It is impossible to complete the topic of Polish concentration camps without mentioning two camps: the Belarusian " Birch-Kartuzskaya" and Ukrainian " Bialy Podlaski" They were created in 1934 by decision of the Polish dictator Jozef Piłsudski, as a means of reprisal against Belarusians and Ukrainians who protested against the Polish occupation regime of 1920-1939. Although they were not called concentration camps, in some ways they surpassed the Nazi concentration camps.

But first about how many Belarusians and Ukrainians accepted the Polish regime established in the territories of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine captured by the Poles in 1920 . This is what the newspaper Rzeczpospolita wrote in 1925.« ...If there are no changes within several years, then we will have a general armed uprising there (in the eastern cresses). If we don’t drown it in blood, it will tear several provinces away from us... There is a gallows for an uprising and nothing more. Horror must fall on the entire local (Belarusian) population from top to bottom, from which the blood in their veins will freeze » .

In the same year, the famous Polish publicist Adolf Nevchinsky on the pages of the newspaper “Slovo” stated that with Belarusians it is necessary to conduct a conversation in the language of “gallows and only gallows... this will be the most correct resolution of the national question in Western Belarus».

Feeling public support, Polish sadists in Bereza-Kartuzska and Biała Podlaska did not stand on ceremony with the rebellious Belarusians and Ukrainians. If the Nazis created concentration camps as monstrous factories for the mass extermination of people, then in Poland such camps were used as a means of intimidating the disobedient. How else can one explain the monstrous tortures to which Belarusians and Ukrainians were subjected? I will give examples.

In Bereza-Kartuzskaya, 40 people were crammed into small cells with a cement floor. To prevent prisoners from sitting down, the floor was constantly watered. They were forbidden to even talk in the cell. They tried to turn people into dumb cattle. A regime of silence for prisoners was also in force in the hospital. They beat me for moaning, for grinding teeth from unbearable pain.
The management of Bereza-Kartuzskaya cynically called it “the most athletic camp in Europe.” It was forbidden to walk here - only run. Everything was done on the whistle. Even the dream was on such a command. Half an hour on your left side, then the whistle, and immediately turn over to your right. Anyone who hesitated or did not hear the whistle in a dream was immediately subjected to torture. Before such a “sleep”, several buckets of water with bleach were poured into the rooms where the prisoners slept, for “prevention”. The Nazis failed to think of this.

The conditions in the punishment cell were even more terrible.The offenders were kept there from 5 to 14 days. To increase the suffering, several buckets of feces were poured onto the floor of the punishment cell.. The pit in the punishment cell had not been cleaned for months. The room was infested with worms. In addition, the camp practiced group punishment such as cleaning camp toilets with glasses or mugs.
Commandant of Bereza-Kartuzskaya Jozef Kamal-Kurgansky in response to statements that prisoners could not stand the torture conditions of detention and would prefer death, calmly stated: “ The more of them rest here, the better it will be to live in my Poland.».

I believe that the above is enough to imagine what Polish camps for the rebellious are, and the story about the Biala Podlaska camp will be redundant.

In conclusion I will add that the use of feces for torture was a favorite means of Polish gendarmes, apparently suffering from unsatisfied sadomasochistic tendencies. There are known facts when employees of the Polish defense forces forced prisoners to clean toilets with their hands, and then, without allowing them to wash their hands, they gave them lunch rations. Those who refused had their hands broken. Sergey Osipovich Pritytsky, a Belarusian fighter against the Polish occupation regime in the 1930s, recalled how Polish police poured slurry into his nose.

This is the unpleasant truth about the “skeleton in the Polish closet” called “concentration camps” that forced me to tell the gentlemen from Warsaw and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in the Russian Federation.

P.S. Panova, please keep this in mind. I am not a Polonophobe. I enjoy watching Polish films, listening to Polish pop music, and I regret that I did not master the Polish language at one time. But I “hate it” when Polish Russophobes brazenly distort the history of Polish-Russian relations with the tacit consent of official Russia.

On January 27, 1945, the Auschwitz death camp was liberated. He was released by the Ukrainians, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland said Grzegorz Szhetyna, since the operation was carried out by the forces of the 1st Ukrainian Front. Both in Poland itself and in Europe, the historical “discoveries” of the head of the Polish foreign policy department caused a storm of indignation, and he himself was forced to justify himself. However, this is not the first attempt to rewrite the history of World War II.

