cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/460511

A few of many ways, to be precise. Quoting Christopher Simpson’s Blowback, page 15:

But inside the [Axis]‐occupied USSR there were not just one or two Lidices. There were hundreds. Mass killings of the Lidice type took place at Rasseta (372 dead), Vesniny (about 200 dead, mainly women and children), and Dolina (469 dead, again mainly women and children), to name only three. In the Osveya district in northern Belorussia alone, in the single month of March 1943, the Nazis and collaborationist troops devastated some 158 villages, according to Times of London correspondent Alexander Werth. “All able bodied men [were] deported as slaves and all the women, children and old people murdered,” Werth reports. This pattern of massacre and scorched earth warfare was repeated again and again throughout the war on the eastern front.

[Axis] warfare against partisans was consistently brutal throughout Europe, and the Germans and their collaborators committed numerous violations of the “laws and customs of war,” such as torture, mass killings of innocent persons in retaliation for guerrilla attacks, and murder of hostages across the Continent. It was in the East, however, that such killings reached a truly frenzied level. At Odessa, for example, the Nazis and their Romanian collaborators destroyed 19,000 Jews and other so‐called subversive elements in a single night in retaliation for a partisan bombing that had killed about a dozen Romanian soldiers. Axis troops rounded up another 40,000 Jews and executed them during the following week. The SS used gas wagons disguised as Red Cross vans to kill about 7,000 women and children in the south, near Krasnodar. At least 100,000 Jews and Slavs were slain at Babi Yar, near Kiev, and so on, and on, and on.

(Most emphasis added.)

I realize that this history is elementary, so what I’m sharing here is likely no news to you.

Nevertheless, between those who feel the need to repetitively equate Fascism with socialism in one country every chance that they get (which, taken to its logical conclusion, would imply that Operation Barbarossa was redundant), and those who have to blame Moscow or ‘the left’ as much as possible for antisocialist atrocities like these (quietly exonerating the actual perpetrators), I think that it’s all too easy for people to forget about this important history.

Throughout all of the time that I’ve been online and offline, I have seen far more Hitler/Stalin comparisons and equivalences than I have seen actual, direct references to these events from the Eastern Front…ponder that for a moment.