Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's “During the Soviet-German War”
Chapter 21 of 200 Years Together
Kevin MacDonald
August 15,
2010
Solzhenitsyn’s Chapter 21, on the WWII years, is now available.
here,
and again notice the link requesting
donations.) As elsewhere, it stresses the
reality behind Jewish complicity in Bolshevism. For example, he argues that
evacuations of Jews during WWII were done without publicity—mainly because of
sensitivity about German propaganda emphasizing “Judeo-Bolshevism”: “The Soviet
leadership undoubtedly realized that they gave a solid foundation to this
propaganda during the 1920s and 1930s.”
During the war, traditional
anti-Jewish themes and hostility toward Jews because of their role as an elite
during the most horrific periods of Soviet history was combined with a new
accusation: That Jews served the Soviet military disproportionately in positions
where they were less likely to suffer casualties. Solzhenitsyn’s own personal
experience is compelling: “Yes, one could hear this among the soldiers on the
front. And right after the war — who has not experienced that? — a painful
feeling remained among our Slavs that our Jews could have acted in
that war in more self-sacrificing manner, that among the lower ranks on the
front the Jews could have been more represented.”
Solzhenitsyn is not saying that Jews
did not serve, but that they tended to serve either as senior officers or
support personnel, not as ordinary soldiers in the front lines. The result was
that Jews suffered lower mortality rates:
What mattered is that not
everybody could survive ….
Meanwhile
an ordinary soldier, glancing back from the frontline, saw all too clearly that
even the second and third echelons of the front were also considered
participants of the war: all those deep rear headquarters, suppliers, the whole
Medical Corps from medical battalion to higher levels, numerous rear technical
units and, of course, all kinds of service personnel there, and, in addition,
the entire army propaganda machine, including touring ensembles, front
performance troops — they all were considered war veterans and, indeed, it was
apparent to everyone that the concentration of Jews was much higher there than
at the frontline.
Such personnel have a “completely
different psychology” because being at the front line is voluntary: “nobody
would have forced him ‘to hold the position.’” He also provides examples of a
Jew who left the frontline in favor of a newspaper position, and he scoffs at a
Jewish musician’s claim to have dug trenches: “As a war
veteran, I say — an absolutely incredible picture.”
Similar attitudes were common in the
American military during WWII, as discussed in
Dynamics of Prejudice
[ Archived in DATA/Occidental Quarterly ],
by Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, a volume in the
Studies in
Prejudice series, published by the American
Jewish Committee.
This is
the same series that included the notorious
The
Authoritarian Personality (by the Frankfurt School folks), so
one should be wary of the numbers. Nevertheless, using a sample of 150
soldiers, they found that a substantial minority of the White soldiers
interviewed regarded Jews as tending to have rear echelon jobs (20%) or were
poor combat soldiers (17%).
But in the
end, Solzhenitsyn acknowledges that the actual data do not allow for any firm
conclusions: “Such anecdotal evidence cannot make up
a convincing argument for either side and there are no reliable and specific
statistics nor are they likely to surface in the future.” Nevertheless, the
general picture one gets is that indeed Jews were less likely to put themselves
in harm’s way.
Solzhenitsyn expresses amazement at the reaction of one Jew who felt that the
war was not really his war:
Of course, Stalin’s regime was not any better than Hitler’s.
But for the
wartime Jews, these two monsters could not be equal! If
that other monster won, what could then have happened to the Soviet Jews?
Wasn’t this war the personal Jewish war, wasn’t it their
own Patriotic War — to cross arms with the deadliest enemy in all of Jewish
history?
Even though this case is presented
as nothing more than an anecdote, Solzhenitsyn ascribes it to a lack of
loyalty—an ancient and persistent source of anti-Jewish attitudes. His treatment
implies that such attitudes are typical among Jews. Jews have proven they are
good fighters by the behavior of the Israeli army. But “their interest in
this country is partial. After all, they — even if many of them
only unconsciously — saw ahead looming in the future their very own
nation of Israel.”
As usual, Solzhenitsyn does not shy
away from criticizing the facile explanations of Jewish historians. Anti-Jewish
attitudes increased dramatically as Jewish evacuees from Eastern Europe mixed
with non-Jewish natives and with wounded Soviet military personnel in Central
Asia. Here traditional themes of anti-Semitism surfaced—Jewish lack of
involvement in physical labor, Jewish wealth (many Jewish evacuees were
high-level bureaucrats) and the involvement of Jews in sharp economic practices.
A Jewish author “explains” this as resulting from “Hitler’s propaganda.”
