By Silvia FOTI

By the time Klaus Barbie went on the payroll of an American intelligence organization in 1947, Klaus Barbie had lived several lifetimes of human vileness. Barbie sought out opponents of the Nazis in Holland, chasing them down with dogs. He had worked for the Nazi mobile death squads on the Eastern Front, massacring Slavs and Jews. He’d put in two years heading the Gestapo in Lyons, France, torturing to death Jews and French Resistance fighters (among them the head of the Resistance, Jean Moulin. ) After the liberation of France, Barbie participated in the final Nazi killing frenzy before Allies moved into Germany.

Yet the career of this heinous war criminal scarcely skipped a beat before he found himself securing entered on the US payroll in postwar Germany. The Barbie was shipped out of Europe by his new paymasters along the “ratline’ to Bolivia. There he began a new life remarkably similar to his old one: working for the secret police, doing the bidding of drug lords and engaging in arms trafficking across South America. Soon, his old skills as a torturer became in high demand.

By the early 1960s, Barbie was once again working with the CIA to put a US-backed thug in power. In the years that followed, the old Nazi became a central player in the US-inspired Condor Program, aimed at suppressing popular insurgencies and keeping US-controlled dictators in power throughout Latin America. Barbie helped organize the so-called “Cocaine Coup” of 1980, when a junta of Bolivian generals seized power, slaughtering their leftist opponents and reaping billions in the cocaine, boom, in which Bolivia was a prime supplier.

All this time, Klaus Barbie was one of the most wanted men on the planet. Even so, Barbie flourished until 1983, when he was finally returned to France to face trial for his crimes. In the whole sordid history of collusion between US intelligence agencies, fascists and criminals, no one more starkly represents the evils of such partnerships than Klaus Barbie.

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On August 18, 1947, three men sat over drinks in a café in Memmingen in American-occupied Germany. One was Kurt Merck, a former officer in Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency, the Abwehr. Merck had worked in France during the war and had been scooped up by American intelligence, who debriefed him and who soon put him on the payroll. The second man was Lieutenant Robert Taylor, an American officer in the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). The third man was Klaus Barbie, at that time on the run from the French and the Soviets, and number three on a US/British list of wanted SS men. Barbie had already been roughly interrogated by the British and did not care to repeat the experience.

Merck was an old friend of Barbie’s. Despite interservice rivalries  between the Gestapo and the Abwehr, the two had worked together in France and had gotten along well. Merck was more than willing to vouch for the American officer that Barbie would be a good hire. Merck had been recruited by the Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1946, at a time when US intelligence agencies were trying to recruit Nazi talent. CIC’s cover story for this unwholesome bit of head-hunting was the need to root out and suppress a supposed network of Hitler Youth, whose fanatical detachments had pledged to fight on, no matter what official terms of surrender had been signed.

But CIC’s real interest in Barbie had nothing to do with the so-called Werewolves of the Hitler Youth. Barbie’s hiring as an agent of the CIC was contingent on his willingness to impart information about British techniques of interrogation and about the identities of SS men the British might have tried to recruit as their own agents. Barbie was only too happy to comply, particularly as this enthusiastic torturer had been slightly bruised when he questioned by the British.

For the next four years, the third most wanted SS man in Germany worked for the US Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps. The Americans set up Barbie in a hotel in Memmingen, brought his family from Kassel and partly paid him in commodities–cigarettes, medicines, sugar and gasoline–that he sold for a handsome price on the black market. After initial debriefings about the intentions and techniques of the British, Barbie’s main assignment, as described in a CIC memo, was to file reports on “French intelligence activities in the French Zone and their agents operating in the US Zone.”

By 1948, the French government had received information that Barbie was living under the protection of the US somewhere in Germany. The French were more eager than ever to get their hands on Barbie, who had already been sentenced to death in absentia for his war crimes. Barbie was needed to testify in the upcoming trial of René Hardy, the Resistance man who saved his own skin from Barbie’s torture by turning Jean Moulin. But the CIC had no intention of handing over its prize catch to the French, even on loan for the Hardy trial.

Barbie’s handlers at the CIC, who saw the French as allies of Stalin, had nightmares about Barbie spilling the beans on his American employers. Eugene Kolb, the US Army Intelligence officer who had worked with Barbie for a year, said that the Gestapo man couldn’t be returned to the French because he “knew too much about our agents in Europe and the French intelligence agency was saturated with communists.” Kolb’s opinion is backed up by CIC memos, which suggest that the French Sûretė’s intention was to “kidnap Barbie, reveal his CIC connections and embarrass the US.”

So it transpired that in December 1950, the US decided to trundle Barbie and his family down the ratline, an escape hatch from Europe for Nazi agents created by CIC officers Lt. Colonel James Milano and Paul Lyon. Lyon and Milano had been shuttling Nazis out of Germany, Austria and eastern Europe since 1946, sending them to Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. The tour guide for this operation was himself a war criminal, Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croatian priest who oversaw the relocation of several hundred thousand Jews from Yugoslavia to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. As the fascist government in Croatia began to crumble at the end of the war, the priest made his way to the safety of the Vatican. Then Draganovic, exploited the cover of his position with the Red Cross and with the Vatican, shuttled hundreds of war criminals out of Europe.

Many of Draganovic’s first recruits were members of the Ustashi regime, the deaths squads under the control of Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic, who supervised one of the bloodiest killing sprees of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs–on some estimates more than two million–were slaughtered by Pavelic’s forces to fulfill his insane desire to make Croatia a “100 percent Catholic state.” Pavelic would show his favorite trophy to visitors at his office: a forty-pound jar of human eyeballs extracted from his Serbian victims. After the war, Draganovic helped Pavelic secure safe passage to Argentina, where he became a frequent dining companion of Juan and Eva Peron.

Some of the other notable Nazis who Draganovic helped escape Europe for South America included Colonel Hans Rudel, who went to Argentina, where he headed Peron’s air force and became a leader of the international neo-Nazi movement; Dr. Willi Tank, a chief designer for the Luftwaffe; and Dr. Carl Vaernet, who had overseen surgical experiments on homosexuals at Buchenwald, castrating gay men and replacing their testicles with metal balls. Vaernet was adored by the Perons, who made the Nazi doctor head Buenos Aires’s public health department.

