After 1945, Soviet Forces Made Nazi Death Camps Part of the GULAG, Moscow Portal Says

 Paul Goble

            Staunton, Dec. 19 – The Putin regime denounces every suggestion that Stalin’s dictatorship was in any way like Hitler’s. It has even made such comparisons a criminal offense. That makes the appearance of an article on a Moscow portal about how the Soviets transformed Nazi death camps into parts of the GULAG all the more striking.

            “Concentration camps,” the Russia-7 portal says, “from the point of view of economics are valuable objects in which large sums were invested. The USSR having won the war decided to use them in its own interests,” carrying off their property for use in the GULAG and imprisoning Germans in them (russian7.ru/post/kak-krasnaya-armiya-prevratila-konclag/).

            Managing the enormous number of German POWs was “a serious problem,” the portal says; and so it was decided to put the prisoners in the concentration camps that had been emptied out. Among them, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, were rechristened Special Camp No. 2 and Special Camp No. 7, in 1948.

            These camps existed until 1950, and there is evidence, Russia-7 says, that “7,000 German prisoners” died in the first of these alone during that period.