29 March 2024, Friday, 3:37
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The Authorities of Belarus Took It Farther Than Hitler's

The Authorities of Belarus Took It Farther Than Hitler's
Alexander Mindlin

Sooner or later they will have to be responsible for it.

It's not about tours.

I watch footage from Belarus.

I see people wearing strange uniforms with no insignia and black masks, NOT showing any IDs, brutally twisting arms and beating up peaceful people. They act this way because they just do not like the flag people were standing with on the street. I see these people breaking into houses and conducting searches without warrants or explanations.

I want to say, as a historian, that even Hitler did not act this way. The SS officers were still wearing the uniform and showed their IDs. Gestapo men wore no uniforms, but they took policemen to hold arrests and searches.

The current Belarusian authorities took it farther than Hitler's.

However, you most likely saw it. I can't tell you anything new here.

However, as a specialist in the history of Nazism and concentration camp guide Sachsenhausen, I look at these people in strange clothes and think about them in terms of history.

Aren't they afraid that sooner or later they will have to be responsible for this?

Well, they will have to. If not even in court, then to their children, their neighbours, God, if they believe in him.

And the option "I was following an order" will not work. I did not help former concentration camp guards after World War II either.

I tell about it on excursions in Sachsenhausen and show portraits of these guards, Barackführers. I first show their faces while working in a concentration camp, and then at trials in the 50s, when they tried to justify themselves by "following orders" and be at large earlier.

It did not work.

After long legal discussions, the execution of criminal orders was considered a crime in Germany. And they upheld sentences of life imprisonment. And shame.

Children abandoned them; wives broke up with them. Many relatives changed their surnames for no one to ask them: "Aren't you a relative of this person?"

I do not think that any of these "great guys", as Lukashenka called them, will read my text.

That's a pity. It would be useful for them.

Here is a photo of Gustav Sorge, who was called Iron Gustav in the camp for his iron fists. He broke the bones of the prisoners.

He individually killed 57 people.

The first photo shows him during his years of service. The second one shows him at a trial in Germany in 1959. He already served his sentence at Vorkuta and returned to Germany hoping for mercy and liberation. Hopes were vain; he was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in Bonn prison.

Alexander Mindlin, Facebook

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