In 1947, the Counter-Intelligence Corps contracted with Father Draganovic to help them dispose of some their own problematic agents and recruits, namely Nazi scientists, doctors, intelligence operatives and engineers. The deal was brokered in Rome by CIC officer Paul Lyon, who noted that Draganovic had established “several clandestine evacuation channels to various South American countries for various types of European refugees.”

This priest Draganovic was not an altruist, even on behalf of his Nazi colleagues. He demanded from the American intelligence agencies $1,400 for each war criminal who passed through his doors, and the US intelligence agencies were glad to pay his price.

A memo from an intelligence officer working at the US State Department explained that “the Vatican justifies its participation by its desire to infiltrate not only European countries, but Latin American countries as well, [with] people of all political beliefs, as long as they are anti-communists and pro-Catholic church.”

Fearing that Barbie might slip through their fingers, the French protested directly to John J. McCloy, the US High Commissioner in Germany. McCloy icily replied that the US would not hand over Barbie to the French for possible execution, “because the allegations of the citizens of Lyons can be disregarded as being hearsay only.”

McCoy knew this to be untrue. In 1944 Barbie’s name was prominently displayed in McCloy’s own office on a list called CROWCASS (the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects), where Barbie was identified as being wanted for “the murder of civilians and the torture and murder of military personnel.”

Barbie was hardly the only SS man whom McCloy and his cohorts endeavored to shield from justice. Another Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man, Baron Otto von Bolschwing. This SS officer was hired by the CIC in 1945, where he quickly became one of the agency’s most productive assets, recruiting, interrogating and hiring former SS officers. Von Bolschwing was later traded to the CIA, where he  plied his tradecraft in East Germany. Like Barbie, von Bolschwing was a top-rank war criminal, having been one of Eichmann’s ideological gurus on Jewish matters, helping to script the plan to “purge Germany of the Jews” and rob them of their wealth. It was von Bolschwing who had directed one of the most vicious slaughters in the war, the murder of hundreds of Jews in Bucharest. The Bucharest pogrom is described in detailed by historian Christopher Simpson in his remarkable book, Blowback. Simpson writes:

“Hundreds of innocent people were rounded up for execution. Some victims were actually butchered in a municipal meat-packing plant, hung on meathooks, and branded as ‘kosher meat’ with red-hot irons. Their throats were cut in an intentional desecration of kosher laws. Some were beheaded. ‘Sixty Jewish corpses [were discovered] on the hooks used for carcasses,’ US ambassador to Romania Franklin Mott Gunther wired back to Washington after the pogrom. ‘They were all skinned… [and] the quantity of blood about [was evidence] that they had been skinned alive.’ Among the victims, according to eyewitnesses, was a girl no more than five years old, who was left hanging by her feet like a slaughtered calf, her body bathed in blood.”

In 1954, von Bolschwing was brought to the United States. Richard Helms, who had helped recruit many of these criminals, defended the protection and use of people like von Bolschwing, saying: “We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts we would have joined the Boy Scouts”–a typically flippant way of rationalizing his recruiting practices.

Barbie’s Counter-Intelligence Corps handlers went to extraordinary lengths to protect their recruit. Eugene Kolb rejected the idea that Barbie might have physically tortured people on the grounds that he “was such a skilled interrogator, Barbie did not need to torture anyone.” In fact, it’s pretty clear that Klaus Barbie was a sadistic monster whose vocational priorities were the infliction of pain and ultimately death, rather than the subtle extraction of information.

Barbie’s expertise as a torturer relied on the use of bullwhips, needles pushed under fingernails, drugs, and, most uniquely, electricity send by nodes attached to the nipples and testicles. His upward career path at the SS, heralded by games of volleyball with Heinrich Himmler in Berlin in 1940, came to an abrupt end when he beat Jean Moulin to death with getting any information out of him. Even so, a generation later, Barbie and his CIA operatives would happily cooperate in applying his old techniques to left oppositionists in Bolivia and elsewhere.

When it came to Barbie’s anti-Semitism, his American intelligence patrons once again sprang to his defense. Lieutenant Robert Taylor contended that Barbie “was not an anti-Semite. He was just a loyal Nazi.” Another CIC memo held that Barbie “showed no particular enthusiasm towards the idea of killing Jews.” In fact, Klaus Barbie got his start as an officer for the SD, a subunit of the SS charged by Reinhard Heydrich with solving the Jewish “problem” as rapidly as possible.

In an early purge in Holland, Barbie led the infamous raid on the Jewish farm village of Wieringermeer, where Klaus and his men use German shepherd dogs to round up 420 Jews, who were sent to their deaths in the stone quarries and experiment gas chambers of Mauthausen.

From the training grounds of Holland, Barbie was transferred in July 1941 to the Eastern Front, where he joined one of the SS’s so-called “special task forces,” the Einsatzgruppen. These mobile killing units were assigned the task of murdering every communist and Jew they could find in Russia and the Ukraine, without regard–in Heydrich’s phrase–“to age or sex.” In less than a year, these roving death squads under command of men such as Barbie killed more than a million people. Here was the model for the CIA’s death squads in Vietnam–William Colby’s Phoenix Program and cognate operations– and in Latin America, where CIA-sponsored hit teams in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia and Argentina applied similar methods of brutal terror, killing hundreds of thousands. There’s nothing, in terms of ferocity, to separate a Barbie-run slaughter in Russia from later operations at My Lai or El Mozote.

Rewarded with a new promotion for his work on the Eastern Front, Barbie headed to Lyons in 1942. One of his tasks was to help fulfill Himmler’s recent order that the SS in France deport at least 22,000 Jews to concentration camps in the east. Erich Bartlemus took up the task with enthusiasm. Barbie and Bartlemus raided the offices of the Union Générate des Israelites de France in Lyons, seizing records showing the addresses of Jewish orphans and other children hidden In the countryside. Later that day, Barbie arrest one hundred Jews, sending them off to their deaths at Auschwitz and Sobibor. Next Barbie descended upon the Jewish orphans’ home at Izieu, rounding up forty-one children aged three to thirteen, along with ten of their teachers. All were trucked off to the Nazi death camps. Reporting on this raid of the schoolhouse to his supervisor, Barbie noted, “Unfortunately in this operation it was not possible to secure any money or valuables.”

