The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 60

Soviet Russia’s Reaction to t
Implications of the Suppr
Auschwitz was “just one more terrible
sight in a war already overflowing with
atrocity. Soviet liberator Ivan Martynushkin
added to his account: “I had
seen towns destroyed .... I had seen the
destruction of villages. I had seen the
suffering of our own people. I had seen
small children maimed.” 27 Another factor
was that the Soviets wanted to make
political capital out of the death camps.
Soviet Marxist propaganda “downplayed
the suffering of the Jews—even
though [virtually all of the 1,000,000
killed there] were Jews—in order to
claim that the murder factory was an
example of fascist capitalism's exploitation
of expendable workers .... In Soviet
minds, there was little suggestion that
this was genocide, no real belief that the
souls they had liberated deserved special
sympathy.” 28 Despite the intention
of freeing the survivors, many viewed
the Red Army as an occupying force
that replaced National Socialism and
extended communist ideology over the
region.
Soviet Suppression
and Its Legacy
The Soviet authorities took advantage
of the reality they faced
upon forcing the Nazi armies
back to Germany and winning the war
with the Americans, British, and liberated
French at their side. In terms of the
news reaching the public,
nothing so placed the horrors
committed by the Third Reich
in front of the public in the
Western allied nations as clearly
as the arrival of their troops at
2