Aphasia over Auschwitz

The further we travel in time away from the end of World War II and its revelations of Nazi depravity, the more the leaders of the United States, the European Union, and Britain cling ever more fiercely to their child’s picture book simplified myth of What Really Happened: The Russian people’s central, commanding role in annihilating the genocidal Nazi fascist force that enslaved all of Europe and exterminated at least 50 million people are all airbrushed out of existence. It is a Memory Hole on a scale even George Orwell in “1984” never imagined.

This winter, spring, and summer, the delusional liberal-romantic Rape of History and the torture of Clio, Muse of History and daughter of the Greek god Apollo, continues. Once again, Clio’s limbs have been cut off. She writhes in agony, as she is being dismembered on the Bed of Procrustes from the Big Lie that the Western Allies led by the United States won World War II all by themselves and the Soviet Union had nothing to do with it. Yet at least 90 percent of all combat fatalities and other casualties inflicted on the fearful Nazi Wehrmacht came at the hands of the Red Army and, as the great US military historian Professor Robert Citino repeatedly emphasizes in his classic series trilogy of books on the destruction of Adolf Hitler’s legions (“Death of the Wehrmacht,” “The Wehrmacht Retreats,” and “The Wehrmacht’s Last Stand”), it was the Red Army that won the war and the German Army that was totally annihilated, not the other way round.

We have just “celebrated” – if that is the word – the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Auschwitz extermination camp on January 27, 2025. Auschwitz was built in Poland in large part because the Nazis knew that the level of anti-Semitism there was vastly higher than among the ordinary population of Germany and they did not want their own people to know the explicit details close up and in your face of what they were doing.

Read virtually all the Western accounts of the Auschwitz 80th anniversary reports in the North American and Western European media, and the fact that the Red Army liberated Auschwitz and then rescued and fought to save the lives of its remaining prisoners is never mentioned. All the emphasis is put on the handful of remaining survivors. But what about those who gave their lives to rescue them? Not a single name in any of the Western coverage. Not a single word. In fact, hundreds of brave Russians – along with Ukrainian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kirgiz, and other Soviet nationalities – died in order to liberate the 7000 remaining survivors in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Here is the testimony of Red Army soldier Enver Alimbekov, a Turkic Muslim artilleryman who served in the 472nd Infantry Regiment of Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front, as cited in Michael K. Jones outstanding 2011 history, “Total War: From Stalingrad to Berlin.”

“We lost our commander, a number of officers, more than sixty men killed and hundreds wounded in the battle just to open the gates of Auschwitz,” Alimbekov later recalled.

So terrible was the condition of the liberated survivors that less than 3000 (the exact figure was 2819) ultimately survived: They all owed their lives to the extraordinarily devoted and dedicated doctors, nurses, and orderlies of Red Army Hospital 2962 led by Dr. Maria Zhilinskaya. Significantly, to this day Dr. Zhilinskaya still does not even rate her own separate entry in Wikipedia.

The Red Army forces of Konev’s First Ukrainian Front had only a fraction of the medical and relief resources available to the US 12th and the British 21st Army Groups in the West. But the response of Marshal Konev’s forces to the humanitarian catastrophe they had uncovered was exemplary.

Jones in his history cited the testimony of Colonel Georgi Elisavetsky of the First Ukrainian Front’s 322nd Division: “We knew immediate action had to be taken to try and save the survivors… 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.”

Elisavetsky found the traumatized survivors in the death camp so stripped of hope that they did not at first even realize they had been liberated. According to his recollection, which Jones cited, “Elisavetsky unbuttoned his greatcoat, showing his tunic and Red Army medals, and repeated again and again (in Yiddish), ‘Do not be afraid. I am a colonel of the Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you.’”

Today, accusations of moral equivalence across the West – especially enthusiastically repeated by historically anti-Russian minorities and states – claim that the Soviet forces were as bad as the Nazis and often worse. Not a single Red Army veteran whom I have met over the past 50 years who fought anywhere from Stalingrad to Berlin, regardless of their political views for or against communism or the Soviet Union, would tolerate such a vile travesty for a second.