During his time in Lyons, Barbie was excitedly alert to the sufferings of the prisoners he held in Montluc prison. The SS man apparently derived a sadistic pleasure from locking his prisoners in cells for days at a time with the mutilated corpses of their friends. He would reassemble captured members of the French Resistance before mock firing squads, apply hot irons to the soles of their feet and palms of their hands, repeatedly plunge their heads into toilets filled with piss and shit and entice his black Alsatian dog, Wolf, to snap at their genitals.

Klaus Barbie’s torture of Lise Leserve was particularly horrific. He shacked her naked body to a beam and beat her with a spiked chain. But despite his “great skill” as an interrogator, Barbie never got Leserve to talk. She survived her torture and a year in Ravensbrück work camp to testify against him at his trial in 1984.

With the Allies advancing on Lyons, Barbie prepared to flee Lyons in 1944. But before he left, he ordered the remaining 109 Jewish inmates of Montluc machine-gunned to death and had their bodies dumped in bomb crater near the Lyons airport. Barbie also endeavored to wipe out the last of the French Resistance leaders under his control. On August 20, 1944, Barbie’s mean loaded 120 suspected members of the Resistance on covered lorries and drove them to an abandoned warehouse near St. Genis Laval. The prisoners were led into the building, where they were quickly machine-gunned. The mound of corpses was drenched in gasoline and the building was destroyed by phosphorus grenades and dynamite. The explosion sent body parts flying into town 1,000 feet away.

Such were the highlights on the resumé of the man who was dispatched in 1951 along with his family by US military intelligence to a Counter-Intelligence Corps safehouse in Austria. There the Barbie family was given a crash course in Spanish and furnished with $8,000 in cash. Barbie was provided, courtesy of in-house forgers, with his new identity: Klaus Altmann, mechanic. In sinister jest, Barbie picked the name Altmann himself, after the name of the chief rabbi in Barbie’s hometown of Trier. The Rabbi Altmann had been one of the luminaries of the anti-Nazi resistance until 1938, when he went into exile in Holland, where he was tracked down in 1942 and sent to his death at Auschwitz.

From Vienna the Barbies were passed via Draganovic’s ratline to Argentina and then on to Bolivia. A CIC internal memo triumphantly noted about the rescue of this war criminal that “the final disposal of an extremely sensitive individual has been handled.”

To be continued…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Under a White Sky: the Nature of the Future
Elizabeth Kolbert
(Crown)

Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire
Pankaj Mishra
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

White Market Drugs: Big Pharma and the Hidden History of Addiction in America
David Herzberg
(University of Chicago)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Manhattan Samba
Hendrik Meurkens
(Height Advantage)

An Overview on Phenomenal Nature
Cassandra Jenkins
(Ba Da Bing Records)

It was with great interest that I read the op-ed jointly penned by Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and his Lithuanian counterpart, Gabrielius Landsbergis, in last Friday’s Jerusalem Post. As could be expected, such initiatives are usually written to offer a rosy picture of the wonderful relations between two countries and the bright prospects for future cooperation. As a descendant of Lithuanian Jews, a frequent visitor to Lithuania ever since independence, and the co-author of a recent book on the rampant Holocaust distortion orchestrated by successive Lithuanian governments, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

On the one hand, it would not be difficult to create a false image of wonderful and flourishing relations between Israel and Lithuania, because the bilateral relations between the two countries have indeed developed exponentially during the past two decades, and especially since 2015, when Israel opened an embassy in Vilnius (Vilna). On the other hand, the underlying basis for the “honeymoon” described in the article by both foreign ministers is the proverbial “elephant in the room.” Israel’s absolute failure to categorically reject, and protest against, the false narrative of the Holocaust promoted by every Lithuanian government since the fall of the Soviet Union, is what has nurtured this ostensibly wonderful relationship.

The horrific fate of Lithuanian Jewry during the Holocaust is no secret. Nor is the highly significant role played in the murders by local collaborators from all strata of Lithuanian society. Of the approximately 220,000 Jews living under the Nazi occupation, 212,000 were murdered (96.4%, the highest percentage of victims among the large European Jewish communities). Some 90% of them were shot near their homes in Lithuania, in many cases by their neighbors.

If we add the more than 5,000 German, Austrian and French Jews murdered in Lithuania, and the approximately 20,000 Jews murdered in 1941-1942 by the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion sent to Belarus in October 1941, the figure of victims is staggering for such a small country. What is virtually unknown, however, is that there were less than 1,000 Germans stationed in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation. Given the fact that all of these victims had to be murdered individually by shooting, and buried in some 250 mass graves, primarily in Lithuania (234 mass graves), but also in Belarus, one begins to grasp the incredibly critical role played by Lithuanian collaborators.

If Lithuania’s leaders had admitted the scope of local participation in Holocaust crimes, incorporated those unpleasant facts in its educational curricula, and make an honest effort to punish those perpetrators who had escaped prosecution, there would have been no reason for Israel to take “revenge” on the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators, or on the country as a whole. We could even bask in the friendship of these two erstwhile enemies.

CONTEMPORARY LITHUANIA, however, doesn’t deserve our friendship or cooperation. Instead of boldly and honestly confronting the tragedy of its Jewish population, Lithuania became a leader of the post-Communist Eastern European initiatives to distort the narrative of the Holocaust in four ways:

• It grossly minimized the crimes of local collaborators (none of whom have ever been punished in Lithuanian courts).

• It inflated the small number of Lithuanian Righteous.

• It has brazenly promoted the canard of equivalency between Nazi and Communist crimes, and vigorously lobbied for the observance of a memorial day for all victims of totalitarian crimes, which would make International Holocaust Remembrance Day superfluous.

• And it has glorified anti-Soviet fighters, even if they committed Holocaust crimes which, in theory, should have disqualified from being turned into national heroes.

So when an article lavishing praise on the ostensibly wonderful contemporary relations between Israel and Lithuania opens with the quote of the Gaon of Vilna, who no doubt would have been murdered had he lived in Vilna during the Holocaust, that “The goal of the redemption is the redemption of truth,” one truly doesn’t know whether to cynically laugh or cry many tears.

jpost.com

Sometimes democracies die from corruption, fascism, or a military coup. But other times it succumbs to terminal stupidity.

