by Roberto Massari
(January 27, 2024, Holocaust Memorial Day)
BILINGUE: ENGLISH - ESPAÑOL
link all'italiano: http://utopiarossa.blogspot.com/2024/01/radici-hitlerocomuniste-dellattuale.html#more
The first Hitlero-communism
By «Hitlero-communism» one should mean the political thought that emerged in the summer/fall of 1939 when the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes allied to invade Poland and annex various countries in Eastern Europe, thereby triggering the Second World War. The followers of Hitlero-communism (in Russia and worldwide) then endorsed all subsequent Russian invasions (Baltic countries, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, etc.) up to the current one in Ukraine. At the core of Hitlero-communism, both old and new, lies the pre-modern (if not medieval) idea that Russia was and still is legitimized in carrying out such annexations because it exercises a historical right by reclaiming territories that belonged to the Tsarist Empire. This position - reactionary in the fullest sense of the term - is found expressed more or less unconsciously in current justifications for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and will likely apply to any potential future aggressions (starting with the Baltic countries).
The Soviet alliance with Nazism lasted from August 1939 to June 1941, the nearly two years during which the project of anti-Jewish extermination took definite shape, initiated even before the Pact and culminating in the so-called «Final Solution», systematized in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942. One of the «necessities» addressed by this extreme choice of Nazism was that about 1.7 million Jews lived in the part of Poland assigned to the Third Reich by the Pact with Stalin: a Jewish population that Nazism intended to annihilate, following plans and guidelines implemented long before, well-known to Stalin and the Soviet leadership.
To establish some dates: the first Auschwitz Konzentrationslager became operational in June 1940, in the midst of collaboration between Nazis and Soviets; the one in Chełmno (considered the first extermination camp) in December 1941, six months after the Nazi breach of the Pact. These and other Polish extermination camps (like Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec) began to operate «late» (in 1942, «Aktion Reinhard») because their planning became possible only after the joint invasion of Poland in September 1939. However, their construction took place during the almost two years of alliance with the Ussr: indeed, that alliance made them possible. It would be a serious error in historical perspective to date the beginning of the Holocaust from there because anti-Jewish persecutions had begun in Germany in the 1930s; for example, the Buchenwald camp, located in the German Thuringia, was operational from July 1937.
