A memorial to the victims of Katyn, the Soviet massacre of 22,000 Polish officers in 1940, in Warsaw, Poland pictured on Monday, Sept. 10, 2012. On Monday the U.S. National Archives is releasing about 1,000 newly declassified documents related to Katyn. Some shed further light on decades of suppression of Soviet guilt within the U.S. government. The cover-up began during World War II when the U.S. needed the Soviets to defeat Germany and Japan, and continued on some level long after.
WARSAW, Poland
The American POWs sent secret coded messages to Washington with news of a Soviet atrocity: In 1943 they saw rows of corpses in an advanced state of decay in the Katyn forest, on the western edge of Russia, proof that the killers could not have been the Nazis who had only recently occupied the area.
The testimony about the infamous massacre of Polish officers might have lessened the tragic fate that befell Poland under the Soviets, some scholars believe. Instead, it mysteriously vanished into the heart of American power. The long-held suspicion is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn't want to anger Josef Stalin, an ally whom the Americans were counting on to defeat Germany and Japan during World War II.
Documents released Monday and seen in advance by The Associated Press lend weight to the belief that suppression within the highest levels of the U.S. government helped cover up Soviet guilt in the killing of some 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners in the Katyn forest and other locations in 1940.
The evidence is among about 1,000 pages of newly declassified documents that the United States National Archives released and is putting online. Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who helped lead a recent push for the release of the documents, called the effort's success Monday a "momentous occasion" in an attempt to "make history whole."
Historians who saw the material days before the official release describe it as important and shared some highlights with the AP. The most dramatic revelation so far is the evidence of the secret codes sent by the two American POWs — something historians were unaware of and which adds to evidence that the Roosevelt administration knew of the Soviet atrocity relatively early on.
The declassified documents also show the United States maintaining that it couldn't conclusively determine guilt until a Russian admission in 1990 — a statement that looks improbable given the huge body of evidence of Soviet guilt that had already emerged decades earlier. Historians say the new material helps to flesh out the story of what the U.S. knew and when.
The Soviet secret police killed the 22,000 Poles with shots to the back of the head. Their aim was to eliminate a military and intellectual elite that would have put up stiff resistance to Soviet control. The men were among Poland's most accomplished — officers and reserve officers who in their civilian lives worked as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or as other professionals. Their loss has proven an enduring wound to the Polish nation.
Posted by Southern on Tuesday, October 09, 2012 @ 02:15:51 EDT (155 reads)
From 1933 through 1945, horrific medical "experiments" were inflicted upon innocent victims in the name of the advancement of Nazi Science. The Nazi doctors justified their acts of torture and inhumanity as attempts to improve German medecine. Few of these doctors collected scientifically useful data and many of the experiments were expressions of pure evil.
This web page details the most notorious of these doctors and their cohorts. Details of the Death Camps and the hideous "scientific" atrocities practiced there, as well as information about the 23 doctors tried for these crimes at Nuremberg and the punishments they received can be found in the links below.
Be warned. The descriptions on this web page of the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Scientists are graphic and uncensored.
An associate professor at Hamburg University, Berning lead the "famine experiments" on Soviet prisoners. While the prisoners starved to death, he observed their bodily functions degrade; this included loss of libido, dizziness, headaches, edema and swelling of the lower abdomen (Annas & Grodin, 1992). Berning then published his results after the war.
Dr. Philip Bouhler
Bouhler was the head of the early euthanasia program (otherwise known as the T4 program) along with Himmler.
Dr. Viktor Brack
Brack formulated ideas for experiments with Himmler. Brack was very interested in assembly line sterilizations and castration. He wanted to be in charge of the x-ray experiments at Auschwitz, but Himmler choose Schumann to be in charge over Brack.
Dr. Karl Brandt
Brandt was a personal physician to Hitler and one of the main defendants in the "Trial of Twenty-Three".
Dr. Carl Clauberg
Clauberg conducted sterilization and castration experiments along with Horst Schumann at Auschwitz. He tried to look for cheap and fast ways of sterilization and found that x-rays worked quite well. Clauberg tried to artificially inseminate women with numerous things. He injected caustic substances into womens' cervixes to disturb the fallopian tubes (Lifton, 1986). One of the substances he would inject into the women with formalin, novocain, progynon and prolusion to terminate their pregnancies. Block ten at Auschwitz was know as Clauberg's block.
Dr. Leonardo Conti
Conti was chief physician of the Third Reich. He was responsible for the killing of a large number of Germans of "unsound mind"(Snyder, 1976).
Dr. Dering
At Auschwitz, Dering removed ovaries after Schumann's x-ray applications by cutting horizontal lines above the pubic area (instead of cutting by the abdominal opening), which put the patient more at risk for infection (Lifton, 1986). After the operation, he sent the ovaries to the labs to ascertain how effective the x-rays were in destroying the tissue.