An example of how this works occurred on Feb. 2 when the State Department announced that “the Biden Administration embraces and champions the working definition” of anti-Semitism put forth by a group known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “We applaud the growing number of countries and international bodies that apply it,” the department said. “We urge all that haven’t done so to do likewise.”

What’s the issue? After all, anti-Semitism is a universally-acknowledged problem, so what’s wrong with heeding the wisdom of the IHRA concerning what it is and how to fight it?

Plenty, as it turns out. The IHRA, founded in Stockholm in 1998, is what the British call a “quango,” a quasi-non-governmental organization that is accountable to no one, but which has somehow gained enormous stature even though no one can quite figure out why. It’s first chairman was Elie Wiesel, an awful novelist and relentless self-promoter who built an entire career based on castigating the world for saying nothing about Nazi crimes against the Jews while refusing to say a word about Israeli crimes against the Palestinians.

Not surprisingly, the organization he headed has made a complete botch of the anti-Semitism question. Instead of defining it as a hatred of Jews qua Jews and leaving it at that, it devised an eleven-point list that starts off reasonably enough but then veers off into theater of the absurd. Anti-Semitism, it says, includes such things as:

• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

• Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

All of which is illogical, hypocritical, or both. What, for instance, is anti-Semitic about denying self-determination for the Jews? If people can argue pro or con about self-determination for the Scots or the Catalans, why can’t they do the same for the Jews without being accused of bigotry? If describing Zionism as racism is a crime, then what are people to do about Zionist policies that – sorry, there’s no other way to say this – are racist as all get-out?

David Hirst, the London Guardian’s long-time Mideast correspondent, pointed out in his 1977 book, The Gun and the Olive Branch, that, under the rubric of “the conquest of labor,” Zionist organizers in pre-1948 Palestine sought to drive Arabs out of the labor market and agricultural markets as well. As he put it, they “stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there … poured kerosene on Arab tomatoes … [and] attacked Jewish housewives in the markets and smashed Arab eggs they had bought.” Jewish socialists in places like New York were aghast because this was precisely what Poles and Romanians at the time were doing to the Jews.

Thus, an immigrant socialist named Chaim Spivak wrote in the Jewish Daily Forward, in 1926 that the tactic “sends shudders through the Jewish workers in the Diaspora countries because the gentiles could try out this principle against the Jewish workers in those countries.” A socialist named Ben-Zion Hoffman demanded to know: “How do we react when the reactionary chauvinists in Poland fight for their ‘conquest of labor,’ meaning prevention of Jews working in Polish industrial and commercial enterprises? How do we respond to the ‘conquest of labor’ of the Romanians?” (Quoted in Yaacov N. Goldstein, Jewish Socialists in the United States: The Cahan Debate 1925-1926 [Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 1998].)

Yet not only does the IHRA suggest that people like Spivak and Hoffman were anti-Semitic, but the clear implication is that anyone who dares quote them today must be anti-Semitic as well. The same goes for anyone who dares to point out that employment discrimination is wide open in Israel and that members of the non-Jewish minority, which includes not just Palestinians but ex-Soviet immigrants as well, face a host of restrictions when it comes to marriage or divorce, finding a job, purchasing property, or renting an apartment. Everybody knows it, everyone discusses it, yet the IHRA says it’s anti-Semitic to breathe a word.

As for double standards, does the IHRA really think that critics have been tougher on Israel for its policies in the Occupied Territories than they were, say, on Britain for its policies in colonial India? Comparing Israeli policies with those of the Nazis may offend the delicate sensibilities of those who worship at the shrine of Saint Wiesel. But in Israel it’s a national sport. In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and Sidney Hook co-signed a letter denouncing future-prime minister Menachem Begin’s ultra-right Freedom Party, forerunner of today’s Likud, as “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” In 1995, rightwing protesters paraded about with pictures of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in an SS uniform just prior to his assassination at the hands of an ultra-Zionist firebrand named Yigal Amir. In 2012, ultra-orthodox protesters in Jerusalem donned yellow Stars of David to make the point that, in their estimation, Israeli secular leaders are no better than Hitler.

Does that make Einstein an anti-Semite? Or the haredim? The sin of “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel” would make more sense if the Israeli government didn’t insist at every opportunity that all Jews are collectively beholden to the Jewish state – real Jews, that is, as opposed to the self-deprecating liberal sort. Collectively responsible, collectively beholden – isn’t it interesting how neatly the two concepts fit together? Zionism feeds into anti-Semitism because, fundamentally, it’s a form of racism as well.

It’s not the least surprising that Washington would embrace the IHRA in this way. After all, Joe Biden is a self-proclaimed Zionist – “I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist” – not to mention the stupidest man to enter the White House since Warren G. Harding. In his years as senator and vice president, he couldn’t suppress that famous grin even while taking part in every U.S. atrocity from mass incarceration to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S.-backed jihad in Syria, U.S.-backed air war in Yemen, and so on. Amid growing dangers of yet another war in the Persian Gulf, his administration’s goal is clear. It’s to silence critics of U.S.-Israeli policy by threatening them with the worst thought crime of all.

This is not the only reason to be concerned, however. Real opponents of anti-Semitism should also be up in arms since the effect of such rhetoric is to undermine the very concept. Since it’s difficult to criticize of Israel without running afoul of the IHRA, everyone winds up being an anti-Semite in one way or another, which in the end means that no one is. If the greatest trick the devil ever played was to make people think he doesn’t exist (to quote “The Usual Suspects”), then the greatest trick the Zionists have played is to make people think that anti-Semitism is a con job designed to make them line up behind the next Middle East war. Real Jew-haters wind up having the field to themselves.

Rather than fighting anti-Semitism, the IHRA thus weakens the effort against it – and the State Department is doing the same. U.S. politics are already reeling from the events of January 6, and now the Biden administration is weakening them all the more. How long can this go on before U.S. democracy disappears down the drain?

The anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 and Holocaust Remembrance Day every year have been hijacked. They have become bizarre photographic negatives of the horrors they were meant to commemorate and manipulated to insult the millions of victims and the heroic warriors who gave their lives to end such horrors

For who ended the Holocaust? Who actually liberated and shut down every one of the six great Nazi industrialized extermination camp killing centers of death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka and Belzec? Why the Soviet Red Army did of course.