Solzhenitsyn mocks him:
What a dizzying revelation! How could Hitler’s propaganda victoriously reach and
permeate all the Central Asia when it was barely noticeable at the front with
all those rare and dangerous-to-touch leaflets thrown from airplanes, and when
all private radio receiver sets were confiscated throughout the USSR?
Anti-Jewish attitudes were also rife
where Jews returned to areas formerly occupied by the Germans. This was
particularly the case in Ukraine, and motivated by memories of the role of Jews
in the Soviet repressions of the 1930s: “A secret
German report from the occupied territories in October 1941 states that the
‘animosity of the Ukrainian population against Jews is enormous... they view the
Jews ... as informants and agents of the NKVD, which organized the terror
against the Ukrainian people.’"
The
organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of Bandera-Melnik (OUN) made the
following remarkable statement: “The Yids in the Soviet Union are the most loyal
supporters of the ruling Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Moscow imperialism
in Ukraine. ... The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists considers the Yids as
the pillar of the Moscow-Bolshevik regime, while educating the masses that
Moscow is the main enemy.” Yaroslav Stetzko (who in July 1941 was named the head
of the Ukrainian government): “The Jews help Moscow to keep Ukraine in slavery,
and therefore, I support extermination of the Yids and the need to adopt in
Ukraine the German methods of extermination of Jewry.”
Solzhenitsyn often juxtaposes Jewish and Russian suffering but emphasizes that
Jewish suffering is better known. He describes
Babi Yar,
the site of mass executions, mostly of Jews, by the Germans and notes that “the
executions at Babi Yar have become a symbol in world history.”
But immediately after he writes that
it should
be recalled that within a few kilometers from Babi Yar, in the enormous
Darnitskiy camp, tens of thousands Soviet prisoners of war, soldiers and
officers, died during the same months: yet we do not commemorate it properly,
and many are not even aware of it. The same is true about the more than two
million Soviet prisoners of war who perished during the first years of the war.
So Russians actually suffered more
than Jews, at least in terms of sheer numbers, but the events are simply
forgotten.
Similarly, Solzhenitsyn discusses a study claiming that 2,733,000 Jews were lost
during the war within the post-war Soviet boundaries from all causes—55% of the
Jewish population. Immediately thereafter he points out that “the
currently accepted figure for the total losses of the Soviet population during
the Great Patriotic War is 27,000,000 and it may be still underestimated.”
And even though the percentage
losses of Jews were larger, the long term effects have been more devastating for
the Russians:
We must not overlook what that war was for the Russians. The war rescued not
only their country, not only Soviet Jewry, but also the entire social system of
the Western world from Hitler. This war exacted such sacrifice from the Russian
people that its strength and health have never since fully recovered. That war
overstrained the Russian people. It was yet another disaster on top of those of
the Civil War and de-kulakization — and from which the Russian people have
almost run dry.
Jews have recouped their population
losses And the Holocaust has become a prime source of identity for Jews and the
prime rationalization for Israel. The Russians are simply exhausted.
In the end, Solzhenitsyn believes
that there is plenty of blame to go around:
I fully agree with Hannah Arendt that the Jews of our century were equal
participants in the historical games of the nations and the monstrous
Catastrophe that befell them was the result of not only evil plots of the
enemies of mankind, but also of the huge fatal miscalculations on the part of
the Jewish people themselves, their leaders and activists.
But the Russians must look into the mirror as well. Russians
need to engage in self-criticism
despite
the unbearable burden of realization that it was we,
Russians, who ruined our history — through our useless rulers but also through
our own worthlessness — and despite gnawing anxiety that this may be
irreparable — to perceive the Russian experience as possibly a punishment
from the Supreme Power.
(my emphasis)
One wishes that Solzhenitsyn would
have been more specific about what he feels were the “fatal miscalculations” of
the Jews that led to the Holocaust. I suspect that the well-founded reality
behind “Judeo-Bolshevism” mentioned in this chapter and the aggressively hostile
Jewish stance toward the Czar leading up to the Revolution (which, as
Chapter 5
shows,
was largely unwarranted) –would have been high on his list.
As for the
Russians, the central fact is that their “useless leaders” were not Russians
during the period when they endured such horrifying losses as a result of the
actions of their own government. Their leaders were ethnic outsiders — with Jews
the preeminent and most loyal force. Solzhenitsyn makes this
clear in
Chapter 18
and it is also asserted in a
recent Russian
textbook that
has drawn the fire of Jewish activists.
The real lesson here is the horrifying fate suffered by
ethnic groups that come under the control of a hostile, ethnically alien elite—a
lesson that White Americans would do well to heed.
Kevin MacDonald
is editor of
The
Occidental Observer
and
a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. Email
him
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