Hell Factory Statistics

Concentration camps were invented long before Nazi Germany began building them in Europe. However, Hitler became a “revolutionary” in this matter, setting one of the main tasks for the camp administration to be the mass extermination of representatives of “inferior nations” - Jews and Gypsies, as well as prisoners of war. Soon, when Germany began to suffer defeats on the Eastern Front, Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians were also included in the nations to be destroyed as “representatives of the defective Slavs.”

In total, Nazi Germany created more than one and a half thousand camps on its territory and mainly in Eastern Europe, in which 16 million people were detained. 11 million were killed or they died from disease, hunger and overwork. There were more than 60 concentration camps in which more than 10 thousand people were held.

The most terrible among them were the “death camps”, intended exclusively for the mass extermination of people. There are about a dozen of them on the list.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz (in German - Auschwitz), which had three sections, occupied an area of ​​40 sq. km. This was the largest camp; it claimed the lives, according to various estimates, from 1.5 million to 3 million people. At the Nuremberg Tribunal, the figure was 2.8 million. 90% of the victims were Jews. A significant percentage were Poles, Gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war.

It was a factory, soulless, mechanical, and that made it even more terrible. At the first stage of the camp's existence, prisoners were shot. And in order to increase the “performance” of this infernal machine, they constantly “improved the technology.” Since the executioners could no longer cope with the burial of the ever-increasing number of executed people, a crematorium was built. Moreover, it was built by the prisoners themselves. Then they tested the poison gas and found it “effective.” This is how gas chambers appeared in Auschwitz.

Security and supervisory functions were performed by SS troops. All the “routine work” was transferred to the prisoners themselves, the Sonderkommando: sorting clothes, carrying bodies, maintaining the crematorium. During the most “intense” periods, up to 8 thousand bodies were burned every day in the ovens of Auschwitz.

In this camp, like in all others, torture was practiced. Here the sadists got to work. The doctor was in charge Joseph Mengele, who, unfortunately, the Mossad did not reach, and he died of his own death in Latin America. He conducted medical experiments on prisoners, performing monstrous abdominal operations without anesthesia.

Despite heavy camp security, which included a high-voltage fence and 250 guard dogs, escape attempts were made at Auschwitz. But almost all of them ended in the death of prisoners.

And on October 4, 1944, an uprising occurred. Members of the 12th Sonderkommando, having learned that they were going to be replaced with a new composition, which implied certain death, decided to take desperate actions. Having blown up the crematorium, they killed three SS men, set fire to two buildings and made a hole in the energized fence, having previously caused a short circuit. Up to five thousand people were freed. But soon all the fugitives were caught and taken to the camp for a demonstration execution.

When in mid-January 1945 it became clear that Soviet troops would inevitably come to Auschwitz, able-bodied prisoners, who then numbered 58 thousand people, were driven deep into German territory. Two thirds of them died on the road from exhaustion and disease.

On January 27 at 3 o'clock in the afternoon troops under the command of Marshal entered Auschwitz I.S.Koneva. At that time, there were about 7 thousand prisoners in the camp, among whom were 500 children from 6 to 14 years old. The soldiers, who had seen enough of many atrocities during the war, discovered traces of monstrous, transcendental atrocities in the camp. The scale of the “work done” was amazing. In the warehouses, mountains of men's suits and women's and children's outerwear, several tons of human hair and ground bones, prepared for shipment to Germany, were found.

In 1947, a memorial complex was opened on the territory of the former camp.

Treblinka

An extermination camp established in the Warsaw Voivodeship of Poland in July 1942. During the year of the camp's existence, about 800 thousand people, mostly Jews, were killed there. Geographically, these were citizens of Poland, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Germany, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, France and Yugoslavia. Jews were brought in boarded-up freight cars. The rest were mainly invited “to a new place of residence,” and they bought train tickets with their own money.

The “technology” of mass murder here differed from that existing in Auschwitz. People who arrived and did not suspect anything were invited into the gas chambers, which were labeled “Showers.” It was not poisonous gas that was used, but exhaust gases from running tank engines. At first the bodies were buried in the ground. In the spring of 1943, a crematorium was built.