They did not just stroll into camps at the end of the war where the cowardly Nazi SS ubermenschen had just fled for their lives to forever after fearfully claim they were “just following orders.” No. From October 1944 when astonished and revolted Red Army soldiers and officers first uncovered the horrors of Majdanek in central Poland to the fierce battle that still cost many lives in the freeing of Auschwitz-Birkenau itself on January 27, 1945, the war was still raging, the Nazi war machine was still fiercely functioning and previous innocent blood had to paid for every yard that was freed.

Yet today, and for many years now, we have entered a world of the Great Moral Inversion. The thousands of precious lives that the extraordinarily dedicated medical staff of Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front of the Red Army saved at Auschwitz alone are forgotten. Western intellectuals now proclaim a contemptible moral equivalence between those who died fighting to rescue and save, and those who killed them and all the genocide victims.

The scale of this moral inversion – this contemptible behavior that the great Sigmund Freud – whose own sisters and their families died in the Holocaust – identified as “projection,” becomes more huge and disgusting every year. We now know that in addition to the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide, at least 20 million innocent Russian civilians were deliberately exterminated too in 200 smaller camps across the occupied East set up and run for that very purpose. Where are the ceremonies and heartfelt tears in the West for them?

The very commander of the heroic unit that liberated Auschwitz, the 1085th ‘Tarnopol’ Rifle Regiment of Major General Petr Zubov’s 322nd Division, was of Ukrainian Jewish origin himself, Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Shapiro lived to the age of 92 and eventually died on Long Island in the United States. To the end of his days, he was proud of his lifetime service in the Red Army: He spent the last years of his life combatting the Big Lie of Holocaust denial by neo-Nazis.

By contrast, today in the West, while hypocritical empty crocodile tears are wept over the Nazis’ victims, real history continues to be suppressed, denied and buried beneath mountains of lies. And not coincidentally, new Nazi slugs arise from the garbage piles from Ukraine to Washington. Starting with the 2014 US and European Union-backed coup that murderously toppled the democratically elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych led to the open, defiant emergence of open neo-Nazi militias and forces that continue to weld disproportionate power in Ukraine, backed by the US government to this day.

New US President Joe Biden has already approved the appointment of one of the open architects and champions of the infamous coup, neocon Victoria Newland, then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, as the new Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs – the position that basically tells Secretary of State Anthony Blinken what to think. From Kiev to Moscow, Nuland has been remembered unforgettably as “The Cookie Lady” who openly handed out sweet treats on the streets of Kiev to encourage the rioters who were waging revolution and war on their democratically elected government.

But what goes around comes around. Blowback of course is now happening all across the United States. The mob that blundered into the US Capitol, more by luck and permission than by deliberate armed force, on January 6 was mixed with individuals who were idealistic and admirable as well as contemptible clowns. Several white supremacists among them were proudly photographed in Camp Auschwitz T-shirts. One can only imagine how such vile slugs would scream in terror if confronted with any of Marshal Konev’s brave real warriors.

The 2014 coup is now called with masterly irony in Wikipedia “The Revolution of Dignity.” That is a Big Lie even Josef Goebbels would have envied.

Scores of millions of decent, suffering working class Americans who have been crucified on the crazed policies of global liberalism, open borders and hard drugs on demand for the past half century are now being slandered and conflated with a handful of jerks and agent provocateurs. The new fascism across the West justifies itself by suppressing traditional freedoms and speech by sticking on the Innocent, labels taken from the Guilty.

According to Lev Golinkin, writing on the New York Forward news web site, well over a thousand statues to Nazi war criminals have been erected from the United States to Ukraine over the past 20 years.

“Wherever you see statues of Nazi collaborators, you’ll also find thousands of torch-carrying men, rallying, organizing, drawing inspiration for action by celebrating collaborators of the past,” Golinkin writes,

In Ukraine, where 25 percent of the Jews killed in the Holocaust died: “In 2016, a major Kyiv boulevard was renamed after [Nazi collaborator Stepan] Bandera. The renaming is particularly obscene since the street leads to Babi Yar, the ravine where Nazis, aided by Ukrainian collaborators, exterminated 33,771 Jews in two days, in one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust,” Golinkin continued.

Yet of course, the Biden administration has made clear it is preparing to send even more lethal weapons to arm the ferociously Russian-hating regime which perpetrates such despicable measures.

This obscene farce unfolds now every year, but it is not even a constant: It is getting worse than ever at an exponentially accelerating rate of intensity. One now has to turn to calculus to grasp it.

It is surely more than an ordinary coincidence that on Holocaust Memorial Day this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced its latest setting of its fearful Doomsday Clock assessing the possible imminence of nuclear war.

The experts who set the clock clearly welcomed Joe Biden replacing Donald Trump as US president, a predictable liberal bigotry. Yet they remained clear-eyed enough, scientific enough to recognize and publicly acknowledge that this would be no improvement at all. The setting of the symbolic clock remains at only 100 seconds to midnight, the closest setting to nuclear war in its 74 year history.

It should have been moved much closer – perhaps to only 75 seconds to catastrophe: For the intensifying phenomena on Western Holocaust denial and projection: The obsession with backing real live 21st century Nazis in Ukraine against the descendants of the very people who died to save the world from them, is now clearly linked to the blowback of emerging white supremacy and leftist anti-Russian conspiracy theories alike in the United States.

Stupid and wicked policies pursued across Eastern Europe have driven US policymakers literally mad – or perhaps just even more insane – and that mania has poisoned and destroyed the fading embers of democratic due process and fair play in the United States itself. The two theaters of madness generating more wickedness are inextricably linked. They cannot be separated.

To truly be a great president and bring the peace at home he claims to cherish, President Biden needs to end at last the disastrous policies in Ukraine and elsewhere that he supported as vice president under Barack Obama. But that would be a new idea – and the new president appears to be incapable of ever accepting such things. Then the obscenity of Holocaust Remembrance Hypocrisy will continue – until its madness brings Destruction upon all.

That war resulted in over 50 million dead with more than half of the victims from the Soviet Union. It incorporated the worst crimes against humanity, including the systematic mass murder of millions carried out by Nazi Germany, known as the Holocaust. The victims included Jews, Slavs, Roma, Soviet prisoners-of-war and others whom the fascist Nazis deemed to be “Untermensch” (“Subhumans”).

