Soviet secret order to convert German concentration camps to GULAG camps. Nazi concentration camps were used in this quality for five more years. Of them, some of the most infamous were Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen (special camps #2 and #7 in the Soviet terminology). Starting with 1948, the former Nazi concentration camps were transferred to GULAG, and destroyed only in the 1950s. The Soviets even saved their equipment and tools: the new owners moved it to the USSR and used for their intended purpose inside Soviet domestic concentration camps within the GULAG. This document states that the USSR took wooden barracks, kitchen, laundry, and medical equipment, as well as some so-called "production mechanisms." What was hidden under that menacing term the document did not explain. (Image: ГА РФ. Ф. 9414. ОП. 1С. Д. 360. Л. 222)
The Putin regime denounces every suggestion that Stalin’s dictatorship was in any way like Hitler’s. It has even made such comparisons a criminal offense. That makes the appearance of an article on a Moscow portal about how the Soviets transformed Nazi death camps into parts of the GULAG all the more striking.
“Concentration camps,” the Russian-7 portal says, “from the point of view of economics are valuable objects in which large sums were invested. The USSR having won the war decided to use them in its own interests,” carrying off their property for use in the GULAG and imprisoning Germans in them.
Managing the enormous number of German POWs was “a serious problem,” the portal says; and so it was decided to put the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps that had been emptied out. Among them, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, were rechristened Special Camp No. 2 and Special Camp No. 7, in 1948.
These camps were operated until 1950, and there is evidence, Russian-7 says, that “7,000 German prisoners” died in the first of these alone during that period. The camps’ equipment was moved to the Soviet Union for continued use within its GULAG system.
Read More:
- Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s Gestapo cooperated closely even before Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
- They broke the Gulag: How Ukrainians overcame the Soviet repressive machine
- GULAG was not something far away in Siberia: it was all around, even in Moscow
- Moscow secretly destroyed GULAG victims records in 2014
- The KGB massacred thousands of Poles in 1940 Kharkiv, declassified files reveal
- Ukrainian women in Nazi prisons & concentration camps
- Soviets executed three times as many Red Army soldiers as Nazis executed German ones
- The forgotten tragedy of Koryukivka: How the Nazis exterminated a town of 7,000 souls
Tags: concentration camps, GULAG, History, Hitler, Nazi Germany, Soviet history, Soviet Union, Stalin, World War II / WW2 / Second World War (1939-1945)
