The gassings of Russians by Germans preceded the gassings at Auschwitz—the first mass gassings were of Russian prisoners of war in the southern Ukraine. Russian intellectuals and Communists were the first to be gassed in Auschwitz. "By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a European habit to distinguish between civilized wars and colonial wars. The laws of war applied to wars among the civilized nation-states, but laws of nature were said to apply to colonial wars, and the extermination of the lower races was seen as a biological necessity. In A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist writes that bombing originated as a method of war considered fit for use only against uncivilized adversaries. The first bomb ever dropped from an airplane was Italian, and it exploded on November 1, 1911, in an oasis outside Tripoli in North Africa. The first systematic aerial bombing was carried out by the British Royal Air Force against the Somalis in 1920. In the Second World War, Germany observed the laws of war against the western powers but not against Russia. As opposed to 3.5 percent of English and American prisoners of war who died in German captivity, 57 percent of Soviet prisoners— 3.3 million in all—lost their lives. The gassings of Russians by Germans preceded the gassings at Auschwitz—the first mass gassings were of Russian prisoners of war in the southern Ukraine. Russian intellectuals and Communists were the first to be gassed in Auschwitz. The Nazi plan, writes Sven Lindqvist, was to weed out some 10 million Russians, with the remainder kept alive as a slave-labor force under German occupation. When the mass murder of European Jews began, the great Jewish populations were not in Germany but in Poland and Russia, where they made up 10 percent of the total population and up to 40 percent of the urban population "in just those areas Hitler was after." (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, 2004, p. 7).
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:52:24 +0000
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