The Soviet Red Army fought back the Nazi forces all the way from Russia through Eastern Europe, eventually defeating the Third Reich in Berlin. Nearly 90 per cent of all Wehrmacht casualties incurred during the entire war were suffered on the Eastern Front against the Red Army. That alone testifies how it was the Soviet Union among the allied nations which primarily accomplished the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Seventy-five years ago, on January 27, 1945, it was Red Army soldiers who liberated the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. It was during the Vistula-Oder Offensive which drove the Nazis out of Poland paving the way for the eventual final victorious battle in Berlin some three months later.

It is incredible that within living memory, these objective facts of history about the most cataclysmic war ever waged are being falsified or insidiously distorted.

Germany’s most-read magazine Der Spiegel, American-European journal Politico, a U.S. embassy announcement, as well as American Vice President Mike Pence, are among recent sources who have either falsified or downplayed the heroic role of the Soviet Union in liberating Auschwitz. This is part of a disconcerting trend of rewriting the history of World War Two, by which, preposterously, the Soviet Union is being equated with Nazi Germany. Such pernicious fiction must be resisted and repudiated by all conscientious historians and citizens.

Der Spiegel and the U.S. embassy in Denmark both had to issue embarrassed apologies after they separately stated that it was American forces which liberated Auschwitz. It is mind-boggling how such an error on the 75th anniversary of one of the most iconic events in history could have been made – by a leading magazine and a diplomatic corps.

More sinister was an article published in Politico on January 24 written by the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki which claimed, “Far from being a liberator, the Soviet Union was a facilitator of Nazi Germany.”

The Polish politician is no exception. It has become a staple argument in recent years contended by other Polish leaders and politicians from the Baltic states who seek to revise the history of the war, blaming the Soviet Union for being an accomplice with Nazi Germany. The corruption of history is partly driven by a desire to whitewash the nefarious role played by these countries as quislings to the Third Reich who helped it carry out the Holocaust.

Vice President Pence’s speech at the Holocaust memorial event in Jerusalem on January 23 was another deplorable sleight of hand. In his address, he never once mentioned the fact of the Soviet forces blasting open the gates of Auschwitz. Pence merely said, “When soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz…” A sentence later, he went on to mention how “American soldiers liberated Europe from tyranny.”

It is quite astonishing how brazenly false narratives about World War Two are being told, not merely by Neo-Nazi sympathizers and cranks beyond the pale, but by supposedly senior politicians and respectable media. It is perplexing how the heroic role of Soviet commanders, soldiers and people is being eroded, airbrushed and even maligned into something grotesquely opposite.

Washington’s belligerent geopolitical agenda of trying to isolate and undermine Russia is no doubt underlying the process of re-writing history in order to deprive Russia of moral authority and recast it as a malign nation. Of course the obsessive Russophobia of Polish and Baltic politicians neatly plays into this agenda.

This reprehensible revisionism is in flagrant contradiction and denial of international libraries of documented history, archives, official and personal correspondence, photographs, as well as first-hand witness accounts.

An excellent essay by Martin Sieff this week recounts how Soviet soldiers and medics tended to the remaining 7,000 wretched inmates of Auschwitz. More than a million others had been exterminated by the Nazis before they fled from the advancing Soviet forces.

The Soviet officer in command of liberating Auschwitz was Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Shapiro. He was himself a Russian-born Jew. The Soviet soldiers spoke of their horror and heartbreak upon discovering the hellish conditions in which skeletal men, women and children were teetering on the brink of death. Bodies of dead lay everywhere among pools of frozen blood.

Another Jewish Soviet officer Colonel Elisavetsky told how Russian doctors and nurses worked without sleep or food to try to save the emaciated inmates.

As Sieff notes: “For Colonel Shapiro, the idea that he, his Red Army comrades and the medical staff who fought and died to liberate Auschwitz and who worked so hard to save its pitifully few survivors should be casually equated with the Nazis mass-killers would have been ludicrous and contemptible… The true story of the liberation of Auschwitz needs to be told and retold. It needs to be rammed down the throats of Russia-hating bigots and warmongers everywhere.”

Maintaining the historical record about World War Two – its fascist origins and its defeat – is not just a matter of national pride for Russians. Ominously, if history can be denied, falsified and distorted, then the danger of repetition returns. We must never let the heroic role of the Soviet Union be forgotten or belittled, especially by people who seem to have a penchant for fascism.

But never in his wildest dreams did Colonel Shapiro imagine that his own contribution to history and that of the entire Red Army in ending the Nazi genocide of the Jewish and Russian peoples would itself be cast into the black hole of denial.

For Colonel Shapiro, who died in 2005 at the age of 92, has become a non-person himself: Because he was the Red Army officer who commandeered the liberation of Auschwitz the greatest and most frightful death camp of all.

Shapiro had not planned to become a soldier. The son of a Jewish family in Konstantinograd in the Poltava region of Russia, he joined the Red Army in 1935. He saw action throughout World War II and was repeatedly promoted and decorated for gallantry. In the great 1943 showdown battle between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht around Kursk, he was seriously injured and had to spend time in hospital.

When Colonel Shapiro received his orders from Major General Petr Zubov’s 322nd Division of the First Ukrainian Front, commanded by legendary Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev to ready his elite 1085th ‘Tarnopol’ Rifle Regiment for immediate action on January 25, 1945 he knew his force was being tapped to liberate a Nazi death camp, but neither he nor any of his men dreamed what lay ahead.

The war was still raging in full fury in the east and the Nazis fought with demented fanaticism to try and prevent the Red Army troops from exposing their most hellish secrets.

On the way to the camp, Shapiro’s forces ran into a minefield. A doctor and five nurses were killed. As British historian Michael K. Jones wrote in his acclaimed 2011 book “Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin” “The following morning the regiment encountered strong enemy opposition and even had to fend off a counter-attack.”

Lieutenant Ivan Martynushkin, a junior officer told Jones in an interview more than 60 years later: “As we approached Auschwitz we had to fight for every settlement, every house.” Yet as the 1085 the1085th’s combat journal laconically recorded, “No one wanted to turn back.”

It was early morning of January 27, after much heavy fighting that the 1085th advanced into Auschwitz itself in the face of ferocious Nazi artillery fire. By 11 am, Shapiro’s men had crossed the Sola River and he gave the order “Break into Auschwitz.”

