NEWS AND VIEWS: Pope speaks about Auschwitz, but blunders on Soviet role (02/06/05)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Pope speaks about Auschwitz, but blunders on Soviet role

by Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk

He was not speaking ex cathedra. Catholics would be obliged to accept his statement as infallible if he had.

So, thank God, he wasn't. For the holy father was wrong.

His words were delivered on January 27, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Underscoring the importance of historical accuracy, the pope remembered not only the horrors that befell Jews but recalled how the Roma, the Gypsies, were also singled out for extermination. Likewise, he paid attention to his own nation, the Poles. Despite their great sacrifices in the struggle against the Nazis he noted they were "sold into slavery to another destructive ideology ... Soviet communism." Indeed they were, although they were not the only nation so betrayed.

Then the pope blundered, badly, not once, but twice. He wrote that "the history of the Soviet Union's role in [the war] was complex" and that "it must not be forgotten that ... the Russians had the highest number of those who tragically lost their lives."

Complex? Has His Holiness truly forgotten that by the time Auschwitz's infamous aperture opened, in June 1940, Hitler's legions, in cahoots with the Red Army, had already dismembered Poland, that France had fallen, and that Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium had, too? Indeed, the Battle of Britain was about to begin. Before it was over, mid-May 1941, 43,000 British civilians were killed, another 139,000 injured.

There are still veterans about, even some of the pontiff's fellow Poles, who can confirm the war began September 1, 1939, that the Soviet Union was allied to Nazi Germany then, and that, as the blitzkrieg unfolded, the Red Army backstabbed the collapsing republic, on September 17, 1939, intervening to supposedly protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians of eastern Poland. NVKD executioners soon butchered their Polish POWs, at Katyn, and began to liquidate the very peoples they had ostensibly arrived to free, continuing their bloody work in Bessarabia and then in the Baltic states. Even after the two dictators fell out, their killers continued killing. Understandably, many eastern Europeans welcomed the Wehrmacht as liberators, not realizing until too late that the Nazis were bent on the exploitation, enslavement and even extermination of many of those they subjugated.

During and after the war Soviet apologists downplayed Stalin's collaboration with Hitler, instead highlighting their losses in the struggle against fascism, "The Great Patriotic War." Once upon a time they claimed "20 million Soviet war dead." Soon after the USSR's disintegration, in 1991, Moscow's men changed their tune, chanting about "20 million Russian war dead." More recently those losses were inflated to "27 million Russian war dead" by the former KBG Colonel who rules Russia, Vladimir Putin.

Undeniably, the Soviet military suffered enormous casualties, for which Stalin was much to blame. He ignored credible evidence of Hitler's plans for invading the USSR. He had most of the Red Army's senior officers executed in 1937-1938. More telling is how, when Operation Barbarossa began, June 22, 1941, millions of Soviet soldiers surrendered or defected rather than fight for Stalin. Some even volunteered to serve alongside the Germans, to free their homelands from communism. They were remarkably naive. Most Soviet POWs were murdered. In Nazi eyes all Slavs were "untermenschen," subhumans. True, some were to be reserved from slaughter. Helots were needed to till the land and create a "lebensraum," living space, for the Aryan Master Race setting out to conquer, racially cleanse, then colonize the East, particularly Ukraine. The majority of the indigenes were not, however, scheduled to survive that project. They were regarded as just so many useless mouths.

In defense of historical accuracy, as championed by John Paul II, let us agree, evermore, that "Soviet" military losses will not be equated with "Russian" ones, for not every Soviet solider was ethnically Russian. And, as the distinguished British historian, Prof. Norman Davies, recognized, let us remember that no nation suffered as many civilian losses in Nazi-occupied Europe as did Ukraine, a catastrophe added on to the many millions who perished during the genocidal Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor.

I am sure the Pole who became pope always understood that Ukrainians were not Russians, not then, nor now. As for President Putin, he was certainly reminded of that by Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Perhaps he even thought of these things as he stood beside a democratically elected president, Viktor Yuschenko, a second-generation Holocaust survivor whose father, Andriy, was once a POW at Auschwitz. Bigots who have stereotyped Ukrainians as nothing more than collaborators or camp guards went dumb for a day at Auschwitz, although their handicap cannot be counted upon to last, unfortunately.

The holy father is probably thinking, even now, of other war-related dates he may be asked to mark this year. For example, 65 years ago, June 10, 1940, Mussolini's fascist Italy attacked Great Britain and France, just as the doors of hell opened at Auschwitz. On that day Adolf's other ally, "Uncle Joe" Stalin, cheered from the sidelines, witnessing Western Europe's great powers fall upon each other. How the bishop of Rome will celebrate that anniversary I cannot divine.

Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada.

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