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Anniversary of liberation of a Nazi death camp: Red Army defeated fascists

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05 February 2021 85 hits

The anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration camp on January 27, 1945, shows how the communists defeated fascism.  
May 1945 was the end of one of the most horrendous capitalist systems the world has suffered. The fascist Nazi government of Germany led by Adolph Hitler was defeated by the Red Army of the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin. Today there are many anticommunist lies about World War II, the Nazi period, and especially about the role of the then-socialist Soviet Union in smashing the fascist German forces. As we commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz camp, let’s refute some of those lies.
Liberals and conservatives lie about World War II
The capitalist media never stops rewriting history. In the Public Broadcasting System’s series “The Messengers,” one of the episodes begins with someone saying: “My biggest mistake was to believe that the Red Army won World War II” (PBS, 1995). The Red Army did win World War II. Nine out of 10 German casualties were at the hands of the Red Army.
The liberal PBS is not alone in lying about WWII. In 1995 the “historian” of the U.S. House of Representatives, Christina Jeffrey, was fired when it was publicized that in 1986 she had criticized a school curriculum on the Holocaust by complaining that the perspectives of the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan were not included in it (New York Times, 1/11/95).
The truth about the Nazis
In 1933, Hitler took power with the support of most of the German bosses. He began what he thought was going to be the “Thousand-Year Reich [empire]”. He ordered the building of the Dachau, Oranienburg, and Buchenwald concentration camps. These were the first of what was to become 900 big and small concentration camps that existed until the end of the war. One of Hitler’s first decrees introduced the concept of Schutzhaft – preventive imprisonment of “enemies of the state.” First, last, and always, these were mainly communists.
Hitler was very specific about the role of these camps. “Brutality inspires respect … The masses need someone to inspire fear and make them tremble and submissive … I don’t want concentration camps to become family housing. Terror is the most efficient political instrument  ... Those who are discontent and disobey us will think twice before confronting us if they know what is waiting for them in the concentration camps.”
The Red Army liberated Auschwitz
Twelve years later, the Third Reich’s “thousand-year” reign of terror was cut short by the communist movement. Around 3 p.m. on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops of the First Ukrainian Front of the advancing Red Army, led by Marshal Ivan S. Konev, saw a sign that read: “Arbeit Macht Frei” – “Work Makes You Free” – on the top of the main gate of Auschwitz. The Nazis called these death camps  “labor camps.”
These troops saw with their own eyes what up to then was only a suspicion based on messages smuggled out from the concentration camps: the incarceration and systematic elimination of Jewish and Romani workers, and political “deviates” (read: pro-communists). It was all part of the plan created by the top leadership of the Third Reich, which murdered millions (El Mundo, 1/8/95).
The Red Army troops found 7,000 prisoners. These prisoners were left behind by the Nazis because they were too weak to move (and, despite the efforts by the Red Army to save them, many died). A few days earlier, knowing the Red Army was getting closer to Auschwitz, Hitler ordered the camp closed. On January 18, the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel-elite Nazi squadron)–Hitler’s killer-troops—led the “March of Death” of 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners to Buchenwald, another death camp. Thousands of prisoners died on this march.
But the United States had delayed entering World War II for at least a year. They were hoping the Nazis and the Soviet Union would weaken each other. So the 42nd and 45th Divisions of the U.S. Army did not get to the Buchenwald concentration camp until April 11, just a few weeks before the Red Army liberated Berlin and ended the war. But the 5,000 prisoners that remained at Buchenwald had organized a rebellion and had killed most of the SS guards. The same thing happened at Dachau when at 9 a.m. on April 29, dozens of prisoners stopped the SS men from eliminating all the inmates by fighting them. It was not until nine hours later, at 6 p.m., that the 42nd and 45th Divisions entered Dachau and joined the fight, which lasted until the early morning of April 30. 30,000 survived the order, issued by Heinrich Himmler, chief of Hitler’s SS, to kill all the prisoners. But it was the rebelling prisoners that saved these lives. Many more would have been saved if the U. S. had not delayed entering the war.
The Soviet Union defeated the Nazis
Today the capitalist regimes in Poland, Ukraine, Finland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, deny that the populations of these lands were “liberated” at all (though Jewish organizations continue to insist that the Red Army were indeed liberators). Everything is being done to excuse the Polish, British, French, and U.S. capitalist rulers, who sabotaged all efforts to stop Hitler. Instead, these capitalist rulers urged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union and put a stop to the communist movement, and the socialist Soviet Union, which did everything possible to stop the Nazis and whose troops ultimately beat the fascist scum.