The fighting continued to be fierce. Dozens of Red Army troops died. Shapiro and his men entered the camp. The Nazis had evacuated most of the surviving prisoners and sent them on a death march towards the German border. However, the camp still held at least 1,200 people as well as another 5,800 at Birkenau, including 611 children.

“The gates were padlocked. Snow was falling and there was a smell of burning in the air. Inside, were rows of barracks but not a person could be seen,” Jones wrote. The Red Army men shot the locks off the doors with their submachine guns. For the next 60 years, Shapiro vividly recalled what they found inside. Decades later, he said in an interview: “I had seen many innocent people killed. I had seen hanged people. I had seen burned people. But I was still unprepared for Auschwitz…The stench was overpowering. It was a women’s barracks, and there were frozen pools of blood, and dead bodies lay on the floor.”

Outside one barracks, a sign said ‘kinder.’ However, Shapiro recalled “There were only two children alive; all the others had been killed in gas chambers, or were in the ‘hospital’ where the Nazis performed medical experiments on them. When we went in, the children were screaming, ‘We are not Jews!’ They were in fact Jewish children, and mistaking us for German soldiers evidently thought we were going to take them to the gas chambers. We stared at them aghast… This was the hardest sight of all.”

Shapiro recalled that the Russian Red Cross rapidly entered the camp and started cooking chicken soup and vegetable soup for the starving survivors.

Another senior Red Army officer of Jewish origins, Colonel Georgi Elisavetsky became its very first commandant after its liberation. His testimony is preserved in the excellent Russian Holocaust Center in Moscow and was also cited by Jones.

The response of Marshal Konev’s forces to the humanitarian catastrophe they had uncovered was exemplary. Elisavetsky testified, “We knew immediate action had to be taken to try and …It is impossible to describe how our doctors, nurses, officers and soldiers worked – without sleep or food – to try and help those unfortunates, how they fought for every life.”

Red Army Military Hospital Number 2962 run by Dr. Maria Zhilinskaya, Jones noted, “Nevertheless managed to save 2,819 inmates.”

After the war, Shapiro never lost his faith in and love for the Soviet Union. Following its disintegration, he moved with his family to the United States and settled on Long Island. He wrote several books on the subject and on his own experiences before his death on October 8, 2005.

For Colonel Shapiro, the idea that he, his Red Army comrades and the medical staff who fought and died to liberate Auschwitz and who worked so hard to save it’s pitifully few survivors should be casually equated with the Nazis mass-killers would have been ludicrous and contemptible. President Vladimir Putin recognizes this too, he is commemorating the anniversary this year in Israel.

The true story of the Liberation of Auschwitz needs to be told and retold. It needs to be rammed down the throats of Russia-hating bigots and warmongers everywhere.

On being refused the opportunity to make such a speech, Duda then decided to cancel his attendance altogether. Such is the thin-skin of Polish sensitivity.

Nearly 50 world leaders participated in the fifth World Holocaust Forum held at the Yad Vashem remembrance center in Jerusalem. This year’s event had added significance because it coincided with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

Lest we forget, it was the Soviet Red Army which liberated Auschwitz and the other main Nazi extermination camps, which were all predominantly located in Poland.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was among a handful of leaders who were given the privilege to address the forum. Other speakers included U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, French President Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Prince Charles and Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

By what presumption did the Polish leader think he had a right to speak at the forum over the dozens of other dignitaries who were not given the privilege to make an address? Not being indulged by the organizers, President Duda went into an infantile huff.

The background to this spat was the furious reaction from Poland’s nationalist politicians after President Putin reminded the country last month that it has a certain share of blame along with Germany’s Nazi regime for having perpetrated the Holocaust during the World War II.

In his speech at the Holocaust forum this week, Putin did not mention Poland by name, but he reiterated the indisputable fact that European countries – at least sections of their political class – had collaborated with the German Third Reich in carrying out the Final Solution which led to millions of deaths among Jews, Slavs, Roma and Soviet citizens.

To be sure, millions of Polish Jews and non-Jews were exterminated by the Nazi genocidal machine. And, yes, thousands of Polish citizens heroically resisted the Nazi occupiers.

Nevertheless, the Polish political leadership during the 1930s flirted with Hitler and his regime right up to the start of the war on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The Polish leadership also concurred with the anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich. Anti-Jewish pogroms were rife in Poland during the late 1930s.

Poland has always been apt to deny its involvement in Nazi crimes. But in recent years, under the ruling nationalist party, the habit of denial has become frenzied. In 2018, the Warsaw government introduced a new law which forbade anyone accusing Poland of past complicity in the Nazi Holocaust. That move sparked international criticism for what many saw as an attempt to launder Poland’s dirty past.

Last year, the Polish government launched sharp criticism at the U.S. media company Netflix over a film about the Nazi death camps. The Poles objected to the depiction of the camps being situated in Poland, insisting that the territory was not Polish at the time but rather “Nazi-occupied Poland”. That’s absurd hairsplitting to avoid reality.

At least when France’s President Macron addressed the Holocaust forum this week, he acknowledged the shameful role his country played under the collaborationist Vichy regime in transporting tens of thousands of French Jews to their deaths at Auschwitz.

There is no way that the current Polish leadership would ever have the integrity or maturity to make similar acknowledgement. Because these vain Polish nationalists are too obsessed with a mental affliction of Russophobia and the need to re-write history in order to burnish their country’s sordid past.

In a recent opinion article, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki had the effrontery to accuse Russia of falsifying history. He disparaged “Soviet history” which, he said, claims the Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz and the death camps, as well as the rest of Poland from Nazi oppression.

That’s not “Soviet history”. It is objective, documented history.

Morawiecki wrote: “In reality, it was the alliance between Nazi Germany and the USSR in 1939 that paved the way for the start of World War II. The Third Reich would not have been able to rebuild German military capability without the Soviet supply of natural resources and military cooperation. It would not have been able to defeat Poland and France so easily, nor would it have had so much freedom in preparing the devastating machinery of the Holocaust.”