Colonel Elisavetsky’s testimony, again cited by Michael Jones, is especially revealing here. Elisavetsky was a hardened senior combat officer who had fought through the previously three and half years in the bloodiest, most ferocious war in human history. Yet Auschwitz was too much even for him.

“What I have just witnessed at Auschwitz defies the imagination,” Elisavetsky wrote in a letter home to his wife Nina. “We have liberated death camps before, but this one at Auschwitz can justly be called ‘a camp for the extermination of an entire innocent people.’ They say millions of people may have been killed here. I feel that I am fighting to stay sane. I haven’t eaten for four days. I can’t sleep. I have fallen ill. I can’t laugh or smile anymore.”

One should note that an appalled US Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower had a similar reaction after visiting the infinitely smaller Dachau camp when it was liberated by General George S. Patton’s Third Army outside Munich.

Of course, the Orwellian Black Hole of Memory Silence of the Western media about who liberated Auschwitz is intimately linked to the more recent Memory Black Hole about why Russia launched its special operation against Ukraine in February 2022. Over the previous eight years, ever since neo-Nazi and other forces violently toppled the democratically elected government of President Victor Yanukovych in Ukraine, the illegitimate regimes that followed approved the openly US and British-backed neo-Nazi campaigns of terror and guerrilla attacks against the ethnic Russian civilian populations of the secessionist Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk in Eastern Ukraine.

Now, according to the sacred rules of national self-determination as laid down by the American President-God Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference 106 years ago, Lugansk and Donetsk, like Crimea, most assuredly should be part of Russia. Successive Ukrainian governments – even all the democratically elected ones – since 1991, have always forbidden any free vote or plebiscite on the issue because they knew in advance what the Russian speaking and largely ethnic Russian populations of those regions would choose.

Then from 2014 to 2022, the neo-Nazi forces – recruited from Western Ukraine and with many fanatics and political extremists from the West – killed 14,000 Russian civilians and militia forces in Donetsk and Lugansk out of a total population of only 6 million. That is 14 times proportionately the number of dead Israel suffered in the first Palestinian Intifada and at least 10 times the number of dead that Israel suffered in the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023. (Since then, Israel has killed at least 44,000 Palestinian civilians in military operations in Gaza.)

However, the Western governments led by the Biden administration in Washington and successive governments, both Conservative and Labour Party in Britain, have repeatedly obstructed all efforts to end the Ukraine war and the eight-year campaign of terror in Donetsk and Lugansk that led to it, blocking all previously agreed procedures of the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords. Instead, the Western publics have been subjected to a relentless Orwellian brainwashing on an endless, unprecedented scale to demonize Russia. Despite this, the American public voted President Donald Trump back into office after he pledged to try and at last end the war – an unprecedented approval for a previously defeated president that has only happened once before – 132 years ago in 1892 when President Grover Cleveland returned to power for a less-than-stellar second four-year term.

Representatives of the openly neo-Nazi Zelensky regime in Kiev – a regime that openly murders its critics with car bombs even in the heart of Moscow and has put an outspoken former United Nations weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, on its death list – was accorded full honors at the Auschwitz ceremony.

Chrystia Freeland, deputy prime minister of Canada from 2015 to December 2024, did not attend the Auschwitz memorial ceremony but made all the appropriate supposedly reverent and tasteful remarks. The fact that her grandfather Michael Chomiak enthusiastically and publicly supported the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people and also the attempted genocide of the Russian people is never mentioned. He was in fact the chief editor of the main Nazi-sponsored newspaper in Ukraine through the Third Reich’s years of occupation before finding refuge in Canada after the war.

Freeland is now a frontrunner to become leader of the Liberal Party and then Prime Minister of Canada. She took pains to issue a statement on the Auschwitz liberation anniversary, deploring the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. She never mentioned her own grandfather or the role of the Red Army in liberating the camp and ending the killing once.

But who should be surprised? The West – especially the nations of the United States and Britain, their Deep States and officially approved mainstream media – are lost in an infernal fog of lies, deliberately generated aphasia, amnesia, and doublethink. As the late, great British journalist and historian Malcolm Muggeridge liked to put it, we are all still lost, wandering without end in the Infernal Grove. And we have lost the Ways to Sanity, Truth, and Peace.

Martin Sieff is a writer, journalist, political analyst.