On the Soviet Union’s Involvement in the Holocaust

By Alex Gordon in Haifa, Israel

On August 23, 1939, a non-aggression treaty was concluded between the USSR and Nazi Germany, known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after the surnames of the foreign ministers of the two countries.

It was an imperialist act because it divided part of European territory between two countries. From 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union was an ally of Germany on the Eastern Front, supplying it with the mineral resources, oil, and food necessary for the war against France and Great Britain.

In 1939-1941, when internal propaganda in the USSR portrayed Nazi Germany as a friendly state, Soviet society stopped criticizing Germany’s policies and began publishing Nazi speeches. Sometimes at rallies, people openly praised “Comrade Hitler” and called for the “triumph of international fascism.” Swastikas began to appear on buildings and even on posters depicting Soviet leaders.

Joseph Stalin personally signed the secret protocol, which was an appendix to the treaty and provided for the division of Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as the annexation of Bessarabia (then part of Romania, now Moldova) by the USSR.

The signed document already spoke of “friendship” between the USSR and Germany. In a telegram to Hitler in response to his congratulations on his 60th birthday in December 1939. Stalin repeated and reinforced this thesis: “The friendship between the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, sealed in blood, has every reason to be long and strong.” This alliance was forged in the blood of millions of victims of World War II.

In 1939, the Minister (People’s Commissar) of Foreign Affairs of the USSR was a Jew, Maxim Litvinov, but three months before the signing of the non-aggression treaty, he was removed from this post and replaced by the Russian Vyacheslav Molotov. With this dismissal, Stalin wanted to please Hitler, who didn’t want to deal with Jews. He knew about the plight of the Jews in the German zone of Poland, but he was unwilling to help them.

In February 1940, Adolf Eichmann proposed to the Soviet leadership to transfer two million Jews, which was the majority of Polish Jewry, to the USSR. This step would have allowed most Polish Jews to be saved from destruction. The Soviet Union responded to this proposal with a refusal.

Many Jews contributed to the birth, formation, and strengthening of Soviet power, but times were changing: The socialist internationalism of the USSR ceased to exist after it concluded a peace treaty with Nazi Germany. It began to transform into socialist nationalism, that is, into National Socialism.

World War II began in September 1939. It began with Germany’s attack on Poland, but Polish newspapers still had time to report on the Nazis’ cannibalistic treatment of Jews. However, Soviet people did not read Polish newspapers. They didn’t read any newspapers at all, except for Soviet ones. Therefore, they were unaware of the Nazis’ crimes against Jews in Poland.

While the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in effect, that is, until June 1941, the Soviet authorities did not inform the Jewish population about the persecution by the Germans in Poland. As a result, almost 2.5-2.6 million Jews remained peacefully in the western USSR, and almost all of them perished during the German occupation.

Isaac Deutscher, a Polish-British biographer of Stalin and Trotsky, wrote: “Stalinist propagandists could do nothing better than maintain an embarrassed silence. He [Stalin] forbade them from responding with a counterattack that would have exposed the strange, inhumane nature of Hitler’s antisemitism. He was afraid to take on the role of defender of the Jews – a role that nothing in the world could make him assume. He was frightened by the reaction that antisemitism evoked among the masses, and the willingness with which Russian and Ukrainian Jew-haters supported the Nazis in the occupied territories only reinforced his fears.”

Deutscher then writes that “[the Soviet] press and radio were silent about the extermination of European Jewry that was taking place behind Nazi lines. They hardly mentioned the death camps Auschwitz and Majdanek, and if they did, they wrote about them in a way that no one understood that the main victims there were Jews.” Because of this conspiracy of silence, millions of Soviet Jews who remained in Nazi-occupied territory perished.

This treaty became the first act of state antisemitism in the USSR throughout its history, as the Soviet state left millions of Jews to be exterminated by the Nazis. This was not “primary” but “secondary” state antisemitism: the USSR did not repress Jews itself, but allowed its ally to destroy them. When the destruction of Soviet Jews and their resistance to the Nazis in Belarusian partisan detachments and within the ranks of the Soviet Army became known, the Soviet government decided not to mention either the Nazis’ crimes against Jews or the role of Jews in the fight against the Nazis. The Soviet authorities didn’t need Jews either as victims or as heroes.

Monuments to the victims of Nazism were forbidden from mentioning the deaths of Jews; the victims were referred to as Soviet citizens. This was the silencing of the Holocaust, which lasted from 1943 to 1985, that is, until the beginning of Perestroika. This was not Holocaust denial, which existed in a number of countries, but its oblivion. This was a manifestation of so-called “secondary antisemitism.”

The concept of “secondary antisemitism” was introduced by Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Peter Schönbach. “Secondary antisemitism” was a new source of criticism directed at Jews, stemming from the desire of some European nations to suppress their ancestors’ guilt and erase memories of the Holocaust from the nation’s collective memory.
“Secondary antisemitism” is also the desire to conceal involvement in the destruction of Jews or the refusal to help them in an attempt to avoid destruction.

Soviet “secondary” state antisemitism, which isolated Soviet Jews from crucial information about Nazi policies in occupied territories and the Soviet authorities’ unwillingness to save Polish Jews from extermination, was not merely collaboration with the devil, but an endorsement of his crimes.

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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education, and the author of 12 books.