Posted by Southern on Monday, October 08, 2012 @ 02:13:21 EDT (135 reads)
He is the founder and the guiding spirit of the Soviet Republics - a communist philosopher, ardent disciple of Karl Marx, leader of the Bolshevik Party and the mastermind of the 1917 October Revolution. Some consider him a prophet, others a tyrant; there are those who call him a saint, many more – a devil. What is certain is that Lenin played an enormous role in the history of the 20th century. He reshaped Russia and had millions of people bent to his will. Lenin applied communist ideas to real life and his “experiment” forever changed the face of the world.
Throughout his life Lenin often used pseudonyms for work or for security reasons. His real name is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.
He was born in the town of Simbirsk in 1870 on 9 April (in 1918 a European-style calendar was adopted in the country, these days his birthday falls on 22 April). After Lenin’s death the city was renamed Ulyanovsk in tribute to its famous native.
Lenin was the third of six children. Little Vladimir was baptized in the Russian Orthodox tradition.
Lenin’s father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was a schoolmaster and made quite a career in education. He received numerous honors for his work and was awarded a special order that made him a nobleman, so technically his children, including Lenin, inherited the title.
His mother, Maria Aleksandrovna, was a daughter of a Jewish doctor who was baptized an Orthodox Christian.
In fact Lenin’s family was a mix of cultures and nationalities: Russians, Jews, Kalmyks, Swedes, Volgan Germans and possibly others.
His father died in 1887. That year marked a turning point for young Lenin and in a lot of ways determined his path as future revolutionary.
His older brother, Aleksandr Ulyanov, was involved with “Narodovoltsy” – a revolutionary terrorist society. In 1891 Aleksandr was arrested and later executed for taking part in an assassination plot against Tsar Alexander III.
Lenin’s sister Anna, who was with Aleksandr at the time of his arrest, had to live in exile at the family estate not far from Kazan, a city in the central part of Russia, currently the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan.
Lenin finished school with honors and was accepted to Kazan University to study law, but was soon expelled for taking part in student protests. Around that time he became interested in the works of Karl Marx. He continued his studies at St. Petersburg University where he soon passed his bar.
Lenin started his practice as a barrister in Samara, a port city on the Volga in the Central part of Russia. He even took part in several trials appearing for the defense.
In 1893 he moved to St. Petersburg – then the capital of the Russian Empire. Lenin quickly became involved with Marxist societies and radical groups and even published several writings of his own. Most of them were declared illegal and passed from hand to hand. Thus he caught the eye of the Russian radicals as well as the Russian police.
In 1895 he founded a group of his own called “The Union for the Liberation of the Working Class.” Soon he was arrested along with his collaborators.
In Siberian exile he met his future wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, who would become his companion for the remaining 26 years of his life.
His teachings attracted more and more adepts and were not popular with the Russian authorities. So Lenin, together with his wife, decided to leave the country. Away from Russia he created his own propaganda machine.
In 1900 Lenin launched his legendary newspaper “Iskra.” It was published in Munich with the motto “From Spark to Flame!” That spark, along with foreign funds, fed the flame of the Russian underground.
Posted by Southern on Monday, October 08, 2012 @ 01:43:15 EDT (112 reads)
"Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and the rest of the Nazis, inadequate to a man, were both pathological and pragmatic liars. They lied so convincingly and so hugely that most statesmen from other countries could not believe that what they were hearing was a lie "One of Hitler's biggest lies was constantly to assure the world of peaceful intentions while obviously planning war by building up massively strong armed forces." [John Laffin, "Hitler warned us."]
When Saddam Hussein grew up, he did in the shadow of a giant portrait that hung on the wall of his father's house, a portrait of the face of a man his father adored above every other political leader. It was the face of Adolph Hitler!
Writing in Inside Asia, Joseph Gunther said: "The greatest contemporary hero (in the Arab) world is Hitler."?
Even Anwar Sadat, a man deemed by many in the West to be a moderate Arab leader, as a young man wrote the following words to the leader of the Third Reich, (whom he assumed was still alive and in hiding after the war):
My dear Hitler,
I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. Even if you appear to have been defeated, in reality you are the victor. You succeeded in creating dissensions between Churchill, the old man, and his allies, the Sons of Satan. Germany will win because her existence is necessary to preserve the world balance. Germany will be reborn in spite of the Western and Eastern powers. There will be no peace unless Germany once again becomes what she was.1
Anis Mansour, editor of the Egyptian paper October and a Sadat confidant who accompanied the Egyptian leader to Jerusalem wrote: "The World is now aware of the fact that Hitler was right, and that the cremation ovens were the appropriate means of punishing [the Jews].
Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, is still required reading in various Arab capitals and universities, and is widely distributed by others.
Posted by Southern on Saturday, September 29, 2012 @ 02:09:43 EDT (125 reads)
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