Liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army

A couple of articles on the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army 75 years ago (before Jan 2020)

http://www.pcp.pt/en/75-years-liberation-auschwitz-soviet-army

~~ by the Portuguese Communist Party ~~

Today we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Army's liberation of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, where more than one million and one hundred thousand human beings were systematically murdered in the gas chambers, by hunger and disease, in the shootings and under torture.

In marking this date, the PCP recalls the decisive and unforgettable role of the USSR, the Soviet people and their Red Army in the defeat of Hitler and Nazi-fascism, the most violent and terrorist historical expression of capitalism. The epic sacrifices of the Soviet people in World War II – with more than 20 million dead –, which led to the liberation of peoples and workers from Nazi-fascist barbarism, will never be forgotten.

In the Nazi concentration camps, millions of human beings were exterminated, mostly prisoners of war and Soviet, Jewish, Slavic civilians, among others. But the Nazi concentration camps were also slave labor camps in the service of the great German monopolies – IG Farben, Krupp, Siemens, AEG and others – that played a decisive role in the rise of Hitler and Nazism to power. Camps where the exploitation of human labor was taken to the extreme – until death – and where those deemed unfit for work were cruelly eliminated.

No campaign of lies and historical falsification can ever erase the decisive role of the Soviet Union and the communists, spearheading the Resistance and the struggle that defeated Nazi-fascism at the expense of unspeakable sacrifices.

A fight against fascism that includes the struggle of the Portuguese Communist Party for freedom and democracy, against the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, which oppressed the Portuguese people for almost half a century, liquidated the most elementary freedoms, condemned our country to backwardness and misery, repressed, tortured and murdered, led criminal colonial wars.

Communists were the first victims of fascism. It was in the name of anti-communism that a large part of the ruling class colluded and supported the rise and brutality of fascism, and not just in the countries – like Portugal – where it came to power. A complicity with clear signs of its supporting social class, inseparable from the desire to see Nazi-fascism crush the workers' movement and the communist parties, save capitalism from a deep crisis, and attack and destroy the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The responsibilities of monopoly groups and Western powers in the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II are evident in the betrayal of the Spanish democratic Republic, in the abandonment of the peoples who were the first victims of fascist aggressions – such as Ethiopia, China or Austria – or at the Munich Conference of September 1938, where the United Kingdom and France openly collaborated with Hitler and Mussolini in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. It was also expressed in the surrender and collaborationism of Vichy France.

The connivance of big capital with fascism continued, after the Second World War, with the promotion of an anti-communist alliance headed by the USA – as exemplified by the transformation of fascist Portugal into an ally and founding member of NATO –, aiming to contain and reverse the historic advances in social and national liberation achieved by postwar peoples. Thousands of Nazi-fascists and their collaborators were put at the service of anti-communist campaigns and networks of subversion and terrorism – like 'Gladio' – created by American imperialism and its allies around the world. In numerous countries, such as the Federal Republic of Germany, they were placed in important positions of power. With these means and imperialism's open and covert support, forces emerge today in several Eastern European countries – such as in Ukraine or in the Baltic Republics – to rehabilitate fascism and openly glorify collaborators with Nazism, at the same time to destroy the monuments and memory of Soviet troops and outlaw Communist Parties, and harass Communists and other Democrats.

As history demonstrates, the most reactionary and anti-democratic conceptions and intentions hide behind anti-communism.

The whitewashing of fascism and its crimes is not new, as attested, for example, by the visit of the US President, Ronald Reagan, and the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Helmut Kohl, to the 'SS' cemetery (the Nazi shock troops), in Bitburg, in 1984. But the campaigns to whitewash fascism, trivialize fascist ideology, of lies and historical falsifications gain an unprecedented dimension today, with the shameful anti-communist resolution adopted by the European Parliament, last September, or the unacceptable initiative to create a 'museum' dedicated to the dictator Salazar, in Portugal.

These campaigns demonstrate that, as in the 20th century, sectors of big capital are now invested again on attack on freedoms, democracy, sovereignty, violence, and war, to try to overcome the structural crisis of capitalism and stop the inevitable resistance of the workers and peoples against the onslaught of this brutal system of oppression and exploitation. Particularly cynical and perverse is the campaign, in the name of the just condemnation of the cruel Nazi persecution of Jews, to justify the crimes of Israel's Zionist regime against the Palestinian people and the violent and illegal occupation of Palestinian territories.

At a time when humanity is once again facing the threat of fascism and war, PCP raises the banner of peace and truth, of the fight against lies and historical falsification, against fascism and war, and appeals to the conscience and mobilization of democrats and anti-fascists to never repeat Auschwitz, the horrors of Nazi-fascism and war.

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More on the liberation of Auschwitz:

https://www.history.com/news/auschwitz-liberation-soviets-holocaust