From Roter Morgen
Organ of the Communist Party of Germany
November, 1992
The international Sachsenhausen Committee, which is made up of both concentration camp survivors and relatives of the deported, has protested against the declaration of Brandenburg's Minister of the Interior, claiming that the mass graves which were found in the neighborhood of the former concentration camp come from the "Stalinist" era.
In a statement transmitted by AFP [Agence France Press, the French news service], the Committee declared that German and French eye-witnesses of the exhumations had unanimously reported that the dead all wore identification tags of the Red Army. In September, 1941, around 18,000 Red Army soldiers were killed by the Nazis in the camp. The organization called the accusation that the Soviet Union had carried out the executions an "abominable falsification." A press conference was generally passed over in silence. For this interfered with the telling of fables.
Instead, pictures were shown of the "gruesome discoveries." A skull was shown in close-up and the commentator told the grossest lies: new mass graves from a Stalin camp were discovered. And if masses were missing from the graves, then some professional victim of Stalinism babbled about how the Stasi [former East German political police] must have secretly removed them. (Perhaps Schalck [one of the revisionist leaders in the GDR] has sold them as donated organs.) Over and over, reports appeared in the newspapers of graves being found. At great expense, the earth was turned over in various regions of Eastern Germany, in the hope of being able to show some skeletons to the public. The goal is to carry out a revision of history.
It was suggested with great fanfare that National-Socialism and socialism are identical.
The internment camps, which the Red Army was forced to set up after 1945, were without hesitation equated with the concentration camps of the fascists. Certainly, it was admitted that war criminals were interned there, but it was constantly emphasized that many "innocent people" were interned. Implicitly these "innocent people" were also made up to have been "freedom fighters" -- victims of Stalin, of course.
Along with that goes the revision of all memorials and warning sites in the former GDR. These have a new director -- from the West of course. And then the "clean-up" begins.
"One would think that an enemy army had gone plundering through the rooms", a former prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp described his impression after a tour through the rooms of the "newly oriented" museum. There is nothing more to be seen "about Hindenburg and Papen, about Krupp and Hitler, about I.G. Farben, about the robbery and killings of the industry, nothing about class justice and the police assassins in the Weimar Republic."
There is also nothing more about "Globke and Oberlaender, Kiesinger and Filbinger," [there is apparently a problem with the layout, as the article ends here].
In 1945 the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAG) set up internment camps in their occupation zone. These were located generally on the grounds of former concentration camps, as was done also in the other three occupation zones. They were set up on the basis of the Potsdam decisions, of the London Four-Power conference of August 8, 1945 and of the Nuremberg trials as well as of directive 38 of the Control Council of October 12, 1946 concerning the "arrest and punishment of war criminals, National-Socialists and militarists and the internment, control and supervision of Germans who might be dangerous".
By the end of 1945 there were in each of the four occupation zones about 100,000 internees (SS-people, Nazi-Party leaders, Gestapo-people, Hitler Youth leaders, but also young people from the "werewolves", who carried out attempts at sabotage, etc.). In the "Special Camp Number 2" at Buchenwald, between 1945 and 1950 about 35,000 people were interned. By order of the SMAG, those in custody were forced to work and the possibilities of democratic self-administration by the prisoners were created. That the prisoners, as well as the general population, as a consequence of the criminal war suffered from cold, hunger and a shortage of all necessities of life, which lead to many deaths in the "Special Camp" as well, is not surprising.
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