What this refers to is the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact which was signed on August 23, 1939. Moscow did so, expediently and under duress, in order to keep the Nazi war machine at bay while it built up its defenses. The Soviet Union was all the more forced into such a tactical expedience of non-aggression because the other European powers had for years constantly rebuffed appeals from Moscow for a wider security pact against Nazi Germany. Britain, France and Poland had all entered into non-aggression pacts with Hitler long before the Soviets did. The Europeans permitted Nazi Germany to remilitarize the Rhineland in 1936, annex Austria in the same year, and invade Czechoslovakia in 1938. It was a policy of collusion, giving Hitler a “free hand” to go on the rampage across Europe. Arguably, they wanted Nazi Germany to attack the dreaded Communist Soviet Union.

However, what the Polish premier is claiming in his opinion piece is that the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression deal signed one week before the start of the World War II allowed the Third Reich to “rebuild German military capability”. He then says this enabled Hitler to “defeat Poland and France so easily”. That’s quite an achievement for an ad hoc pact that was only one week old.

More preposterously, Morawiecki goes on to claim that the inchoate Soviet dalliance with Nazi Germany prepared the “devastating machinery of the Holocaust”.

The Final Solution carried out in the Polish death centers only got underway after the January 1942 Wannsee Conference near Berlin chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler. By that time, Nazi Germany was already six months into its war against the Soviet Union – a war that resulted in up to 27 million Soviet deaths.

How Polish leaders can make out that the Soviet Union was involved in enabling the Holocaust is a feat of intellectual dishonesty and immense historical corruption.

Remembering the Holocaust, the World War II and its causes is of crucial importance. It was a product of fascism, European collusion and cynical appeasement. If we can’t accurately delineate and learn from the causes of history, then we are at the mercy of repeating the same mistakes and horrors.

The irrational anti-Russia sentiments of Poland’s nationalist politicians, as well as their desire to sanitize the past, make their revisionism a disgrace and a danger to the present world.

The grimly deceptive German maxim “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Works Sets You Free”) adorning the iron-gate entrance to Auschwitz through which millions of prisoners passed on their way to death, could be subtitled today with the more honest phrase “Wahrheit Macht Frei” (“Truth Sets You Free”).

Because what is going on in the Polish commemoration of Auschwitz and claims about the origins of the Second World War more generally is an appalling distortion of history to suit current geopolitical interests in the West of undermining Russia. Concealing or denying the causes of war only traps the world into repeating war.

Rather than being given a full place of honor for the liberation of the extermination camp in southern Poland on January 27, 1945, by the Soviet army, today Moscow is being sidelined despite its crucial role in crushing the Nazi regime and all its horrors.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly declined to attend the 75th anniversary in Poland. Russia will be represented by its ambassador to the country. Putin is attending an equivalent event in Israel, and at that alternative commemoration will be afforded due prominence to mark the liberating achievement of Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union. It is understandable why the Russian president decided to give the event in Poland a miss because of the toxic claims made recently by Warsaw and other Western states concerning allegations that the Soviet Union colluded with Nazi Germany in instigating the war.

This distortion of history has even gained an official status when the European Parliament – after Polish and Baltic state lobbying – adopted a resolution last September in which the Soviet Union is cast as equally culpable along with the Nazi Third Reich for starting World War II.

When President Putin slammed that resolution as “nonsense” and went on to point out Poland’s own documented collaboration with Nazi Germany, the current Polish government, along with German and American diplomats, doubled down on the accusations impugning Moscow for having partial responsibility for the worst conflagration in history.

Those Polish and Western accusations stem from the historical Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact which was signed on August 23, 1939, one week before the Nazis invaded Poland. Thus it is claimed that Stalin’s detente with Hitler emboldened the latter to launch the war.

As Radio Free Europe reported: “German envoy Rolf Nikel and US Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher both said on December 30 that Germany and the Soviet Union colluded to start the war in 1939 that led to the death of tens of millions of people on continental Europe.”

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Moraweicka denounced Putin’s version of history as “lying… trampling the memory of those events. Poland must stand up for the truth, not for its own interests but for the sake of of what defines Europe.”

That’s quite an audacious feat of historical distortion.

The motives for such re-writing of history are obvious. Germany can unburden some of its war guilt for terrorizing Europe with its fascist genocide.

By implicating the Soviets in Nazi horror, the Americans and their rightwing surrogates in Poland and the Baltic states can breath some air into the stale, breathless claims of “Russian aggression” towards modern-day Europe. That twist is especially odious given that the Soviet Union suffered the most out of any nation from Nazi barbarity, with up to 25 million dead and tens of millions more wounded.

Poland has perhaps the most to gain from falsifying history. Its own shameful past of colluding with the Nazi regime before and during the war is, it is anticipated, whitewashed and shoved down the memory hole.

The people lining up to disparage Russia over alleged Soviet complicity with Nazi Germany claim, ironically, that Putin is “rewriting history” by referring to Soviet records and propaganda.

One of the finest scholarly accounts of the period from the First World War until the late 1930s and the outbreak of war is the work by British historian AJP Taylor, entitled ‘The Origins of the Second World War’ (published 1961). Taylor is no “fellow-traveller” of the Soviet Union. His study is a consummate exercise in objective scholarship.

The Russian perspective is substantially corroborated by Taylor (and other Western historians, see for example this recent essay by Michael Jabara Carley). The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact on the eve of the war’s outbreak was a desperate attempt by Moscow to keep the Third Reich at bay. Because, as Taylor points out, the Western powers, in particular Britain and France and Poland, had consistently rebuffed Soviet appeals to form a collective European security pact against Nazi Germany.

Britain, France and Poland looked the other way when Hitler annexed Austria in 1936 and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Fuhrer’s manifesto in ‘Mein Kampf’ and his various ranting speeches during the 1930s explicitly targeted the Soviet Union and European Jewry for annihilation in a Final Solution.

Polish ministers during this period shared the Nazi contempt for Soviet and Jewish people. The case of Polish Ambassador in Berlin Josef Lipski proposing to Hitler in 1938 a scheme to deport European Jews to Africa is indisputable.

What Polish authorities today are compelled to deny is the objective historical record which assigns complicity to their predecessors in unleashing the Nazi monster. The fact Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps are on Polish territory does not seem to give these virulent Russphobes any pause for thought. The fact that the Soviet Red Army saved millions of Poles from Nazi barbarity – a barbarity that their vain, deluded political leaders emboldened – is perhaps the clearest example of how “Lies Do Not Set You Free”.