An underground organization operated among the members of the Sonderkommando. On August 2, 1943, she organized an armed uprising, seizing weapons. Some of the guards were killed, several hundred prisoners managed to escape. However, almost all of them were soon found and killed.

One of the few surviving participants in the uprising was Samuel Willenberg, who after the war wrote the book “The Treblinka Uprising.” This is what he said in a 2013 interview about his first impression of the death factory:

“I had no idea what was happening in the infirmary. I just entered this wooden building and at the end of the corridor I suddenly saw all this horror. Bored Ukrainian guards with guns sat on a wooden chair. In front of them is a deep hole. It contains the remains of bodies that have not yet been consumed by the fire lit underneath them. Remains of men, women and small children. This picture simply paralyzed me. I heard burning hair crackle and bones burst. There was acrid smoke in my nose, tears were welling up in my eyes... How to describe and express this? There are things that I remember, but they cannot be expressed in words.”

After the brutal suppression of the uprising, the camp was liquidated.

Majdanek

The Majdanek camp, located in Poland, was originally intended to be a “universal” camp. But after the capture of a large number of Red Army soldiers who were surrounded near Kiev, it was decided to repurpose it into a “Russian” camp. With a prison population of up to 250 thousand, construction was carried out by prisoners of war. By December 1941, due to hunger, hard work, and also due to the outbreak of a typhus epidemic, all the prisoners, who at that time numbered about 10 thousand, died.

Subsequently, the camp lost its “national” orientation, and not only prisoners of war, but also Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and representatives of other nations were brought to it for extermination.

The camp, which had an area of ​​270 hectares, was divided into five sections. One was reserved for women and children. The prisoners were housed in 22 huge barracks. On the territory of the camp there were also industrial premises where prisoners worked. In Majdanek, according to various sources, from 80 thousand to 500 thousand people died.

At Majdanek, as at Auschwitz, poison gas was used in the gas chambers.

Against the background of daily crimes, the operation code-named “Enterfest” (German - harvest festival) stands out. On November 3 and 4, 1943, 43 thousand Jews were shot. At the bottom of a ditch 100 meters long, 6 meters wide and 3 meters deep, the prisoners were packed tightly in one layer. After which they were successively shot in the back of the head. Then the second layer was laid... And so on until the ditch was completely filled.

When the Red Army occupied Majdanek on July 22, 1944, there were several hundred surviving prisoners of various nationalities in the camp.

Sobibor

This camp operated in Poland from May 15, 1942 to October 15, 1943. Killed a quarter of a million people. The extermination of people took place using proven “technology” - gas chambers based on exhaust gases, a crematorium.

The vast majority of prisoners were killed on the first day. And only a few were left to perform various tasks in the workshops in the production area.

Sobibor became the first German camp in which an uprising took place. There was an underground group in the camp, led by a Soviet officer, Lieutenant Alexander Pechersky. Pechersky and his deputy rabbi Leon Feldhendler planned and led the uprising, which began on October 14, 1943.

According to the plan, the prisoners were supposed to secretly, one by one, eliminate the SS personnel of the camp, and then, having taken possession of the weapons located in the camp warehouse, kill the guards. It was only partially successful. 12 SS men and 38, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, Ukrainian guards were killed. But they failed to seize the weapon. Of the 550 prisoners in the work zone, 320 began to break out of the camp, 80 of them died during the escape. The rest managed to escape.

130 prisoners refused to escape; they were all shot the next day.

A massive hunt was organized for the fugitives, which lasted two weeks. It was possible to find 170 people who were immediately shot. Subsequently, another 90 people were handed over to the Nazis by the local population. 53 participants in the uprising lived to see the end of the war.

The leader of the uprising, Alexander Aronovich Pechersky, was able to get into Belarus, where, before reuniting with the regular army, he fought as a demolition worker in a partisan detachment. Then, as part of the assault battalion of the 1st Baltic Front, he fought his way to the west, rising to the rank of captain. The war ended for him in August 1944, when Pechersky became disabled as a result of his injury. He died in 1990 in Rostov-on-Don.

Soon after the uprising, the Sobibor camp was liquidated. After the demolition of all buildings, its territory was plowed and sown with potatoes and cabbage.

Photo at the opening of the article: surviving children after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz by Soviet troops, Poland, January 27, 1945 / Photo: TASS